… one and the same on this May morning. It’s sprinkling a bit right now, just enough to be a nice little change of pace. We haven’t had rain here for a while, even though the weather forecasters keep promising that it’s on its way. I like rain, actually, especially in the summer (although it’s not summer here yet, of course). It must come from ten years of living in the desert of southern Idaho, where we would go weeks and weeks and weeks on end with nary a raincloud in sight. I remember one afternoon the last summer that I lived in the States when we had a sudden, violent downpour and I was so excited that I called in sick to work and went out dancing in the streets. After the rain stopped, I stayed in my soaking clothes until they dried again, rejoicing in the cool wetness of them. It seems that people almost never have an accurate picture of what the weather is like in Idaho, but believe me when I say that southern-Idaho summers are extremely hot and extremely dry, and that an unexpected rainstorm is truly a gift from the gods.

Tage had a rough night last night and was very restless, which translated into a rough night for Olof and me as well. He finally fell asleep and stayed asleep sometime around four in the morning, which meant that seven-thirty came all too early for me. The good news, though, is that he’s still asleep now and I’ve been able to get a lot of Mosaic Minds work done this morning. In fact, I think I’ve done everything that I can do at this point and am just waiting on a couple of articles so that I can finish up my work for this month. I have only one piece for the Prose (fiction/creative non-fiction) section, which is stressing me out a little bit. I should write something myself to include, but I’m just not coming up with anything. I’m really much more comfortable with non-fiction, much as I would love to write short stories and novels.

Oh, while we’re on the subject of fiction, I just finished reading Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier (you know, the one who wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring). Wow, what a good book (both of them, actually). I could not put it down almost from the moment I opened it. It’s a rare book that can grab my interest at the very beginning and hold onto it for four hundred pages. My only complaint, if you can call it that, is that I read it in Swedish and I spent a lot of time wondering what the writing was like in English. I love words and I love to spend time re-reading and savoring well-turned phrases, but my Swedish is not to a point yet that I can truly appreciate wordcraft when reading (also, I do think it’s important to read a work in its original language to get the full impact of the words — no matter how good a translation is, the words are ultimately not the author’s).