Category: general

Dreary day of non-stop rain, lowering clouds, white mist, wet roads. Sleeping in helps. Ignoring the state of the house helps. Reading a good book when I should be cleaning helps. Butterflies in stomach are not for the concert today, but for the first day at a new job tomorrow. They start early, those butterflies, so they can really sink their fangs in. After the concert, the final song stays in my head for several hours. I have my own private mental chorus. Pi da me la! I feel like an octopus. 8 arms waving around madly, each one full...

Imagine a theater nearly in the round, one of those old medical operating theaters, with high paneled wooden seats, so that the students can see every detail of what’s happening under the hands of the surgeon. Now, instead of a surgeon, add a black dance floor, a backdrop, a jazz saxophonist, a drummer that really rocks out, a tall young blonde woman with dramatic makeup and a slinky eggplant-colored flamenco dress, and a choir dressed in black with red espadrilles. We rocked the house with our Sangria premiere today. 1 down, 4 concerts to go. 🙂 natooke wanted to know

I have so many things to write about that I hardly know where to start. I might have to do a bullet-point list just for the sake of my sanity. If you’re in a group of 9 people where half of them speak French and half of them speak Swedish, and they ALL speak English, they will still divide and gravitate to each other by language, only remembering now and again that they should ALL be mingling together. I like Chicken Satay better than Chicken Green Curry. I might need to clone myself for my new job, there is so...

October 14th, 2004 To: Human ResourcesEricsson Technology Licensing Due to circumstances beyond my control, that is, the closing of Ericsson Technology Licensing, I have found a new job outside of the corporation, and therefore, I am tendering my resignation, effective today, October 14th, 2004. To the best of my knowledge, all relevant materials and files have been handed over to the Marketing department. Regards,Elizabeth Slaughter-Ek

I’ll be sitting in a 2-day marketing group conference tomorrow and Wednesday with my new colleagues (!!) at this hotel in Gilleleje, Denmark. We get back Wednesday night just in time for me to make it to final choir rehearsal before our first concert on Saturday, so I won’t be posting again until Thursday. And, just so I have lots of comments to return to, I’d be thrilled if you (including you lurkers out there who never comment!) would do at least one of the following: 1. Ask me a question you’d like answered 2. Tell me something you’d like...

There’s a silvery sheen over everything these mornings, a satin glimmer to the world. Nothing mars the blue beauty of the sky, it stretches on forever, white to blue to cobalt. The shining sun means there is more to see, everything delineated and sharp. Objects that fade away when it’s gray and rainy are suddenly demanding attention, silver shines, asphalt glitters, each leaf on each tree is an individual object to be noticed and taken into account. No visual slacking is permissible when the sun is shining in Sweden! Look! Look around you! I used to be able to reply...

The weather is glorious, biting autumn cold, but sunny…one of those edgy, orange/red/yellow leaf days where the clouds seem to stand still in the sky and the shadows are so crisp they could cut you. A group of parents has had the unenviable project the past few months of transforming the school yard from a sea of concrete to a green and inviting playground. They’ve put out calls for volunteers and materials and spent several weekend working, and several days worth of time calling the county and wheedling their way into approvals for this and that. Today we were there...

If someone had told me 8 years ago that I would one day eat pea soup with relish gusto*, I would have laughed them out of the room. As a child, I once threw up pea soup AT THE TABLE as revenge on my father for making me eat it in the first place. This was before I met Swedish pea soup, where the peas are not green and slimey. I’ve had varying degrees of acceptance with the Swedish pea soups over the past 8 years, but the one I had on Thursday was by far the best yet. Swedes...

Karin just came over to me after the last strains of Everybody Wants To Be A Cat faded away and stuck her mouth in my face and said, “Mama, is there a hole here?” and pointed at her face. I looked at her teeth and said, “Well, there seems to be a bigger gap here than I remember…” I stuck out my finger and touched her bottom teeth one by one and sure enough, the front right tooth moved back and forth under my finger. “Whoa,” I said, “You’re going to lose a tooth.” Her face lit up like a...

Yesterday was a horrible day. Instead of listening to my heart and head, I let my boss freak me out and convince me to hold out for more money and my stomach was tied up in knots for hours because of it. However, all’s well that ends well, assuming the contract arrives any minute, which I’m expecting… I’ve taken the job with Company A, the permanent position, the one that I’ve been leaning toward the whole time.* And I’m happy and relieved and sad and resigned and too many damned emotions all tied up at once, what with having the...