You know, I had seriously good intentions to post more often this month, since I was so lame busy in November, but it appears that I am paving the road to blog post hell instead. I hate just writing catch-up posts of what I’ve been doing, where I’ve been, why I’m absent, because who cares, really?
I know I have a few faithful readers, but I really wonder if anyone is REALLY following this journal anymore. I don’t know that I would be, if I were you. Though it’s not like there are a lot of bloggers left to follow anywhere, anymore, and I’m certainly not one of the interesting ones these days!
Martin has been gone for 7 weeks. He comes home on Tuesday, assuming that my mom and uncle can get him from Michigan back to Toronto in the expected snowstorm that is heading their way. If his flight is cancelled or delayed, it might be an extra day before he makes it back, so we are holding thumbs that the weather is not as terrible as predicted and that they don’t have any problems, either driving there or his flight actually departing on time.
We are ready for Christmas: the tree is up and decorated (since last week) and I went Christmas shopping today and made a huge dent in my list. Just have a couple of things left to get, not sure if I will do that tomorrow or wait until after my vacation starts. The kids and I are planning to go see the new Star Wars movie on Wednesday (Martin already saw it in Detroit, but wants to go again with us) and we have our plans for Christmas Eve at Anders’ sister’s home in place including the list of the food we are responsible for.
Karin crashed her moped last week; nothing serious, but her phone call scared the crap out of me until I figured out that she was fine. I’ve been dreading that call since she started driving 2.5 years ago. She slid taking a corner on black ice, and ended up with the moped sliding on its side, though she managed to push it away off of her. She was still banged up and stiff and sore all week, but thankfully unhurt in any serious way. The moped is “crooked” but Anders thinks it’s fixable, thank goodness. She relies on it so much, so it would be hard to have it out of commission completely.
Anders and I have been binge-watching Bron (The Bridge), a Swedish police/detective series. He started watching it a couple of weeks ago, and I got hooked by the 4th episode, just from watching bits and pieces as I came and went around the house while he was watching. We totally missed the hype around this one, even though I remember my colleagues all talking about it at work when it first started airing several years ago. I don’t usually like crime-murder series at all but this one is SO good, so well-done and with characters that you come to deeply care about despite their many human flaws…or perhaps in spite of. Now we are done and have to wait an entire year until season 4 starts airing in January 2018: AUGH.
Choir is over for the year, and I’m quite sad about it, because our two excellent choir leaders have stepped down and won’t be returning at the end of January for next year’s spring term. I hope they can find a replacement (or two) that are as good, but after having been in choirs since I was 13 years old, I know how rare their particular kind of talent is.
However, a group of women at the office, me included, have signed up to sing in a Gospel concert that is taking place in Malmö at the end of January. I wouldn’t normally be interested, since I’m not really into gospel…and not at all religious, but I got a bit railroaded into it by their enthusiasm. 🙂 Anyway, we got the music CDs a week ago, and I am memorizing the alto part by listening to it over and over in the car (it is only nine songs). And Karin, who has been riding to and from Lund with me several times this week ALSO has three of the songs memorized so we sing them together VERY enthusiastically any time we are in the car now, to our own mutual hilarity. There are going to be 1000 choir singers altogether along with several solo artists from the US and the colleague who did this same event last year swears that it is SUPER fun. I’ve been involved in this sort of multi-choir event a couple of times before (though never gospel) and it IS a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to it even though it kind of pains me to be singing such super-religious songs. Heh.
What I’m wishing for, right now, and for Christmas, is a little snow to lighten things up. It’s SO DAMN DARK. Dark all the time. Sigh.