Tagged: obiterphotos

12
Nov
2010

FAIR & FASCINATING FLORENCE

One thing that mesmerized me in Italy was the feat of engineering that is the autostrada (motorway) through the northern Apennines down to Liguria along the west coast of the country. Italy was the first country in the world to begin building motorways. The ones that we used to get from Milan to Genoa to Rapallo and the ones to Florence and Pisa have lovely names: The Motorway of the Flowers and the Blue Motorway. To distract myself from the rather narrow lane widths and the high-speed (130km/h limit for cars) race-car driving style of our fellow motorists I concentrated...

09
Nov
2010

RAINY RAPALLO

Apparently the time to skip Italy, if you want to avoid the tourist jam is July, August & September. What luck for us, then, that we chose to go the first week of November. The weather could have cooperated just a teensy bit more, but we had some sunshine at the end, so we were happy, and after all, rain in Italy on vacation is better than rain at home, right? The place we stayed was an apartment building up the hill in the west coast town of Rapallo. It belongs to the parents of my colleague, Sara, another love...

26
Sep
2010

AUTUMN BOUNTY

This has been a lovely, busy weekend. Karin had a soccer tournament in Halmstad all day Saturday. They played 7 games (short games of 16 minutes in several cases) and came in 3rd. She spent the night with one of her teammates, though I doubt either of them got much sleep 🙂 Martin and I were supposed to go to the Gothenburg Book Fair as part of an AWC event but the other 3 members who had said they might go backed out, so instead he and I ended up going into Malmö. We hit two bookstores, and found several...

05
Sep
2010

GOLDEN DAYS

It’s been a busy, yet strangely relaxing weekend, and one that has gone by far too fast. Anders arrived home just in time for dinner on Friday evening, and after he had been thoroughly greeted and handed out presents and started unpacking he came into the kitchen where I was finishing up dinner preparations, took a look at the meal in progress and said, “I’ve been in China for 3 weeks and you’re making rice??” HAHAHAA!! Oops! Karin had come home with a tale of woe about her day being ruined because they had had korv stroganoff for lunch at...

24
Aug
2010

IN WHICH BAD THINGS ARE MADE UP FOR BY GOOD THINGS

This has been kind of a stressful week…it’s week 2 of 3 of Anders being gone. So far, I’ve had to deal with my son’s Xtreme After-Party Vomit Splatterpalooza in the middle of the night on Saturday (too much cake & excitement, apparently, as I know he wasn’t sneaking the Slushie Margaritas) and my daughter’s spillage of Compound W ALL OVER THE MIDDLE of the living room chair. AAGH. On the plus side I’m inordinately proud of myself: first because I didn’t throw up as well during the horrendous clean-up aftermath and second because I didn’t strangle Karin, especially since...

17
Aug
2010

IT IS NOT ONLY FINE FEATHERS THAT MAKE FINE BIRDS*

I’ve always been a collector, especially of small things. I’ve had shadowboxes to corral them in since I was a girl. Other than being wee, there wasn’t always a unifying theme to the things I collected, though small animal figurines keep showing up in every grouping. Some of them were outgrown as I got tired of them or lost interest: the dogs I adored as a child, the cow-themed things I had for awhile after college, the thankfully short pink flamingo phase. The only real collection in my house that is worthy of the name is in the moose bathroom,...

07
Aug
2010

BOUQUET BREAK

Despite being late in the summer, things are still blooming around here, both inside and outside. I have pelargoniums in the pots outside, most of them extravagantly fuchsia, some red, and the roses keep popping up and blowing open with beauty. The lavender is almost done but the bees don’t seem to have gotten the message. We don’t have a lot of flowering plants otherwise in our yard/garden…mostly I subscribe to greenery that comes back every year and except for the lungwort and the stonecrop I haven’t had a lot of luck with flowering perennials. I fill the pots in...

05
Aug
2010

THE KIDS OF SUMMER

Martin’s eyes squinch up when he smiles so that they nearly disappear; mine do the same thing. I must have taken a dozen shots of them from one side and the other and I couldn’t get any of him with his eyes open and smiling simultaneously. This is the summer when Martin suddenly shot up and caught up to me in height; he’ll have passed me before the equinox. This is the summer when my feet became the smallest in the family. The summer when Martin’s voice dropped an octave and Karin started putting her hair up with barrettes and...

02
Aug
2010

THAT TODDLING TOWN

Pulse and passion, verdant parks and sweltering sidewalks, every restaurant a delight, every face a smiling or interesting one. This place is in my blood, in my bones, in my dreams. Turning to my husband, the sun beating down on our heads, the buzz and thrum of Navy Pier behind us and the blue of the lake stretching out as far as the eye can see: blue blue blue with white dots of sails, of clouds, of whitecaps, and saying, “Can’t we move back? Don’t you want to move back?” I do. O! I do. Cracking Me Up: The Problem...

24
Jul
2010

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE

I tend to like photos of people and faces better than things and places. My husband and my daughter both take photos of things around them: a flower, an interesting statue, the city skyline, someone’s dog; not me. I DO take photos of flowers and trees and such, when I’m out walking or when it’s springtime and everything is blowing my mind with its beauty, but usually it’s the photos of friends and family that I want to have to remember vacations and trips and happenings by. My sister’s son, Bryce in his summer ‘do. Second cousins once removed: Martin,...

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