Niki

Comfort

I sometimes entertain thoughts of opening a store. It would be a bookstore, where you could also buy wine and beer. Also cheese, coffee and ice cream. Unlike other wine stores, my store would not match the wine to cheese per se, more to your budget and reading.

Say you come in to buy Donna Leon, I'd suggest a Northern Italian Red. Not very imaginative, agreed, but why  ruin something that's just goes together.

I would also, like a doctor, ask for your state of mind and perhaps nr of kids.

Say you have 2 or 3 kids and little or no patience left at the end of the day.
I'd advice you to have a beer and get O magazine for the guilty pleasure of being both cheesy and intoxicated and still picking up some reading advice along the way.

If you looked like you needed to laugh, I'd see what I could do.
If you wanted just a little bit of everything, I'd send you home with The Assassin's Cloak and a bottle of red, coffee and chocolate and a sign saying Don't disturb.

My store would be called Comfort. The Swedish translation is Komfort. As so often happens, the Swedish word can also be read as a combination of other words, in this case the words kom fort - come quickly, stressing the acute need of comfort in a person's daily life.

One day my friend, you might be able to come by my store and I will help you find stuff to read if you need it.

speaking of which: what did you read this summer that you would recommend to other people? And while you're at it, please recommend a suitable snack or beverage to go with your literary suggestion. Thank you.

Some Porter with your Poe or Parker, Tokaji with your Tolstoy? Champagne with your Chaucer or mead with your Mead?

Perhaps you are fully contemporary and would like some single malt with your Silent Wife? Let me know.

Putting a word in for a friend

Lyssna på Jenny!

Putting a word in for a friend

Rösta på Lotta!

Putting a word in for a friend

Rachel, this looks fantastic. So looking forward!

Perhaps a bit late, this consolation

I'm reading W.N.P Barbellion's Journal of a dissappointed man (The title alone would be enough for me to buy it).  You can find it here if you're not like me, if you don't need to hold the book in your own hands to enjoy it fully. 

I'm copy + pasting from Wikipedia to give you some background info. Barbellion was a pseudonym (I feel phony writing nom de plume), his real name was Bruce Fredrick Cummings. 

Says Wiki:

Cummings' life changed forever when he was called to enlist in the British Army to fight in World War I in November 1915. He had consulted his doctor before taking the regulation medical prior to enlisting, and his doctor had given him a sealed, confidential letter to present to the medical officer at the recruitment centre.^[2] Cummings did not know what was contained in the letter, but in the event it was not needed; the medical officer rejected Cummings as unfit for active duty after the most cursory of medical examinations.^[2] Hurt, Cummings decided to open the letter on his way back home to see what had been inside, and was staggered to learn that his doctor had diagnosed him as suffering from the disease now known as multiple sclerosis, and that he almost certainly had less than five years to live.

----

Barbellion writes frequently about his death but even more of his will to live. 

""But I cannot for the life of me rake up any excitement over my own immediate decease — an unobtrusive passing away of a rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self- assertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House — what a mean little tragedy! It is hard not to be somebody even in death."

Cummings/Barbellion, you are so somebody even in death. Reading you, you seem more alive than many of the living around us. 


A rancorous, disappointed, morbid, and self- assertive entomologist in a West Kensington Boarding House. Didn't know I was so interested in such men. 

Here's an entry to show the humor shining through the sadness of the diary. (That dog sounds just like me when I was a teenage girl): 

September 14, 1915

There is a ridiculous Cocker spaniel at the house where we are staying. He must have had a love affair and been jilted, or else he’s a sort of village idiot. The landlady says he’s not so silly as he looks — but he looks very silly: he languishes sentimentally, and when we laugh at him he looks ‘hurt.’ To-day we took him up on the Down and it seemed to brighten him up. Really, he is sane enough, with plenty of commonsense and good manners. But he is kept at home in the garden so much, lolling about all day, that as E—— said, having nothing to do, he falls in love.

-----
I also love this, about death itself.

"To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, and so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my 'Soul,' my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part — I shall still have some sort of a finger in the pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me — but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you."

I love you W.N.P Barbellion.  It might be of little or no consequence at this point, but who knows, perhaps my own living body contains some of the atoms you speak of. The human condition, the universe, luckily we're all in this together. 

Seen lately, in Brooklyn

That little house up there, what's its story? Who has lived there? When was it built? It's like a little treehouse, nestled in between the buildings. 

Vanja, Wilda and Joel at Smorgasburg.

I bought ice cream, and (morphing into a ridiculously optimistic Brooklyn mom) beet ketchup.

Here, the Guner-Frostenson household demonstrates two different attitudes to spending time at the playground. Choice is all yours, kids. 

Never met this woman or even heard about her till today and she's already made me smile and cry

Jane Lotter wrote her own obituary. Read it here. 
You must also read this text about Jane and her obit. 

"Mom, I AM the statue of liberty"

USA

There are so many things I don't understand about the US. This is not one of them.

Kale craze

This is something you don't hear much about in Stockholm yet, so take note Swedish hipsters: After the cult of coffee and your obsession with wheat grass, sour dough bread and micro brewed beer, you will move on to:
KALE.

Kale kale kale, it's everywhere here.

It is kind of tasty, especially cooked, but am still surprised at how seriously people treat this leafy green.

Yesterday I was waiting in the cinema lobby while my kids watched a movie. A woman came late to the screening and was stopped by a guard who told her to leave her bag outside.

She got really upset.

"It's kale. Just kale. It's not like I'm going to be sitting at the movies munching on kale. "

The guard kept his calm.

"You're going to have to leave your kale with me. "

He got exactly what he asked for and, as a bonus, a hissing "what ever".

So now you know. Don't try to combine superfoods with superheroes. At least not in Brooklyn.

Also! Read this about Kyra Sedgwick who ENDED UP in the hospital with a shorter finger because of  trying to cook kale.
Imagine trying to make a vegetarian dish and in the end, your main source of consolation is Bacon.

+
Read this if you're interested in 50 shades of Kale. 

stumbled across

life as it has been, since forever. Photo by VOANH KIET at www.theopen.ca

In the park after dark

New and old

See this place in the background? It's getting fixed up like so much else here. Walking around in Williamsburg and Greenpoint is like walking around in a stream of rapid transformation. Everything is being bought, fixed, changed, sold.

Things that wouldn't happen at home

Kids were supposed to go swimming at camp today, but they didn't because it rained. I can't remember anything being cancelled because of rain at home. In that case, we wouldn't be able to do anything, ever.

Had to take them to the playground to let them move around freely. No other kids there. Weird. Just a little rain.

After the rain.

Niche-ing it. In a good way.

Which is the best water park within 2 hours from New York?

Trying to see the world through the eyes of the kids

So all three kids are enrolled in camp and all three wonder "when can we go back to Sweden, please?". Though when I came to pick Vanja (our 11-year old) up the other day, she said could I please come back a bit later. My heart soared. SOARED.

And Joel said he'd liked to bring a Swedish book to camp because it was so much fun when the other kids tried to read in Swedish and also they were so impressed that he could be fluent in such a strange language, a language they had barely heard of, such a foreign sounding tongue that one of the campers said it was most likely "a secret language".

Niki throws tantrums every day and says she misses her grandparents and her friends so much. But she also says she know knows how to say horse in English which is no wonder since she watches My Little Pony whenever she can.

I wonder what this whole experience is like to the kids. They seem to be doing OK so far and I'm so happy the have each other. But at the same time, so much is different here and they're so new to being outsiders. Still, being an outsider, a newbie, a foreigner is something many of us have to experience and it's not all bad. It's humbling.

One thing is very different here from Stockholm. In Stockholm, you'd rarely talk to strangers, unless you're a bit crazy or want to be known as an extreme extrovert. Sad but true. Here, people seem to talk to each other all the time. A nice lady struck up a conversation with me at the bus stop the other day. She was a retired school teacher who'd lived on our block for more than 30 years. The neighborhood has changed SO MUCH she said, it used to be gangster country with shootings, machetes, killings, dead bodies thrown into the Hudson. That's gone now, replaced by hipsters staying in Air BnB apartments. "How the hipsters make a living I don't know, they all seem to just saunter along the streets, sipping on their coffees. When I was their age, I worked my butt off".

"How did it all change?", I wondered.

"The Hasids. They bought up so many of the properties around here, it cleaned up the neighborhood. They run everything. Everything. See that building? They own it. That one too, and that one. They don't live here, but they own.. a lot.".

I don't know if that's all true but could be. So interesting. Then went to the gym for my complimentary PT session with a Canadian triathlete. She was so great. Afterwards went for a run on a treadmill right behind two Hasidic men who worked out with their yarmulkes in place and now I wonder if a Hasidic group owns the gym too?

If you have any tips on good books or docus on the Hasidic community let me know. In the meantime will watch this to learn more. 

Dear Americans

Where do I find smaller hangers than the American standard? I need hangers for a narrow shouldered person who's kind of small but not a child. Myself.  Need an answer for this and Niki is pointing to the person who could help me. You.

More exploring Brooklyn

Visiting Mast Brothers chocolate. Smelled so great, that place.

Went to a shoe sale.

Niki gave Anna thumbs up to buying these red shoes. 

Imagine having two of her. 

Joel before and after

Dinner in the backyard

There's a back door in our bed room. 

If you follow...

these people...

you'll end up here. 

Everything is bigger in America. 

Paparazzing my own family.

Great things that have happened lately that I have limited or no pics of.

Anders sister Anna came to visit. She and I went to the movies at a place where they serve drinks and food during the screening. I loved it.

I went to see my friends Josh, Gill and Charlie.

Sarah took me to IKEA yesterday.

Far away from her tree.

Adjusting?

Life here now is all about trying to get the kids adjusted to life abroad.
It's tough on them, this was mine and Anders decision and though it's hard to pity anyone who gets to move to NYC, it is challenging to switch environment, friends, habitat and yes, language.

They're at camp now, to pick up more English and hopefully make friends from the area before school starts.

I'm so impressed by how they stick it out, how they learn, how they adapt.

Also moved by camp counselor who found an app in his phone that translates English words into audible Swedish for Niki since she can't write or read yet.

School starts September 9. Our goal is to have the kids speaking and understanding English to a great degree by then. Vanja is already getting there, Joel right behind her. Niki is struggling but she's picking it up too.

Friends who've done this before us tell us not to worry and that soon the kids will start speaking English with each other.

Dear people of Greenpoint, Brooklyn

We love your park, too.

What Sweden's princess royale would look like with cornrows

Princess Victoria will most likely never get cornrows, but thanks
to my fingers and this optical illusion, you get an idea. Victoria, I say go for it.

Svenska läsare: Som ni ser avslöjar Carl Philip sin underbara hemlighet: han vill också ha cornrows.