Checking in from Lund - 4½ months since last update!
I have missed you dear dreamwith- and livejournalers. I hate the fact that I hardly write anything now. I miss the interactive way of posting on livejournal, and the sense of community, yet I find myself more and more seldom reading my flist. Why? I scroll though tumblr pretty much every week, even if I hardly ever post there. I can't blame everything on my smartphone or tablet, can I?
Things are both calmer and more hectic. Dad is doing quite well, after all. There are things coming up all the time, but on the whole he is happy and communicating a bit more. Still on the feeding tube, still problems with swallowing, still some phlegm etc.. but hanging in there and just being superamazing and sweet. What keeps us annoyed and tired are the same things as before, all the every day issues that DON*T work, people that don't do what they are supposed to etc etc etc.. Wheel chairs that don't work and the TIME it takes to try out a new one etc etc..
My sister has been on sick leave since february, as I think i wrote in my last update. She still isn't much better, and the latest doctor's note has her on sick leave until november. She has spent the last five months in Lund, which meant that we got some breathing-space from each other, but also that I haven't had a day off until NOW.
YES, I am ON VACATION. Totally amazing and feels very strange. But I am on my fourth our of five days in Lund, and I have had a wonderful couple of days of catching up with friends, and visiting them in the countryside and picking blueberries, and biking for the first time since December last year etc. I have slept a lot, and just taken it easy and having fun. And I have been totally ON MY OWN for longer than five minutes for the first time since last December. Awesome-cakes indeed.
best of all is the fact that even though I am heading back to Gothenburg tomorrow, I actually have another holiday coming up on the 21st of August. I'll spend a little more than a week in Oxford, where my friends A&C are renting a house for the summer while A does research at the Bod, and C looks after his son J.
Will be totally amazing to go abroad again after three years stuck in Sweden. The fact that dad is well enough that I feel comfortable leaving him for a week or more is wonderful, and I feel so much better than last year. Yes, things are in no way solved or perfect, but we survive, and even a bit more than that. I will be able to have a proper holiday, and head into London for the day perhaps. Hopefully meet up with
cassandre and my friend M and just enjoy being in Britain again.
One wonderful thing we have been doing these last four months is reading our way through the Swedish author Maria Lang's back-list. She was an über-productive old school puzzle detective author who wrote one novel a year from 1949 until he death in 1990!! And they are this this totally fantastic mirror of life in Sweden during four decades.
I am completely in love with her books. I read quite a few of them as a teen, but she went completely out of fashion (and out of print!!!) after her death, and I haven't really thought about her more than in fond passing until this year, when they suddenly decided to make six films from her first books, and a Maria Lang renaissance slowly emerged.
Her first book was pretty daring in its way, since she deals with a lesbian protagonist (yes, naturally she is the murderer, the book was written in 1949 after all, BUT she gets a very good soliloquy where she defends her actions, and her sexuality), and from that book people tend to say that Maria Lang is queer-friendly and daring, which doesn't really ring true when you read through the rest of her work, which remains pretty hetero-normative.
The author herself, whose real name was Dagmar Lange, had a PhD in Swedish literature and never married, lived on her own, and was the principal of a girl's school for a long time, so naturally there have been questions asked about her own life.. She wrote a lot of opera critique as well, and after the first 10 books she changes narrator and brings in much more opera references, and also refers to a LOT of Swedish canonical poets and authors. So it's a good way to get a crash course in Swedish literature. Most of all her books are fun to read, and describe a world that no longer exists, and they were perfect to read aloud for my dad (and mum) in the kitchen this spring and early summer. A few of her titles have been translated into English, and it would be interesting to see how well she works in another language.
And no, I still haven't seen the films they made this years! I have heard some pretty bad things about them, and the male lead is completely wrong in my opinion, but we will probably try to watch them soon anyway, since we finished her last-but-one novel the day before I left for Lund, and her last novel is SO bloody expensive to buy second hand that I'll probably have to save it for my birthday.
Things are both calmer and more hectic. Dad is doing quite well, after all. There are things coming up all the time, but on the whole he is happy and communicating a bit more. Still on the feeding tube, still problems with swallowing, still some phlegm etc.. but hanging in there and just being superamazing and sweet. What keeps us annoyed and tired are the same things as before, all the every day issues that DON*T work, people that don't do what they are supposed to etc etc etc.. Wheel chairs that don't work and the TIME it takes to try out a new one etc etc..
My sister has been on sick leave since february, as I think i wrote in my last update. She still isn't much better, and the latest doctor's note has her on sick leave until november. She has spent the last five months in Lund, which meant that we got some breathing-space from each other, but also that I haven't had a day off until NOW.
YES, I am ON VACATION. Totally amazing and feels very strange. But I am on my fourth our of five days in Lund, and I have had a wonderful couple of days of catching up with friends, and visiting them in the countryside and picking blueberries, and biking for the first time since December last year etc. I have slept a lot, and just taken it easy and having fun. And I have been totally ON MY OWN for longer than five minutes for the first time since last December. Awesome-cakes indeed.
best of all is the fact that even though I am heading back to Gothenburg tomorrow, I actually have another holiday coming up on the 21st of August. I'll spend a little more than a week in Oxford, where my friends A&C are renting a house for the summer while A does research at the Bod, and C looks after his son J.
Will be totally amazing to go abroad again after three years stuck in Sweden. The fact that dad is well enough that I feel comfortable leaving him for a week or more is wonderful, and I feel so much better than last year. Yes, things are in no way solved or perfect, but we survive, and even a bit more than that. I will be able to have a proper holiday, and head into London for the day perhaps. Hopefully meet up with
cassandre and my friend M and just enjoy being in Britain again.
One wonderful thing we have been doing these last four months is reading our way through the Swedish author Maria Lang's back-list. She was an über-productive old school puzzle detective author who wrote one novel a year from 1949 until he death in 1990!! And they are this this totally fantastic mirror of life in Sweden during four decades.
I am completely in love with her books. I read quite a few of them as a teen, but she went completely out of fashion (and out of print!!!) after her death, and I haven't really thought about her more than in fond passing until this year, when they suddenly decided to make six films from her first books, and a Maria Lang renaissance slowly emerged.
Her first book was pretty daring in its way, since she deals with a lesbian protagonist (yes, naturally she is the murderer, the book was written in 1949 after all, BUT she gets a very good soliloquy where she defends her actions, and her sexuality), and from that book people tend to say that Maria Lang is queer-friendly and daring, which doesn't really ring true when you read through the rest of her work, which remains pretty hetero-normative.
The author herself, whose real name was Dagmar Lange, had a PhD in Swedish literature and never married, lived on her own, and was the principal of a girl's school for a long time, so naturally there have been questions asked about her own life.. She wrote a lot of opera critique as well, and after the first 10 books she changes narrator and brings in much more opera references, and also refers to a LOT of Swedish canonical poets and authors. So it's a good way to get a crash course in Swedish literature. Most of all her books are fun to read, and describe a world that no longer exists, and they were perfect to read aloud for my dad (and mum) in the kitchen this spring and early summer. A few of her titles have been translated into English, and it would be interesting to see how well she works in another language.
And no, I still haven't seen the films they made this years! I have heard some pretty bad things about them, and the male lead is completely wrong in my opinion, but we will probably try to watch them soon anyway, since we finished her last-but-one novel the day before I left for Lund, and her last novel is SO bloody expensive to buy second hand that I'll probably have to save it for my birthday.