Author: lizardek

03
Oct
2010

ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER

UGH. I would like a weekend do-over, please. Except for the party I attended last night which was really fun and a huge success, this has not been a couple of days I’d like to keep. I’d rather hand them back in and get new ones, please. I’m the membership officer for the American Women’s Club and come September one of my responsibilities is to chase down membership fees for the new season and determine whether or not members are renewing. If they are, then I need to update their info in the printed directory, which I also handle (not...

29
Sep
2010

CIRCULAR

It’s colder out than I want it to be. Not window-scraping weather, yet, but I can feel it’s coming. Geese are flying in v-formations low across the sky. Recently, there was a lazy circle of storks flying over our neighborhood. They looked so weird, alien, almost. Then they turned in unison and flew north. The storks we have here were supposed to be raised and then released to migrate to Africa each winter. Instead they stay. Every stork I see reinforces a feeling of wonder about where I live. It’s crazy season. Can you feel how fast everything is going?...

26
Sep
2010

AUTUMN BOUNTY

This has been a lovely, busy weekend. Karin had a soccer tournament in Halmstad all day Saturday. They played 7 games (short games of 16 minutes in several cases) and came in 3rd. She spent the night with one of her teammates, though I doubt either of them got much sleep 🙂 Martin and I were supposed to go to the Gothenburg Book Fair as part of an AWC event but the other 3 members who had said they might go backed out, so instead he and I ended up going into Malmö. We hit two bookstores, and found several...

23
Sep
2010

THINGS YET TO DO

I have lived in Sweden for nearly 14 years. Is that right? Did I count correctly? I moved here in January of 1997, so if I take my gloves and shoes and socks off and wiggle my toes and ignore Mr Numbers’ malicious grin and start on my pointer finger with January 1998 and add 99, 2000, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11…it means that when January 2011 rolls around 14 years will have gone by since we moved to Europe. We’ve done a lot of things since we moved to Sweden. We’ve been to...

19
Sep
2010

SLEEPY SUNNY SUNDAY

The kids forced me to read 3 chapters of The Hunger Games to them today; no hardship since I want to know what happens next as much as they do. We only have 6 more chapters left: we’ll be done long before the discussion date which is set for October 13th. I suspect by then I’ll have been badgered into ordering the next 2 books and we’ll have read them as well. Karin has never been as much of a reader as Martin, but she gets excited by a good story, too. I don’t know that I would call this...

15
Sep
2010

A SUDDEN & UNEXPECTED CLUTCH OUT OF THE DARKNESS*

hen I lived in my first apartment in downtown Chicago it was on the 3rd floor of an old brownstone with no elevator. We had a stairwell in the front with 2 apartments off each landing and a rickety wooden contraption on the backside that opened off our kitchen and led down to the laundry room and storage rooms in the basement as well as up to the roof access. It doubled as a fire escape but the landing was too small to use as a balcony. I lived there for a couple of years with various roommates: 2 friends...

11
Sep
2010

WHACK WHACK WHACK!

Woke up at 7:42 a.m., went back to sleep for TWO HOURS, got up, showered and dressed, dusted the whole house, windexed all the glass surfaces, tidied, vacuumed, cleaned out the front hall closet, watered the plants, started laundry, went grocery-shopping, ate lunch, read 3 chapters of the book group book which I’m finding more more engaging and interesting than I thought I would. Then I fixed lunch for the kids. In the meantime, kids cleaned up, dusted & vacuumed their own rooms, emptied garbages in the whole house. Martin helped me take out recycleables. Karin went to the grocery...

07
Sep
2010

SNAPSHOTS

A tractor plowing a field, turning under hay stubble, turning up loamy chocolate earth, a line of sentinal storks on either side waiting for their worm buffet. The sun, flat behind them, hiding their red beaks, their black and white bodies, their spikey gangly legs in a flare of brightness; stork silhouettes. The French teacher at Martin’s school, speaking in Swedish so fast with such a thick French accent that I understood maybe 1 word in 10 of what she said at the parent meeting tonight. The English teacher grabbing and shaking my hand with a hearty introduction and a...

05
Sep
2010

GOLDEN DAYS

It’s been a busy, yet strangely relaxing weekend, and one that has gone by far too fast. Anders arrived home just in time for dinner on Friday evening, and after he had been thoroughly greeted and handed out presents and started unpacking he came into the kitchen where I was finishing up dinner preparations, took a look at the meal in progress and said, “I’ve been in China for 3 weeks and you’re making rice??” HAHAHAA!! Oops! Karin had come home with a tale of woe about her day being ruined because they had had korv stroganoff for lunch at...

October 2025
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

Archives