Thirteen years ago today I embarked on the adventure of my life, moving from Idaho to Sweden.  That’s nearly a third of my life spent as an immigrant — where does the time go?!

Today is Yrsa’s birthday, and also Olof’s and my anniversary (11 years!), and I’m heading to Uppsala in a couple of hours. At least I have time to do presents before we all head off to school. I’ll miss birthday cake later, but the bright side is that I don’t have to make a birthday… Read More Just like last year …

Mother Nature, that is. In the past two days we’ve got the whole winter’s snow, it seems. There’s about a meter of the stuff covering my front yard right now, and it’s not supposed to stop coming down for at least a couple of hours.

For the first time in nearly a month, I just took a shower and washed my hair without having to worry about getting water in my ear. I don’t mind saying that it felt pretty luxurious. I’d perfected a method for keeping the water out — first I covered a piece of gauze in vaseline… Read More Squeaky clean

This blurry photograph shows my front yard this morning. Yes, THIS morning. In the second week of January. In northern Sweden. If I didn’t know better, I could easily think it was taken in April (or even early May, to be honest). What’s even stranger is that it’s not an untimely thaw; rather, this is… Read More Winter’s coming?

It’s Olof’s birthday today, and this is how he celebrated, at the kids’ activity table in the local emergency room. Nothing to worry about, everything’s fine, but I’ve been having some ice pick headaches around my operated ear and then started getting a little strange feeling in the ear itself, so I decided I should… Read More The big 4-6!

Sarah in Illinois remarked the other day that she was surprised Yrsa didn’t have to fight off a cat for the foot stool under my desk. As you can see, she had it right on the money:

My four younger kids got Amazon gift cards from my mom for Christmas, and they’ve spent most of the day poring over the site trying to decide what to buy. I think they’re having just as much fun shopping as they will with whatever gifts they end up choosing. Given her tender years, Yrsa doesn’t… Read More This and that

Not for the ear doctor this time, but to see the neurologist and finally get my MRI results from October. I was dreading it a bit, partly because you just never know, and partly because our last discussions were a tad on the contentious side. The news was good, however, showing no new MS activity… Read More Another visit to Umeå