Library

This beautiful school has got a new library. It's very small and very nice, and I'm very happy to be able to show it to you:



I hope that in a few weeks it will not only be nice, but also frequented by students who will feel welcome and at home in it.

Dear neighbourhood

Dear neighbours,

There are many different kinds of neighbourhoods. Some are all new and shiny, in some there are huge private gardens with flowers ans things, some are more of the lived in kind, and some rather worn down.

One thing they all have in common, one very important thing, is that in them people live. Adults, old people, children, all ages share the area that is the neighbourhood.

Another thing that makes one neighbourhood different from another is how people in it live. Some areas are very quiet all the time, others sometime. In some there is a constant background of sounds and voices.

Let's be honest, shall we? Silence would not become our neighbourhood. It's much more natural with a certain amount of sound when 600 people share an area this small, so let the kids play, ok?

Qwerty

The keyboard on my phone is a qwerty keyboard. I really like that, so much easier to use!

I'd like to end this post with a quote: "and that was all I had to say right now"

A hint for a Christmas somewhere in the future

This is a book I am really looking forwards to, even if it will actually be titled The Big Boring Book of Aesthetics, or: How Poetics got to Now from Then

Robert Archambeau is a brilliant narrator, and a fantastic teacher. He has a way of sort of casually untangle the most complicated concepts in literature and doing it in such a way that the student, or reader, feels that 'of course, I actually knew that to begin with, I just didn't know I knew'. He’s funny and serious at the same time and still, years and years after I left his classroom, I learn things from his lessons, find little nuggets of gold in the notes that I don’t remember writing and find inspiration in thinking back on how he teaches.

So if I do survive the curse for a yet a few more Christmases, and you find yourself wondering what to give me, you may want to go looking for this book. I’ll be very happy.

Cursed

Standing at the busstop today was a man a few years older than me. When I arrived he stared at me, then walked against me stabbing his finger towards me saying something I could not hear. I honestly think he was cursing me, so if I catch the piggyflu you know why.

I might have misunderstood, of course. He might have been threatening me with violence and murder, or something else much more ordinairy than a curse.

Catching a bus has its hazards!

Allergy

I am developing a slight allergy as I'm growing even older, I realise. Grown up women who, when they want to show off their girlyness, write *giggles* everytime they want to indicate that they are joking give me a rash.

I wish I could be more tolerant, but this habit annoys me.

Tattoo removal

I notice a change in the way people look at tattooes. Today people talk about laser removal as if it was no bigger a deal than it is to erase a word written in pencil, tattoes are fashion and when fashion changes they are removed or possibly covered.

To me, though, a tattoo is something to keep. It's a token of who I was then, sent from me of yesterday to me of today, and of tomorrow. Should I decide to remove a tattoo I feel I should also be removing a piece of what made me me. I'm not saying that those who choose to have tattooes removed or covered up are doing something wrong. I'm just saying that for me that would be like erasing a message from me of yesterday to me of tomorrow.

The old that is strong

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Today's Sky

I like clouds. Some would go as far as to say I am slightly obsessed with clouds. Some would leave out the slightly from that sentence.



This could possibly be the forerunners of what Swedish media call ‘the Polish Storm’. Yesterday it was nicknamed ‘the Polish Cold Spell’, and we got little house hold tips on what to do while it lasted. Stay in and read, watch TV and that sort of ingenious little ideas. But today it’s been upgraded, in media, to a Storm. With capital S. That means we should Worry. We should not be running out taking pictures of the clouds shouting ‘oh look how pretty it is! Oh how cold and wonderful the wind is!’, instead we should be… I’m not sure, they haven’t gotten around to telling us yet.

I will prepare myself by reading about how Winnie the Pooh and his friends made it through their Windy Day.

Vampire

Twilight may be giving us the Vampire Nouvelle, but I'm an old fashioned girl when it comes to vampires. Rice stands a better chance



And so does Stoker



Do we want to go this way? We may possibly do.

Sunset

We've had a long stretch of clammy hot days, not a cloud in the sky and hardly any air to breath. Then, finally, the clouds that have been hovering over other parts of Europe came to visit us too. Last night gave us this beautiful, silvery sunset


followed by a magnificent thunderstorm and then a full moon lit up the rest of the night.

Today the sun is back, but the clouds are still in the sky shading us at times and keeping the temperature down. Clouds are nice.

A clear mind in the night

I have always functioned better in the night than I do in the day. I'm nicer, I think better, I communicate better, I learn better, I teach better, I do everything better in the wee hours, when the world's asleep. During the years I have thought of many reasons for this: nights are calmer, phones are quiet, neighbours sleep, those few of us awake have time to finish our streams of thoughts and conversations since nobody else claims our attention. Darkness is peaceful and undemanding, unlike daylight that keeps nagging you for action and energy.

Now I am informed that there is one more reason: cold air, it seems, contains more oxygen per cubic measure than warm. Thus, every breath we take during the night contains more oxygen than the breaths we take during the day.

So there's a biological explanation to why I function better at night as well. Who knew?

Too hot

It's too hot to think straight, let alone write something worth reading.