Monthly Archive: December 2020

30
Dec
2020

RETROSPECTIVE

ad a laugh just now when I looked back at my Retrospective entry from last year, and the expectations I had for the first year of the 20’s. Well, THAT certainly didn’t turn out as planned…for any of us. The H at the beginning of this post really sums up the entire year of 2020 for me. The terrifying split that is defining my birth country, the polarization of politics, the crisis of the global pandemic, the destruction of all our plans for the year. And personally, the passing of my grandmother in July and the sale and packing up...

29
Dec
2020

ALL OVER THE PLACE

Almost no one is writing anymore. Apart from John and June, I seem to be alone out here. Even Chuck has disappeared. I hope it’s temporary; there are already so few people blogging these days. It’s the holidays, when people are living life and not hanging out online, plus the pandemic has, I suspect, left us with nothing to write about. At least nothing happens to write about. But that just means there should be more time for writing about what one THINKS and FEELS and CARES about. We watched David Attenborough’s documentary A Life on Our Planet yesterday. It...

27
Dec
2020

INBETWEENING

I’m a big fan of wish lists (not to mention lists in general). They’re helpful and useful and revealing and mistake-free. Some people claim not to like providing wish lists because then, they say, they’ll know what they are getting. Or they think that you should know them well enough to know what presents to get them. Screw that, I say. There’s no time for that. There is nothing wrong with getting a list of gift ideas for people, so that you don’t buy things that the recipient doesn’t want or doesn’t like or already has. I’d rather give nothing...

24
Dec
2020

EK FAMILY CHRISTMAS LETTER 2020

Oh 2020, we had such high hopes for you! Martin was going to come home in the spring and we were going to go the States for summer vacation and everything was going to be wonderful. I almost feel like I could write this letter sort of like the part of Twilight where Edward leaves Bella, and for four or five months there are just blank pages with the month’s name on them. Karin and Anders did manage some ski trips at the very beginning of the year; Karin spent a week in Austria with a friend and then the...

17
Dec
2020

BOOKS IN THE TIME OF CORONA

Barack Obama released his favorite books of 2020 list today and I confess to feeling a little thrill to see that the book I’m currently in the middle of was on it. And that two other books in my queue are also on it. Reflected good taste! To be honest, the book I am reading, that was on his list, is probably not going to end up on my list of best books I’ve read this year, unless it takes off or takes a rather drastic turn. It’s good, but it’s really heavy and because it’s about the consequences of...

13
Dec
2020

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

We’ve had approximately ONE hour of sunlight in December so far. And in the past month, we’ve had a total of 24.3 hours of sunlight…spread out over 3 days. I looked at the weather app for Lund for the coming week and all it showed was clouds and rain. I’m guessing that even when the solstice comes, it will make no difference for the next couple of months. Normally this time of year we average around 52 hours of sunlight, which is still AWFULLY little. Seems like weatherwise, all we have to look forward to is depression and sadness. I...

08
Dec
2020

BRING IT ON

I’m feeling on top of things concerning the holidays. I wrote and printed our Christmas letter several weeks ago, which felt idiotic because usually it’s a rundown of the things that have happened in the past year, and like everyone else, NOTHING happened in the past year, because everything that was planned got canceled, and we’ve only been at home. I sat and wrote out my short list of Christmas cards during the AWC Zoom meeting the last week of November and got them in the mail last week. I only send printed cards to people who reciprocate so the...

03
Dec
2020

I WAS DREAMIN’ WHEN I WROTE THIS

I follow my college roommate’s daughter Erin on Instagram; in fact, she has two accounts and I follow them both (along with her mother’s, of course). One of them is her professional account (she’s a content developer) and the other is personal. She’s older than both my kids, and we’ve seen her and her brother along with her parents (who met in college; he was also a friend back then, and still is, though he’s not on social media) every time we’ve been home in Michigan for the last 23 years, so even though it wasn’t often, I still have...

02
Dec
2020

MONKEY SEE MONKEY DO, MONKEY PROUD

Karin made dinner for us tonight: potato soup with carrots, leek and chicken dogs (cut-up). It’s a soup that she and her classmates made once, on an expedition to Skrylle, which is a nature reserve not too far from the school. She was about 14 at the time, and they made the soup over an open fire and she clearly remembers me asking her, when she got home, if she’d been smoking, because she smelled like smoke, and being upset with me for EVEN ASKING, GOD MOM. It was yummy, and Anders made garlic toast in the oven to go...

December 2020
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