Monthly Archive: September 2005

13
Sep
2005

MY CHILDREN ARE FREAKS

You’d never guess it by the picture-perfect photos that I usually post (hahaha!) or the ones that Tracey has just posted, but my children are FREAKS OF NATURE. I could get them on Stupid Human Tricks! My sister can turn her arms all the way around and inside out with her palms flat on the table, and I used to be able to vibrate my eyes (now it gives me a monster headache), but I don’t know where my kids got their freaky freakishness. The apple may not fall very far from the tree in most cases, but this time...

12
Sep
2005

GROUP COMMITMENT TO AN INDIVIDUAL EFFORT

How many things can you do at once? Can you walk and talk? Can you walk and talk AND keep track of a child? Can you walk and talk and keep track of a child and follow directions that are only in your head to your destination? How many things can we multi-task at once and still do any one of them halfway decently? Can you pat your head and rub your stomach simultaneously? Can you talk on the phone and surf the web at the same time? Is there some law of diminishing returns that governs how progressively less...

11
Sep
2005

REMEMBERING

Something to Read Today Even Though the Day is Nearly Over in Sweden: 9/11 (thanks to megancrane for the link)

11
Sep
2005

HUNTING AND SHOOTING, NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER

Blue sky days…I can never have too many. Each one a gift wrapped up with a sunshine bow. Yesterday, I was privileged to meet another online friend, the inimitable Tracey Marshall. She’s a talented photographer, and an American expat living north of Gothenburg in Sweden. She and her boyfriend Tobey drove down to visit and brought the camera. Tracey is one of a handful of photographers that I admire greatly, one who also writes passionately and amusingly about her experiences adjusting to life in Sweden. In addition to her engaging online persona, in person she is friendly, talkative and charming....

10
Sep
2005

SING OF GOOD THINGS NOT BAD

I’m not a very religious person in the conventional sense of the word, but I have a reverence for spiritual settings, and there is something about singing in a church that gets me every time. It doesn’t matter whether I am singing alone or with a group. And it doesn’t matter whether the music is secular or not. It’s not so much the song as it is the SINGING. Something about the engineered raised spaces, the way the nave and the sanctuary draw your eye upward, exposing your throat and opening it up. Something about the acoustics, the way the...

08
Sep
2005

SOMETHING IN THE WIND HAS LEARNED MY NAME

Something That Made Me Giggle Today: shazzerlive reading the instructions on a package of Raspberry Chai…”Entice your water to a gentle boil…” Hee! I was interviewed today, by a newspaper! in Swedish! A journalist contacted the AWC last week, wondering if there was anyone in the club who had moved to Sweden “for love” …ho ho ho, only at least half of us, I laughed. So I called her and said, hey! I’m up for it…want to me to call some of my girlfriends? And she did, so I did and they all came today, except for Emily who hurt...

06
Sep
2005

FIRST NAME BASIS

Man, I’m tired. I’m so tired my eyes feel stretched and red and rubbery around the insides, as if my eyeballs had receded.* I felt, at 6:30 p.m, as if I could go to sleep and sleep for 24 hours. But I went back online to check email after fighting off the sleep monster for a short amount of time, and Sam has posted, and she’s okay! *happy dance* And then I wrote you all a note. Jennifer, don’t sweat the small stuff. And don’t let the big stuff ruin the good stuff. Hang in there. Carolyn, I hope and...

05
Sep
2005

GOOD THINGS

Is there anything better than friends and books and food? Don’t answer that, it was rhetorical. e11en, your surprise package was waiting for me when I got home, and I was literally floored by your kindness. Thank you so very, very much. There’s nothing better than friends, and the ones inside my computer are wonderful. (Click Here for More Night Trampoline!)

04
Sep
2005

WINDING DOWN

It seems as if the sun is setting so much faster these days, but here it is 8:30 at night and there is still a westerly glow. Maybe it’s just that we don’t notice it when the skies are overcast or it’s raining, compared with the clear and crisp weather we’ve been blessed with this week. The trees are a bit droopy, on the verge of being droppy, but they haven’t started shedding yet. Most of the fields have been cleared, and there are only a few dotted with thick wheels of hay still waiting to be collected for winter...

03
Sep
2005

REVIVAL

A morning of sleeping in was just what I needed to revive me. Awakening on my own, with no alarm incentive, rolling over and lying in the bed alone, listening to the breakfast clinks and clatters as Anders and the kids spoon up cereal. I stretch my toes, rotate my feet, feel my ankle pop a bit. The window is open and morning sunshine is slanting across the backyard, illuminating the pines and the far side of the ditch. It’s heating up and the dew has already faded. A last-of-the-season fly is desultorily buzzing about, slow and heavy. He’s not...

September 2005
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