You may have noticed yesterday that this website seemed to have vanished into thin air overnight, and some may even have concluded after the tone of my last post that I had decided abruptly to pull the plug on my blog, but it was only one of those hosting snags that we all face from time to time. Anyway, on to bigger and better things . . .

Olof and I made a quick trip to town at lunchtime to pick up some chicken nuggets (Lydia had expressly requested them for her birthday dinner this evening and our little store here doesn’t carry them) and on the ride there I mentioned that the aforementioned interruption of my blog had also been an interruption of the flow of my ideas and I didn’t know what I would write today. He said, “you could write about the ‘no food’ signs on the buses in Uppsala.” I reminded him that I’d never ridden the bus in Uppsala (which I later realized was a lie, but that has no bearing on this).

“Well,” he said, “they have a picture of a hamburger with a line through it, except the hamburger is a bit curved up and it looks sort of like a hot dog, too. If you’d seen them, you could write about that.”

“I can’t write a blog entry about that,” I scoffed. “Wait, though, that reminds me of something …”.

It reminded me of a place in the town I lived in when I was going to college. It was a little drive-thru hamburger restaurant across the street from the Fred Meyer shopping center, and the sign on its roof advertised, “Long, Juicy Burgers.” I had no idea what that was all about but I found it faintly annoying and gave it a disapproving glance every time I drove past.

At some point I did end up going in there and I discovered that the “long, juicy burgers” were indeed that — an oblong beef patty served in a long bun. Unusual, perhaps, but not so annoying after all.

I related that story to Olof and he said, “Oh! Like the ones you can buy at 7-11 — those hamburgers that are shaped like hot dogs.”

I clarified that no, they were not at all like that but were long, flat patties in a long, wide bun, like if you’d grabbed hold of a conventional burger on either side and stretched it out into an oval.

“Oh,” he said again. “Well, that’s better because the ones from 7-11 look like a turd and that’s just disgusting.”

I laughed. “True. It’s a different sort of bajskorv.*”

Well, whaddya know. I could blog about it after all.

*Bajskorv is the Swedish word for “turd.” It literally means “poop sausage.”