God, I’m lame. I can’t seem to get a post up to save my life, though I’ve thought about it several times.
Mostly, I’ve been reading, re-watching Glee with Anders and Karin, working like a crazy person because work=crazy, trying to avoid shoulder issues, perusing art on Instagram and various and sundry other small things that go into making up a day. None of which are earth-shattering or all that interesting.
I read a fantastic book last week, the latest by Bryn Greenwood. If you haven’t read any of her books, do yourself a favor and go get them now. They are ALL SO SO GOOD. I am still thinking about the characters and the story a week and another book later. The Reckless Oath We Made is the title.
Karin and I went to see the Downton Abbey movie last night with a colleague and his sambo at the Bar Deco Salon of the Spegeln movie theater in Malmö where they serve food and drinks and you sit in giant over-stuffed armchairs with a very small audience. It was delightful. If you were a fan of the show, it was like watching a good, very satisfying episode. It was nice to see all the characters that we used to bingewatch together again.
We had another 9 zucchini during the past week plus several yellow squash. I managed to give most of them away but when I went out this evening to check, I saw there are four more of each on the way…oy! Next year, only ONE squash plant, thanks. The gift that apparently never stops giving! 😀
I was really pleased yesterday after a major disappointment on Friday. I have a beautiful brass lamp in the living room that I got as part of gift package of furniture with my roommate from our boss a million years ago in our first real job after college. (It’s a long story, but basically my boss had money to burn and thought we both did a good job and rewarded us for it in a ridiculously extravagant way that I’m still a little boggled by many years later on). It’s quite large and very heavy and it came with a huge fan-shape pleated shade in a warm off-white. You can see it in this picture. It’s a very AMERICAN lamp.
Several years ago, Karin and Anders were goofing around and a ball (that was not supposed to be played with in the house for this very reason) hit the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp itself was fine, but the shade was pretty wrecked. Even though the outside escaped damage, the inside lining was cracked in several places and it had come away from the top circle fixture. Anders patched it up with duct tape and glue and I put it back on the lamp and forgot about it…until about a month ago, when I was sitting on the sofa reading and I heard a really weird noise and looked up to see the shade slowly detaching from the top circle and sliding down the base of the lamp. Ack! When I removed it and inspected the shade, I knew it was past an easy fix. The whole thing is at least 35 years old and the plastic lining was in really bad shape.
I figured I could find a replacement…maybe but the fittings that hold an American lampshade on a lamp are COMPLETELY different from the Swedish ones, and I wasn’t sure I could find a shade that would work, here in Sweden. When I tried to google lampshades, I couldn’t find ANY that were big enough or the same style at all. Lampshades simply don’t have pleats here. Next step was to google lamp repair, but that only gave me hits on lamp STORES, some of which claimed to also repair lamps, but NONE of which covered lamp SHADES. I took the shade with me on Friday after work to Malmö and checked one of the stores. Nope, I was told, no such thing and no one who does that kind of work that they were aware of. They only worked with repairs on the electrical parts of lamps.
I checked on Amazon and apparently pleats are still in style in the US, because they had plenty of them, ranging in price from $44-$60, but I couldn’t figure out how I’d get it here…shipping would cost a fortune for something that large, even though it wouldn’t weigh anything, and it would surely get stuck in customs to boot.
Back to the drawing board. I talked to Anders about the possibility of repairing the whole shade myself but trying to find a replacement material for the inside plastic lining was beyond us. I figured I might be able to remove it and remove all the glue around the fitting rings but if I couldn’t find a replacement liner, I would have done a lot of work with nothing to show for it. Then I remembered a huge lamp store that we went to once that is about 20 minutes from our house. So I took the whole lamp and the shade with me yesterday to see if they could help.
And they could! The lady at the desk oohed and aahed over my lamp and took me upstairs where they had large shades and we found two that would work, though neither was pleated, nor quite as wide. The one I ended up with is white with a lineny texture to the fabric and glows a nice golden off-white when lit. She took off the entire armature of the fittings, gave the lamp a whole new set of Swedish fixtures and a new cord with a button switch and sold me a bulb with a built-in dimmer. All for a really decent price. She asked me where I was from and when I said Chicago was my last stop before moving to Sweden, she surprised me by saying she was from Chicago, too! Grew up in Northbrook until she was 23 and then moved to Sweden. I didn’t get the full story, but her kids are also American citizens. Small world!
Anyway, so now I have a lamp, though it seems to be missing one piece that I have to ask her about, but I’m quite happy that my American lamp is now a Swedish one and back in place!
And that, my friends, is all the news that’s fit to print.
Okay, not all of it, but hey, it’s a post. Whaddaya want, wicker?