If you’ve ever flown in a Boeing 777, which is Boeing’s most recent commercial jet airplane in production, you probably remember walking through a section of the plane where instead  of proper rows of seats, there is what looks like an array of empty cubicles for elves. Every other seat faces opposite each other, some toward fore and some toward aft, and there are plastic dividers that wave their way between them. In the eyes of a conventional coach traveler, it just looks bizarre.

OK, I know you’re all going to be really annoyed with me for doing this again, but I changed the address of this blog slightly, so this is the last post that will appear on “jfranklin.wordpress.com”. Don’t worry, all of the earlier posts, and even all of your comments, have been preserved at the new address. I actually would have done this much earlier if I had been smart enough to figure out how sooner, but there you go.In return…you get a smörgåsbord of blog posts all at once that I’m just now finally getting around to writing!

So…buck up, and change your bookmarks—or change your RSS subscriptions—to the following:

Web Address: http://scities.wordpress.com/

RSS Link: http://scities.wordpress.com/feed/

I’ll see you soon over there!

I have moved into my long(er)-term home! I now live back in Hornstull, the same neighborhood where I lived in 2004, but this apartment is quite a bit nicer than that one, in that now I’m on the top floor of my building, I have a view over the waterway between Södermalm and Liljeholmen, and in the ground level of my building is one of Stockholm’s only two remaining one-screen neighborhood cinemas, Kvartersbion.

I have a new phone number…in addition to my mobile number. This one is on Skype, and it’s a USA phone number:

1

(408)

91605731

And, it’s easy to remember! Just take the first two cities from the title of my blog, enter their area codes in sequence (for the lazy gits among you: San Jose = 408, Sacramento = 916), then dial “JPF1″. My Skype number is in fact a San Jose area phone number.

Now, the catch to the Skype number is that most of the time it will call my computer. And there’s always a chance that my computer will be off, or I will be away from it. But there is voicemail, so if you leave a message there, then I can reply by Skype (and it’s much cheaper for you to leave a voicemail on Skype than on my mobile phone).

Happy dialing!

070819_177_midnattsloppet
Originally uploaded by hindfelt

Some of you may remember that I had this crazy ambition, when I lived in Stockholm in 2004, of running the Stockholm Marathon. Having never done a running competition before. Well long story short, it only took a 13 km training run, 6 weeks into training, to halt my training for another 6 weeks due to a strained ligament in my knee, and this put my ambitions on hold.

Three years later, after coming back to Stockholm, I arrived in plenty of time to train for a more reasonable event: the Midnattsloppet — literally, Midnight Run — which is a 10 km run around the island of Södermalm, and going right through my neighborhood (much in the same way that the Pride Parade did). Along the way, I also recruited Christina, a recovering athlete, to run with me.