I’ve let posting go so long now that even claiming post-NaBloPoMo slump is pushing it a bit. What we’ve got here is just plain old laziness.

For all of you who were wondering, Olof did indeed get his Wii yesterday. He actually went to the game store on Thursday night at 11:30pm so he could stand in line and bring the new console home as soon as it was officially December 8th. He got home from town about 1am, set everything up, and played until 5am. He slept for a while then got up at 8:30, went to a meeting at Tage’s school, came home at 9:30 and started playing again. Except for taking an hour or so to eat dinner, he played Zelda until sometime past 1am. Exhaustion finally caught up with him, and he slept for about ten hours last night, but once he was up he was back at it, and has been playing for most of the days. I’ve started calling myself a “Wiidow.” I’m punny like that.

In other news, I don’t guess I wrote here that my mom moved to Texas in October. She was the last one of my family (by which I mean me, her, and my brothers) to live in Idaho, and it feels weird now that none of us is there any longer. I was showing Lydia on a map the other day where I grew up, and suddenly it struck me as just wrong, somehow, that we’re all flung so far from where we’re supposed to be. I mean, I’m happy where I live, and I know that my mom and my brothers are happy where they are, but there’s something about home–about Grangeville, Idaho–that will always pull at me. I haven’t lived there for fifteen years, but there’s a corner of my heart that always whispers, “I want to go home.”

Last time I wrote something like this, I got a fair number of responses saying things about the way places change and that the town wouldn’t be like I remembered it. I have to say, though, that I expect the town would be more or less exactly like I remember it, which is not necessarily a good thing. But my yearning is not for town. Town is just a place to buy groceries and fill your gas tank. For me, it’s about the mountains and the rivers and the prairie. It’s pretty here where I live now, but it’s the coast, and what they call mountains are scarcely more than hills. There are no elk (moose are not elk; they’re moose), no cougars, no coyotes or skunks or raccoons. There are no long summer nights filled with cricket serenades. No herds of Hereford or Black Angus cattle, no Australian shepherds riding in the backs of dusty pickups. Not much of anything that makes me nod to myself and feel, “yep, this is my place.”

As the years pass, I do feel more at home here in Sweden, and I expect that feeling will continue to grow. This is certainly more my place than it was five years ago and I don’t have any desire to leave here. I will probably live here for the rest of my life, and I feel good about that, but I don’t think it will ever move me the way that home does.