Nice evening memories.

It's been such a nice evening. I took a very very hot shower and spent a couple of hours reading on the couch with M with the rainstorm CD playing loudly before playing a nice game of Rummy, which I won. For some reason it strongly reminded very much of the summer I was in Sweden with him (2000--if you remember it as cold and wet, I'm sorry, that was my fault.) I was there two and a half months--long enough to kind of feel like I was there for more than a visit, not long enough to get seriously homesick. I mean, I knew all along that I was going home, so it's not like it is for the rest of the gals living in Sweden with their guys. Tonight just had that relaxed, happy feeling to it.

When I look back on that summer, it's all hazy and pink and glowing. It was charmed, I tell you--completely magic. M worked three days a week and took vacation for the rest of the time (and was able to work from home a couple of days) so we spent most of that time together doing the silliest things, and spending three days at home alone was little enough to remain fun. We did the touristy things, but we had just as much fun at Vivo as Vasa*. We entertained a group of our online friends and saw them see us as a real couple for the first time. I blew up fifty balloons one afternoon with little love notes inside. We took off mountain climbing one night (okay, okay, it wasn't really a mountain, but it *was* a hill and it *was* dark.) I watched Days of Our Lives and, for the first time in my life, I even watched Ricki Lake. We spent hours creating a set of five CDs that we could both stand to listen to, and then we listened to them for weeks on end while playing Rummy and Go Fish in Swedish. We got engaged. I started learning to cook, and I filled bowls with jasmine from the backyard and spread them throughout the house. We grilled out. We got dressed up and went on a date in town with free movie tickets, but it rained, the theater was super crowded and we wanted to go home, so we gave our tickets to the couple standing beside us, who looked at us as if we were Martians (or Americans, I guess.) We invited his family over for dinner--funny, almost the only thing I really remember about that was what I wore and that I dropped a piece of rotini on my shirt. I broke a dozen different beverage containers--including a bottle of Pepsi, and I still don't know how I managed to do that. We set up a little network and took over the world--in other words, we played Age of Empires for hours on end with bags of chips and dip. We spent Midsummer at Skansen and we bought a thousand candleholders at Obs. We bought stacks of books on sale at a bookstore in.. Täby, maybe? We took the boat out and had expensive pizza at Vaxholm in the rain. It was a lot of very happy things all rolled up into a brief period of time where we took nothing for granted and took every bit of the togetherness and happiness that we could get, knowing fully well that it was going to end sooner rather than later. I cried before I even left the house on the day I came home because I knew I was walking out of that house never to return.

I left in August, a week before I had to go back to school and start on wedding preparations. We had it all planned for M to move in October, but I would have stayed in a heartbeat if he had asked me to. I knew I would, so I didn't bring it up and I hoped he wouldn't put it into words. Luckily, he was also being all practical and stoic, so we managed to get ourselves started on the life we had planned after all. I often wonder how things would have turned out for us if I had stayed, though. I don't think I would have been happy in the longterm, but sometimes I regret that I didn't have the chance to find out. Maybe when we retire.. :)

*Vivo is a grocery store; Vasa is a 1600s warship turned tourist attraction.

My Desktop

margrethe's meme, via carrieb. Cut since it's a fairly large picture.
( Read more... )

To play, just take a screenshot of your desktop (that print screen button actually works--just press it, open a photo editing program, and paste it into a document), resize it smaller (this one is 600 pixels wide) and upload somewhere. I love looking at people's desktops.. it's like voyeurism.