Erm, oops.

I realized this morning, thanks to dbrus, that today is Mothers Day in Sweden. I told Magnus, who promptly picked up the phone to call. His dad answered the phone, and Magnus asked for his mom after a few minutes. He wished her a good day.. and she reminded him that today is also his dad's birthday. ROFL! Oops! Dawn, you didn't mention that! ;) We would have thought of it later, probably, but the whole thing was rather funny.

Magnus and I are working at the store today to give my poor parents a day off. Especially Dad.. he's been there most all day every day. We don't really want to.. this is a long weekend and we were hoping to enjoy it in relative laziness, but they do quite a lot of stuff they probably don't want to do for us, so we figured that we should. But at least it's just seven hours on Sunday instead of ten. We'll live. And there is something good about it, actually. If we didn't have to work, we would have to go to my papaw's house today because we haven't been in ages, for one reason or another. And if we had gone there, we would have missed the Good Eats marathon! But there's a satellite at the store, so we'll be able to see it! Yay! And we're going to take blank tapes, too, so we can even record it! (Our sucky VCR will only record channels 1-13 for some unknown reason.)

Oob, time to go. Have a good day, ya'll. :)

Welcome Home and yes, even a Monty Python reference

I'm sitting in the dark, singing wildly. This is somewhat unusual for two connected reasons. I have a horrific headache, which is usually not conducive to singing, but it has made me somewhat melancholy and bored. It's also the reason for sitting in the dark, which I tend to really hate. (Also, don't invite me over if you're afraid to turn on your lights. It's weird, it will freak me out and why do people have lights if they refuse to turn them on?!)

And if I thought I was weird, my perfectly sane (?) husband is standing in a closet carving wood. Except it's not really a closet, it's a room smaller than many closets and filled with junk with absolutely no work space.

Also, blookum has given me trip-envy. I wanna go to France. *pout* We were going to go when I was in Sweden for the summer in 2000. Well, apparently we were. It was M's Proposal Plan, but it just didn't happen like that.. which was alright since I didn't know about the plan until after it wasn't happening. I might have felt differently if I'd known about it in advance. :)

When we arrived back in the US after last year's visit to Sweden, the man behind the counter looked at our passports, smiled and said "Welcome home" to us both, and thinking about it still makes me want to burst into tears. It was just such a simple but profound concept. First, that we actually live on the same continent is still something we don't take for granted, and that this is Magnus's home as well as mine pushed a sentimentality button. But more than that.. there was an overwhelming gladness in being on American soil again. For all that the current administration has pushed to make disagreement of any particular federal policy an act of unpatriotism, that's the complete opposite of how I feel. We, and Magnus in particular, have chosen to make our lives here. We have looked at the social and cultural aspects of both Sweden and the US and we have decided to live here. The idiots who say things like "If you don't like [insert topic here], then you might as well just leave and move to Russia!" have never made that choice and typically have no earthly clue what life is like in any other country and, as I'm beginning to realize, probably can't even point to another country on a map*. There is no particular patriotism in being born an American. So before you call my liberal self unpatriotic, remember that I'm the one here because I want to be, not just because I was born here.

(*Wild inaccurate generalization made in the heat of the moment; recognize that I meant it as such.)

Not that I'm bitter or anything and have had that in my mind for several months now just bursting to come out for no particular reason. Ahem.

I've noticed that I tend to post two different kinds of things. "What I've been up to" and "Random things I think about". I enjoy the random things much more, and other people seem to enjoy them more, but the truth is, I never know which it'll be when I start typing. I don't even know what I'm going to write about until I'm done. I didn't even know that the insinuations of unpatriotism were still bugging me until I had to restrain myself from adding an offensive political-party-referencing insult to the end. Twice. In general, that's my problem. I think too much about stuff that shouldn't bother me. Then again, I also think too much about stuff that perhaps should bother me. You know, it'd be really cool if you could produce energy from the process of worrying. It'd be better for the environment, too, which would give us all one less thing to worry about.

This post has gotten entirely too silly.