Lizardek

26
Nov
2018

IT’S BEGINNING TO NOM NOM NOM

Our Thanksgiving dinner guests arrive at 5 pm and we’re sitting down to eat around 5:30…and by 9 pm some of them are already getting ready to leave: a dog at home that needs to be let out, kids that have activities early Sunday morning, two that were fighting colds and needed to head to bed. By 9:30 it was just my two best friends and two husbands (mine included) that moved our bloated turkey bellies to the living room and sprawled on the sofas. It was nice to have an extra hour with just a couple of people to...

23
Nov
2018

GATHERING, GIVING AND THANKING

The whole house smells delicious. Anders is taking turkey 1 out of the oven right now. Tomorrow he’ll cook turkeys 2 & 3 in the final preparation for our annual Thanksgiving (or Friendsgiving as everyone refers to it nowadays) potluck dinner. It’s our 20th anniversary of having Friendsgiving with our best friends. 20 years! Some of them are the same friends that came to the first one. Some of them have joined along the way, and some are fairly new to the celebration. As we have done every year, Anders and I provide the turkey(s), mashed potatoes, stuffing (in the...

18
Nov
2018

LIVING ON IN LIBRARIES

I’m reading a fantastic book. A book about books, what could be better? It’s fascinating. It’s technically about the worst library fire in American history, when the Los Angeles Public Library burned in April 1986, but it is also about the idea of libraries, the history of them, the purpose and updated use of them and how they’ve changed from a modern-day viewpoint, and the love of books in general. The first chapter, which details the spread of the fire and what it consumed, and how much it destroyed actually almost brought me to tears. The thought of all those...

17
Nov
2018

STUFFED

I think a lot about dying these days. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m over halfway to a hundred? Maybe because I wonder what my family would do without me? Maybe because I see signs of decay in so many places. It’s in the news. It’s in the illnesses and diseases and diagnoses that drop like bombs around you. It’s a worm in the brain that whispers what if. What if? What would I do if I lived forever anyway? Even if inevitable, it’s a squirmy uncomfortable contemplation. All the accumulated flotsam of my life, both soothing and cluttering...

31
Oct
2018

CARPE DIEM AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES

I find it so inutterably hard to read the news these days. It feels overwhelming and awful and as if we are just buried in an unending heap of horrible that goes on and on. I know that it’s NOT all bad news, but the scary stuff so often outweighs the positive that I really struggle sometimes to find the good things. I read Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness a month or so ago and he talked quite a lot about how the human brain is wired to respond to bad news and drama and that we, as humans, tend to...

21
Oct
2018

FALL FRENZY

The fall frenzy has started…each week has more things scheduled than the one before and I’m not even in choir this year. On Friday I went with two colleagues and another friend to the sing-along showing of Hair at Spegeln in downtown Malmö. It’s the second sing-along I’ve been to there, and it was just as fun, though a different feeling since it is such a different movie. I love Hair…it’s one of my all-time favorite musicals. I grew up listening to the soundtrack from the play because my dad loved musicals, too. I knew every word to every song...

13
Oct
2018

HOW TO HAVE A GOOD DAY

Get a good night’s sleep. Sleep in a little bit, but not too much. Move your bowels.* Take a hot shower, then add a blast of cold water. Get as clean as you can. Brush your teeth. Clip your nails. Eat a nourishing breakfast that includes avocado, egg and fruit. Plus V8 if you can get it. Send your best friends a message thanking them for a lovely evening the night before. Start a new book (or continue a good one. Or finish one that makes you regret it’s over). Get some things done. Cross things off your to-do list....

10
Oct
2018

GOOD THINGS, DESPITE EVERYTHING

So much of everything lately makes me roll my eyes or grit my teeth. I seem to be seething, constantly. Like so many others, I am horrified and frightened and angry as all hell by the news, by the news, by the unending, ungodly, unbelievable news, that you keep thinking can’t get worse, but then it DOES, but I feel mute. As if what I say doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change anything, even when I know that’s not true. There are so many things stuffing up my brain that nothing can get out, despite all the pushing. I don’t...

19
Sep
2018

IS THIS THING ON?

I used to live a lot more of my life online, in the blog world mostly, than I do now. Not surprising, since so very many people have stopped blogging for one reason or another. I find that weeks fly by and I don’t even think about it once, and when I do check my list of people to read I find it takes just a few minutes to scan through the time that has passed…maybe someone has posted something that takes longer than a minute to read, but it’s rare. And getting rarer, sadly.* It’s not exactly that I’m...

06
Sep
2018

WHERE’S MY “I VOTED” STICKER?

It’s that time of year again, when we vote on books for the AWC book group after sending in our nominations. There are around 15 or so regulars and when each of them sends 3-5 book recommendations, it makes for quite a long list. We had 35 to choose from this year and the 9 winners were announced today. We actually have one book left from last year’s list, that we will be discussing next week and I just realized I’d better get going on it. I often wait until quite close to the book discussion date because if I...

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