The days just whiz by. Sometimes at the ends of them, I suddenly stop what I’m doing, and give a little shake of my head, blinking a bit, wondering, “What just happened? What have I been doing all day?” when the truth is life keeps motoring along whether I’m consciously partaking or not.
Living on autopilot is a bad habit.
Some things I have listed quickly so I wouldn’t forget to talk about them: Dirty Jobs, election ballot, rotating CDs, spider season, weird mom.
Then I look at the list, a list of things that I kind of mentally wrote on mental post-it notes and stuck all over my brain (I typed brian again! Why do I always type brian first before I get it right?? Do you do that? Is it just me and my weird brian??) so I won’t forget to write about them here, and I think, “why would anyone care about this stuff? What a weird list. Maybe what Martin says, says constantly, won’t let me forget, okay, I get it already kid, is true: I’m weird.
I’ll start from the end and work my way forward, how about that? Read on, my friend.
Weird moms
Martin has taken, in the past half year or so, to continually commenting on my weirdness. Mostly I think it’s his way of saying I’m being silly, or that I’m embarrassing him, but the fact remains that it’s become his favorite refrain in regards to me, his mother. Not only am I generally silly, and very embarrassing to have around if you are 10 years old (I sing! out loud! in public! IN FRONT OF HIS FRIENDS!), but I’m also not Swedish, and my Swedish is full of errors, which must only double the embarrassment at this stage of his pre-adolescent sensitivity, and the worst part is: I DON’T CARE ABOUT MY WEIRDNESS. I get my weirdness honestly: from my mom! (hi Mom! Don’t try and deny it!) and I’ve always been kind of proud of it. I’ve always equated “weirdness” with “unconventional” and though I’m really VERY conventional in oh so many ways, there are some things about me which will always and forever remain different. Isn’t that nice? I’d hate to be the same as everyone else, even though we’re all essentially the same. Everyone is someone else’s weirdo, after all. I can certainly be his, until he wises up at the age of 25 or so and realizes what a treasure of a mom he has, just like I did.
Spider season
Every year about this time, all the spiders in Sweden suddenly realize it’s getting a bit nippy out there and they all head indoors. This would be fine, if they weren’t so freaking big and LEGGY. O! those gams! *shudder* I’ve caught-and-released so many giant spiders in the past few weeks that I feel like I deserve my own Steve Irwin-like TV show: The Spider Hunter.
Rotating CDs
Most of the time I have mixed CDs in the car, unless I’m in the middle of a crush obsession wherein I listen to the same CD over and over and over until the rest of the family starts asking, “Can we take the other car?” But the other day, for some reason, I was remembering my old roommate, the Great LP, telling me that she was listening to my (then small at 50) CD collection one CD at a time. And I thought, hey! I have FIVE HUNDRED CDs now! (not including all the mixes) and a great many of them never get listened to at all. So now, I’m grabbing 4 at a time, at random, and listening to them in the car. I have a lot of old stuff, and a lot of 80s music, so I may get tired of this experiment quite quickly. Today it was The Cars’ Greatest Hits, Da Buzz, General Public and Vanessa Carlton. Why in god’s name do I have a Da Buzz album? Hrm.
Election ballot
I voted today, for the next president of the U.S. of A.! Am I first? Woo hoo! I registered online for my absentee ballot last week and I received an email yesterday with my ballot and certificate of overseas status and instructions to print out. Signed, sealed, and soon to be delivered!
Dirty Jobs
If you’re a long-time reader, you might remember that I’m not a big television watcher. But I have to confess that the Discovery Channel has done the unthinkable and addicted me to a TV show for the first time since The West Wing’s first season. On Friday nights we have traditionally had myskväll (family night) with a DVD film, popcorn and candy, but lately films have been pre-empted in favor of Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs. I think I have a crush on Mike Rowe. He’s so earnest and funny and educational, and he also reminds me a lot of my Uncle Mike, whom I adore but so rarely see. And now Dirty Jobs is on every weekday, so the kids and Anders (who are equally smitten) and I are all getting down and dirty every evening before bed-and-story-time with Mike.
There, look at that! It’s after 11! It happened again! ZOOOM!
Bouncy Bouncy Pouncy Flouncy Birthday Wishes to Tracey and Belated ones to orangepoppy!