I’ve stopped and started this journal entry about 5 times now. Everything I start to write sounds trite. I’m making myself yawn. yaaa-a-a-a-wn.
The sun shone all weekend. What a gift of sunny days we’ve had this winter, even WITH the snowstorms and Siberian Express and usual quota of grey, rainy days. There is so much snow on the ground and it’s so cold that despite the sunshine, the snow doesn’t seem to be melting very fast, even though the edges are looking acid-dipped, sun-chewed, exhaust-browned.
The other day I meant to write about my morning ride to work, after a night of fog which coated everything with white and frosted glitter. The trees were holding diamonds in their branches, winking little mirrors catching the sun and tossing it about, flash, glimmer! Today, I felt content knowing that Spring is only 15 days away. Fifteen days to the Vernal Equinox. Then it’s going to go fast. Wham! Crocus! Bam! Daffodils! Violets and tulips and primroses, thank you, ma’am!
Martin and I went to the mall this afternoon, in fact, we went to two of them. We had 3 missions: return and hopefully replace a snowsuit for him, buy 2 pairs of gym shoes for him (indoor and outdoor) and find some appropriately-Swedish loot for my GISBE partner. We were only semi-successful. We returned the snowsuit but couldn’t find any in his size. We found 2 balta-cool pairs of gym shoes. We found a couple of small items for the GISBE package, but not the specific things I had in mind, so I’m not done and can’t mail it tomorrow. I also bought new, kicky black suede flats for me, a book each for me, Martin and Karin, and 2 DVDs on sale (The Commitments and Hair), so all in all, it was a pretty decent shopping spree. Although, not at all on a par with the type of shopping spree I used to be able to manage on my own in Chicago. Before we headed home, Martin and I sat at the little Expresso House kiosk and fika’d. He had a gigantic vanilla cream pastry and I had a lingon-and-cranberry white chocolate brownie. YUM
I find the amount of classics that I managed to weasel out of reading despite being an English major in college a little disturbing. Since my university days, I’ve made some effort to take care of that, and have slowly dug through some of the books that I felt I really ought to have gotten around to (although there are still tons of them out there). One of the major literary characters I knew an awful lot about without ever having read a word of, because he’s referenced EVERYWHERE, is Sherlock Holmes. Thanks to my brother loaning me 2 anthologies of the collected works, I’m finally rectifying that this month. After that, it’s Lemony Snicket on the menu. I’m so eclectic!