It’s hot today, the first real hot day of the year. According to the thermometer outside my living-room window, it’s 84°F (30°C) in the sun. It’s too hot to be comfortable in the sun–and, anyway, we’re heeding the standard advice to limit sun exposure between ten o’clock and two o’clock–so the little kids and I… Read More Scorcher!

Helena and Melanie came over yesterday afternoon for fika, and I talked them into staying until the wee hours with promises of dinner and drunken debauchery. It was good times.     For the record, there was no Jack Daniels in Tage’s shot glass, but after he slammed it he did go to the TV… Read More Raise a Glass

Read an interview with Michael Berg (the father of the young man beheaded in Iraq two years ago) on the implications of the killing of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. Any commentary by me would be superfluous — suffice it to say that he’s my new hero.

Today is Sweden’s national day, the Swedish Fourth of July, if you will. This is only the second year that this day has been a “red day,” or a public holiday in Sweden, so people are a bit at a loss for what to do with it. We’re just two weeks away from Midsummer, which… Read More Nationaldagen

Last week, in trying to keep her out of his “lab,” Tage shut his bedroom door on Petra’s finger and her nail was ripped almost completely off (including the part that goes under the skin). Because it was still attached at one corner, we just put it gently back over the nail bed and secured… Read More Gruesome

We had been planning for a couple of weeks to make a trip today to visit a friend we don’t see often. She and her eight-year-old son live about a hundred miles (American miles, that is) southwest of us, and making the trip down there is a pretty big deal for us. We have to… Read More Road trip

I read an article on CNN.com yesterday about a 63-year-old British woman who used in-vitro fertilization to become pregnant. There are, of course, many, many things I could say about that, but frankly I don’t have the energy to get into it. I couldn’t leave the issue, however, without remarking on the comments made by… Read More Who knew?