Visitors from Scandinavia! (Part 1)

Our Swedish friends came to visit last month (and into this month, which was lovely as extended visits from friends are a treat that we haven’t been able to enjoy since 2019). It was wonderful to see them and we miss them now that they’re gone, but it has to be said that these visits were a lot simpler when the kids were small.

Small children are basically a form of luggage, though generally with more personality. You cart them from place to place and they pretty much stay wherever you are unless they go running off (this is where the Discworld fans nod sagely), and when that happens you go catch them because you are bigger than they are and can still outrun them. Also, the airlines are less likely to lose them.

But the bottom line is that with small children you only have to make one plan.

However, it turns out that our kids are grown now and while Oliver has moved back home for his job here in Our Little Town (at least for the next year or so) Lauren decided to stay up at Main Campus University and take classes there. On the down side, we don’t get to see her much. On the plus side, well, it does free up a bedroom for when we have guests, I suppose.

Mats and Sara have three kids – Maria, David, and Helena, all of whom are adults now. Helena has been in Wisconsin for the last year on a foreign exchange program – she didn’t want to stay with us, because what kind of adventure would it be to stay with people you’ve known since you were born? We got to see her a couple of times, though. Her year expired at the end of June, and the overarching purpose of her family’s trip here was to see her and meet her host family.

This was, of course, only the beginning.

Mats and David flew into Chicago on the 17th. David came up to Our Little Town on the bus while Mats flew to Minneapolis and northern Wisconsin to visit friends and his host family from when he was an exchange student in the early 1980s. Sara and Maria flew to NYC because Maria is an actor/director and wanted to see Broadway. A week later I drove to Oshkosh to pick up Mats after our friend Joe drove him down there for a baseball tournament. Sara and Maria flew to Chicago where Sara rented a car and drove to our house while Maria took the train to her host family in Indiana, where she was before the pandemic hit. She eventually came up to join us on the 27th. The whole family spent some days with Helena’s host family in the middle of their time with us – we never did see Helena this trip – and eventually the exchange program flew Helena home about a week ago, which is more or less when everyone else was scheduled to leave as well.

Meanwhile SAS pilots went on strike and it was not clear whether the rest of the family would get back to Sweden or just stay longer with us, which would have been fine (extra time with friends!), but after a few days of phone calls Mats, Sara, and David got rebooked onto a flight home via Finland while Maria (as planned) went back to Indiana to spend more time with her former host family because why not – it’s a long way from Indiana to Sweden, after all.

Got all that? There will be a quiz later.

So it was a lot more complicated than our previous visits have been, but no less lovely to see them. They’re the sort of people you can just hang out and talk and play games with (there were many iterations of Ticket to Ride, Hand & Foot, Codename, Avalon, and the Swedish card game Maja which is not all that far from Hearts, in none of which did I come in anything other than dead last), and they actually take me seriously when I say “make yourself at home – kitchen’s over there” which is something I adore about them.

Plus, they’re fun to do things with as well.

We did a lot of things.

David and I hung out together for much of the first week, since Oliver and Kim had to work. We did a fair amount of hiking around the trails here in Our Little Town – at least it felt like a fair amount of hiking to me, since my idea of hiking generally takes me on the path from my bedroom to my office. The trails have some adventurous parts which I left to the younger and fitter person in the group as seemed wise at the time, though I did manage to gouge myself on a tree branch at some point. This really only confirms the wisdom of leaving the adventurous parts to others as far as I can tell.

But it wasn’t just the two of us doing things. We all went to the Farmer’s Market here in town, for example, and one day we went out strawberry picking – nothing like a little agricultural labor to make a guest feel right at home!

There was a trip up to see Lauren and Maxim, which worked pretty well except that it was beastly hot, which kept the walking to a minimum.

We went over to Oliver’s workplace one evening when they were having a special event, where we met some friends unexpectedly (it is a small town after all) and where David and Oliver faced off over a giant set of Jenga blocks.

This is quite possibly the best photograph I have taken in years.  This could be a painting.

At some point we were absolutely shocked to discover that while David has been to the US many times he had never seen either Airplane! or The Princess Bride, which calls into question his right to stay on American soil (this applies to people who were born here too, by the way – if you haven’t seen those films you need to correct that immediately. Go ahead. I’ll wait) so we corrected this. It turned out that none of the rest of his family had seen The Princess Bride either, so WE WATCHED IT AGAIN, ALL TOGETHER. The sacrifices one makes for friends! Sacrifices!

I keep using that word. I do not think it means what I’m saying it means here.

I also convinced him to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so now David is Fully Nerd Qualified and a Member of the Clan. Welcome aboard!

Eventually there were more Swedes in our house, and as this post has gotten long I will finish this story later.

Further News and Updates

1. Our Swedish friends have left and it’s just the three of us around here now. At some point there will be bloggage about all the lovely times we had together, but that point is not today. It’s good to have company, and it’s good to have quiet. It’s all good, really. Now it is our turn to visit Sweden! Next year, perhaps.

2. The problem with having a “classic car” is that they don’t make parts for it anymore. On the plus side, though, the old Saturn wagon does have three functional window controls.

3. A long term project may be coming to an end soon, and when that happens there will also be bloggage. So many of my recent posts have just been “Coming Soon!” posts, but that’s about the limit of my brain these days.

4. Still far too infuriated to comment substantively on the right-wing extremism of the Supreme Court’s decision to reduce American women to the status of livestock. I’ll get to that too, I suppose. In the meantime, a simple and heartfelt “fuck you” to all those who think the Dobbs decision has any moral standing whatsoever.

5. I made it through Independence Day without any trolls finding my viral meme from a while back and defecating all over my social media feed, which was a pleasant change from recent years. Going viral is completely overrated. So it goes. Every so often I do a Google search to see where it has spread and mostly I find it in the usual places – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and so on. Once in a while, though, I get surprised. This year’s discovery was finding that it had been turned into a closing prayer by a minister and posted on his church’s website. I have to confess I did not see that coming.

6. I now have a new office down at Home Campus! My old boss got headhunted by another university and left in March, much to our great dismay, which left her office vacant. This month was the first time I had the breathing space to consider my options and then make the switch. My new office looks exactly like my old office (to the point where one of my students actually complained about my lack of decorating imagination – it’s like she doesn’t know me at all) except that unlike the old one it has windows. Lots of them! Kind of a drag in the summer when the sun is hot, but I’m looking forward to the autumn and winter when the turkeys roam around campus and the snow starts to fall.

7. I was in my old office for six and a half years. It took me all of an hour to move everything. What can I say? I was an adjunct instructor for a quarter century before I became an advisor, and adjunct jobs are never guaranteed for more than seventeen weeks. I’m always ready to throw my stuff in a medium-sized box and go home.

8. I have a summer project, for which I am to be paid upon completion. I do not wish to do this summer project. I’m even okay with not being paid. But there are long-term consequences for not doing this project that I’d prefer to avoid, notably not getting paid for additional work that is dependent on this project, into the next half decade. So I need to do this summer project.

 

 

9. The UEFA Women’s Cup started last week and I’m having fun catching up on the games that my various streaming subscriptions allow me to see. So far none of the games I’ve seen have been close but they have been interesting. I’m very grateful for this event, since we are now in the Dead Zone of sports as far as I am concerned – the Stanley Cup has been awarded and most soccer leagues won’t start up again until the fall. Every once in a while I will check the baseball standings to see how the Phillies are doing (so far, NOT in last place!) but that’s about as far as that goes.

10. Last week would have been my grandfather’s 110th birthday. This week would have been my mother’s 82nd. The ghosts accumulate as you get older.

Party Ever Onward

The difference was the other parties.

When we had Lauren’s graduation open house last year we stocked up on burgers, dogs, and – from one of the Mexican restaurants in town – three different kinds of taco meat, and we had no leftovers. We figured for Oliver’s graduation party we should just repeat that menu, but this year we had leftovers. Not that I am complaining about this, mind you. That particular restaurant makes great tacos and we feasted on tacos for some time afterward. I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.

Last year there were many graduation open houses going on – it’s a big thing here in Our Little Town, and Lauren basically went from party to party for about a month after she graduated from Local Businessman High School. Her own open house went from sometime in the afternoon to about 10pm, while the events that some of her friends planned for that very same day ended at 8pm, which is why at about 8:20pm there was a sudden influx of teenage boys into our back yard. The phrase “taco eating contest” appeared, as if by magic.

There were no leftovers.

This is just and proper and As It Should Be. The whole point of these things is to celebrate and feed people, because food is love and celebrations should be about both of those things. Also, I was quite happy not to have to put away extra food afterward.

This year, though, we were the only graduation open house going on that I was aware of, since Oliver was graduating from college and his college friends do not live here in Our Little Town. So the group was somewhat smaller and no additional groups came by toward the end of the evening to help out. But between his old high school friends, our friends here, our Swedish friends (who were in town and around whom Oliver very carefully planned the date for this), and Lauren’s friends, we made a valiant effort.

Because this is, after all, something to celebrate.

Oliver worked hard and graduated with honors from Small Liberal Arts College, and we are proud of him.

So there was food. There was conversation. There were three different kinds of cake, all baked by Grandma because we had no oven at the time and our previous go-to bakeries were no longer options, and since our Swedish friend David had also graduated not long ago we decided to have a joint cake as well. There was also a fair amount of running back and forth to the bus station to pick up incoming folks, which is easier to do in Our Little Town than you might imagine. It was worth it. Even with the pandemic at least temporarily in something of a lull (at least as far as mortality goes, thanks to the vaccines) we don’t get to do these sorts of things as much as we used to do and every opportunity should be cherished.

We did steal one idea from SLAC’s graduation and set up a canvas in the back yard with instructions for people to paint whatever they wanted on it. It turned out pretty well, and now we have Art – and, more importantly, Meaningful Art.

Congratulations, Oliver. I’m proud of you.

A Set of Memes Regarding the Latest Battle in the Republican War on Women

 

Eventually I will put into words what I'm thinking about this right now, but in the meantime here are the words of others who have already captured much of what needs to be said.

 

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