Tagged: martinbean

20
Jul
2007

THE ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Lately, when we’ve been going on our walks and martinek has actually deigned to accompany me, he’s done a lot of mysterious dodging and hopping about behind my back as we go. “What the heck are you doing?” I asked and was treated to a long discourse on the different values assigned to different designs on manhole covers in the streets. The ones with A are “bad luck”…the ones with V are good luck because they stand for vänskap (friendship) meaning you’ll get more friends the more you step on them, and the ones with “K” are good luck because...

17
Mar
2007

THE FRUIT DOESN’T FALL VERY FAR FROM THE TREE

Martin is spending the night…with his girlfriend ! I was warned this day would come, but I didn’t think it would be quite so soon. I had quite an “American” moment when he first asked, but Anders and I talked about it, and we figure it’s fine…this time. In a year or so, it won’t be appropriate, but for now, they’re just kids. He and Ebba have been a special “couple” since they were in daycare together. Apart from a period in 2nd grade when they got teased too much by some older kids and “broke up” they’ve been steady...

16
Feb
2007

HOW I WONDER WHERE YOU ARE

We borrowed a nearly full-sized eletric keyboard from my friend Debbie for Martin to practice on for the next several months while he’s taking piano lessons. I brought it home late last night and set it up on the dining room table.* Martin headed straight for it when he got home from school. It has 99 song and style settings, allowing you to change the pitch and sound-style of the keys to just about anything you can imagine except quacking duck. It’s got harp, polka, rock-and-roll, softbeat, tango, and honky-tonk to name just a very, very few. It rocks into...

07
Dec
2006

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARTIN!

My firstborn turned 9 today. No matter how much I squish him down on the top of his head, he keeps growing. All he wanted for his birthday, and all he got, was books and Lego (and one Bamse DVD). If you were 9 years old and your parents asked you what you wanted for your birthday dinner, what would you say? Pizza, maybe. Tacos! Hotdogs…hamburgers, salmon even. I was pretty sure he would say salmon or the inevitable sushi, but he wanted JULBORD. He and Anders made a list of all the absolute must-haves for his julbord birthday dinner,...

14
Nov
2006

HOW TO TURN YOUR FROWN UPSIDE DOWN

For some reason, my mood, never the best in the early morning when I stumble blearily and resentfully from bed 10 minutes after smacking the snooze button again, ended up on a rapidly declining downward spiral that escalated as the day wore on. Don’t ask ME how that metaphor works, but it was true. My bad mood went from bad to worse and by the end of the day, as big fat raindrops began smacking the glass of my window while my back was turned, I was pretty sure that I had metamorphosed, sprouted a snout and fangs, a wiry...

16
May
2006

FREEZING FEET AND BLOOMING BRAIN

It is 8 degrees Celsius (46F) out right now. Do you know how cold that is for the 3rd week in May? Colder than a witch’s Springy tit, that’s what. I just checked the 2-week forecast and it’s all BLOW and COLD and GREY and SUCK. There are no numbers anywhere in sight above the middle 50s except for the ones that give percentage chances of precipitation. Those? Are in the 90s. Overnight, it seems we have gone from spring to fall. Summer, we hardly knew ye! I just went out and watered the garden and the trees, fully expecting...

13
Feb
2006

I CAN SEE SPRING FROM HERE

There’s vaseline on the winter lens, everything is airbrushed in a vaporous and peripheral veil, a shadow fog teasing the eye. The fields down the long hill are mottled, a snowmelt, no-melt zone of loamy chocolate earth, frozen-in-motion sprouts of rapeseed, sugarbeets, alfalfa green against the spangled white of the snow crisps. All along the edges of the roadways, exhaust has pitted and etched a poisonous lace pattern. It makes me literally sick to my stomach to think too hard about that black sludge seeping down into the earth, into the water, into the grain. The snow is only momentarily...

07
Feb
2006

INTELLECTUAL DEFEAT

I’m a little grumpy tonight, because Anders left for Italy today and won’t be home until Friday, and considering that he was gone for 9 days just 3 days ago I think I’m entitled to a little grumpiness. *sigh* Things I Really, Really Need to Get Off My Butt and DO: Get Karin’s passports renewed; at least the Swedish one, and soon Learn the song I am supposed to be singing at my brother’s wedding in May. I suspect my non-motivation has to do with the fact that I don’t really like it that much, and that it’s not really...

22
Jan
2006

WHEN IT HITS YOU, YOU FEEL NO PAIN*

Martin and I discovered today that the snow isn’t really white. It’s blue and violet and grey and silver and white. Where the lowering sun paused behind the trees and shone, the shadows melted along the sloping sides of every drift. It only sparkled on the sunny side, but we agreed both sides were beautiful. We’ve got a good half hour walk mapped out now, and we march along, arms swinging free, talking about whatever subject strikes our (mostly his) fancy. One of his Christmas presents was a little suitcase full of illustrated boardbooks about the different countries of the...

18
Jan
2006

MENTAL PARENTAL

Life is heating up, along with the earth, which is, although it may not SEEM like it, moving down the orbital arc towards spring. Choir started tonight with a bang. We’ve already got a schedule of concerts through to August, with 3 major programs, including a tour show of the Spanish theater/dance/song/music extravaganza (Sangria!) we put on in 2004. Wheee!! We worked through a couple of our favorites from Sangria, and then started the first song from Stabat Mater, which nearly all the Swedes have sung before and knew, but I’ve never even heard of. Which is a bit strange,...

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