Yearly Archive: 2018

28
Dec
2018

RETROSPECTIVE

here is something crazy about how fast time goes…it flies, it swoops, it zooms and I am left gasping again by the fact that it is once again the end of a year that sped by. It’s been a good year for all of us, and we only see good things for the year to come. Family & Personal Highlights of 2018 Keeping myself diabetes-free and my weight down Singing with Karin in a huge 1000 participant Gospelfest concert Anders participating in the year-long X-Cup mountain biking tournaments and Cykel Wasa My oldest best friend visiting for a week Martin...

28
Dec
2018

EK FAMILY CHRISTMAS LETTER 2018

The beginning of 2018 was pretty calm and we hosted a New Year’s Eve dinner with friends here in Flyinge. Liz was recovering from gall bladder removal surgery, so she was taking it pretty easy. Anders went skiing again with colleagues, now an annual tradition. Martin returned to college in Detroit for the second half of his freahman year, even though his flight was cancelled and rerouted, and he ended up getting to spend a couple of nights with Liz’s sister in Connecticut. Karin and Liz participated in a gospel fest choir festival together, Karin’s first big choir event. In...

11
Dec
2018

SOON THE BELLS WILL START*

I don’t feel very Christmassy. Even though my cards were all signed, sealed and mailed over a week ago, and I’ve been to a Christmas market and bought and shipped several presents, I am just not in the Christmas spirit. I suspect part of the reason is that we are not decorating for the holidays. Normally by now, we’d have a tree (even if it wasn’t yet all the way decorated) and the smell of fresh pine would have filled the house. There are no cheerful Santas or tomtes or reindeer or angels peering at me from various nooks and...

02
Dec
2018

TRADITION, REPETITION OR RUT?

I wrote my first Christmas letter in 2002. We had just built and moved into this house, Martin turned 5 and Karin was 3.5. Anders had turned 40 earlier in the year, I was working at Ericsson, and he had just returned to Tetra Pak after a 2-year stint at ABB. I wrote in MUCH more detail about the things that we did each month than I do now…where did I find the time and energy to gather all that information? My Christmas card now seems to have settled into a rut. I wrote this year’s Christmas letter this weekend,...

01
Dec
2018

WAKE UP WITH DETERMINATION, GO TO BED WITH SATISFACTION

No slug day for me today, though I did manage to sleep in a bit. I wake up early nearly every day with a headache starting or raging, and have to decide whether I can fall back asleep or must take some medicine after getting to the bathroom. It feels like it’s almost always either dehydration or tension causing the problem and despite drinking plenty of water, it happens again the next night. UGH. I read for awhile, checked emails, and then got up around 10 to shower and dress. I had a full mental list of things to do...

26
Nov
2018

IT’S BEGINNING TO NOM NOM NOM

Our Thanksgiving dinner guests arrive at 5 pm and we’re sitting down to eat around 5:30…and by 9 pm some of them are already getting ready to leave: a dog at home that needs to be let out, kids that have activities early Sunday morning, two that were fighting colds and needed to head to bed. By 9:30 it was just my two best friends and two husbands (mine included) that moved our bloated turkey bellies to the living room and sprawled on the sofas. It was nice to have an extra hour with just a couple of people to...

23
Nov
2018

GATHERING, GIVING AND THANKING

The whole house smells delicious. Anders is taking turkey 1 out of the oven right now. Tomorrow he’ll cook turkeys 2 & 3 in the final preparation for our annual Thanksgiving (or Friendsgiving as everyone refers to it nowadays) potluck dinner. It’s our 20th anniversary of having Friendsgiving with our best friends. 20 years! Some of them are the same friends that came to the first one. Some of them have joined along the way, and some are fairly new to the celebration. As we have done every year, Anders and I provide the turkey(s), mashed potatoes, stuffing (in the...

18
Nov
2018

LIVING ON IN LIBRARIES

I’m reading a fantastic book. A book about books, what could be better? It’s fascinating. It’s technically about the worst library fire in American history, when the Los Angeles Public Library burned in April 1986, but it is also about the idea of libraries, the history of them, the purpose and updated use of them and how they’ve changed from a modern-day viewpoint, and the love of books in general. The first chapter, which details the spread of the fire and what it consumed, and how much it destroyed actually almost brought me to tears. The thought of all those...

17
Nov
2018

STUFFED

I think a lot about dying these days. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m over halfway to a hundred? Maybe because I wonder what my family would do without me? Maybe because I see signs of decay in so many places. It’s in the news. It’s in the illnesses and diseases and diagnoses that drop like bombs around you. It’s a worm in the brain that whispers what if. What if? What would I do if I lived forever anyway? Even if inevitable, it’s a squirmy uncomfortable contemplation. All the accumulated flotsam of my life, both soothing and cluttering...

31
Oct
2018

CARPE DIEM AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES

I find it so inutterably hard to read the news these days. It feels overwhelming and awful and as if we are just buried in an unending heap of horrible that goes on and on. I know that it’s NOT all bad news, but the scary stuff so often outweighs the positive that I really struggle sometimes to find the good things. I read Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness a month or so ago and he talked quite a lot about how the human brain is wired to respond to bad news and drama and that we, as humans, tend to...

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