Yearly Archive: 2022

30
Dec
2022

RETROSPECTIVE

urprisingly, 2022 did not totally suck like the two years before it. Even though COVID finally visited us twice, no one was very ill, and Martin missed it completely. We had a couple of big milestone birthdays, with Anders turning 60 and Martin turning 25, and 2 big, very fun trips, to Rome, and to Bornholm. Mostly, life continues with the usual bumps and ups and downs. I’ve taken 2 weeks of vacation, here at the end of the year, and today is the last day if you don’t count the New Year’s weekend. I start back to work on...

27
Dec
2022

ART EVERY MONTH

My new year’s resolution for 2022 was to do art every month, and I just finished drawing my last one for December. My idea was to kickstart doing art again, which I think I definitely succeeded in doing, and I hope that I will continue to pull out the sketchpad and the watercolors and make art more frequently than I had been doing before 2022. I did 4 pencil drawings/sketches (5 if you count my self-portrait for work, which I didn’t include in my 2022 art posts), 2 watercolor paintings, 1 acrylic painting, 2 pastel drawings, 8 pages in my...

23
Dec
2022

EK FAMILY CHRISTMAS LETTER 2022

This was the first year that started to feel like the pandemic might, just might, be over. Until Anders tested positive for COVID…twice (!) in the space of 2 months. He had no symptoms at all the first time, and nearly none the second. Karin also managed to get it twice, and Liz is pretty sure she also had it the second go-round. Good thing we all got our boosters! In between bouts of COVID, Anders and Karin managed to fit in a week of skiing, up north in Sweden, and Karin went up again a couple of times to...

17
Dec
2022

READY SET GO

Today is my first day of a 2-week vacation, if you count weekends as part of vacation. I’m off work until January 2, a whole new year. So it’s the start of something, and the end of something: another year. I’ve been counting down the days at work until vacation started and this last couple of weeks nearly did me in. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to hitting the wall before. Add medical issues on top of work stress, and other things, and it’s been a LOT, this year. So, I’m not sad to see the end...

13
Dec
2022

SOME SHORT STUFF AND THEN COMPLETE IDIOCY

My hands are freezing whenever I’m at home because we turned the heat down several degrees. It’s been well below zero every day this past week, so my hands are even colder than usual. We have the tree half-decorated. All the bigger stuff went on last night. Tonight, when Martin gets home we’ll do the rest (all the small stuff). I can’t wait for 2 weeks of vacation. Or rather, just 2 weeks of NOT WORKING. Everyone is on the edge of burnout, and I really hope that when I go back to work the first week of January, that...

04
Dec
2022

TO-DO TO-DO DOBIDO

I probably shouldn’t be sitting down to write anything here, since I’m not really in the mood, and don’t know what I want to write about. It’s a kind of blah day, partly because I woke up with a headache, got up and took a pill, and went back to bed, and didn’t wake up until SUPER late. It’s gray and rainy and I don’t have any plans until later this afternoon, apart from finishing my book. At 4 I’m calling my mom and sister to plan my trip for the spring. I started working on the flight booking last...

27
Nov
2022

IT’S BEGINNING

Martin and I decorated the house today. That was 3 boxes and 3 huge paper bags worth of indoor decorations. We still have two huge boxes full of decorations just for the tree. I went through all the Christmas decorations a few years ago and got rid of an entire moving box full of stuff (some of it was Martin and Karin’s things), but it kind of feels like I should do it again. Then again, we do live in a big house, and it’s very mysig to have it all decorated for the holidays. And I only decorate the...

26
Nov
2022

ANTICIPATION GLITCH

All morning I was looking forward to the things I had planned for this afternoon and evening. Even yesterday, when Anders and Martin and I were eating dinner, I mentioned that I’d be gone the second half of today so that they knew about my plans. There is a maker’s market that we went to in the early fall that was happening again as a Christmas market over the weekend and then Debbie and Camilla and I were going to meet at Camilla’s tonight for dinner and to exchange Christmas presents. Only all that was on the calendar for December...

20
Nov
2022

GOOD STUFF and GOODBYES

What a weekend! We had our annual Friendsgiving dinner potluck yesterday and it was a smash success. I was quite worried to begin with because I invited too many people, or rather, I invited so many people that we weren’t at all sure how we’d manage to set up the tables and chairs so that there would be space for everyone, or even if that many people would fit. But we did, and they did. I should remember that inevitably there is always someone who cancels last minute and sure enough, 3 people on the invite list weren’t able to...

07
Nov
2022

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

Today was such a Monday. I realized late last night as I was finally going to sleep that I had scheduled myself to hold a training at 8:30 this morning for new colleagues in Asia. So I had to get moving and be to work by 8 so I had a little time to get things in order beforehand. I had meetings all morning, and then immediately after I was done eating lunch, I had to run over to the bank office on the next block to get a new “dosa” which is the little device that allows you to...