Some days I feel like I would give everything I own for a long, hot shower. I don’t understand all the reasons behind it, but we have, at best, only lukewarm showers around here. I think most of it is because we have a small water heater, but there must be something about the blender or mixer, or whatever it is they call that thing that sets the water temperature, that’s just not right. Whenever you turn on the water, no matter where you have the temperature set, you get cold, cold, cold for twenty or thirty seconds (which is normal), then you get scalding hot water for twenty or thirty seconds, then it gets tepid and then not-so-gradually colder until it’s pure cold after a few minutes. Now, I am a person who can and will stand happily under a hot, hot shower for a half-hour at a time, so the shower situation here makes me downright miserable a lot of the time, especially when it’s cold outside, as it is now (and the cold has scarcely yet begun). Even though I love our house almost as much as it’s possible to love a house, every day (or every other day, as I can’t bring myself to take a cold shower every single day) when I’m in the midst of shower torture, I curse this house and swear under my breath about how much I hate it.

In somewhat happier news, I made brownies a couple of hours ago. Well, they’re not really brownies — they’re my Swedish cookbook’s version of “American brownies,” which as you might imagine, if you’re familiar at all with Swedish cooking, is not quite the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad, but they’re just not brownies as I have grown to know and love them. In any case, Olof was surprised and delighted when I brought him down a fika consisting of “brownies” and milk, so they were worth baking. He deserves some surprise and delight now and again.