Yesterday, I’d had enough of my own sluggyness. So I cleaned the bathroom. THOROUGHLY. Everything out, and scrubbed top to bottom. I felt much better when I was done. It was another day of downtime though, as Anders and the kids didn’t get home until 10 pm. So, after the major bathroom blitz I sat down and watched the pilot episode of The 4400 TV show box set that Anders brought home for me from Shanghai last August and which I hadn’t gotten around to. After only a couple of episodes I’m hooked and a little bummed that it only lasted 4 seasons. I was sorely tempted to watch the next episode of The Pillars of the Earth Miniseries that Martin and I are in the middle of, but managed to restrain myself out of a sense of fairness to him. (We watched Episode 3 tonight and I’m very sad about Tom Builder’s death right now, even though I’ve read the book and knew he didn’t make it to the end.)
It was beautiful out today, sunny and warming. The daffodils I planted last year between the baby roses are all coming up! Some of the shoots are actually 3 inches high already! I am afeared, alas, that the roses have not made it through the winter. They look terrible: dry and rotten-looking. We’ll see…I don’t know anything about roses, so maybe it’s not as bad as it appears. There are still a few straggling snowscabs here and there throughout the village, but the ground around them was wet: they’re not long for this world, hurrah!
Most of today has been occupied by laundry, all eleventy-million loads of it. Anders left again this afternoon for a week-long business trip in Germany and Karin spent most of the day at a soccer match watching her BOYFRIEND play and then at his house, where I picked her up after dropping Anders at the train station. She came home yesterday all bubbly and excited about the fact that while she was gone, a boy she likes in the village where she plays soccer (he’s the same age and also plays there) asked her out, and now they’re AN ITEM. Normally I would think this was adorable, but now she’s approaching 12, I confess it makes me mostly nervous. EEK. Boyfriends!
It’s cute in Sweden, though…when a boy or girl asks the object of their affection to go steady (as we used to say; I have no idea what the kids call it nowadays), they fråga chansen which literally means to ask about your chances. Apparently, she spent most of the time she wasn’t actually skiing or snowboarding SMSing with various friends and with this boy with the end result that one of them asked the other out (she was a little fuzzy on the details) and now they’re “together” as much as 11 year olds can be said to be together. DOUBLE EEK. And so it begins.