Author: lizardek

I’ve never been much of a one for make-up and major beauty routines in the morning and lived with pretty much the same hairstyle for long periods of my life. Before I had children and moved to Sweden (Land of Personal Poodle-Hair), my morning routine with hair was much longer and more involved. Big round brushes, blowdrying and curling iron, etc. Long periods spent getting each wave and curl to behave and stay in place before setting out. Nowadays, it’s mostly wash-scrunch-capture-and-go. I’ve gone down from a shower-dress-face-hair routine of 1 hour to about 20 minutes, max. It always seems...

Karin is currently vacuuming the dining room and singing as she goes, dressed in her outside fleece sweater, snowpants and spiderman woolen hat. Perhaps child labor is the answer to all our problems. Just got the hall closet partly cleaned out and keep wondering, where do we get all this STUFF from? Every nook, cranny, cupboard, drawer and closet in this house is STUFFED with stuff. It’s as if when you move to a bigger space, your stuff automatically expands wwwwwhhhhuuump! to fill the space so you gain nothing by moving if more space was one of your reasons for...

It’s after midnight, which means it’s January 11th, and officially the anniversary of the day I moved to Sweden 7 years ago. My sister-in-law and I talked a bit about it tonight when we were over there for her son’s 7th birthday (I went straight from the airport to the hospital to see the new baby). She asked me if I regretted the move at all or if I felt like this was home now. No and yes, which it felt nice to be able to answer her. I miss the States sometimes, especially Chicago, but missing it and wanting...

Slept WAY in, since I was pretending I was still on vacation last night and stayed up super late playing on the web. 🙂 Oj! I must stop that!! I have nothing to say about today so far except about household chores getting accomplished and what we have on the agenda this evening, (which is NOT going to a concert, play, or film, more’s the pity) which I’m pretty sure no one else is interested in (if you really want to hear the details of my boring existence let me know, haha). Karin and I are still at loggerheads in...

When the Modern Library published its list of the top 100 20th century English-language novels, Feminista.com was outraged that the list, compiled by a panel of NINE men and ONE woman, included 92 works by men, and 8 by women. So they made their own list: 100 Great 20th Century English-language Works of Fiction by Women I’ve got some reading to do. As usual. 🙂 (thanks to ricecricket for posting this in !) *** Upon hearing that Joan Aiken passed away recently and reading several LJ journals praise of her work, I realized that I might somehow have made it...

I wasn’t going to post anything today, because I’m not in a social mood, but what the hell. I’ve got nothing better to do at work, and I’m tired of myself, so maybe writing something will help push me out of it. Things Karin refused to do last night but ended up doing anyway under duress: stop fighting with Martin, eat dinner, sit in her bed for a 5-minute time-out, sit in her bed for another 5-minute time-out, remove her clothes, take a bath, wash her hair, dry herself off, put on pajamas, go to bed, go to sleep. Thing...

I’ve just had one of the worst evenings ever with Karin. So bad that I left the house in tears and walked around the neighborhood twice and then sat on the porch and cried. I’m at a complete loss. 🙁

This was me, last night, and sort of this morning too. Not sure why as there isn’t any real reason for me to be crabby, so I suspect it’s PMS. Damn you, Biology! I went grocery shopping after work, something I haven’t done for over a week (except the regular emergency runs for milk and bread), and the lines were long and slow, which is probably what started it. And there weren’t any of my favorite Chicky World Cordon Bleus in the freezer section. And the bill was really high. sigh Then I came home and fixed dinner for the...

Historic Tale Construction Kit The only bummer: no moose images in the middle ages, apparently. Or lizards.

The fog in Lund lumbers in like an overweight, lazy smoky-grey cat with half-lidded eyes that can’t be bothered to get up once it has plopped its fat ass down and lies around on its back with its feet in the air all day. Combined with the snow on the ground, the view out my window is all-white and translucent and opalescent and vaseline on the lens. The snow is the kind that makes for great snowballs and building forts, all wet and sloppy and heavy. I didn’t even have to scrape windows because the snow all collapsed from its...