Kitty’s Place

My answers to ’s 20 questions survery are .

1) What food(s) do you hate enough to pick it out of your dinner and leave in a pathetic little pile on your plate? Lutfisk. Don’t ask what the consistency reminds me of. ugh!

2) What is your favorite setup for reading (place, time, etc)? I prefer to read in bed with the book propped on a pillow and a cup of tea at hand. These days the only reading time I seem to get is before going to sleep but I love to curl in bed with a book on a cold blustery day.

3) Name two things you like to mix together and eat or drink. Coffee and Bailey’s Irish Cream.

4) Name a texture that really pleases you. The roughness of a towel that has dried out on a clothesline.

5) Name one person who could drop right off the face of the earth without its bothering you in the slightest! Joe, a friend of my ex, who seemed to live his life with the sole purpose of belittling people and eroding their self esteem.

6) Do you like Christmas (if your culture doesn’t celebrate Christmas, substitute the biggest state or religious holiday you have instead)–why or why not? I love Christmas, I think it is genetic. My mom thought of and planned for christmas all year long. There is an even deeper sense of family devotion at that time of year. As if the world slows and we have time to appreciate each other again.

7) What’s your favorite daydream? Getting on a plane and flying to England to visit Lori. I check out the airline websites at least weekly and think how much fun it would be.

8) If you had to live your next life as an animal, which animal would you pick? A nightingale. I would love to be a bird whose song could bring joy.

9) If you could obliterate one invention from human history, which one would you choose? Cell phones. Irritating little things that make noise and distract you wherever you go.

10) When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? A nurse.

11) Name any irrational fears you have. Spiders. I suffer from really severe agoraphobia.

12) If you had to pull up sticks and relocate to another place (real or fictional) for the rest of your life, where would it be? Rivendell. It is a place of dreams.

13) What’s a childhood toy you still enjoy playing with? I still have my Raggedy Anne and it is her I talk to when the world gets overwhelming.

14) Name a smell associated with a memory for you–and name the memory as well. Parsnips cooking. It makes me think about when I was a child and would go to visit my great grandmother and we would make dinner together.

15) What’s your favorite piece of clothing and why (if you’re a real clotheshorse, I’ll allow you five pieces of clothing)? My flannelette nightgown and my red boots. The nightgown because it is comforting to snuggle into it when I am sick. The boots because I wanted a pair all my life and only got the nerve to go against the stereotype of “tramp boots” when I was 40.

16) Name one sound that gets the hell on your nerves. The high pitched whine of microphone feedback.

17) Do you play the lottery (or other games of chance)? When I think of it I get a Bingo Lotto ticket. I think it is a law here in Sweden that you play this at least once. *laugh*

18) What’s your favorite thing about your house (or apartment)? The living room windows that look out into a forest.

19) If you’re really upset, what do you do to calm down? Walk long and fast.

20) What’s a skill or talent you lack that you’d love to have? I would love to make music.

It has been so busy here and I am feeling contentment and a great sense of accomplishment.

After spending two days glued to the tv watching images of New York and Washington, I decided to turn it off. It was becoming a morbid obsession and not something I needed to do myself when I am still struggling with family deaths. It was a good decision.

Got my life back on track. Since my father died I have been slowing down and doing less and less with my days. Spending time at the computer seemed to be about the only enjoyment I found, especially the past month or so. I looked around our home and saw what a mess it had become. Of course I have been cleaning, but I let things get messy and accumulate all over the place. The clutter was unbelievable. So I started on a major cleaning campaign. Each morning I got up, caught up on email while having tea and toast, went to playgroup and then cleaned the rest of the day.

It took a week to get this place back to what it was like when I went off to Canada last March. I washed all the windows, inside and out. Scrubbed walls and cupboards. Scrubbed furniture. Put away all the clutter. One job that took almost 8 hours was sorting out the kidlet’s toys. He has 5 plastic bins with his toys in them. They are sorted into: stuffed animals, cars and trucks, painting and drawing materials, games and puzzles and odds and ends. Nothing was where it should be and nothing was complete. Puzzles were scattered between all the containers, crayons were everywhere and all those silly little kinderegg toys were dismantled and a mess. So I organized and washed toys. When I was done, we had found every piece to every game and toy and all were back in the shape they should be.

The kidlet had a birthday on the 20th. He turned 3. We made invitations with his handprint on them and sent them out. We were going to have his party on Thursday (his birthday) but then we discovered that his great grandparents were not flying in until Thursday evening, so we postponed to Friday. It was a lovely party, just family and we had fun. The kidlet was a hoot opening gifts. His grandparents got him a Fisher Price tape player with a microphone. He was so excited with that, since he has inherited his parents love of music. Then he got clothes. Every gift of clothing, he would open it, hand it to farmor and say no. I can’t believe he is already doing that at 3. *laugh* He got tapes from his great uncle and g-u’s girlfriend. So we listened to all of them.

From us he got a little plastic hockey set, with two sticks, a ball, a puck and a net. I would never have thought of it for him, but when we went shopping for his gifts, he spotted it in the store and dragged both of us to see it. We also got him one of those toys that you put a propeller on the top and pull the string on the handle and the propeller flies. It was probably the least expensive of all his gifts and the one he has had the most giggles with. A chalk board and chalk were also a great hit. Finally we went ahead a picked up the starter kit for his electric train set. We started collecting cars when he was born and have been debating getting the starter kit. We looked at accessories for his wooden Brio train set and when we figured the cost, we decided to get the other now. He was excited when he opened it but was content to leave it in the box since there were other toys to play with. We set it up for him the next morning and he had the best time with it. Then we took it apart and put it away. He is still too little to play with it but we wanted him to get a chance to play some with it. When I get my boxes from home, there are 3 battery operated train sets in it that he can play with until he is old enough for the electric one. In the meantime we will continue to add to the set.

So here I sit in my clean apartment, catching up on livejournal. One thing I have been keeping up with is . Sending and receiving postcards is lots of fun and I am enjoying this community a lot.

I don’t know where to even begin. I am so relieved my family and friends are safe and I feel immense pain for those who have died.

I put CNN on, since the kidlet was napping. The first images of the tower were mindboggling and then the second plane hit and all hell broke loose. For the first time since the Challenger disaster, I saw a male broadcaster cry as he reported the Pentagon was on fire. The whole thing was surreal.

I did an inventory of who I knew in NYC and prayed they were ok (they are). Then I thought about my brother who criss crosses the US on commercial airlines regularly. So I tried to phone home with no luck. Lines into the US and Canada were almost impossible to get during the first hours of the horror. My aunt phoned me finally and said my brother had been on his way to Dallas(she thought) and his plane had to land in Arizona when they discontinued all air traffic. He was on the ground and safe. So I just sat here the remainder of the evening and into the night watching the tv and crying.

There are no words that can make this better for anyone living in the US. The president used an apt one when he called the terrorists cowards. It is cowardly to kill innocent people just to achieve your own ends. The images of people dancing in the streets in Palestine were sickening. Even remembering that they are people who have been indoctrinated for an entire generation to hate “America”, people who live with this kind of horror in their lives on a daily basis and that they believe that if you lose your life in the “battle for right” you will ascend to a place of great glory, I still was horrified that anyone could find pleasure in the devastation. How could they forget that it was not “America” the entity that was dying, rather her innocent people who had done nothing to warrant such death. This was not an act of war, war is something that involves both parties actively fighting. This was slaughter.

When the reports came that things were pointing to Osama bin Laden as the mastermind to this attack I thought about an article I had read a couple of days ago,”Taliban’s War On Women “. It was about Afghanistan and I remembered how I thought as I was reading it that it was unconscionable what the Taliban was doing there. Now just a few days later the Taliban was being linked to the worst event I have ever seen in my lifetime.

There was a post on my mom’s list. A woman was telling about her young daughter seeing the image on Sunday of the bus explosion in the Middle East. I had seen that too while we were at Ibo’s parents and had cried about it after, so I can understand how a child could be upset. Her parents talked to her about it and showed her on a map where the US was and where the Middle East was and how far away such things happened. They assured her that something like that could never happen in their country. On Tuesday that all changed. What has occurred is a loss of innocence and the beginnings of an era of suspiciousness and hate. The terrorists have achieved one goal already. I am reading quotes online from people saying things like “lets just go in and level Afghanistan”, “let’s just turn the entire Middle East into a giant parking lot”. Of course these things are being said in the heat of the moment and I can’t believe anyone really means that when there is not any proof as of yet who is even responsible. But the seeds of hate have been sown. :/

I know this is just pure rambling, I am trying to put my thoughts into some semblance of order. I think it will be a long while before they can really be in order again.

We had a lovely weekend.

Friday evening farmor and farfar picked up the kidlet to take him to the cottage with them. After he was gone we set out to the crayfish party. It was great fun. In addition to the crayfish we had a couple different types of quiche, salad, bread and cheese. They toasted with snaps … which was much like the eau de vie that I tried when I was living in Canada. No real taste, just harsh raw liquor. I had one shot and that was more than enough, I switched to wine. There was lots of singing when they toasted and that was fun too. As long as I concentrated on one or two people only I could keep up with the conversation. When everyone started talking at once I got lost. As the evening progressed everyone kind of mingled and visited. If people were speaking directly to me they spoke english, otherwise everyone spoke swedish and most of the time I could follow along. If I didn’t understand something, no one had a problem translating. So it was just good fun and no stress, even though I am far from fluent in this language here. We got home about 3 am. Since we were kidless, we slept in late and had breakfast in bed at 1:30 in the afternoon. We haven’t been able to do that since before the kidlet was born, so what a treat it was.

Saturday was a lazy day and Sunday we slept in again since the kidlet told his grandparents that his mom was not home, so he couldn’t go home. *laugh* Good way to get to sleep over a second night. My fellow took me to work and stayed while I cleaned. Then we went out for burgers for dinner. That was nice. I had almost forgotten how relaxing it is when it is just us two. We went to his parents after we ate to pick up the kidlet. They were just sitting down to dinner so we watched tv while they ate and then had coffee and dessert with them. When we got home I got the kidlet into bed but right after I settled him in we had a call from home. So I let him get back up to talk to my grandparents and my aunt on the phone. He insisted on tickling my toes as I talked on the phone. He is a scamp child. *laugh*

Yesterday was cool and very autumnish. Kidlet and I went for a long long walk and then did some shopping. It was a nice day and we had fun together. This morning we went to playgroup. Because it is pouring rain I put the kidlet into his rainsuit, a 20 minute ordeal, since he did want it and then didn’t and then did and on and on. There were lots of kids at playgroup and he had great fun there. I cut out the pictures we made on Friday. Kidlet has a birthday at the end of the month and instead of buying invitations to his party, we made some by painting his hand with fingerpaint and then doing handprints on a large sheet of paper. Today I cut them out and will write on them so we can send them out tomorrow.

I am feeling much more settled now. Still miss my family but it is back at the bearable point. Tomorrow is swedish class again. I have been working hard at speaking swedish, which is the big problem I have. It is easier to talk to the kids at playgroup so I chat at them every chance I get and force myself to also speak swedish to the moms there. I would love to have someone I could sit down with over coffee and talk to in swedish. Someone who would have the patience to let me fumble along with words but also would correct things for me. In time I may find someone like that here. *smile*

The past week and half has been a roller coaster of emotions.

My uncle’s death was an expected thing but still just threw me. The news that my aunt (his sister) is much sicker than I previously understood was too much to handle. I decided after lots of thinking and pouring out thoughts in private, that I want to go home. To live in my own country again. To live where I can visit family and friends when I want or call without getting up in the middle of the night. I don’t want them all to die while I am tucked away here in Sweden.

To add to the anger and pain I was feeling, the kidlet got out of bed one morning about 0630. We get up at 0700 and I saw he was playing quietly with his cars so I dozed off again. Got up, made breakfast, packed lunch and then saw my SO coming out of the bedroom with his pocket watch in his hand. During the course of playing beside our bed, kidlet decided to have a look at dad’s watch and bent it so that it no longer closes. Of course he would not know that to me that watch represents love and commitment and was a gift to his father after we had him. It seemed like a sign. “Nothing is working here, everything is falling to pieces.” I think I cried the bulk of the day over that. (Watch is currently in being repaired.)

I told my SO I was going home because everyone there was dying and I didn’t want to be so far away and never see some of them again. He was hurt. He wanted to know why it was ok to leave this part of my family, what if they died while I was over there. He says that he is my family now. He is 100% right about that. However he has been my ‘family’ for 4 years, the others have been my family for 40+ years. I tried to convince him that he would be happy there too. He has tried it, prefers Sweden and can work here in his chosen field at a level he could not achieve in Canada for a number of years. This is the classic dilemma of people in relationships that span continents. One or the other will always be in a strange culture and longing for home.

So I fumbled along debating. I *do* want to go home. Very much. I will go home eventually. I will not go home right now though. As tempting as it is (he offered me a trip back if I thought it would help), I need to remember that all the hurt I feel will be transferred to others if I selfishly go home at this time. It was quite apparent in the spring that the kidlet can only handle a short time away from his dad. The final week of our month in Canada he got up every night and looked for and called for his dad.

So what convinced me to stay in Sweden for now? On Monday he saw his dad coming home from work and raced out the door and right out of the building to throw himself into his dad’s waiting arms. How can I think of separating these two ever? Tuesday we went to farmor’s and again the kidlet literally launched himself at his grandmother and chattered non stop, catching her up on the 9 days since he had seen her last. He has forged such a strong bond with his grandparents here and they love him back just as much. These are his only grandparents.

Saturday we went to a birthday party for a little girl who turned 5. It was fun. Kidlet played with the other children (both of whom have english as their first language as well) and enjoyed every minute. I sat and visited with the adults and we talked about the advantages to living here and raising our children here. We talked about the disadvantages too. I realized as we visited that I really have made friends here even if we are a bit scattered about in different towns. By the end of the afternoon, I felt more at peace with the idea of remaining here.

Last night I went back to swedish class. I was so dreading it that I was wheezing by the time I got to the school. So imagine my absolute delight that instead of the sarcastic teacher we had last term, our original teacher came back from retirement. She is sweet, gentle, funny, soft spoken and a great teacher. The other teacher is a man who seems to be just as much a gentle person. I was confident enough with them there to speak only swedis
h and instead of fading into the background if I didn’t understand something, I actually said I didn’t get it. There was no fear of hearing a sarcastic response.

My SO wants me to stay and through all my tears and ill humour, he has been there to listen and remind me that he loves me. He has been extra thoughtful and caring and has only growled a little about my lack of housekeeping the past week or so. He is taking me to a party Friday. He is not a party person so I know that accepting the invitation was a gift from him to me.

Yes, I will go through this same thing again. Will be at wit’s end about where my priorities lie again. Hopefully the next time I will be able to look back and read here and see how I worked through so it will not be as hard to deal with.