Tagged: holidaze

23
Nov
2012

THINGS TO DO

….and suddenly it’s Friday again and an entire week has gone up in ether. It’s been a particularly crazy one, it seems, though it wasn’t REALLY anything out of the ordinary. Karin was sick on Monday with a sore throat and head cold and Martin was sick on Wednesday with an upset stomach. Martin and I went to a gymnasium open house at Kathedralskolan in Lund and now he’s considering IB again for which I’m glad, and today we went to his half-year parent-teacher conference and he has some things that haven’t been turned in which is risking major bad...

10
Nov
2012

GOOSE CHASE

I feel like writing, so here I am. Not that I have anything particular to talk about, but so what? That shouldn’t ever stop a blogger, right? I look at the little calendar at the top right hand side of my blog and see that I have only blogged twice this month: pathetic. It seems to be a good month if I manage to write once a week. How will I remember anything if I don’t write it down? I already have plenty of evidence about how threadbare the net of memory has become. We ate a Mårtensgås dinner at...

31
Oct
2012

HALLO’WEANED

Well, I’ve managed to totally mess up my LJ formatting by posting from LJ directly instead of from Semagic like I usually do, so I’ll just have to write a bunch of long posts to push it all down to the edge of the page. Heh. First world problems. I saw a bunch of unbelievable photos of the destruction on the East Coast and in New York after Sandy hit: holy moly. Everyone I know out that way seems to be okay but it sure is scary. It feels so safe and quiet here in Sweden, when the most we...

10
Jul
2012

NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO, NO PARTICULAR THING TO DO

Why, when we aren’t really doing ANYTHING, is it so hard to find time to sit down and post? It’s 11:30 p.m. and I should be in bed falling asleep because we are getting up early tomorrow to go Öresunds Runt (around the Öresund) ending with dinner in Copenhagen, but instead I’m catching up on reading blogs and hoping I don’t dream about Lego again tonight. Even my mom has been sucked in to the Giant Never-Ending Lego Project. We have many many kits completed but unfortunately, the majority of them are missing a piece or two. HOWEVER! Lego.com sells...

07
Jul
2012

SHOT

Not surprisingly there are few to no images of the men behind the cameras during our family reunion in northern Germany…I ended up with none of Tom, Sarah’s husband, and only got some of my brother because my mom shared her photos with me. John, Sammy & Mom (photo by Simone Slaughter) John & Sarah (photo by Linda Slaughter) Sammy & Simone (photo by Linda Slaughter) Rachel (photo by Tom Fletcher) Sarah (photo by Tom Fletcher) Simone, Sammy & Bryce (photo by Tom Fletcher) Anders (photo by Karin Ek) Bryce (photo by Karin Ek) Typical pastime (photo by Anders Ek)...

01
Jul
2012

WHERE THE HEART IS

There are some times when I fervently wish that I lived closer to my first family. My brother lives in southern Germany, my sister in the middle of Illinois and my mom in the thumb of Michigan. And no one gets me the way they do. A look, a shared sense of humor, a laugh, a dig at someone else’s well-honed defenses…there’s just nothing like the connection between you, your parents and your siblings. Last week, my brother and his wife and their almost-one-year old son drove up from the bottom end of Germany to the top end, bringing along...

06
Jun
2012

OF THIS & THAT

There is a nest of baby birds up under the roof just outside of Martin’s window. They go crazy, peeping their little heads off as soon as it starts to get light in the morning and it gets light EARLY. Like 4 a.m. early. And they scream for food until approximately 7 a.m. at which time their poor parents who have been darting back and forth for hours must collapse, muddy and exhausted. We are not 100% sure what kind of birds they are, but we guess they must be onE of the LBJs (sparrow, most likely) because that’s the...

20
May
2012

PERFECT REFRESHMENT

The last time I had a 4-day weekend I was super-productive. This time, I’ve been a total slug. A super slug! I HAVE done laundry, because you pretty much can’t NOT do laundry when you’re a family of four, but otherwise? I’ve read and read and read and slept in and watched all of season 3 of The Big Bang Theory and gone for walks and sat on the porch and sat on the trampoline and done nothing much of note. Sometimes the slug just beats the bee. It seems to be harder and harder to find things to write...

01
May
2012

SPRING FLING

It’s the first of May! Here in Europe and in a large part of the world, that means Labor Day. However, since it’s a day off, and yesterday, being a “pinch day” was also a day off, in fact for us it was a NON-labor day. It’s been a nice long weekend, with lots of sunshine and walking the loaner-dog. I had a to-do list of about 20 things that I divided up over the 4 days, which meant nothing was stressful and it included things that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, like iron those 3 tablecloths from...

22
Apr
2012

WATER WATER EVERYWHERE

What happens to a place like Venice when there is no one left but the tourists? Anders read an article about Venice recently that said people were moving out of the city in droves; that they couldn’t afford the price of groceries and that there is no business left there except tourism. I wonder how many of the buildings along the canals are empty; abandoned. There are only 60,000 people residing in the city, though the total population including all 118 islands that make up Venice is 272,000. That’s not very many considering the amount of tourists averages 50,000 A...