Lizardek

21
Oct
2026

WHEN I STARTED, WHEN I’M STOPPING

I had a mammogram (free) on Oct 12 and the results came today: no signs of breast cancer. Reason to celebrate! And today, we celebrated my 22-year work anniversary at our afternoon team meeting. My manager looked up my actual hiring date and it turns out it was officially October 18 (which was Sunday), but I hadn’t really been thinking about it. I knew it was in October, and this morning someone on LinkedIn congratulated me. Haha! 22 years: crazy. So I went down to the café and bought silviakaka and another pastry of saffron and coconut and brought it...

18
Oct
2026

GRUMPLEPANTS

I’m tired today. No plans and a long sleep in, and yet I’m still tired. Hard news from within my family is rumbling around in my head, hard news everywhere in the world, it seems. It’s been a tiring year for everyone and it’s not over yet. The sun is shining, the sky is solidly, purely blue, but it’s chilly outside and fall is burning up the treetops, tinging everything with yellow, orange, red, and brown. Leaves are blowing acros the yard and piling up in corners. There are things on my to-do list that I can’t seem to get...

15
Oct
2026

POPPING IN, POPPING OUT

This week is kicking my ass. It’s Thursday evening and I cannot WAIT for the weekend. Anders told me that he talked to his sister today and she said she has only 11 work days left until retirement. Her husband is even closer. It made me start having retirement fantasies. Maybe getting closer to retirement is a GOOD thing? Hmmm. We have one person out for personal reasons, and I have been feeling fairly overwhelmed after taking over 2 of her projects, on top of all the ones I already have. I do a lot of smaller booth design projects,...

06
Oct
2026

A BUNCH OF ANNOYING THINGS

One of the daily newsletters I get had a short article today about the fact that the US Supreme Court is back in session and a list of some of the big cases it has on the docket. And then it asked “Wondering how the Supreme Court became so influential?” And my immediate response was, “Because people can’t take no for an answer anymore.” If they feel they are in the right, even when they are NOT, even when lower courts and judges have ruled against them, they keep appealing until it gets raised all the way to the Supreme...

05
Oct
2026

ANOTHER MONDAY

Another Monday. An autumn Monday. I saw a sugarbeet on the side of the road a couple of weeks ago, and now the trees are all turning red from the top down. Well, the ones that turn red, anyway. Most of the trees here turn brown (oaks) or yellow (birch) or something in between, and fall soggily to the ground. Fall is a soggy time in Sweden, even when it’s not actually raining. We had two stunning sunshiney days over the weekend but today was solid, thick, cloud cover. It was really windy when I left work, and quite chilly...

01
Oct
2026

THE MORE THINGS YOU DO, THE MORE YOU CAN DO*

This is one of the craziest busiest weeks I think I’ve ever had. Starting on Sunday, and going through until Saturday this coming weekend, I’ve had to drive to Malmö every single evening except Tuesday. All for good stuff, but still: oy. Sunday was the AIC Fire Station tour that I organized again with our firefighter friend (also named Anders). We did it a couple of years ago and it was as big a hit this time. We had 40 people all together and Anders and another fireman named Martin (felt like old home week, haha) showed us around the...

23
Sep
2026

IT IS SAD TO GO TO PIECES LIKE THIS BUT WE ALL HAVE TO DO IT*

Is having yearly colonoscopies a thing I have to look forward to now, like having yearly mammograms because I’m a woman between the ages of 40 amd 74? It was the same home test 2 years ago that started me on this health crisis trip to colitis (not really, but it feels like it, and I like having SOMETHING to blame). I’ve had 2 colonoscopies now (and I just had to fucking GOOGLE the plural of colonoscopy because my brain and my fingers kept typing colonoscopys) and I can assert that while having a colonoscopy is no fun, having to...

22
Sep
2026

MORE THAN LUCKY

I’m pretty grateful that I’ve never lacked for friends. Even though we moved around all the time when I was young, I was in school and made friends pretty easily everywhere we went. When I started university, I didn’t know anyone, but my years as a military brat stood me in good stead and there was a built-in way to meet people and make friends with all the women on my dorm floor and in my classes. I moved to Chicago after college with a friend, and made friends at the company I worked for. It seems to me in...

19
Sep
2026

THE STUFF I’M UP TO

Apart from the fact that work was crazy busy and I was drowning in PPTs, this was a quiet week and it’s now a quiet weekend. Anders was gone part of Monday expecting to stay one night in Tingsryd but ended up coming home in the late afternoon. I had NO plans any evening so had lots of quiet nights. The only appointment I had was at Malmö hospital on Thursday to get my latest dose of Zessly (my colitis meds). The nurse asked me again about the initiative they are driving to get people to administer their own shots...

14
Sep
2026

BRATBABY DAY AND A PERFECT LONG WEEKEND

This past long weekend was lovely. Macbeth at Malmö castle was great, if freezing once the sun disappeared under the roofline. It struck me that I’ve never actually seen Macbeth. Not sure why not. I’ve seen Hamlet a bazillion times and many of the comedies and romances as well. I knew the gist of the story, and I know most of the most famous quotes from the play. Anyway, the theater group that did the performance were super, though they must have been freezing, especially the woman who played Lady Macbeth; in her mad scene she was wearing a thin...

October 2026
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