Monthly Archive: November 2003

I ended up with Toby because my boss thought he was my cat, Pooka, and she trapped him under a milk crate behind the café. No one claimed him, and after a couple of weeks he was mine. Pooka, needless to say, was neither thrilled nor amused at the addition of a big, dumb GUY to the household. The vet estimated he was about 8 months old, and he was in good health for having been on the streets for an unknown period. He looked exactly like Pooka except for his size and a pink nose. Pooka was a tiny...

(Be grateful: I left a lot of them out) aunt as in ant been as in ben caramel as in car-ml crayon as in cran creek as in kreek mary/merry/marry are pronounced the same, dammit mayonnaise as in man-aiyz both miss-chiv-us and miss-chee-vee-us pee-CAN unless it’s pee-kahn pie poem has only one syllable, dammit etc = et-setra or et-setera It’s a faucet, dammit umBRELLa dragged (but I have to admit I thought drug for a second) you all or you guys one modal at a time, dammit none of those uses of anymore are acceptable, dammit garage sale or yard...

My daughter has been singing the refrain all day to the Netherlands entry from the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The song is about Dick—a friend of the singer’s mother. As the result of a cerebral haemorrhage Dick is completely paralyzed. He can only blink his eyes and uses them to communicate with other people. It was called “Mijn ogen zeggen alles” (My eyes will tell), which Karin has been rendering as “mina ögon säger Alice” 🙂 Scored 4 books while in town shopping, and not one of them was on my book list (sorry, Mom!) They’re all hugely thick and...

It’s about as grey as it can be outside without a blanket of fog. When Ericsson was in the middle of the product launch for their first Bluetooth headset, I was asked to come up with color names for the product description*. You would think there aren’t that many ways to describe grey, but you’d be wrong. Knowing a lot of different ways to describe grey comes in handy when living in Sweden, at least when it comes to the weather. I’m sending my children off to terrorize some other poor mother on her day of rest and not feeling...

Next time Anders is out of town and one of Martin or Karin’s little friends wants to come over to play on the day you had planned on relaxing, politely suggest that it’s their turn to host. The decision to stop after two children was the right one, no doubt about it.

I think the sign of a successful potluck is when the dessert-to-other-food ratio is 3 to 1. You would have hated it, galestorm, it was one of those pregnancy/delivery conversation evenings because 2 people were pregnant (a second-timer, and a first-timer with twins on the way) and 1 has a 6-month old, so those of us who have already had children spent quite a bit of time scaring the bejeezus out of poor Laurie with horror stories. 🙂 Hey, it happened to ME, it’s only fair to pass the experience along! muahaha! Since we didn’t get home until after 10,...

She’s my real martian beauty My number nine cutie She has nine hairs on her head 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Tied up in ribbons of red She has nine little eyes All the same size Looking up, down, round, and straight ahead She has nine little holes in her turned up nose And she snores when she goes to bed She has nine arms that’s one of her charms, Each just like the other; Some people say she looks like her dad; Some say she looks like her mother. She has 1, 2, 3, 4,...

Package Dance results were good for me today as there were 2 waiting in the mailbox when I got home, and they weren’t Christmas presents so I could open them right away and they were all BOOKS! goody goody (thanks mom!) One of the packages was 4 books for the kids, and what a stroke of genius my mom had: she sent a SUPERHEROES coloring book for Karin. As she saw it and picked it up, she crowed, “Oh oh oh oh Batman!!!” LOL Then the kids sang the Batman TV theme song, which mind you, they’ve never seen, all...

Reading several people’s blogs/journals about their childhood with angry fathers made me realize once again how lucky I was. My family wasn’t spectacularly dysfunctional, and my dad didn’t start drinking until I was a teenager. Or at least I didn’t notice the effects until I was a teenager. My parents were spankers, within the limits of reasonableness, until I was about 5-6, then I don’t remember being spanked except once, and I deserved it. Seems like everyone got spanked in the 70’s 🙂 We were living in Nebraska so I would have been somewhere around 8-9 years old. We had...