Lizardek

21
Aug
2016

SUPER SUNDAY

It’s been a nice, pretty quiet weekend with the kids mostly away and me mostly puttering about the house…shades of what’s to come, I guess. Martin is working and Karin was gone Friday for a soccer match in Växjö and a sleepover last night. I’ve cleaned house, worked on my recipe book, read, and relaxed. The weather has been up and down, but today is mostly sunny though I can see a lot of cloud cover from the window. Anders and I are going to fika with his mom this afternoon, sans kids, since Martin works until 6 and Karin...

17
Aug
2016

WHEN A POST SNOWBALLS

Dammit, I ran out of photos and then I forgot to post and here it is a week later and I’ve got nothing. Getting back into the swing of things in my real life (as opposed to my vacation life) has taken all my energy…literally. I come home from work so tired that I can hardly see straight. Some days I take a nap and some days I manage not to. Napping is brutal…you’d think it would help but it just makes things worse. Even when I set the alarm so I don’t sleep more than an hour…oof: total zombie....

13
Aug
2016

WISH YOU WERE HERE

When you live this far apart from your loved ones, time together is never long enough, even when some days together it feels like it. I would like another couple of weeks together just to RELAX, without plans, without parties, without anything but time to sit together, talk more deeply about our lives, get to know my niece and nephews better, give my children more time with their grandma, their uncle, their aunt, their cousins. Time to do all the family things together that we so rarely get to do with each other: play games, go shopping, eat meals, hang...

10
Aug
2016

FILLING THE YEAR

In Sweden, the phrase for having a birthday is “fyller år” which literally means “filling the year”. In Swedish, you don’t turn 100, you fill it. The word birthday is the same in both languages; födelsedagen. In my family, we have a pile of birthdays in March (Sarah, John, Simone, Bryce) and a pile in the summer, mostly in July with mine lagging in early August (my grandmother, my mom and dad (same day), me, Sammy, Karin) and another group in December (Danely, Martin, Jakob). My sister’s husband Tom, and Anders, are the odd men out, with birthdays in January...

09
Aug
2016

FUN WITH FAMILY

When I proposed having a party this summer to celebrate all the big events & milestones in our family, it never occurred to me how it might snowball. I persuaded my mom to let me invite the entire family, never suspecting that so many of them might actually come. I thought it would be like my plans for my 50th birthday trip with my friend Russell: all our family and friends would come…when in reality not even my brother could make it (we had a great time regardless). And we had a LOT to celebrate this year: big birthdays, graduations,...

08
Aug
2016

FUN WITH FRIENDS

It turns out, when I am selecting photos from vacation, that I tend to take all the ones with people in them. Even though I appreciate photos of the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen, the ones that get me, that contain the things I most want to remember, are the ones with the people we were with in them. You can find fantastic photos of the Statue of Liberty and New York and Boston anywhere online, but if you want to see what I love, then here you go. Three posts coming up full of smiling faces...

04
Aug
2016

IN WHICH I MENTION MY DIGESTIVE SYSTEM ONE TOO MANY TIMES

Things about jetlag that suck 1. Setting the alarm and lying down for a 1-hour nap because you are literally so tired you cannot keep your eyes open, and then, in your zombie-induced haze, turning off the alarm and struggling subsequently as if you are in sleep quicksand to wake up. 2. Getting your digestive system cycle back on track. For a intestinally-regular person like me, being completely off on my disposal schedule is discombobulating. 3. Waking up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. and not being able to get back to sleep in the time left...

01
Aug
2016

WELL HELLO THERE!

Did you miss me? I missed me! I missed you, too! It’s hard to believe that it’s been a month away and now we’re back. It was full on summer in the States but back home in Sweden, I feel we’ve landed in the early onset of autumn and I have to say I am SO GLAD. I never do well in heat and humidity and we had enough of it this past month to last me a lifetime. There’s a lot of reasons why I love living in Sweden, but cool weather and no humidity trumps just about everything....

30
Jun
2016

OVER AND OUT

I just finished a really good book, The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry. It was excellent and had a (sad) twist that I did not see coming, which I always appreciate in a book (even if it is sad). I’ve been reading a lot lately, after what felt like a very long streak of not reading much at all, or at least reading so slowly as to be the same thing. I read a new Bill Bryson book, which was both interesting and ho-hum at the same time. I’ve downloaded 2 more books to my Kindle so I’ll have more...

24
Jun
2016

MIDSUMMER

We had a whiz-bang thunderstorm yesterday evening that went on for HOURS. It lasted pretty much all night, rolling and booming and crashing with lightning strikes. The kids and I sat out on the porch for a long time watching, and going Ooooo! every time lightning split the sky and the big cracks of noise hit. Then it poured rain for hours, too. One of our neighbors measured it at 40 mm (1.6 inches-ish) but it sure seemed like more than that. The dog was anxious all night as well, so when we weren’t being woken up by crash-bangs, we...

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