This is Karin (Liz kid) and this is my script for a movie that I'm gonna make on a game.
Its a Comedy action romance movie.

The dark ninja

*beach*

(Henry and Elizabeth kissing)

Elizabeth: I don't want you to leave.
Henry: I must, i have a big test tomorrow, and i may not come back.
Elizabeth: Honey, don't say things like that.
Henry: I'll always have you in my heart.
(Henry leaves)

------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*the living room*

(Elizabeth looking at picture and is sad)

------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*Subway station*

(Henry stands waiting for train)

-------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*train*

(Henry boards)

(camera- looks at Henry sitting in train)

(Henry goes off train)

-------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*Neighborhood*

(Henry walking in neighborhood)

(Henry walks into house)

-------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*Living room*

(Henry calls Elizabeth)

Elizabeth: Hello?
Henry: Elizabeth ? Its me Henry
Elizabeth: Oh my dear Henry !
Henry: I'm in your grandpas old house, and I'm just about to go to my test, and i called to say i love you...
Elizabeth: Henry you will come back i promise you.

-------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*rural field*

(two enter)

Teacher: Are you ready to rock?
Henry: I am

(kungfu fight)

(teacher dies in Henry's arms, Henry panics)

(Henry runs out of sight)

---------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*living room*

(phone conversation)

Henry: Honey, I killed my master
Elizabeth: OK...you did what?!
Henry: I accidentally killed my master
Henry: Honey? Honey, are you there?

----------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*neighborhood*

(Henry runs out of the house)

(And then off the set)

----------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*train*

(Henry sitting)

-----------------------------------------------------------

(new set)

*hotel room*

(Henry runs in)

Elizabeth (with gun): I'm so sorry, Henry... (shoots)

Henry (reacts to shot and dies)

Elizabeth: ...but I won't live with a killer.

---------------------------------------------------------

(THE END)

Karin's room is taking shape. We went to IKEA yesterday and bought her bed (though we forgot a piece of it that I had to go back for today), and now we just have to get her bookcase and new dresser, but those things will have to wait until after we're back. It looks really cool, I think you'll agree, even though the walls are still bare, pending furniture placement before hanging anything. You can really see how great the silver trim (Anders' idea) looks in these photos, and you can also see the difference in the red of the dragon vs the red of the walls. We toned down the walls, on the paint store guy's recommendation and I'm glad we did, otherwise the room would have been fire-engine screaming red! Karin's thrilled and that's what matters :) When we get back, we'll start on Martin's room.





Burnished Brilliant Belated Birthday Wishes to travelertrish!

*This makes me laugh, because rum in Swedish is room.

How many gazillion posts can I start writing with no clue as to what I'm going to write about, limping solely along on the determination to post something or die trying? 1703 apparently, as of this one.

My daughter has been, for whatever reason, lamenting the fact that she is THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD with an outie bellybutton. I'm not sure exactly how this bit of information has suddenly come to the forefront of her consciousness. Comparison tests in the locker room while changing for gympa? She is the only person in our family, at least, but I hardly think that warrants wailing and despair at her extreme other-ness. To stem the angst, I promised I would conduct a poll of my friends and acquaintances online so I'm asking you: innie or outie?

Her outie is, I think, the result of a rather botched umbilical tie-off, but I think it's cute. It's a little button in the middle of her darling little tummy. She seems to be fixating more and more on her appearance lately, something I keep trying, with a rather decided lack of success, to head off at the pass. Her feet are "ugly", her hair is "bushy", she's "not cute". When I ask where she is hearing this, who she is hearing it from, her answers are evasive. She's certainly not hearing it from us, and frankly, I don't think that it can all be credited to sibling affection in the form of regular teasing from her brother.

It's weird to me, because she's so very much a tomboy in so many ways, that this very feminine affliction would be bothering her at the relatively tender age of nine and a half. Isn't that early for self-image introspection? Are they really growing up THAT fast? It's scary to think that she's already aware of the way she looks and that it CONCERNS her. I know things start young nowadays, but I was hoping we had a few more years leeway.

Her emotions swing from the wildest high to a crashing low, one moment to the next. It's never dull around her, that's for sure. Giving her a compliment can send her spiraling with joy and an off-hand, teasing comment can be completely misconstrued and agonized over to the point of tears. This tough kid of mine has paper-thin skin apparently, and she's already learning about what gets through it. She's weighing and measuring and considering every angle and aspect of her revelation of self. Comparison is just a part of that process, but it's a scarily important part that can have repercussions for years, depending upon which side she comes down on herself.

As someone who has never considered herself much of a beauty, and who frankly, hasn't given much of a hoot EVER for make-up or hairstyles (no need with Barky on the job!), I'm not at all sure I'm equipped to deal with this beyond frequent and honest applications of love and affirmation. What your MOM thinks of how you look, when you're young, has no bearing on reality. It's just your MOM and she's biased, right? Of course she's beautiful to me, she thinks, I HAVE to say that. But my lord, it's true. She's so beautiful! When beauty is blossoming in a healthy glow and crackling energy and funny faces and a boundless capacity for affection, how could I NOT think she was beautiful? How could anyone, including her, ever think otherwise?



***

Kitcheny Cookery Bakery Bookery Birthday Wishes to brief_therapy!

It's snowing like crazy outside. Fat white fluff-flakes floating dreamily down, down and around in the white light of the streetlights. The street is filled up with snow. Clifford the Big Red Rock has a sparkly white skullcap. The plants are hunkered down, puffed up with the white stuff. We've had snow on the ground for almost 2 weeks now, though really it hasn't been that much; it keeps melting down to a thin covering and then freezing. All the footprints in the yard: kid, dog, neighbor's cat, are softening at the edges and filling in. They'll have to stomp their snowy flattened paths all over again.

Everyone else all around the world got clobbered with snow early on. We just had grey. Snow makes everything whiter and brighter and sparkly. Ooo sparkly! Add that to the bright blue sky days, sunshine-filled with freezing temps we've had lately and that's just about the perfect winter weather for me. Sun and snow, who could ask for anything more?

***

Inside Joke at Work, Just For My Own Remembrance
Kristian sent me an email, groaning a bit about the awful DVD project he's working on (one that I very joyfully gave up to him when he was hired), telling me that he had changed his name to Sisyphus. And he had actually changed his email signature to sisyphus@axis.com; I laughed like a maniac. He and I are both struggling with monster projects and too much to do at the moment. I replied that I knew how he felt, as I was resembling Prometheus more and more everyday. The rock I'm chained to being the Technical Guide localizations and the damn eagle that is pecking out my liver every day is the Marcom-Helpdesk that he and I handle (all the million marketing tasks that flood in every day from our subs, and which I've been trying to be front line on this week so that he could get somewhere on his project). So now he's signing off on emails to me as SiSS and I'm signing off on mine to him as PRO. Hee!

***

The kids spent last night at farmor & farfar's and tonight, too, and spent the whole day today out sledding (see above: snow). But this evening Karin called me up with a trembly voice to say that she'd just thrown up. After initial sympathizing and confirmation that she didn't want me to come pick her up and that she didn't think she was going to hurl again, I asked her, with a note of trepidation, where? "In the living room," she replied, sounding very guilty. "Oh, honey!" I exclaimed, "Couldn't you have made it to the toilet?" No, she told me. "My mouth just exploded."

Poor unlucky farmor was cleaning up the mess, though apparently it wasn't that much, but STILL. I'm simultaneously feeling very guilty that I'm so glad I'M not having to clean up vomit and incredibly sorry for farmor. Though, she WAS a nurse, so maybe it doesn't bother her as much as it bothers me.

***

There was more, but I'm stopping now and taking myself off to bed with a book that I suspect I've read before a million years ago (niggling familiar feelings) and am not enjoying all that much now. However, it's for book group and it's not quite (yet) reached the point of awfulness at which I will actually stop and put it in the giveaway bag without finishing it. I keep thinking SOMETHING'S got to happen soon, and the jacket blurb backs me up: someone's gonna kick the bucket and I'm greedily hoping it's ALL of these oblivious, self-centered, vapid women or their stuffed-shirt, insufferable, chauvinist men, though I know only one of the characters, sadly, will actually get the ax.

Sometimes when you are reading a book and a character dies, there is an actual jolt of complete horror and disbelief and then anger at the author for daring to do such a thing: how could they??! But in this book there is no one I wouldn't be rather pleased to see knocked off. I'm feeling very bloodthirsty, apparently, and since I can't kill anyone at work, aggravating fictional characters will have to do. DIE! DIE!

Karin was sick over the weekend, running a fever, complaining of a sore throat and being generally draggy. She stayed home from school Monday, with my chaperonage to make sure that she didn't play games all day as sick kids who stay home from work DO NOT GET TO HAVE FUN. She was allowed to watch TV and DVDs and otherwise she could lie on the sofa and sleep or lie in her bed and sleep or lie in OUR bed and sleep.

I worked the entire day, while she slept and watched and moaned about how boring it was to be sick (sure sign that she was going to school on Tuesday if I had anything to say about it), and when the day was done I worked some more, because I had a sneaking suspicion that she had already infected me. At 5 o'clock, she moaned and groaned so much that we went and laid down together in my bed, whereupon we BOTH fell asleep and Anders woke me up at 7 wondering if the kids had had dinner yet. Oops.

And I got up and ate something and then I worked until 10 p.m., because now I knew I needed to put away some hours against a coming sick day.

Tuesday she went to school and I went to work, though neither of us felt all that great, and I self-medicated with my rapidly dwindling supplies of Tylenol Cold Medicine. By yesterday, Wednesday, I KNEW I'd caught the plague but was pretty sure the super-powered American cold medicine would be able to keep it at bay.

Wrong! By afternoon, my throat hurt so much I knew I wouldn't be able to go to the first choir practice of the year and called with my sad regrets. This morning the plague was full blown: headache, achy muscles, fatigue, sore throat, stuffed up head and sore sinuses. WAH! I slept half the day and worked the rest, and now I'm going back to bed, because I really really need to go to work tomorrow and besides I WILL be better tomorrow, because it's sushi night tomorrow and I MUST BE BETTER FOR THE SUSHI.

It was much better being sick when you were a kid; even if you couldn't play games, you could make forts with your duvet, and read all you wanted and play with the cat, and your mom would bring you chicken soup and toast for lunch, and most of all, you didn't have to worry about work or your other obligations. Being sick when you're an adult, and especially when you're a parent: BLEAH.

Send healing thoughts, please! Sushi, sushi, sushi!

Cracking Me Up: My Rejected Twilight Screenplay

I still have the 2 batches of sugar cookie dough in the fridge, as we ran out of time this weekend. They take the longest of all the cookies to do, what with the rolling and cutting and patching and baking and swabbing with sugar glaze and decorating with red hots and colored sugars and dragees and sprinkles and nonpareils. We'll do them this coming weekend, most probably, along with watching The Grinch. So, because I had limited time possibilities this evening, I whipped up a batch of green Holiday Balls instead and undercooked them on purpose and they were declared perfectly perfect by my taste testers.

The kids sang in their school Christmas concert this evening, and tomorrow I'm going to julbord with the AWC at a Japanese restaurant. They told me when I booked it that it's a traditional Swedish julbord with a Japanese twist, so I've got rather high expectations. And here's proof that I'm not the only baker in the house! Anders took photos of Karin making lussebullar, but only of the preliminary kneading:







Baka Baka Pepparkaka Birthday Wishes to Sunday School Rebel!

One of things my mom managed to instill in me while I was growing up was the necessity of writing thank you letters. If I had been a guest at someone's home or received a gift from someone, it was good manners and a courtesy to respond to it with a written thank you note. Writing cards or letters at all seems to be gradually becoming a lost art, which is a shame since getting "real" mail in the post is one of the nicest ways to make someone's day. Over the years I've gotten several surprised and grateful thank you responses to MY thank you cards, which is a pretty clear indicator that such courtesies are not necessarily commonplace any longer.

One of the things on my 6-year-old nephew's Christmas wish list this year (among all the PlayStation and Xbox and Wii requests) is to get "Mail every day." Wouldn't that be lovely? Mail every day! And I don't think he means bills and junk mail and advertising and more bills. I think he means cards and letters from his friends and family. What more could you want for Christmas?

I haven't written a lot about politics here or the election, but I couldn't sleep for 2 nights running for worrying that the crushing disappointment of 8 years ago (4 years ago I was just numb) would be repeated. I have been less and less proud of the government of my country over the past near-decade and less and less willing to admit my nationality to strangers or other foreigners. As a military brat who has spent a great deal of my life overseas, not being proud to be an American has been a horrible feeling, and I am thrilled that I can once again hold my head up high.

President-elect Obama has a hard road ahead of him. The uphill battle is nowhere near over and the magnitude of the mess he has to begin cleaning up must seem staggering. I hope he can continue to handle the weight of so many people's hopes and that the American people will realize that THEY have only done the first part of their job. It's up to all of us to help him get the job done.

I suspect that Mr. Obama's mailbox is overflowing with mail, both with the thank you kind and the good luck kind, along with every other kind of mail you could ever imagine. There's another one coming shortly from Sweden, courtesy of my half-Swedish, half-American daughter, karinek: Letter to the President

And this post is mine: Thank you, Barack. Thank you so much.

Cracking Me Up: Obama Comes Out as French

Not too long ago, Marilyn linked to a really cool site that allows you to make word maps of text that you upload or that exists on a website: Wordle. So, of course, I popped this journal's URL into the engine and came up with something that surprised me, though it shouldn't have.

The 2 most frequently used words on this here journal, on that day*, were Liz (no surprise there, perhaps) and KARIN. Her name was many times larger than both Anders' and Martin's and it took me a bit aback for a moment, and then I laughed since really, with stuff like THIS going on around the house, why would I be surprised that she gets mentioned so often?



She's leaping off the arm of the big chair, expecting her father to catch her which, thankfully, he does...every time. She's been doing this for a long time, off and on, our own little flying monkey. She's pretty fearless when it comes to the physical stuff, even though she sometimes gives me palpitations. I hope her willingness to leap forward with enthusiasm, knowing that she's got a safety net of love to catch her before she breaks something will stay intact through her life, for all of the metaphorical, emotional and social cliffs she'll need to jump from some day.

I know it's an ability that has stood me in good stead throughout my life. What leaps of faith have you made in your time?

> > > BONUS! Flying** Monkey Video!

*I ran the obiter dictum through Wordle again today and Martin and Karin's name were equal in size, which gave me some relief from thinking I was unconsciously playing favorites here.
**Much like typing "brian" for "brain" (BWAHA! I just did it AGAIN!) I can no longer type the word "flying" without typing "flyinge" first.

Anders left for Italy yesterday and while in transit on the Munich airport runway, one of the wheels of his plane starting SHOOTING FLAMES out that actually began LICKING UP THE SIDE OF THE AIRCRAFT.

*commence minor it-was-over-before-i-heard-about-it freakout*

Coming as this did so soon after the airline tragedy in Madrid, I was more than a little concerned when he called to tell me he wasn't yet at his destination and was, in fact, waiting in Munich airport for more news on what to do next, considering he had left the plane without any of his possessions except his mobile phone, and that the only thing he did know was that they might be able to fix the problem and put him BACK ON THE SAME PLANE.

Um.

Would YOU get on a plane that had, only a short time before, been ON FIRE? Me neither. Nosirree bob, not me. Anyway, when he called me this morning (from Italy!) to tell me he had arrived (at 1:30 a.m.!) and was fine, they had, in the end, put the passengers on a DIFFERENT plane. Which, hello, why would there even be a debate about this? Why was it even in question? Plane on fire = Time for new plane.

It figures that every time Anders has a business trip, we have a crazy busy week that I have to deal with singlehandedly. I do this with efficiency but very poor mental grace, bitching and moaning up a storm inside my head because I am so very put-upon and have to do everything my own damn self. Then I get a reality check and a chill pill, respectively and manage, because hello, my children are not infants and they actually dress themselves and eat their own breakfast and come home by themselves and even, sometimes, do their homework without being reminded more than twice.

Anyway, because it's the start of the school year and the start of every extracurricular activity known to man, we have the following on the schedule for this week:

Monday: First meeting of Chess Club (Martin), return recyclables, post office stop & grocery-shopping (me & Karin)
Tuesday: First AWC meeting (me, plus I'm dragging the kids along only they get sushi first, to minimize the impatient demands of "when are we leaving, mooooommmm?)
Wednesday: First choir practice (me...might skip this one, though)
Thursday: Bookworms (me, plus I'm dragging the kids along since it's at my friend Debbie's house and the kids can hang out with hers)
Friday: Wonders dinner here at my house because even though it was not my turn to host, Emily was having trouble with the logistics so she's hosting it at MY place. BONUS: not having to drag the kids anywhere) Plus, pre-packing for the overnight camping trip Anders and the kids are taking on Saturday night after Anders gets home on Saturday morning.
Saturday: Collapse, muddy & exhausted (me)

Tonight, when Karin and I arrived back at the community house to pick up Martin after running our errands, we had a few minutes to kill and were sitting in the foyer waiting for him. I was flipping through a magazine and found an article on Face Yoga which caught my eye, so I called Karin over and read the directions to her and we tried it out.

Liz: First exercise is for your eyes. Look to the left, then to the right, then diagonally up to the left, then diagonally down to the right. Repeat diagonals 4 times, then repeat, flipping the directions.

Karin & Liz: *Do the eye exercise, ending up with a few crossed-eyes*

Liz: Okay, second exercise is for your lips. Put two fingers to your mouth and then blow a kiss. Repeat 6 times.

Karin & Liz: *blow kisses at each other*

Liz: Next one is for your cheeks. It's called The Satchmo after Louis Armstrong; he was a famous trumpet player. Fill your cheeks with air and then move the air from one side to the other until you run out of air.

Karin & Liz: *Blow up our cheeks with air and then make poofy faces at each other until we crack up*

Liz: Next one is for your mental attitude. Close your eyes and visualize a spot between your eyebrows. Hold this pose for 30 to 60 minutes.

Karin: *Shuts her eyes and pokes herself in the forehead*

Liz: No, no, you're supposed to just THINK about a spot.
Karin: That's boring, what's next?
Liz: The Lion. This one is for your whole body. You tense up tightly and then throw everything out: your tongue, your arms and hands and fingers. So tense up your face muscles and your fists and scrunch everything up as tight as you can, even your butt, it says! And then...

Karin: *Squeezes everything up tight and then lets loose a tremendously loud and obviously unexpected fart*

Liz: *Gapes at her and then explodes into laughter* You were supposed to CLENCH first, THEN release!!

Karin: I DID!

Liz & Karin: *giggle madly*