The fog in Lund lumbers in like an overweight, lazy smoky-grey cat with half-lidded eyes that can’t be bothered to get up once it has plopped its fat ass down and lies around on its back with its feet in the air all day.
Combined with the snow on the ground, the view out my window is all-white and translucent and opalescent and vaseline on the lens. The snow is the kind that makes for great snowballs and building forts, all wet and sloppy and heavy. I didn’t even have to scrape windows because the snow all collapsed from its own weight and slithered in heavy folds down the sides of the glass. The kids were very jazzed this morning about being the first to put footprints in the yard. Virgin snow! Stomp stomp stomp!
Now I’ve gone through my 112 emails and answered or pitched them all, updated our contact database and caught up on all the really important things, like 2.5 weeks worth of Bizarro and Mutts and it’s lunchtime! On the sad side, I’m afraid my two office plants are in the process of biting the dust from lack of water over the holidays. We’ll see if the sustenance they got this morning revives them or if they are a lost cause.
Anders told me more about the skate-school tryout that he took Karin to on Saturday. There were about 30 kids there, mostly little girls with 3-4 boys. Karin had expected that Anders would be out on the ice skating with her and when she realized that was not to be the case, she panicked and didn’t want to go, so Anders spent several minutes reasoning with her and finally convinced her to try it out “just for a little bit.” The instructor-girls came over and fetched her and after a few minutes, she forgot all about her time limit and waved happily to Anders every time she passed the place where he was outside the rink. She didn’t fall down once. Anders said all the other little girls had pretty white skates and pink helmets. Karin, along with the boys, had black hockey skates (fräckt!) and a blue hockey helmet. 🙂 Afterwards, when the hour was up, she apologized to Anders for forgetting her promise to only stay out there for a little bit.
The receptionist today, a sub for our regular girl, is wearing a gigantic silver men’s watch, about 3 sizes too big for her that hangs clunkily above her hand, and four big chunky silver rings on her right ring finger that keep slipping down and threatening to fall off. Is wearing things that are too big, like hip-hop pants, taking over as a fashion statement? Maybe she just lost a lot of weight over Christmas.
Yesterday, when I made lunch for the kids, just to amuse them, I made smiley faces in their slices of summer sausage (stab with a knife and turn for eyes!) and stuck plastic pinwheels in their bread and butter. Sometimes I cut the letters of their first names out of the bread before I butter it (M! K!). Sometimes I serve them everything as circles or as sticks. It’s the little things.