Monthly Archive: January 2004

Just had a scheduled 15-minutes-with-the-boss, with Johan, our department manager, and told him exactly how I’ve been feeling about my job, our company culture, the upcoming move, and all. He was very sympathetic and agreed with me on several points and offered alternate solutions and promised to take action on several of the most important things that are bothering me. Too bad he can’t do anything about the open landscape shit, but at least he agreed that it IS shit, even if we have to make the best of it. I’ve gotten involved with the trivselkommitteén for the move to...

Everything is flocked in sparkling white velvet. The smack of wet, sudden splotches on the windshield immediately swiped away, and repeat. Snow hyperspaces and dazzles. The slither and crunch of well-mixed packsnow rattles in the wheel wells. Sliding rubber grabs and fails, clutching only at my panicked heart. Recover, and drive on in the wet, woolly, pillowfought world. The half hour slow slide from our house to the nearest exit where I could turn around and retreat, which usually takes 7 minutes, convinced me that driving to Malmö in a blizzard for dinner qualified as a bad idea. Even in...

I wonder if it would take just some sunshine to make things seem brighter when it comes to my job and my work environment? Everything seems grey and squashed right now. We are moving in about a month to new offices, only there won’t be any OFFICES, we’ll be sitting in an open landscape, not even in cubicles. I’m getting very depressed about the whole thing and have been walking around with a frowny face all morning. We went up to look at the site so we could get an idea of where we will be sitting and hopefully choose...

I can no longer resist the call of the crowd, the longing for the leap. I’ve achieved lemminghood. I’m creating an Amazon wishlist. Happy dance for packages: 3 books came today, thanks Mom! I’m almost done with my current read, so this was perfect timing. They’re going to televise the trial of Anna Lindh’s murderer on Swedish TV. They’ve been airing commercials for it all evening, like it was a newly released prime-time reality show. This bothers me. Quite a lot. Yesterday evening, before we went to bed, I caught a few minutes of some documentary on TV that was...

I’ve never been much of a one for make-up and major beauty routines in the morning and lived with pretty much the same hairstyle for long periods of my life. Before I had children and moved to Sweden (Land of Personal Poodle-Hair), my morning routine with hair was much longer and more involved. Big round brushes, blowdrying and curling iron, etc. Long periods spent getting each wave and curl to behave and stay in place before setting out. Nowadays, it’s mostly wash-scrunch-capture-and-go. I’ve gone down from a shower-dress-face-hair routine of 1 hour to about 20 minutes, max. It always seems...

Karin is currently vacuuming the dining room and singing as she goes, dressed in her outside fleece sweater, snowpants and spiderman woolen hat. Perhaps child labor is the answer to all our problems. Just got the hall closet partly cleaned out and keep wondering, where do we get all this STUFF from? Every nook, cranny, cupboard, drawer and closet in this house is STUFFED with stuff. It’s as if when you move to a bigger space, your stuff automatically expands wwwwwhhhhuuump! to fill the space so you gain nothing by moving if more space was one of your reasons for...

It’s after midnight, which means it’s January 11th, and officially the anniversary of the day I moved to Sweden 7 years ago. My sister-in-law and I talked a bit about it tonight when we were over there for her son’s 7th birthday (I went straight from the airport to the hospital to see the new baby). She asked me if I regretted the move at all or if I felt like this was home now. No and yes, which it felt nice to be able to answer her. I miss the States sometimes, especially Chicago, but missing it and wanting...

Slept WAY in, since I was pretending I was still on vacation last night and stayed up super late playing on the web. 🙂 Oj! I must stop that!! I have nothing to say about today so far except about household chores getting accomplished and what we have on the agenda this evening, (which is NOT going to a concert, play, or film, more’s the pity) which I’m pretty sure no one else is interested in (if you really want to hear the details of my boring existence let me know, haha). Karin and I are still at loggerheads in...

When the Modern Library published its list of the top 100 20th century English-language novels, Feminista.com was outraged that the list, compiled by a panel of NINE men and ONE woman, included 92 works by men, and 8 by women. So they made their own list: 100 Great 20th Century English-language Works of Fiction by Women I’ve got some reading to do. As usual. 🙂 (thanks to ricecricket for posting this in !) *** Upon hearing that Joan Aiken passed away recently and reading several LJ journals praise of her work, I realized that I might somehow have made it...

I wasn’t going to post anything today, because I’m not in a social mood, but what the hell. I’ve got nothing better to do at work, and I’m tired of myself, so maybe writing something will help push me out of it. Things Karin refused to do last night but ended up doing anyway under duress: stop fighting with Martin, eat dinner, sit in her bed for a 5-minute time-out, sit in her bed for another 5-minute time-out, remove her clothes, take a bath, wash her hair, dry herself off, put on pajamas, go to bed, go to sleep. Thing...