I've noticed that people are starting to give out awards and such for blogging in 2001. And I thought to myself, no one gives out the awards I would give out, why not make up my own?



So here they are, the My Way Blog Awards. Vote early and often. The results will be posted whenever I get enough responses to make it worth posting.



- by Francis S.

According to my friend the priest, one of the most hated little rhymes- with- a- moral told by generations of Swedish mothers to their children is: Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder. It means there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. Me, I find it cute, but I suppose it's not hard to find the annoying smugness underneath. And if my mother had said it to me when I was a kid, I would loathe it too. Why is it that a mother's advice can be so off-putting?



- by Francis S.

Tinka's got a new site. With comments, at long last. Yay, Tinka.



- by Francis S.

So I decided that it would be better for my marriage if I actually helped my husband in his quest to Clean The Entire Apartment and Rid It of Useless Flotsam and Jetsam (especially the mess under the bed).



So among other sundry tasks I ended up sorting old photos - it seems that the part of my physical life I brought to Sweden with me was mostly books and old photos - and I was going to write something profound here about how I love and hate photos. I love to look at them, but I worry that my memory of any one situation becomes replaced by the photograph if there is a photograph taken. (Perhaps I am still too fascinated, as I was in my early 20s, with Susan Sontag's On Photography).



So then my intentions were totally derailed when the neighbors invited us down for a celebratory glass of champagne (we have created a monster in our neighbor, L., Sweden's Woman Chef of 1999 - she is now addicted to Louis Roederer champagne because we fed it to her on New Years Day and now she can't get enough). I am now completely tipsy and in no kind of mood for anything (is that some kind of weird double negative?).



So how did we manage to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in an hour?



Oh, my poor sad blackened lungs.



The Swedish phrase for the day is ingen aning. It means no idea.



- by Francis S.

Yikes. A google seach on "Learn Swedish" turns up, gulp, this page as the No. 1 site.



Not that there are, uh, even a hundred people each day looking to Learn Swedish on the Web, but I suppose those that do find this site must surely be disappointed.



Still, the name is very self-explanatory.



- by Francis S.

I am a lazy sonuvabitch. I piddle around on the Internet (piddle is one of my mother's words, and should always be intoned with a mixture of disgust, disappointment and just a scoche of anger) while the husband is working hard, filling in with plaster the cracks in between the tiles in the kakelugn - tile stove - in our bedroom. (We have three of those nice old Swedish tile stoves in our apartment. They are all white, but the one in the dining room is quite plain and round with a somewhat intricate cornice at the top; the one in the bedroom is also round, but the details and the cornice at the top are picked out in a sort of faded wine color; the one in the living room is much bigger, rectangular and with lots more detail, picked out in green and pink, especially the elaborate cornice at the top.)



A profound difference between the husband and I is my ability to be a layabout, while he needs to be doing something constructive for at least a good part of the day, otherwise he feels bad.



Still, I suppose some people would say that Internet-piddling doesn't belong in the general category of layingabout behavior.



I'm not sure where I stand on this.



- by Francis S.

It was a snowy and glittering welcome to the new year, with plenty of glasses of Louis Roederer champagne and a party full of beautiful Swedish people - former models, actresses, television personalities, famous fashion photographers, (well, here in Sweden at least) - plus the hoi polloi (me), all of us dressed to the nines. The physics behind A.'s red pumps was completely beyond me. I think that A. could stand, not to mention walk, on shoes with such teeny-tiny toothpick-thin 5-inch heels, simply because she doesn't know it is mathematically impossible. Me, I was dressed in a ruffled tuxedo shirt of some shiny dark blue synthetic material and my black suit with the long coat, the husband was dressed in a ''Manchester'' - courderoy - suit of dark green. Oh, such victims of fashion we are.



Unfortunately, we only got to savor the whole fabulous event until about 5 minutes past midnight because my poor dear husband was overcome by a migraine. We left in a rush and were forced to take the subway (not an empty cab to be found in all of Stockholm), me dragging him past hundreds of partygoers tottering in their best out in the snowy streets, a glass of champagne in one hand and firecrackers in the other, the whole city a noisy burst of sparks, block after block. The subway itself was filled with drunken 16 year olds, trying their best of prove to the world that they can be as adult as the adults, ignoring the adults around them trying to act like they think 16 year olds act. And of course, there we sat, me trying to comfort the husband, who didn't want me to leave the party simply because of him.



"But I won't have any fun without you," I said. "I'll just be worrying all night."



Still, it was fun while it lasted. And, the husband has recovered after a good 16 hours of sleep.



The Swedish phrase for the day is tack och lov. The closest translation would be thank god.



- by Francis S.