How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

My friend K. is coming back again to Sweden. She'll be here tomorrow.

She just can't seem to stay away.

Well, actually, it's because I keep asking her to come back to manage projects at work because she's so good at it. She'll be here for a month this time, staying with us. Which will be much nicer a year from now because we will have more space: the co-op board of the building at long last has said that we will be able to buy at least 70 square meters of the attic above our apartment, and the bank has said they will give us the money to buy it.

This is brilliant, amazing, wonderful news.

We will expand our apartment so that it is on two levels - build a terrace, and a great big bathroom with a sauna (you have to have a sauna here in Sweden), and extra bedrooms, and turn the dining room into a library, and the big bedroom into the dining room and open it up to the living room.

We will have a huge apartment (by Swedish standards at least). We will be spoiled rotten. Our lives will be even more complete. Er, not exactly, but we'll have more space in which to make our lives more complete. Or something like that.

The Swedish word for the day is ovän. This is at the request again of A., the former model and aspiring producer. She was asking me last night if there is a comparable word in English, and there isn't. It means one who is not a friend. Not an enemy, just not a friend. This can be someone who was a friend before, or someone who on first acquaintance is immediately not a friend. When it comes to words that don't translate from Swedish into English, this is almost up there with my favorite, kissnödig.

- by Francis S.