Feels like it’s a good time for a new round of random thoughts and factoids from the above Raboff Randomizer.

• Few people seem to know (or, are willing to acknowledge) the fact that Sweden has an abundance of trees and milling facilities that can transform almost any kind of tree into any imaginable kind of paper product – including toilet paper. So people, stop hoarding it!

• Popcorn, at least when made the old school way, is a reasonably healthy indulgence that nothing should ever keep you from enjoying. If you’re a micro pop fan, read the ingredients and then stop nuking your corn, dude.

• With over 100.000 lakes, water will never become a scarcity in Sweden or Finland or Norway. Neither will vodka.

• The real reason Danes closed their country’s borders? So they could smoke and drink without feeling guilty or frowned upon by goodie-two-shoes tourists from Sweden.

• I’ve met and shaken paws with the Swedish Prime Minster twice without washing afterward. But his shake was about as coarse and dry as Ingvar Kamprad’s thick, leathery hands were.

• If you don’t have peanut butter, banana and cinnamon as three main accessories in your porridge, you’re absolutely missing the whole point of the dish. And since growing oats is extremely common in Swedish agriculture, you don’t need to hoard that either.

• Any single malt whiskey will always lose against Four Roses bourbon (small batch) and, according to my friend Michael, this applies to a staple straight bourbon like Maker´s Mark.

• The true brilliance of the Star Wars series is that it takes place in the past. Not in some absurdly overrated future.

• Mike Pence could definitely have been cast as an East German villain in a Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, Gung-ho movie, circa 1984.

Let’s just put the virus to the side for a moment, shall we? Let’s focus on something fun and important. Like this recipe. For lunch this afternoon, I made one of my most famous dishes; the Raboffski Open Egg Salad Sandwich. For whatever reason, I’d never served Charlotte this classic before and since I happened to have all the required ingredients at home today, everything fell perfectly into place.

So, boil two to four eggs. Cool them off. Peel and place in a large bowl. Add a tablespoon or two of Hellman’s mayo, a half of a finely chopped red or yellow onion, a generous tablespoon of relish, a teaspoon of dijon mustard, some salt, pepper and a long squeeze of lemon.

From yesterday’s walk along the coast. I love the drama of stormy weather about as much as I appreciate the tranquility I get from when there’s total calmness. Best of all here in the “sticks” is that that I’ve got the scenery more or less to myself aside from the occasional dog walker or energetic stave trekker. Unlike most proper cities that have gone through extensive iterations through the decades and centuries, the environment here is so timeless, so eternal.

From where I’m sitting and typing these words, with just a small window and a garden between me, a meadow and the sea beyond, there’s a landscape that has looked much liked it does today for probably tens of thousands of years. Maybe longer. This is somehow comforting to me. That in the long run, Earth will survive and work things out – regardless of whether or not we can comprehend a timeline that reaches far beyond the scope of our barely measurable existence on the planet.

We, humans, try so very hard to cram as much into our ridiculously short lifespans, that it’s no wonder we don’t have time to think about all the stuff we’re doing to our environment as well as the species and organisms that live among us.

Short-term, the chain of events that have led to the exponential spread of the coronavirus is having a bigger and wider impact than I initially thought it would. Long term, I’m fairly sure the psychological reverberations are going to be both long-lasting and make a huge dent in societal behavior;

We are likely going to be very suspicious of each other and scan for symptoms of the disease like never before. This could last years.

• We’ll be even more wary about foreigners in general and Chinese tourists in particular.
• Hand hygiene will improve substantially – and not a day too late.
• It will become trendy to wear colorful, surgical gloves throughout the day and neon hues at night. If you’re in the mask, glove or antiseptic wipes biz, good for you.

That people are frightened about getting to close to potential carriers in crowded situations like public transportation, shopping centers, amusement parks, cinemas, restaurants, political rallies, concerts, airports, planes, and trains isn’t hard to understand. Even if you are healthy, who wants to be quarantined and isolated for up to two weeks, right?

Long-term, the effects could also mean that industries that aren’t fully automated might take a big hit. Farming and food production industries, their supply chains and the complex logistics of making sure fresh dairy products, meat, fish and produce are replenished in grocery stores and supermarkets might have to endure big disruptions in the next few months.

I can see this as something good, though. It’s the meat-eating population that got us into this mess, to begin with. I don’t want to point fingers, but I hope that a whole lot of people take note that the virus does not stem from a rotten carrot or an overripe head of cabbage. So, on some level, I hope that this scare does get our species to start reevaluating how we treat our host, Mother Earth, and our fellow planetarians.

Perhaps I’m reading too much press. Maybe it isn’t all that bad and I am allowing my vivid imagination to run amok. In any case, this deep rabbit hole got me thinking about what kind of stuff I would stock up on (hoard) if fresh food actually became a rarity or even a scarcity. Condiments aside, my list of favorite non-perishables would look something like this:
• variety of beans
• kalamata olives
• peanut butter
• all and any kinds of dried fruit
• sweet corn
• popcorn (non-microwave)
• brown rice
• all and any nuts (and legumes)
• oats (for my addiction to porridge)

The pile of chain links was shot here in Vejbystrand the other day.

This is from a small forest near the public pool in Vejbystrand which the locals fondly refer to as “The Enchanted Forest”. The area has a plethora of windswept trees that over time, possibly hundreds of years, have become remarkably twisted. It reminds me of a gathering of similarly warped trees just north of the city of Visby on the island of Gotland. At the very last moment, I realized that this beautiful hideaway needs to be included in the map of Vejbystrand that I’ve made for the upcoming book, “Moments from Vejbystrand”.

Yesterday was one of those, “I forgive everything” days. Zero wind, sunny sky and not too cold. I spoke to several people during my two-hour walk and everyone seemed elated about the vexatious and stubbornly consistent bleak weather letting up for a day. Though I’ve been fortunate to have been able to avoid this year’s winter, I can totally relate to the sentiment.