Trip pictures: my parents' house

I'm back, alive! After leaving home at 7:30 Saturday (3 pm Finnish time), 8 hours shy of 3 days later I finally arrived home. That was because when the airline bumped the flight forward, they couldn't "contact" Orbitz, the ticket vendor responsible for notifying me. So I never was notified: Mom and I drove the three and a half hours to Atlanta Saturday morning only to discover my flight had been moved AN ENTIRE DAY. The airline discounted a hotel room (though not by much), but my whole trip was delayed a day and Wax had to make me a completely new ferry boat reservation, since it wasn't refundable and I missed the original one (total cost of delay $80+ to my mom and €35 to Wax). So the trip back went approximately like, ( in list form: )

Here are a lot of pictures of my parents' house. I was responsible for a number of decorating decisions here, mainly in the livingroom and dining room (the guest room I did is not pictured), but my designs were more minimal and my mother's natural taste has added a lot of sparkle and tchotchkes. I love my parents' house desperately. It's a shotgun-style farmhouse a little more than a hundred years old with lots of heavy wooden doors, painted wooden floors, huge wooden trim, hand-blown glass windows, & ten foot ceilings, with four bedrooms down one side of the hall and the kitchen, dining room, livingroom, and library down the other. It's filled with colour, artwork, antiques, and eccentric sparkle, sort of like the Anthropologie shop I saw in Atlanta the other day but cooler, IMO, since we did most of it.

( Pictures from home )

the changing of the seasons

I think it's really, really fall now. I can smell it or something. I don't mind the weather part of it, but I'm so not ready for the daylight hours to start shrinking down to nothing again. I can feel the seasonal depression looming over me like a big white-capped wave about to break and fill my nose and mouth with musky, sea-salty water. Time to buy some rainboots.

I haven't been reading anything in Swedish but textbooks - nothing but Astrid Lindgren anyway - because I thought it would be, well, harder, that I wasn't quite fluent enough. But while I am significantly slower at it, it's not hard. I'm really loving Populärmusik från Vittula. It's been so long since it happened to me that I had forgotten that a generous sprinkling of words you don't know doesn't usually impede understanding that much when you factor in context. It's coming back, though, and I remember vividly the experiences like that I had with English when I was a child. Maybe I can tackle that famous Swedish mystery writer next - Mankell, I think?

Oh, and I need to learn Finnish. Insert ironically flippant cat macro caption here. PS: I bought a bottle of nail polish on the boat. (Duty-free nailpolish ahahah. Big savings!) The brand is ORLY.

the matching handbags of evil

My parents hadn't heard of Hot Fuzz (I planned to use a cunning comparison to explain the awfulness of the Junior League crowd at the wedding) so I remarked that it was the second movie by the Shaun of the Dead guy and they said...

"I think I've heard of that."

*facepalm*