Monthly Archive: April 2004

That white flowering explosion behind us in the farmyard? It’s called hägg in Swedish. I didn’t know what that was in English, so I looked it up yesterday and turns out it’s a bird cherry. They’re everywhere now. I can’t stop seeing them now that I know what they are. It’s like when I got my engagement ring and everyone on the el train suddenly had big sparkly rocks on their fingers. And when I was pregnant, and SO WAS EVERYONE ELSE. It was freaky, man. I have a major compulsion to know the names of things. It bugs me...

Along Planteskolevägen, daffodils bow their heads and curtsey before the royal red crowns of the regal tulips. The sun is out, and you’d think by now I’d be used to it, but no. It’s just as awesome and bright every day it makes an appearance. The fields are plowed and turned and fertilized and some of them are even green, tiny little rape plants already pushing forth. Fields of rape. Rape fields. Amazing that something that sounds so potentially horrifying produces such unbelievable BRIGHT yellow blooms. You’d swear they’re fake. Nothing can be that yellow, right? Wrong. I don’t like...

This house exists now only as a mind picture. I haven’t been there since I was a teenager and my childhood memories are more romantic than reliable. My father’s father died when I was 5, and I don’t remember him physically at all. I have his eyes, though; my genes remember. He was a doctor and he and my grandmother lived in a beautiful ranch-style home in Northfield, one of Chicago’s aristocratic north side suburbs. This meant nothing to me as a child, since snobbiness wasn’t my own family’s style. My grandmother lived on in the house for years after...

Whenever someone asks whether I’m the kind of person who sees the glass as half-full or as half-empty, I always reply that I see the glass as TOO BIG. I can’t remember if I read that somewhere or if I made it up myself, although it’s much cooler to think I came up with it on my own. Meeting someone in person that you’ve had a connection with online is a strange feeling. It’s like recognizing an old friend from long ago that’s changed in some substantial way. Until they say something exactly as you’ve heard their voice in your...

The shit hammering continues. bleah.

Busy busy weekend which just flew by until it crashed to a stop this afternoon after I dropped jes6ica and galestorm at the train station to go their respective ways home. I returned home and crashed myself, on the bed, for over an hour. I feel like, as jes6ica so succinctly put it not so long ago, hammered shit. I just hope that I didn’t give whatever this bodyslam is to either one of them. Thanks again for dinner, Jessica, and Gale for the yummy homemade chocolate chip goodness. It was GREAT fun! 🙂 Weekend highlights: Friday night’s Social Circle...

Woke up this morning with a migraine and was afraid to move for fear of throwing up. Anders dropped the kids off and I laid in bed until I could get up and fetch medicine. Then I fell back asleep. I made it to work at 10:30 but I don’t really feel up to par and I’m certainly not earning my salary yet. Anders brought me home a huge bouquet of red and yellow fluffy-edge tulips yesterday and we picked up the kids and went to Malmö for dinner at Jensens Bøfhus. Unfortunately their ice cream machine was broken so...

It was Friday night and I was a little nervous, although not so much because Linda and Nick were there. Linda, a colleague of mine, had been haranguing me for months to let her fix me up with this guy, a friend of Nick’s, but I was tired of the dating scene and not at all interested in a blind date. Then, on a work trip won as a sales incentive by our entire department, I met her husband Nick, and he started in on me, too. “You’ve got to meet him! You’re perfect for each other…he’s European and you...

A couple that we know, and that we are friends with, and that Anders has been friends with since he was a teenager, made the startling comment the other night at a party that they are not in the market for new friends. In fact, whenever the opportunity arises to get to know someone new or he, for example, says “We ought to invite that new couple over for dinner,” she panics and immediately squashes the whole idea…or vice versa. Considering that this is the first time we’ve seen them ourselves since February 2003, we can sort of understand where...

Things That Made Me Laugh Today: This blonde joke over at Genuine The spoiler on the back of my husband’s new motorcycle helmet A bulletpoint from a list of “Things That Are Different in Sweden” proclaiming that No salad is complete without grated carrots. It’s so TRUE! What’s up with the giant piles of grated carrots, already?! New blog find: Finslippy Being greeted by my kids with little red plastic lawn chairs upside down on their heads as I pulled into the driveway after work + Anders in motorcycle leathers = rowr! And Hey! Did you Ask Me Questions Yet?...