I can’t believe it’s been two months since I have written here.  Time has flown by.  Winter never really came.  Well, it was dark, dreary, and cold, just not frozen.  Not even one cozy walk through the snowy forest to the waffle cabin.  Sad, really. It was a strange revelation to myself that I missed the snow and ice. Yesterday’s snow surprised me, I had thought spring was here with the snow drops and hedgehogs.  Oh, the poor little hedgehogs!

The Tegan and Sara concert I looked forward to all winter finally came last weekend.  Jonathan, Andreas, and I went to see them at Nalen.  It was awesome! I love them!  I’m still kind of high off of the experience.

The pace at school has really picked up, I have been studying most of my free time. Yeah, I’m a nerd. I’ve been doing very well in my classes.  I had been wishing time would stand still, enjoying studying and my friends at school, and not knowing what I wanted to do this fall, going back and forth between biomathematics and biomedicine.

Then a couple days before a chemistry exam I was frustrated with studying and, mostly for the purpose of wasting time, looking through a very long list of programs in Sweden.  I stumbled across exactly what I want!  A program at the Royal Institute of Technology  (Kungliga Tekniska Högskkolan), the prestigious engineering school in Stockholm, a school I had never thought about looking at since it is engineering, as in building and machines and electricity, and, ugh, physics, or so I thought.  But they have an engineering program in biotechnology.  It has the elements I liked best about both the biomathematics and biomedicine programs combined, and even more opportunities.  A new dream is taking shape! And I was desperately in need of a new dream. I'm so excited!

It is kind of cool that if I had found that program before this year, I would have studied this year at KTH, instead of Stockholm U. And then I never would have met Sofia and Sanna!

In other news:  Coral had her baby, beautiful, tiny Gabriel (or spawn #2 as he was lovingly referred to as before birth).  We spent a lovely day with the Ljunggren family on Saturday.  Stacey got a job and is moving away.  I’m happy for her about the job but I will miss her dearly, her, Fredrik, and Petrus.  Another dear friend may be moving even further away.  Oh, how can they leave beautiful, wonderful Stockholm? How can they leave me?

I’m feeling especially sorry for myself today, I have an icky cold. And a long list of things I have put off until Easter break.  I’ll have to get on with that, cold or no. Tomorrow…

Today it is Jane Austen movies, pajamas, quilt, cuddly comforting Silly, smoothies, lattes, English cookies from our latest couch surfers and German chocolate from the couch surfers before them, and maybe a little planning our trip to the States this summer. Yup, we bought our tickets! Five gloriously hot weeks in the USA!  Can’t wait!

It annoyed me in college when my older classmates would say that studying as an adult was so much different than studying as a ”kid,” right out of high school.  They claimed that they valued learning more than their younger classmates, and that their life experiences gave more understanding and meaning to the knowledge they were acquiring.  Perhaps they were right after all.  My education was important to me then, but somehow more so now.  It is just so frustrating that all these adult concerns tumbling about in my head make it more difficult to concentrate on the studies that are so important to me. 

Today is my wonderful husband’s 30^th birthday.  We had cake and lattes in bed by candlelight early this morning.  We will go out Saturday night and celebrate, the party is scheduled for after payday.  I’m kind of nervous about the number of guests.  Jonathan knows a lot of people and is quite likeable.

I know less people and am, let’s be honest, less likeable.  Therefore, I am filled with awe and thankfulness whenever I think about the amazing friends I have around me.  Sanna and Sofia, my friends at school, whom I can not only study with, but have fun with and confide in.  Stacey and Coral, my sisters, through good and bad, there to encourage or correct, listen, laugh or cry.  Without them my life would be as dark and dreary as this dark and dreary day.

I can't believe it is 2008, just like that, like overnight!

I go back to school tomorrow.  Still not caught up.  Haven’t even done my lab reports from the last week of school before break.  Tomorrow I get my physics exam back, Thursday I hope to find how I did on my chemistry exam.

The chemistry exam.  I felt really good after the exam.  But on the subway on my way home I kept getting this picture in my head, a picture of a water molecule drawn with two oxygen atoms and one hydrogen atoms.  Can I really have drawn this?? Seriously?!?   This entire Christmas break I have been haunted be a dyslexic water molecule.

We had jul (Swedish Christmas) in the archipelago with Jonathan’s dad, and jul in Falun with Jonathan’s mom.  In between we had a wonderful Christmas in Stockholm.  We opened our presents in our pajamas, ate a long breakfast and lattes and lussekatter by advent candlelight.  Jonathan opened his Star Wars booster pack and we installed my webcam.  We ate dinner at Hard Rock Café, a special treat for me in preparation for the Swedish Christmas in Falun…

We celebrated our five year wedding anniversary with dinner at Café Milano, an Italian restaurant by Kungsträdgården, and a nice walk in the city (in the freezing rain).  Five years…

We had lovely couch surfers from Texas for New Years, and a surprise visit from a fellow American Interconnect alumnus. We went out (in the snow/freezing rain) and risked our lives watching the masses of our drunken neighbors shooting off amazing fireworks everywhere around us.  Jonathan even contributed to the festivities with a “Viking Bomb.”

In other news:  Andreas came over, great to see him again, as well as Jonathan’s brother Josef, back in Sweden after a year and a half in Japan.  Lunch and the traditional Christmas exchange of 100 crowns with Coral. Couch surfing afterwork, couch surfing brunch.  Hundreds of pages of chick lit. Romantic walks in the snow, freezing rain, and the charmingly melancholic foggy grayness of Stockholm.  Started filling in and ordering forms for my Swedish citizenship.  Finally convinced someone in the US to get Skype, my brother even got a webcam so I hope to very soon see my nieces for the first time since summer 2006!

Aerobics is in full swing again after Christmas break, yeah! Tegan and Sara, my favorite band, is coming to Stockholm in March, yeah! Yeah! Yeah!!!!  I’m looking forward to getting back to school. Mostly because I’ve missed Sanna and Sofia.  But I am kind of freaking out about how behind I am. But honestly, am I not always? Hope Coral is right, and that I still function best under pressure.   We’ll see!

It's Cinnamon Roll Day. One of several sweet Swedish holidays.  I had chemistry all day today so I just took some of my homemade cinnnamon rolls from the freezer with me to school.  Sanna and I had fika at the coffeehouse on our break. 

Sofia wasn't there today so I was without a lab partner.  I asked Anna (whose picture just might be found under "sweet" in the dictionary) if I could join her and her lab partner.  When our lab assistant was checking who was gone and that we had partners, Anna raised her sweet little voice and practically shouted, "we've got Amy!"  And in case you are thinking, oh, it's because she thinks Amy is smart (which was the only reason a senior quarterback wanted high school freshman Amy for his lab partner), let me set the record straight, I am totally clueless in chemistry right now and in Swedish I sound even more clueless than I am.  And it's not like it was my sparkling personality, Anna doesn't know me that well anyway. 

Maybe it sounds kind of childish, but it felt so good to have her call out and claim me like that. A silly little thing, but it made my day. It is a wonderful feeling to feel wanted as a fellow human being.  Makes me want to be better at making others feel that way....

Jonathan is off playing Star Wars Miniatures and I am avoiding chemistry.  I went for a walk and bought Campbell's tomato soup and tuna for dinner.  Campbell's tomato soup is my autumn comfort food. Funny thing is I never more than tolerated it as a kid, it was a necessary evil associated with grilled cheese sandwiches. I get most "homesick" in the fall.  I day dream about apple orchards and pumpkin farms, hay rides under the stars, bonfires, homecomings, hot-spiced cider....

Monday evening we had dinner at friends'.  Delicious food, great company, a very pleasant evening. It had been awhile.  Life has gotten so busy for us and for our friends, and their growing families.

We had a lovely afternoon at Skansen's autumn market on Sunday. We watched a group showing games from different lands and different time periods, very fun.  We ate traditional Swedish kroppkakor, "body cakes," mmmm, and yummy Swedish sweet baked things.  My photos are posted in my web album.  We spent the afternoon with a very nice Couch Surfing ambassador for Stockholm who told us about a CS ambassador in Paris who has now agreed to host us when we are there!  I am looking forward to losing our couch surfing virginity! 

I am not looking forward to chemistry lectures and labs all day tomorrow.  I thought I would like chemistry the most, then math, then biology.  But I'm really liking both math and biology and hating chemistry.  We have no classes on Friday so I guess I will torture myself all day with chemistry and see if a deeper understanding will improve my attitiude on the subject.  We are studying genetics in biology right now, my favorite.  Physics starts after fall break.  I didn't like physics in high school, and that despite a really cute teacher.  

I had my first exam, in Biology, and I think I did well.  I still have writer’s cramp. Went to lunch with Sofia, met some old friends by chance and enjoyed talking to them, went home and watched Grey’s Anatomy trying out my new celestial coffee in a latte, went back into the city to the Free Burma manifestation, had a fika with one of Jonathan’s members of parliament and friends, then drinks with Couch Surfing.  I was so tired yesterday after all that on Friday, I really am getting old.