Today I left work 2 hours early because I could no longer resist the siren song of the sun. The kids, who bitched at me yesterday to please pick them up earlier today, grumped at me when I appeared in the daycare doorway that I was too early, whereupon I rolled my eyes and bundled up their muck-schlurped playclothes and took them home. I did the happy dance at the mailbox (2 packages!) and then I sat down in my sunny living room with the deck doors open wide to the fresh, clean spring air and the woven-rush-bead curtain moving...

Why do so many women get stuck in 8th grade cliquey cattiness and never grow out of it? What is up with that? Just a rhetorical question, as I’m not in the mood for a rant. It makes me sad, though. (and it’s nothing to do with my online friends, thankfully). Does badmouthing someone else REALLY make people feel better?! Anders is in Italy this week so I’m doing the single-parent thing for a couple of nights. So far, so good. Karin is back in another phase of testing, pushing limits as far as they will go, until she runs...

Gorgeous sunshiney spring days, albeit shivering frosty cold in the minus temperatures. The kids play in the gurgling water-filled ditch behind the house, stomping the ice edges, building bridges, muck schlurping around their sodden ankles and mud-spattered playpants. We can’t keep them out of it. They’re drawn like magnets to water, that new, cool plaything. This morning we went to the International Dog Show in Malmö in the hopes of accosting a flat-coated retriever breeder or two and bombarding them with our ignorance and questions about puppies, the acquisition of, the care of, the raising of, the logistics of. No...

Summer breeds a sort of ecstatic mania among Swedes, probably because it’s so fleeting here. The trappings of summer are treated with a worshipful reverence that borders on lust. The appearance of Swedish strawberries and the tiny, buttery new potatoes, which have a place of honor on the traditional Midsummer menu, is awaited with breathlessness and much anticipatory lip-smacking. This morning the radio DJs announced that the first new potatoes of the season will be sold in Helsingborg this weekend, the last weekend in March, 3 days before the official advent of Spring, for 500 KRONOR A KILO. That is...

I don’t think I belong to the cool kids club anymore…not that I ever really did. Or maybe I just don’t want to belong. Or maybe I’ve found a BETTER cool kids club, right here. Yeah, that’s it. As much as I love my job, man, is it kicking my ass. I feel I could work about a week’s extra worth of days and still not have cleared all the miscellaneous projects off my to-do list. I am so tired each day from the total concentration I’m exerting for 8 hours, that I feel stretched and beaten with a stick,...

Ohmigod, it’s SO late! I have to go to bed!! Crazy busy day at work, followed by short interval with babysitting in-laws and quick dinner, then out the door for choir, and finally home to wrestle with a pile of AWC website changes. And it’s nearly midnight! SHIT! But I can’t go to bed without taking a moment to wish Great Big Beautiful Birthday Wishes to brief_therapy!!

Song Snippet I Burst Out Spontaneously Singing ALL YEAR LONG: Oh no! the mistletoe! Hung where you can see! Somebody waits for you, kiss her once for me!* The temperature hovered above freezing today, enough to make what would have been more snow be rain instead. The nubbly nap of the snow carpet is wearing away. It’s sinking slowly down below the surface, filling the water table, although as I drove through the fields, it often appears as if it’s the earth RISING through the patches of snow. Flat-bottomed clouds cruise the horizon. Relaxing on my sofa after work, I...

There’s a weird feeling hovering about my head these days. I started this journal with the expressed intention of kick-starting my writing again, after a long drought during which I changed just about everything in my life it was possible to change: my marital status, my country of residence, my language skills; my identity as a woman blending with the new and all consuming challenges of being a wife and a mother. I had no time or energy for the person I used to be, or the pursuits I used to enjoy. It was a nearly total reversal of too...

So many thoughts, whirling around my brain. Each one glitters in the streetlights like snow, before coming to rest in the cold and crispy covering that coats everything. I would make a good troglodyte, I sometimes think, or a hermit, burrowing away inside my cave, surrounding myself with the things I want and need, no desire to go outside and squint in the bright sunlight. Usually I’m drawn to sunshine, but this weekend, I seem to have been working on my anti-tan. Tjej, another American expat in Sweden, got a group of us together recently and after a lot of...

How To Make Me Feel Old: Tell me with all the seriousness available to your 5-year-old self that the song on the radio is a good one and ask me to turn it up. It was the remake of The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes. Re Melodifestivalen 2005: Nana was robbed. Even though we did think Las Vegas is a good song and Martin Stenmark a cutie. How is a song about a gambling town in another country supposed to be the best representation of Sweden? Hmmm…Also, rather against my will, I found myself really enjoying Jill Johnson’s Redneck Woman. Sigh:...