The longest day at work is the day before your holiday starts. It is another 7 hours until I get to leave not just for the weekend, but for TWO WEEKS! The Lover, my daughter and I will be going to Norway. Tomorrow, we will be taking a ship from Rostock in Northern Germany to Trelleborg in Sweden and then continue in a West-Northerly direction.
My daughter, of course, has no concept of what a holiday is. She understands that I have bought salami, chocolate and drinks that cannot be consumed until "the holiday". She also understands that I won't be going to work, that she won't be going to her Kinderladen and that we won't be at home. And she thinks about The Big Ship a lot, the ship which will hold not only the three of us but where The Lover's car will also be parked. What kind of icecream will it have, she wonders? She has taken ships on the Elbe with her grandmother twice, and they had different kinds of icecream. We discussed this yesterday: maybe the Big Ship will have blue icecream, she suggested. Or cucumber icecream. Or, best of all, vanilla icecream.
Me, I have never been to Norway. In my mind, I have patched together things I have read, things I have been told, places I have been in other Scandinavian countries. We will be staying in a cottage in some remote place. I haven't asked The Lover all that much about what it will be like, because I want to picture it in my mind: lots of wood, very quiet. Beds that have to be pushed together to create a double. A veranda. A view over hills and forest. Personally imported wine drunk from the bottle.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Monday
Mondays are very special to me. My daughter stays with her father each Monday. Which means that for one day a week, I come home after work and it's quiet. It's a beautiful thing.
Yesterday, I cleaned, sweeping the floors, picking up toys - and because for once, it was done without thinking that really, I should be playing with my daughter and not do housework, it was fun! On all the other days, I have about 3 hours I get to spend with my daughter after I come home from work and before she goes to bed. This is her time, and I always feel slightly guilty if I do things that aren't part of what she wants to do. After all, I could always do laundry and dishes and whatelse after she's gone to bed. At which point, of course, I am tired, want to spend time with The Lover or just sleep. It's a dilemma. But anyway: yesterday, cleaning all by myself was great.
Then I spent time listening to The Lovely Bones, an audiobook that Radmila generously sent to me. The internet is a generous place: she sent me these 10 CDs, and more, just because I mentioned that I liked audiobooks! The Lovely Bones is a wonderful, touching story. I would never have thought that it could work, a story told from the perspective of a murdered girl, watching earth from her personal heaven. Sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But it's not, it's delightful. Thanks again, Radmila!
Finally went to see Supersize Me with my friend JM. JM lives on sweets, his drawer at work is full of plastic sacks with colourful candy inside. As far as I know, he never eats fresh fruit. He loves fast food, and all through the movie, as the protagonist shoveled mountains of disgusting foods into his mouth, he kept saying Oh man, that looks great! I feel hungry now! Mm! Ah! I had kind of hoped that the movie would, maybe, somehow, reform him, show him the error of his ways, but that didn't work out at all. Not at all at all. JM, I should add, has an enviable body, firm and muscly, broad shoulders, slim hips, a flat stomach with ripples in all the right places... somehow, the world isn't fair.
Yesterday, I cleaned, sweeping the floors, picking up toys - and because for once, it was done without thinking that really, I should be playing with my daughter and not do housework, it was fun! On all the other days, I have about 3 hours I get to spend with my daughter after I come home from work and before she goes to bed. This is her time, and I always feel slightly guilty if I do things that aren't part of what she wants to do. After all, I could always do laundry and dishes and whatelse after she's gone to bed. At which point, of course, I am tired, want to spend time with The Lover or just sleep. It's a dilemma. But anyway: yesterday, cleaning all by myself was great.
Then I spent time listening to The Lovely Bones, an audiobook that Radmila generously sent to me. The internet is a generous place: she sent me these 10 CDs, and more, just because I mentioned that I liked audiobooks! The Lovely Bones is a wonderful, touching story. I would never have thought that it could work, a story told from the perspective of a murdered girl, watching earth from her personal heaven. Sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But it's not, it's delightful. Thanks again, Radmila!
Finally went to see Supersize Me with my friend JM. JM lives on sweets, his drawer at work is full of plastic sacks with colourful candy inside. As far as I know, he never eats fresh fruit. He loves fast food, and all through the movie, as the protagonist shoveled mountains of disgusting foods into his mouth, he kept saying Oh man, that looks great! I feel hungry now! Mm! Ah! I had kind of hoped that the movie would, maybe, somehow, reform him, show him the error of his ways, but that didn't work out at all. Not at all at all. JM, I should add, has an enviable body, firm and muscly, broad shoulders, slim hips, a flat stomach with ripples in all the right places... somehow, the world isn't fair.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)