Tagged: famdamily

18
Jul
2010

ONLY A VERY SMALL PART OF IT

Who was watching over me during vacation? Left my purse ON THE FLOOR of the pharmacy aisle in one of the million billion Target stores we visited during the past 4 weeks. Didn’t discover it was missing until I had finished with pharmacy, noodled through cosmetics, spent ages picking out random greeting cards, strolled through housewares (finally! sheets are in my colors again!) side-stopped in groceries, wandered over to music/books and then had a complete and total heart attack when the fact that my purse was not in the seat of the shopping cart with its strap wrapped around my...

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...

07
Jun
2010

WAITING FOR RAINBOWS

Today, it rained. Relentlessly. The only time it stopped was during the half hour in which my son and his classmate had to walk up to my office after school. I had told him that if it was still raining “like this” that morning, that he could call me and I would come pick them up. So, he was grumpy when he arrived. There was no inspiration on tap for making dinner when we arrived home. Frankly, I’m out of ideas and back to recycling meals and sick of everything I can come up with. My kids answer SUSHI to...

04
Jun
2010

WAY TO GO

When I came home from work on this third of a string of three gorgeous blue-sky-sunshine days it was to find my daughter lying on the trampoline in the sunshine with a friend, my son writing diligently on some extremely involved project he’s working on that mostly consists of lists of clans and names and monsters (much reading of the D&D Monster Manual going on right now, even though he’s never actually played a game), my husband outside in the front yard ripping moss from the lawn with a moss ripper, my father-in-law cosily ensconced in the living room watching...

06
Mar
2010

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

It’s not like I had anything particularly much to do this week, other than the usual, and yet the last 5 days have sped by in a blur. It’s been sunny nearly every day and the snow on the ground has that rotten lacy look to it, though it’s clinging for dear life. Hard to believe there was 2 feet outside our windows only 2 weeks ago…it’s down to inches in most places, though the big pile-ups from shoveling and plowing will take longer to disappear. This morning, the spring-cleaning bug bit me hard in the butt and I cleared...

20
Feb
2010

IN JUST TWO DAYS, TOMORROW WILL BE YESTERDAY

This is the 3rd weekend of February. Before you know it, Christmas will be here…that’s how fast it feels like it’s going. It snowed again last night, or this morning: really heavy wet snow. The kind that soaks your mittens instantly when you scoop up a double handful and shape it into a ball and fire it at the nearest person who is ducking to scoop their own. It snowed again this evening: sideways horizontal blizzard snow that clung and stuck to every surface like flocking. We spent most of the afternoon shopping. The kids needed indoor gym shoes because...

11
Feb
2010

IT’S ALL RELATIVE

In January I passed my 13th anniversary of our move to Sweden, and later that month a cousin of mine finally made the move here. She’s also married to a Swede, but because of their careers they’ve been commuting back and forth from Sweden to the US for TEN YEARS. She said part of the reason for the decision to finally choose one place was motivated by how tired her husband was starting to look. I’m boggled that it took that long, but delighted that they chose Sweden. My mom’s family is huge—her dad had 7 sisters and a brother...

23
Jan
2010

ROOM RENOVATION

I didn’t get my own room until we moved to Belgium, the year I turned 13 but once I did, one of the best things about having my own space was getting to change things around to suit myself. I loved to rearrange my room. I’d move furniture around every so many months, trying out every possible combination of filling the space. I’d move the pictures I had taped or tacked to the walls. I’d rearrange the books in my bookcase and on my shelves. Interior design was an appealing career path. I still feel this way, but having a...

10
Jan
2010

NO ONE NEEDS A VACATION MORE THAN THE PERSON WHO JUST HAD ONE

The wind has been scouring Skåne for days now. It’s blown all the frozen snow away from every surface and left the fields bare. Driving at night, you could see the wind pouring like water across the surface of the asphalt, only better because it was blowing snow along with it: white wind, white water. Today, mom and I went to the grocery store and as we got in the car, I looked down at the blown-up drifts around the driveway and thought, hmmm…that’s weird, the snow looks kind of…beige. And as we drove out of the neighborhood, it got...

24
Nov
2009

LOOSE ENDS, FOR A MOMENT

I got shot in the arm this evening. I have to say, I’ve been sort of dreading getting the H1N1 vaccination…I never get flu shots, I have always just taken my chances, but I guess something about a) the fact that if I did get sick with it, it would be 2-3 weeks of illness versus (hopefully) 1-2 days of potential side effects from the shot and b) how can you say no to getting a vaccination that the country you live in has bought for every single one of its residents? Not only did they do that, they also...

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