Category: general

It snowed and snowed and snowed last night, wild whirling white flakes for hours. Already at 10:00 p.m., Anders’ previous shoveling efforts were completely undone and recovered with several inches of perfect powder. This morning the damage looks to be about 5-6 inches. Snow is a constant wonder. Every time it’s equally amazing. Nothing frozen solid, despite the -11 temperature. Both kids took their sleds to school. Martin’s class (and the entire school of classes above him) are going to Krankesjön (or Cranky Lake, as I like to translate it) to iceskate and sled and grill hotdogs this morning. They...

Anders stayed home with Karin this morning as she still had a low-grade fever even though the coughing seems to be done. It was snowing when Martin and I left, and it snowed nearly all morning and into lunchtime. Big white fluffy flakes, good for snowball packing. It stopped a couple of hours ago and as if by magic, the skies cleared to bright blue and the sun came out. Sun shining on snow ought to make for happiness, but I’m at work where the frowny face has taken over and settled like a mask. 🙁 Thank goodness Jes6ica posted...

Mosaic Minds is taking off and we are looking for submissions. If you are interested, here is the list of themes through October. Please consider writing a feature article, a poem or a story or contributing artwork or photography. Look back through your older stuff, maybe you have something that just needs a bit of polishing that will work for one of the upcoming themes! We also highlight blogs and links of the week so if you know of something that might be of interest, please let me know. Deadline for each month’s submission is the 15th of the month...

The amount of time I can spend online just reading other people’s writing is truly mind-boggling. Especially when some of them, and you know who you are, insist on writing stories and essays that are so incredibly wonderful that I have to finish them all before I can turn my attention to other things. Home from work today with Karin the coughing machine, who continues to cough non-stop despite liberal doses of cough medicine and regular applications of children’s Tylenol. Even the chicken noodle soup at lunch didn’t slow the coughing down. I gave her a cough drop at one...

List the good things about the day in bullet points! My Tuesday morning massage which reprieved me from a half hour of the meeting I was stuck in today from 8:30 until 1:30 Planning a dinner date for next week with our friends Emily & Martin Karin’s coughing non-stop and running a low-grade fever, meaning we’re probably staying home tomorrow (not a good thing that she’s sick or that we’ll probably have a bad night, but I can stay home from work with a clear conscience 🙂 A phone call from my mom, during which both kids talked to her...

Last night’s meeting was an energy kick. I went into town right after work and scored two books at the lovely Hamrelius bookstore which has great old-timey bookstore atmosphere and a chimey bell when you open the glass-paned door. Tracey Chevalier’s new one, The Lady and the Unicorn, was out in paperback, and since I’ve been reading all these lists of great novels of the 20th century, etc., that I haven’t read, I picked up Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as well. 🙂 Then I had sushi (what else?!) and it was soooooooooo gooood. There were several new people at the...

Man, people are such assholes. 🙁 Just saw this on LJ news: Password Scam 2004-01-26 Currently we’re seeing a number of abuse cases that describe accounts being broken into and used to spam communities, after the owners of those accounts entered their username and password in a form that was posted in various journals. The form claims to be a way of customizing your LiveJournal account. It’s not — it’s a password collection script. Please never, ever give your password to anyone for any reason. LiveJournal will never ask you for your password via email, or for any reason other...

Excellent article in Newsweek about the crossover of young adult and children’s literature into adult mainstream reading and why*: …Or maybe grown-ups like children’s entertainment simply because it’s better than their own. Since writers can’t fall back on sex, romance or profanity, the storytelling has to be dramatic and clear. Critic Francis Spufford, who reread all his childhood favorites while writing his memoir, “The Child That Books Built,” believes that kids’ books fill a need for compelling stories currently missing in adult fiction. He blames modernism for encouraging experimentation at the expense of a sound narrative. “What’s happening now is...

Yesterday felt crazy and out of control, and really LOUD, but that was mostly because I’ve been alone and quiet all week. The kids seemed to be everywhere, bouncing off the walls and ceilings. 🙂 Karin ran in and out of the house all day visiting her neighborhood buddies. Anders’ parents came over. Another friend came over to go through kid’s clothes. Okay, so maybe it WAS a little crazy, and not just me. I cleaned out another closet and all of our old files with bank statements pitched that were over 7 years old. What a huge pile of...

The two girls who came over today reduced my 9 bags of kids clothing to 2, which made me very happy. I got laundry, dishes, dusting, vacuuming done and the bathroom cleaned. I also scanned all the pictures, moved the old website pages to the archives and started editing photos before heading into town for the movie. Plans got switched around at the last second and it ended up being just Emily and I. Which was fine, we had fun. Under the Tuscan Moon was really good; I had absolutely no expectations and hadn’t read any reviews and enjoyed it...