I’m doing it again. I’m doing it right now! I don’t even want to stop! I’m STAYING UP LATE! Dag Nab It.
I ate a normal portion-sized dinner and have been fighting cravings all evening long. A few minutes ago I went into the kitchen to, um, browse, and upon opening the refrigerator, said, “Isn’t there anything in here I can eat without getting fat?” Anders laughed at me, but he didn’t have any answer. Hmph.
It was cold today. Bone chillingly, ice crackingly, knee sufferingly cold. I know this because I spent 2.5 hours out in it, patiently waiting while my children were lifted and flung and dropped and ridden around various carnival rides. We went to “Winterland” which is what the kind-of lame-ass children’s amusement park in Malmö turns into for 2 months around the holidays. There was no snow, so it wasn’t very wintery, except for the massive amounts of people in down-filled jackets, knitted caps and mittens and the weirdly dressed fake snowmen with obscenely long arms on stilts that were walking around near the entrance.
Karin got totally gypped out of ice skating a third day in a row except for one quick trip round the frozen-over fountain/wading pool square in the middle of the park, because the zamboni made an appearance and everyone was shooed off the ice.
Words I’ve just used that I really like: gypped, shooed, zamboni.
Why won’t I get a clue and and get a winter hat? I hate hats. I have this thing that they 1) don’t look good on me and 2) make my hair even more frizzy freakazoid than normal, and I’ve apparently always had it because I can remember my grandmother getting extremely upset with me during an unusual babysitting episode and telling my mother upon her return that I was unmanageable and independent LIKE THAT WAS A BAD THING because I refused to wear a hat. My mother, if such a thing had been popular back in the 70’s, would have pumped her fist and hissed “yeeesss!” because she thinks independence is a GOOD thing.
Anyway, since I knew it would be cold out, I put leggings on under my pants and a sweatshirt on over my shirt, but forgot about the inappropriately thin socks I had on, even inside my giant moonboot-wannabe boots, and I only had this pathetic little semi-elastic knitted band that goes around your forehead and covers up your ears. After we got to Anders’ parent’s house, I begged for big thick socks to put on, ate dinner, read a royal-family-gossip magazine (turns out Madeline learned her lesson with décolletage after last year’s Nobel dinner) and then crashed on the sofa for an hour until a snore (my own, darn it) awoke me. My knees hurt so much from the cold that I could only hobble stiffly like an old, old woman, and I’m STILL cold, 7 hours later. what a wuss.