TBT

TBT Work lying down

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Yours truly testing the workstation lying dow.

[TBT THROW BACK THURSDAY] Lately there have been lots of images on FaceBook and other sites of a workstation for working lying down. During the period 1982-04-19 – 1989-01-09 I worked at Arbetslivscentrum, Stockholm (later Institutet för Arbetslivsforskning) as a project assistant (1 year), then administrative assistant, secretary to one of the research directors in one of the research departments. Our department researched in the areas of work organization and computers – coordinator of jobs for the assistants and assigner of jobs to the assistants, economic administration for the department. Parallell to this from December 1984 I was the main operator for the Macintosh installations in the house, responsible for three networks with a total of 70 Macintoshes. All support and installations and internal training programs.

The image above is from 1988. We were testing workstations of different kinds, among them one for working lying down, together with Ergonomi Design Gruppen (EDG). Conditions were very different in 1988 than today as there were no portables, no pads, no smartphones and no flatscreens. We used a Macintosh Plus… and hoped it wouldn’t fall down on the person sitting there testing the chair… You can easily say that we were too early with what we wanted to achieve. Conditions today are much different.

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Workstation from http://altwork.com/

Above tone of the images from Altwork.com that lately has been seen in various social media and on various websites. If you visit the site, there are more images and a video about the ideas around it.

The image with me in that contraption above was what I immediately thought about when seeing the Altwork workstation. The image of me and our workstation was published in a leaflet about how to make offices better in an ergonomic and organizational way. The leaflet was called Bakom Knuten, News from Knut-Projektet, December 1988. Still today, the leaflet is interesting. Some of those ideas have since been implemented, like working and meeting more flexibly standing up for instance.

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Stokke zero gravity chair. Image from the internet.

We also tested various ergonomic chairs. The one above was good for relaxing or reading, but at the time not something you could use in front of a computer. Today yes, as there are pads of various sorts. Some found it difficult to use and were a bit afraid of using it as it leans quite far backwards.

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Stokke kneechair. Image from the internet.

One of them, the above kneechair from Stokke, stayed with us permanently as it turned out to be very comfortable and good to sit on and work. It was relaxing for your back. Trick was to not hang on your knees on it. I’ve missed that chair ever since… (I left that job in januari 1989 to join an Apple Center).

This was a research project. Some of it has become reality since, but not everything. Particularly the design of office furniture isn’t really there yet. Some of the more advanced ideas about how it would come to be in 2003, that were in that leaflet, seem dated today. Development on the technical side also has advanced much faster than the researchers then could foresee. It is interesting to compare the ideas from 1988 with the reality of today. To work lying down still has a long way to go though I think.

Posted by nini in office, TBT, Thoughts, Various, 0 comments

TBT When I was a kibbutznick

 

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Nini as kibbutznick in 1963.

(TBT – Throw Back Thursday) In 1963 I went to Israel for the first time. I went together with friends Ninna, Hans and Elge. We had our base-camp at friend Channas parents villa just north of Tel Aviv. It was popular to go to Israel during that period.

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The house we lived in at kibbutz Gevaram in 1963.

For a while we went to a kibbutz. Ninna and Hans left already after two weeks because they were bored. Elge and I stayed another three weeks working in the fields etc.

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Elge and Hans comparing how much their beards were growing… We were young in 1963…

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Me and Elge at the kibbutz in the afternoon after work. March 1963.

The kibbutz was kibbutz Gevaram, 7 kms north of the Gaza border, outside of Ashquelon. This was my first experience working in a kibbutz. I think about this kibbutz sometimes when there are incidents reported on the news. It really is close to the Gaza border.

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Map of area close to Gevaram

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Map of area close to Kibbutz Gevaram.

I went back to Israel several times after that and lived in different kibbutzim before finally settling in Tel Aviv. All in all I lived seven (7) years in Israel. Ninna died of breast cancer in 1995. Elge and Hans are still around as well as Channa and Elge is my FB friend.

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Hans, Elge and Ninna in 1964.

Posted by nini in TBT, Various, 0 comments

TBT Freehand

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Freehand 4.0 T-shirt. Photo: ©nini.tjader

(TBT Throw Back Thursday) Once upon a time when I first learned to use a vector application for drawing, it was Aldus Freehand that I started out with. In my former life I taught software applications to customers. Freehand was one of them. I even recorded a two-part video about Macromedia Freehand 5.0/5.5 for a education company. Those videos were around for quite some time long after Freehand had more or less disappeared.

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Freehand 5.0/5.5 video. Photo: ©nini.tjader

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Freehand 5.0/5.5 video. Photo: ©nini.tjader

This was around the time when every software company regularly gave out T-shirts in seminars you attended. They were always size L or XL or even XXL. Perfect nighties, but not T-shirts for a smallish person like me. I still have the old Freehand 4.0 T-shirt… And the old videos (on VHS). If nothing else, it is fun watching oneself teaching…

Eventually I had to switch to Adobe Illustrator as Freehand disappeared from the Swedish market. Later Aldus products got first bought by Macromedia and then Freehand was bought by Adobe and in the end Freehand was discontinued in favor of adobe Illustrator. We were many that were sorry about that. There are still several features that Freehand had that to this day has not turned up in Adobe Illustrator. To easily create text on a circle at both top and bottom is just one of those…

Nowadays I am one of the testers of the Illustrator WOW! books for each version. Today I am at home in Illustrator but I still miss some of those smart features that Freehand had and Illustrator still doesn’t…

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Freehand 4.0 T-shirt. Photo: ©nini.tjader

Posted by nini in Nerdish, TBT, 0 comments

TBT I used to live here

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Rondovägen 30, Skogås. 1992-07. Photo:©nini.tjader

(TBT Throw Back Thursday) I used to live in this three floors, four rooms, corner-rowhouse. This is how it looked from the front in the summer of 1992. Below is the backside, which you went out to from the middle floor of the house. The door was from the living-room.

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This was the plan of the house and its three floors. In addition to that there was a large storageroom under the roof which you reached from a ladder on the top floor.

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The bottom floor housed the guest-room/third bedroom, entrance, walk-in-closet and a 19m2 space without windows which was built sub-terranean. Good for storage of all kinds of things, like garden-furniture and bicycles in the winter… We also had an outside shed for everything for the garden etc. at the entrance, but that was not isolated so not good for the bicycles over winter.

The middle floor contained the kitchen, a shower-WC room, a small hall-way and the livingroom.

The top-floor contained the bathroom, the master bedroom with walk-in-closet and a smaller bedroom which we used as an office.

I lived there with Janne and Josefina (my female cat) for seven years or there around until we separated and Janne moved out. Josefina, who became 15 years of age, died in the spring of 1992, just half a year before I moved to the flat in Vårby Gård.

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Above our bedroom at the topfloor. Just to the right of the bottom picture is the door to a walk-in-closet.

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A corner of the office-room/small bed-room at the top-floor.

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Above three pictures from the living-room with the exit to the backside garden.

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Another corner of the living-room.

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Above three pictures from the kitchen. It was quite big, but really unpractical when it came to placement of the cupboards and work-areas. There were almost no work-areas…The kitchen had a door out to a balcony which we rarely used as we had the backside garden.

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Above two pictures from our guestroom/third bed-room at the bottom of the house. When Janne was still living in the house, we had a second TV in here. When he moved out, so did the second TV… I loved that horizontally striped wall-paper. It was hard to put up though I remember as you had to get the lines really straight.

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This is the entrance at the bottom-floor. Quite dark as it had no windows. The only natural lgiht that entered here came from the door of the guest-room.

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I used the walk-in-closet at the bottom floor as a sewing-room. I know some of the neighbors used it as an extra bedroom… don’t know how though as it had no real ventilation.

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The extra sub-terranean space we used for storage of garden-furniture over the winter and for the bicycles. We also used it as a room to watch pictures in as it was really dark. On and off we thought of getting proper furniture for it but never got around to it.

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Rondovägen 30, Skogås. 2014-07-02. Photo:©nini.tjader.2014

This is the same house 22 years later… I went back to have a look yesterday. Looks much the same except that it has a new roof, the fence of the balconies are brown instead of white, the fence is changed as is the postbox, and the people living there now, or before them, have demolished most of the plants and the garden. The front part is now covered by cement- slabs and all the bushes and other greenery is gone. I couldn’t see the backside, but I noticed there were hedges all over the place and fences and not a glimpse of the huge lilacs we used to have on the backside at the corner. I don’t understand people who do not want greenery around them…

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Rondovägen 30, Skogås. 2014-07-02. Photo:©nini.tjader.2014

It felt totally odd to see the house again and I didn’t feel one bit at home in the area. House was familiar but… I almost got lost on my way from the train-station and had to use the GPS of my iPhone to get there… No, I have never regretted leaving this house though I always missed having a garden until I moved to my present place. There was a 17 year long pause without a garden in between.

Posted by nini in Architecture, Furniture and Decoration, TBT, 0 comments

TBT My Old Hoods

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Photo: ©nini.tjader

(TBT Throw Back Thursday) I grew up in this quarter, from when I was born and the thirty (30) first years of my life. Then I, like so many others who grew up in this area, moved to the suburbs. Population in these blocks has changed a lot. These were workers blocks. Not so today.

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Photo: ©nini.tjader

This was the entrance to the house. I lived on the second floor towards the back of the house. All we saw from our windows was a wall without anything at all on it. The houses behind us, in the next block were higher up on the mountain than our house. To see what the weather was like outside you had to open the window and lean out… Which season we could not see, as there was no greenery at all in our backyards.

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Photo: ©nini.tjader

The next block, east of us in the direction of Slussen, looks like this. Cobble stones. Old houses, regarded as picturesque today, but was far from it when I grew up. Today they are modernized, but when I was a kid they had no hot water indoors, only cold, no heating other than a wood-burner, no WC, only outhouses behind the houses. Very primitive. Our house was one of the most modern ones in these blocks.

Those cobblestones… my knees remember them. We ran there daily, me and the boys I played with, and sometimes fell.

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Photo: ©nini.tjader

This is the beginning of my street, Brännkyrkagatan. Brännkyrkagatan once was the longest street in Stockholm. But that didn’t last. It was changed in the 60-ties when it was cut off and renamed at certain points.  Very steep ascent. Cobblestones again. For a while they had them covered by asphalt, but they returned it to its initial state and removed the asphalt when it became interesting to keep old areas as they once were. I’ve passed here many times, particularly during my youth as to the right from here there was a passageway beside the railway-bridge that led to the center of town and the Old Town. This was the closest way to where things happened…

(Pictures are from 2004).

Below map of the area

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Posted by nini in TBT, Thoughts, Various, 0 comments

TBT My former flat

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Bäckgårdsvägen 31, Vårby Gård

(TBT Throw Back Thursday) From November 30th 1992 until November 30th 2009 I lived in a suburb to Stockholm called Vårby Gård.  There I had a three room flat (2 bedrooms, 1 livingroom, kitchen, bathroom and hallways) that was 78 square meters large + a long narrow balcony with sun until around 11:30 AM.  After that the sun went around the house and was on the other side, where the entrance was from an exterior corridor. We used that too as an extra balcony.

During those 17 years there, the items and the interior of the flat changed over time. Furniture and things came and went. I will now give you a glimpse of how it looked in my previous flat. It was really quite different to how my present flat looks.

Click on an image to see a larger version and to switch to slideshow-mode.


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Posted by nini in Furniture and Decoration, Interior Design, TBT, 0 comments

TBT Rehov Melchett, Tel Aviv, 1973

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(TBT Throw Back Thursday). In 1973 I rented a room at Rehov Melchett in Tel Aviv at Margalits flat (Margalit is in the picture above). The flat was situated real centrally in Tel Aviv, on the fourth floor, no elevator. Her room had green walls and darkblue ceiling. (If you can read Hebrew, disregard what the paper says, she was not).

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This is the hallway when you entered the flat. My room was inside where the sliding door is. The walls in the hallway were orange on one side and yellow on the other three sides. My room thankfully had white walls. The poster on the wall with all the fruit was mine, and the handmade thing in the doorway (which led to the kitchen and the bathroom) was made by me of ropes once when I was bored.

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Inside my room. It was tiny. The width was the length of the bed (which was very narrow). It also contained that small bookcase and a wardrobe for my cloths. It had a small window rather high up on the wall. That was it. I think I had a tiny pallet beside the bed as a nighttable too. The curtain in blue and white to the right covered the sliding door which had glass-windows.

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This is part of the kitchen. Orange and yellow… Marble worktops. It had a tiny balcony where you put your gas-containers. It had a fridge which we shared. The tray in the picture was mine (from Marimekko).

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This is where I worked, at Albany Travel, a then South African owned travel agency that is no more (it later became British owned). I was upstairs in the office managing bookings for our scandinavian clients. Don’t remember the name of the girl there but she worked in the shop. I worked there from September 1971 until August 1974.

Renting a room or sharing a flat were the only options with the low salaries we had. I lived in this flat during the October war/Yom Kippur War. Remember vividly the outbreak of the war (I was on the balcony of the kitchen when the sirens went off and Margalit was in Ashquelon at her parents for the holiday), the huge US planes (B-something) that flew right over us at nights bringing all kinds of stuff, the sirens in the middle of the night and running downstairs until signal was that it was nothing to fear any longer (we did not have a bomb shelter in the house), the blackouts.

I lived in Margalits flat for about a year, then moved to another shared flat. I have no idea what the life of Margalit turned into. We didn’t have all that much in common so we didn’t keep in touch. She had no phone. There were no computers. And there definitely was no FaceBook. Keeping in touch is much easier today.

All the photos are mine and were scanned from slides in really bad condition.

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TBT Hagoshrim in the Northern Galilee

(TBT Throw Back Thursday)

I’ve lived in Israel on and off in periods, totally around 7,5 years. The winter 1965-1966 I spent at Kibbutz Ulpan Hagoshrim in Northern Galilee and learned to speak, read and write hebrew for six months, at the same time working half-time at the kibbutz, most of the time in the fields.

I sometimes wonder how life turned out for all those people I knew then. I know Dany (Daniel Elkouby, my then boyfriend) became a policeman, at first in Tel Aviv, later in Haifa. Leon (Leon Ergaz) and I shared a rented furnished flat for a year a couple of years later in Tel Aviv and it it was through him I got to know Tedy (Tedy Knitel, born in Romania). Leon later emigrated to the U.S. and has been impossible to find since. Heard he worked with installing wall.to.wall carpets. I know Jaqueline (from Morocco) moved to Haifa and started a family. Michael (Mickey, from Turkey) became a military trainer of dogs for the military and lives in the Tel Aviv area. We kept in contact for a couple of years. Alan moved back to London and we kept contact for some years, but later lost it.

Kibbutz Hagoshrim doesn’t look like this nowadays and neither does the border to Lebanon…Here are some pictures from 1965-1966.

Click on a picture to see a larger version and to get a regular slideshow. Hover over a picture to see a comment. Quality is not all that good as these pictures are scanned from very old and partly destroyed slides.

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Posted by nini in Israel, TBT, Travel, 0 comments

TBT Things I used to do – aquarelles

TBT (Throw Back Thursday). One of those things I used to do but have not done in a long time is painting aquarelles. Here are some examples from 1996.

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Winter. ©nini.tjader.2014

spring

Spring. ©nini.tjader.2014

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Summer. ©nini.tjader.2014

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Autumn. ©nini.tjader.2014

One of these days I might, maybe, take it up again and again paint aquarelles.

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Posted by nini in Art and Drawings, TBT, 0 comments

TBT The fence

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2012-03-25. View to the bus stop from my bedroom window.

TBT (Throw Back Thursday). When I moved here 4.5 years ago, there was no fence outside my bedroom window. The bus stop is right across so you always had to be aware of how dressed (or not) you were when passing the window. I knew though that a fence against noise from the road, particularly the busses, and people passing by, was planned and was to be built. The fence at the time stopped just outside my patio. The building of the fence started in April 2012. This is a picture story about it going up.

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2012-03-31. My bedroom window is to the left in the picture.

2012-05-02. And here they had begun by removing buses along the road.

2012-05-02. And here they had begun by removing bushes along the road and making the concrete in the ground to attach the fence to.

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2012-05-09. The first is up for the prolongation of the fence.

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2012-05-13 From the other side of the road.

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2012-05-16 From the inside.

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2012-05-28 From the inside.

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20121-05-29 From the inside. Fixing of the bottom of the fence to make it tight at the bottom.

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2012-05-30 Painting and fixing the top of the fence seen from the other side of the road.

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2012-05-31. The top and the painting is finished. Gravel is being put at the outside of the fence to make it tight at the bottom.

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2012-05-31. Now tight at the bottom and gravel is there. All finished. My outside place is now inivisible from the outside.

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2012-05-31. All finished.

Did it get any quieter? Yes, a bit. But the best with the fence is that I no longer am overlooked by people coming and going with the bus or passing by to go to or from the bus stop all the time.  I now have a very quiet place on the other side of the fence.


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Posted by nini in TBT, Various, 0 comments

TBT – Things I used to do

(TBT = Throw Back Thursday)

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©nini.tjader.2014

The above is the kind of thing I used to do when sitting somewhere listening. It was my trick to keep awake when things were boring. In this case it got colorized later. Done when I was in the kibbutz ulpan at kibbutz Hagoshrim in 1965-66.

The below is a sketch from the teahouse Tetley in Kungsträdgården, Stockholm in 1960. Also the kind of thing I used to do. Being in Kungsträdgården at the teahouse, making sketches.

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Sketch by Nini 1960. ©nini.tjader

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Posted by nini in Art and Drawings, TBT, 0 comments

TBT Nationalmuseum November 2011

TBT (Throw  Back Thursday) of a visit to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm on November 5th 2011. I was there with friend Monica (who now lives in Umeå and is going through a very tough cancer treatment which so far has lasted a year – fingers crossed that it will go well in the end) to watch the most fantastic exhibition of Russian artists. We watched more than the Russian artists though. We actually went through most of the departments at Nationalmuseum including Swedish art and contemporary design items. The museum is now closed and emptied for renovation but they have exhibitions at the Cultural House (Kulturhuset) during the renovation period.

For some to me unknown reason I never got around to publish the pictures I took then.
So here we go. Click image to get a bigger version.

All photos are ©nini.tjader

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Posted by nini in Art and Drawings, TBT, 0 comments

TBT My friend Gustav

TBT (Throw Back Thursday). My friend Gustav, my neighbors cat, in April over the last few years. He is now 9 years old and the most friendly cat I know. He likes to come to visit me even though he never gets either food or drink from me. He just likes being here and take a nap now and then.

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Gustav 2011-04-13 Photo: ©nini.tjader

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Gustav in the sock drawer, 20120414 Photo:©nini.tjader

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Gustav 20130409 Photo: ©nini.tjader

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Gustav 20140402 Photo: @nini.tjader

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Gustav 2014-04-10 Photo: ©nini.tjader

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Posted by nini in Gustav, TBT, 0 comments