Happy Birthday Anders!

Thanks for the National Geographic Kids subscription, Grandma! Anders is always excited when it arrives - great animal pictures and stories. He is getting better at reading - and reading English - all the time.


Something came over me and I made this fox out of carrot sticks and shredded carrots, with M&Ms for eyes. Its not as nice as the birthday cake Karin made in the shape of a fruit tree, but I did make it myself.


Here is big brother Fredrik - he's been playing with Anders today, helping him with a Pokemon game and building some things out of legos.


Here is the birthday boy - Anders - Seven years old! - when he first got back from his swimming lesson this morning. They swam through an underwater hoop today.

New Car

I went to a used car dealer yesterday and arranged to buy this 2003 Ford Mondeo wagon. We'll trade in our 1997 Ford Mondeo wagon which had too much rust. It seems like a good car to me but I'd like to talk with Dad about it. That was always fun. I'll go pick it up next Saturday - they are going to mount winter tires and have it inspected.

Halloween

We carved pumpkins and sugar beets this afternoon. Carving sugar beets is an old tradition in Sweden - and when you put a candle inside they smell like roasting sugar.


Anders wanted to carve 'a pumpkin in a pumpkin' and this is the result.

I spent three days this past week at an EU meeting in Valencia Spain, on the Mediteranean coast. Did not get to see so much more than the hotel - full of Japanese tourists - and the laboratory where the meeting was held - the 'European Photoreactor'. It was a good meeting and I got to see my good old friend Professor Claus Nielsen from Oslo. We ate like the Spanish - lunch at 3 in the afternoon and dinner around 11 PM. We flew through Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris and I was worried that the French labor strikes might affect our travel. The flights were fine, but they lost my bag on the way there so I wore the same clothes a second day until the bag returned.

Went for a nice bike ride yesterday, past an abandoned country church to a manor in the countryside. Had a nice view of the other side of the valley where there is a factory turning sugar beets into sugar. Saw a family of swans, two deer, a few hares and rabbits, and a lot of storks following a tractor harvesting sugar beets. Returned from the ride with beets from the ditch for us to carve.

Pumpkin!

Hi yesterday we dropped Fredrik off for a scout overnight. On the way back we passed a farmyard where they were selling pumpkins and picked up this prize:

Anders went to swim class this morning and came back happy.

Pictures

Here's the view from up top of the hill, looking across the water towards Denmark:


Fredrik is taking guitar lessons and is getting better all the time.

10-10-10

It is the tenth day of the tenth month of the year 2010 - as our High School physics teacher would have said, a full house!

I am spending the weekend, once again, preparing my teaching for next week. The first quarter is my most intense teaching quarter, with two classes and lots of students.

We bought two Siberian hamsters for Anders for his birthday and he and all of us are having a lot of fun playing with them. Their fur looks kind of like a huskie - white with grey/black patterns. They are very active and chase each other around and play games. I just helped Anders build them a slide, and he and Fredrik are in the workroom making a little wooden jungle gym.