This past month, I have been recuperating from personal issues as well as getting over a vicious cold. Taking care of a 15 month old while running a low-grade fever is forgiving, but a lot harder than it sounds.  She didn’t seem to mind that I was slower than usual – as long as her meals were on time. She was also sick, but not nearly as sick as I was.  Getting the motivation to move my body was the hard part.  I know that these early years are the easiest, so please don’t take my complaints seriously.  Who else am I going to talk to, if not you, my dear readers?

Due to all that, I didn’t do any language studies for one week.  Seven whole days!  I truly felt horrible, and there was nothing that could be done about it.  Happily, I am back on track.

I have also taken up a cleaning routine, one which I refuse to allow any slack.  It was hard going at first, but now it’s a little more mundane.  The first part of the day is taken up with it, and there can be some big projects. There are some days that question my resolve, particularly the ones where it takes three or four hours. How long will I be able to keep this up?  Maybe it is taking so long because most things have never been cleaned. Hopefully, upkeep will be easier in the future.

Damn straight.

The 6 Week Challenge started February 1st, and I forgot all about it.  The neatest thing about the challenge is the Bot.  Oh, how delightful it would be to have my own bot that would log all the time spent on everything!  How efficient would I become?  It works through Twitter.  You input data in a formatted tweet, and voilà!  A pie chart in cyberspace is automatically updated with the total amount of time you have spent on that language.  I guess the pie chart could be replicated using pivot tables in Excel, but the Twitter automation saves time mainly because it’s accessible from a cell phone.

In local news, there’s a book sale going on in town.  I stopped buying books when I moved here because 1) it was becoming too cumbersome to pack and relocate them whenever we moved, 2)  they are too expensive, and 3)  the English books are limited in variety (or entirely missing altogether).  That was all rectified today, when my husband and I pillaged the store (along with our little tyke).  It’s a yearly sale.  Our current collection is old, and it would be nice to have something new to read.  Usually, I borrow books from the library through my e-reader.  I happen to love my e-reader, but no one I know here has one, and it is nice to read with other people. Admittedly, e-readers aren’t for everyone. Sometimes, it’s better to have the real thing in your hands.

Booty!

• The Family Coreleone – Ed Falco (fiction)
• Dandy – Jan Guillou (fiction)
• A Storm Came From Paradise – Johannes Anyuru (non-fiction, story about his dad’s decision to leave Uganda for Sweden during Idi Amin)
• Kings, Queens and Lovers – Margareta Beckman (history)
• Among Spies, Communists and Weapons Dealers – Jan Mosander (non-fiction)
• Ru – Kim Thúy (immigrant Vietnamese/Canadian autobiography)
• China’s Leaders: 1912-2012 – Hans Hägerdal (history)
• Petals of Blood – Ngugi wa Thiong’o (historical fiction (?) during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya)
• Queens of Sweden – Tomas Blom (history)
• Morberg Does Homecooking – Per Morberg (cookbook)
• Before the River Takes Us – Helena Thorfinn (fiction)
• Godfather – Mario Puzo (fiction)
• The Garlic Ballads – Mo Yan (historical fiction (?) during the Cultural Revolution in China)
• Swedish History – Olle Larsson, Andreas Marklund, history

And of course, we got three small books for our daughter.

It’s important to note that Herman Lindqvist (a journalist) is viewed as the popular authority on Swedish history, but the reviews for the book by Larsson and Marklund called it the “new standard”.  I have not read Lindqvist.

Speaking of e-readers…  If anyone knows of a way to get a default Swedish-English electronic dictionary added to a Sony e-reader or a Kindle, please get in touch with me.  They both come with pre-installed dictionaries, but obviously Swedish is not one of them.  I think at this point, I’d settle just for a Swedish-only dictionary.  I can buy readers with Swedish-only dictionaries pre-installed, but I don’t want to buy a third reader just for a specific language.  Currently, I use the Norstedts dictionary app on my phone.

*Edited to say that this shopping spree greatly cheered me up!  All these books, waiting to be read – delicious!