Tagged: americanabroad

23
Sep
2010

THINGS YET TO DO

I have lived in Sweden for nearly 14 years. Is that right? Did I count correctly? I moved here in January of 1997, so if I take my gloves and shoes and socks off and wiggle my toes and ignore Mr Numbers’ malicious grin and start on my pointer finger with January 1998 and add 99, 2000, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11…it means that when January 2011 rolls around 14 years will have gone by since we moved to Europe. We’ve done a lot of things since we moved to Sweden. We’ve been to...

17
Jul
2010

MWAH!

Am very glad to be home though leaving was, as always, a wrench. Horribly long trip with a 2-hour sitting-at-the-gate delay in Atlanta, but we are home and halfway unpacked. More soon, once I catch my breath!

04
Jul
2010

HOT HOT HOT

The dial-up connection at my mom’s is killing me. By the time I get email checked it’s been over an hour online and I just don’t have the gumption to write a post. We’ve been busy, busy, busy, and time is flying by. The weather has jumped from lovely high 60s and low 70s to high 80s and low 90s and I’m sweltering now. The kids were great on the plane trip and we had a yummy, though very pricy, sushi lunch at Amsterdam airport, and we arrived with no problems. The day after we got here my sister and...

16
Jun
2010

DON’T KNOW WHEN I’LL BE BACK AGAIN

Tomorrow is Martin’s last day of school. He’s had a really good first half year at his new school and seems to be thriving from all accounts. He had his piano recital today and hours later his piano teacher called to tell me how much he seems to have blossomed the past few months; she thinks it’s on account of the new school. Tomorrow morning first thing is his end-of-school “ceremony” with recitals and music and afterwards a cake party. Everyone is supposed to bring a cake: Anders is in the kitchen right now, frosting a cake shaped like a...

13
Jun
2010

COUNTING DOWN

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. I love that line. It’s such a perfect way to think about the fact that the present is so fleeting and time moves so fast and the future is so very, very hard to grasp, because it’s always transformed into the present just as we get it in our hot little hands. The weekend has slipped into the past, now it’s after 10 p.m. on Sunday. It slipped away in a welter of snapshot images from the lenses of my eyes: Karin playing soccer, the swirly clouds, a beautiful sunset after...

20
May
2010

WHERE WE ARE

Spring has been sneaking up on us. We had a beautiful April until the volcano blew and for nearly three weeks we’ve been shivering and turning up our collars and sneaking betrayed looks at the cloud cover. Today: glorious summer! Though I was at work, head bent to my PC, frantically pounding out task after task, trying to keep abreast of the mountain of work that threatens to slide and consume, so I couldn’t really enjoy it properly. Karin called around 3 p.m. asking if she could get the sprinkler out to play with. They put it under the trampoline...

19
Apr
2010

ASHES TO ASHES ALL FALL DOWN!

Sunny day, blowing the clouds away, and all I think when I’m inside is OMG the house is so dusty! EEK. Dust bunnies! Dust mice! Dust ELEPHANTS! A dust lake on every surface. ACK. Dusting is so boring. And so USELESS. All it seems to really do is rearrange the stuff. It never goes away, not really. Don’t think about it too closely, though, or it will really gross you out. I forgot to water the grass seed my husband spread out in the backyard where the pool used to be, again tonight. Oops. I wish he was home. I...

31
Mar
2010

PASS THE CHOCOLATE

I’m a little stressed out about our 4-week vacation this summer to the States and I haven’t even done anything yet but book the flights. You would think that 4 weeks is enough time to fit in everything and everyone, right? But I’m beginning to believe that while it may be possible, it won’t be RESTFUL. I don’t want to come home from my vacation needing another vacation. The list of people we want to see is growing: my mom (of course), my brother and his wife, my sister and her family, my grandmother, my aunt & uncle and cousins...

28
Oct
2009

WHEN BLACK CATS PROWL & PUMPKINS GLEAM

I had an unexpected phone call at work this morning from a radio personality that had gotten my name from one of our neighbors who works for a broadcasting company in Malmö. The man who called me works for Sverige’s Radio and had been told that I was a “Halloween expert”. Haa! I guess being an American in Sweden qualifies me as a Halloween expert, if anyone is! He asked me several questions about Halloween: when it was, what you were supposed to do, did you have to dress up, what were the rules for trick-or-treating, etc. I answered him...