362 days and 8 hours to go!...

What a cold and grey day we're having!... :-(

For over a week now that I have been having pain in practically every joint. As I had promised, yesterday I went to get my wrist checked and to present all of my various complaints to my family doctor. For the first time ever, I found him extremely attentive at the description of my symptoms and also quite inquisitive about them. I really can't deal with the suspense doctors have the tendency of creating in these situations... “We'll first start you on these pills and then you're going to take this... and this... and this... and this examination... just to check the possible causes of all this...”. I always feel like I'm being treated like a child, as if I can't handle whatever information he's withholding from me and so I press on, almost eager to quote him the Code of the Order of Doctors and all my prescribed rights as a patient. So, he then asks me, quite seriously “Do you have anyone suffering from Lupus in your family?”. I double blink, trying to hide an inner laugh and almost throw at him the legendary Dr. House's quote - “It's never Lupus!”. But the fact is that I'm now brooding on Lupus and the scary things I read about it, while trying to write this post in a light tone and with a still hurting wrist. :-(

On the plus side of that doctor's appointment, though, is the fact that there I seem to weigh 2 Kgs less. :-) I even offered to buy his scales from him, but he took a chance at weighing himself and found them very flattering too - so he decided to keep them. Hm!

Another thing that was particularly interesting with the appointment yesterday is that the doctor decided to challenge my daughter to build a pretty cryptic puzzle. Ten minutes later, upon her vain attempts at fitting all the weirdly shaped wooden pieces into the puzzle's frame, he revealed the solution to be on the bottom side of that frame – cheater! - and he proceeded to put all the right pieces in their right places. Then he scrambled it all again and, with a smirk, told my daughter - “See, I did it! Now you try, but you can't cheat!”. I'm proud to say that it took her about 5 minutes to make all the pieces fit, much to the shock of everyone present. She seemed to have memorized the location of every single piece in the few seconds he had showned her how they would fit and that was remarkable. As a prize, she got offered a DVD with cartoons – though off season (yay for Santa and his raindeers!), she enjoyed it as much as she would have enjoyed it any other time of year. :-)

But enough about this medical soap opera of mine...

Yesterday I was finally able to finish watching “Kommissarie Winter”'s 2nd episode and figure it all out. Hmm... I think so, anyway. I confess that I was left with the sensation that not all loose ends came to be tied together (which raised a major curiosity about the book), but then again, I cannot say I understood every word of it, so I might have got lost in translation somewhere along the way. I did guess who was the author of the letter Winter was reading throughout both episodes, though. So, yay me and my detective skills! :-)

Besides that TV series' watching, I confess to not having furthered my Swedish studies... But still, I can tell you about another handy tip in language learning that I try to use as much as possible.

Well, in the end of every text or dialog in my Swedish textbook, there's a “true/right or false/wrong” exercise to test your understanding of what you just read/heard. One of the things I try to do to maximize the worth of that exercize is that, not only I rewrite the sentence given into my notebook, along with the mention of it being “rätt” or “fel”, I also try to correct the sentence when it's false/wrong. Along with that, you can make a negative sentence, or a positive one, or even convert it into a question. You can change genders, if that's important in the language you're learning, and substitute nouns for pronouns, for example. You can test your knowledge of verbs too, by putting the sentence in the past, present or future, or any other more elaborate verbal form. It's really all up to you how much you can get out of such a simple exercise, though also much depends on the level of knowledge of the language you're at at the moment.

* - * - *

Today's lunch was a bit of an adventure...

Everyone who knows me well enough, knows that I'm not a huge fan of cooking on a regular basis. But today I've woken up to realize that I had to cook something and that there was really nothing handy and quick to make, so... all of a sudden, something popped to mind - *light bulb moment* - why not an omelet?

Though we often cook omelets in this country, they're often chunky and stuffing and I had this vision of an old Julia Child's video in which she cooked a nice smooth looking omelet in less than 2 minutes. I wanted that omelet!!...

So, a bit like a Sim on a gaining skill points' mission, I set myself to work gathering my tools...

Well, the recipe book is called "Vår Kok Book", by Birgitta Andrews and Barbro Lindgren and this is an edition from 1999. This actually is the all-so-famous cook book Mr. B. packed in, on that also famous first trip to Portugal. :-) On top of it lays the pièce de résistance - Norstedts Lilla Engelska Ordbok - Engelsk-Svensk/Svensk-Engelsk - absolutely unrecognizable after its surely tribulated life, but still quite handy in moments of need. :-)

And this was the challenge I soon enough encountered... Hmm!... :-S

Well, the recipe I wanted, for "Fransk Omelett", was now held hostage by two glued pages that wouldn't unglue and so I proceeded, with the utmost care, to sneak-a-peak in between pages, to figure out the simple recipe.

It was quite worth it though. I "swedified" it a bit by adding lingonsylt (lingon jam) and inlagda rödbetor (pickled red beets) and that's how it looked... :-)

... and now... time for coffee! :-)