We set the clocks back last night–I started mid-afternoon, actually; with upwards of thirty clocks, it doesn’t pay to leave things to the last minute–and it’s felt like a very long evening tonight. It only gets worse from here, of course, and within a few weeks I know I’ll be looking wistfully back to days… Read More Daylight fading

The other day, on our way home from Umeå, Olof, Brynja, and I stopped off to browse around an odds-and-ends store that’s tucked away sort of in the middle of nowhere.  A particular item on a shelf in the menswear section caught my eye, and I had to investigate further: For comparison’s sake, we put… Read More Namesake

I don’t know if my comment yesterday about no bread being safe from Asbjørn was prescience or me jinxing myself or just plain coincidence, but that fat bastard ate an entire unopened loaf of bread today.  He’s so sneaky that I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it was missing if I hadn’t found the chewed-up… Read More Binge

We needed to pop by the vet’s office today to re-stock our supply of Asbjørn’s diet food, so we decided to take him with us for an official weigh-in.  He’s down three kilos (almost seven pounds), which is less than I was expecting but still good.  It’s been six weeks since we started this plan,… Read More Slowly, but surely

Tage’s favorite bedtime story of late is a book he checked out from the library last week, Döden i ett nötskal (Death in a Nutshell). It’s about a young boy whose mother is gravely ill. When the boy meets Death on the beach, making his way to the mother’s bedside, the boy attacks Death and… Read More Sweet dreams

After a several days of rain and freezing or near-freezing temperatures, we had a beautiful, beautiful fall day today, complete with clear blue skies and temperatures upward of 50°F (10°C).  It was so gorgeous out that when I walked to pick Petra up from school, I wore only a light jacket instead of the winter… Read More Glory day

A woman whose blog I read more or less regularly had a baby boy last week, and she named him Ezra. I got a little pang when I read that, because Ezra was my boy name, the name Petra would have been given if she’d been a boy, and a name I was still angling… Read More Wistful