The most difficult thing about leaving this apartment will be leaving our neighbor the chef behind. At least for me that will be hardest. She's working on a cookbook due out in the fall, and the husband and I are lucky guinea pigs testing, say, four different pasta dishes - asparagus and bacon, roasted broccoli and blue cheese and walnuts, cherry tomatoes sautéed in butter and sugar with sunflower seeds, lentils and orzo with oranges and rucola - or desserts like ice cream sandwiches with toasted gingerbread and clementines in anise syrup.

I don't think she's going to be at all interested in hauling these meals halfway across town just to be nice to us.

(They've finished sanding and oiling the floors; they've now started spackling the walls... we've only a month to go before we move in and whenever I stop by to see how it's going, it feels more and more like home, despite the mess.)

The Swedish word for the day is skrattkammare. It means funhouse.

- by Francis S.

Some people jet from San Francisco to Los Angeles just for lunch. Me, I jet from Stockholm to Helsinki for coffee and a chat with my favorite Finn. Of course jammed in before the coffee (not actual coffee, it was more kind of metaphoric, with a lot of talking) was an interview with a Japanese designer who has worked for Marimekko for the past 30 years.

When I was 13, I was the shit in my striped Marimekko shirts, purchased by my mother at what must have surely been one of the first Crate & Barrel stores, located in a tiny strip mall off Sheridan Road in Winnetka.

It was so oddly nostalgic to be wandering around in an office and factory I'd never been to before, watching them print cloth in patterns that I remember as being the hippest thing when I was a kid.

I got some interesting swag, too: books with some nifty photos of all those familiar patterns in various forms, from bedsheets to beach hats. Amazingly, this stuff has all come back into fashion again and achieved a kind of classic status. Um, I think.

The Swedish word for the day is formgivare. It means designer.

- by Francis S.

I thought I'd left Chicago behind years ago, but we came home from an afternoon birthday party only to find our street blocked off and lit up by klieg lights, a bunch of big old American cars parked here and there, some garbage cans artfully placed beside a restaurant and a Chicago Tribune newspaper dispenser outside the secondhand clothes shop.

It seems I moved to Sweden only to find myself in Chicago again. Even stranger, it's pouring rain on one side of the building, while the courtyard is clear and filled with snow.

(It was those Finnish fun-boys The Rasmus, filming a music video on our narrow street, the Farmer Street, which apparently looks like Chicago to your typical Swedish music video director.)

The Swedish word for the day is stjärnor. It means stars.

- by Francis S.

Most days, I take a lunchtime promenade up one side of a canal, cross a bridge and then walk back down the canal on the other side, which is an island that, if I'm not mistaken, still officially belongs to the king of Sweden (who is currently mired in controversy over remarks he made about Brunei being a sort of paradaisical land of the free and home of the brave, despite the fact that the Sultan of Brunei has absolute power. Of course the Prime Minister is now also in trouble because the government didn't prepare the king properly before the visit, apparently. Unfortunately, I can only find Swedish links to this story, except for this short from Swedish Radio where you have to scroll down a bit.)

There, not far from the Nordic Museum, stands a statue of Jenny Lind in crinoline skirts and crossed ankles, all ladylike with a green patina sitting amidst a little stand of birches. It always makes me so cold to look at her.

The Swedish phrase for the day is in honor of Dong Resin, who invariably makes me laugh out loud: Var finns biblioteket någonstans? It means where is the library?

- by Francis S.

Swedes aren't so big on marriage. They seem to get married only when they really want to make a big statement, say, after a couple has been together for 25 years and their children are grown. Since the laws surrounding common-law-marriage do such a good job of protecting people, including children, there's no legal or social advantage to tying the knot. It's a bigger deal to people, so they don't do it as lightly.

"It's a desire not to make promises you can't keep," says my friend the priest, who was recently quoted in an article in the Baltimore Sun.

But it doesn't mean that people split up any more often than they do in the States, or even that there are more single parents. Yet conservatives still love to point to the high rate of children born out of wedlock in Sweden as an example of the failure of liberal sex education, which is utterly ridiculous - these children's parents aren't married, but they're as together as any married couple in the States.

I've had it with all the rhetoric about marriage.

The Swedish verb for the day is att lova. It means to promise.

by Francis S.

Language amazes me:

In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian," and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality." I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, non-visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar.

From an interview with linguistic researcher Alexandra Aikhenvald conducted by Adrian Barnett in the January 31 issue of New Scientist.

So, if the lingua franca of the world were Tariana, what exactly would this mean for George W. Bush and Tony Blair if they had given speeches about attacking Iraq because they had heard that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? I wonder if there are enough suffixes in Tariana to convey believability in this particular case.

The Swedish verb for the day is att överskatta. It means to overestimate.

- by Francis S.

Groundhog day was a mere two days ago, but with the thermometer hovering at nearly 8 degrees celsius, it feels disconcertingly like spring has arrived already in Stockholm.

But in Ohio it's deep and darkest winter for great big homo types like myself: There's nothing quite like a bit of mean-spirited anti-gay legislation to give one the chills. I wonder how many states will follow in Ohio's footsteps?

The Swedish word for the day is baklänges. It means (facing) backwards.

- by Francis S.

As Blogger gives, so give I: at last, a site feed. Over there after the links and before the archives.

- by Francis S.

Less than a hundred years ago, the general public picnicked on the White House lawn whenever it wanted to.

Apparently, the general public can still picnic on the lawns of the various royal residences of Sweden. You can even wander aimlessly on the grounds of, say, Uriksdal Palace late on a Sunday evening, in the dead of winter, clutching a bottle of champagne and searching desperately for the greenhouses where a birthday party is going on.

Amazing.

The Swedish word for the day is trädgård. It means garden.

- by Francis S.

Yesterday, I was reading in the latest issue of Wired Magazine about how all these Silicon-Valley types are all hot and bothered because hi-tech jobs are being outsourced to bright young engineering geeks in India. Then, today I read that the state of Georgia has removed the term "evolution" from its recommended education curriculum guidelines (and thereby its achievement exams) - joining a handful of other states, according to the New York Times.

I think that companies across the United States should just give up now and start investing in Indian education, because the U.S. graduating class of 2014 is going to be a generation of idiots.

The Swedish word for the day is vetenskap. It means science.

- by Francis S.

Before I forget, at the popularity contest that is The Bloggies, the voting booths are soon to be shut down. In the category of "Best Great Big Homo Blog," I recommend voting for a girl called Irk, a.k.a. Swirlspice.

The Swedish word for the day is priset. It means the prize and the price, causing endless confusion for Swedes using the two words in English.

- by Francis S.

The Countess of Castiglione was a sort of Paris Hilton of the Second Empire. Except instead of scandals involving videotaped sex and starring in a television show where rich girls slop the pigs á la Marie-Antoinette, the countess seduced Napoleon III and horrified Paris by wearing costumes with no underwear. Obsessed with clothes and, when she was young, making a scene wherever she happened to be, she was probably a bit vapid. I'm talking about the countess here. But she did one lasting thing: she had a photograph taken of herself that is undoubtedly the most enigmatic of all early photographic portraits, in which she is holding an empty oval frame up to her eye.

The picture evokes so many thoughts and questions about the nature of looking and being looked at. I've been baffled and taken in by that photograph ever since I first saw it in a book, when I was 20.

The Swedish word for the day is grevinnan. It means, of course, the countess.

- by Francis S.

When I was a kid, girls still had real muffs.

Sure, they were covered in some kind of strange white fake fur, and they didn't really have that Anna- Karenina- jumping- in- front- of- a- train glamour that I associate with a good muff, but they were honest to goodness muffs. Now, the only time you see a muff is on some matron promenading about Östermalm in a full-length mink.

I wonder if the demise of a once common item of attire is due to the fact that the name has become synonymous with female genitalia?

And, don't you hate it when perfectly good words, like, um, gay for instance, get co-opted by fanatics and end up meaning something sick and disgusting?

The Swedish word for the day is tantig. It means little old ladyish.

- by Francis S.

I was a, um, postmature baby. One month late.

"I must have counted wrong, of course," my mother said. "But at the time I thought 'isn't this baby ever going to come?'"

Strange that it took her 42 years to tell me.

"Once it's past, you sort of forget about it," she explained on the phone, not half an hour ago.

So I guess I can start acting postmature now. Which is sort of like postmodern, only with a bit less ornamentation.

The Swedish word for the day is pondus. I've always felt the best way to translate it is, more or less, with the word gravitas.

- by Francis S.

What could be a more perfect role for reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon than playing himself, complete with a paperbag over his head, on "The Simpsons"? (item stolen from a blog on my referrer logs that I somehow can't find again; thanks, whoever you are.)

It seems, somehow, disingenuous of Pynchon.

And yet, if I were offered the chance to play myself on "The Simpsons," whoo-ee. Just ask me. Playing opposite Homer is a sure mark of über-success.

The Swedish phrase for the day is Gravitationens Regnbåge, which means, of course, Gravity's Rainbow.

- by Francis S.

Why is it that big old otherwise well-adjusted girly-men like myself are so insecure, deep down, about whether we're manly enough?

I ran into the husband's ex-girlfriend this morning and she said, "You look so, um, masculine."

I was so proud of myself. I thought, wow, I sure have you fooled.

Pathetic, and yet I can't help it.

The Swedish word for the day is självklart. It means obviously.

- by Francis S.

I've changed from being a subway person to being a bus person. And I thought it was the kind of thing that one was for life, sort of like being left-handed or right-handed.

It's purely a matter of convenience: the bus gets me to work and back faster and with less legwork than the subway. The downside is that I can't read, the upside is that there is actual scenery, even if it is the same scenery every day.

I still haven't figured out the queue system, though. As far as I can tell, there isn't one. And so I end up being one of the first to board the bus every time because when I get to the bus stop, I stand where I know the bus doors will open. No one has even given me a dirty look, so I guess I'm not making a faux pas. Still, it seems too easy somehow to be one of the people to manage to get a seat and not have to stand in the aisle, desperately holding onto the closest strap or pole.

The Swedish phrase for the day is kommunikation, which means, among other things, transportation.

- by Francis S.

I've been thinking for the past year and a half that I'm past my sell-by date. So I don't know exactly what to say when these kinds of things happen.

The second Swedish word for the day is vad, and it means what?

- by Francis S.

The historical museum was closed today as it is every Monday, although there were a few news photographers lurking outside when a co-worker and I stopped by at lunch today to see if we could catch a glimpse of the pool of blood in the museum's courtyard. Because, you see, on Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, in a fury, threw one of the spotlights on the periphery of the courtyard into the red pool, which was part of an installation called "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," by an Israeli artist living in Sweden.

The ambassador said that the piece - a small white boat with a picture of a Palestinian suicide bomber on the sail, floating in a sea of water dyed the color of blood - promoted terrorism and was an incitement to genocide. He was eventually thrown out of the museum. It's been all over the Swedish news since Friday, vying for attention with coverage of the trial of the murderer of Anna Lindh.

The Israeli government has called for the work to be dismantled.

The Swedish government has said, more or less, that this won't happen.

Me, I want to decide for myself. The piece is terribly provocative - it is part of a show held in conjunction with a conference on genocide. And it is, without a doubt, implicitly critical of Israel. But the underlying message seems to be that both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering.

But, really, I haven't seen it yet, so it's not quite fair to decide anything just yet.

The Swedish word for the day dom. It means judgement.

- Francis S.

Do you suppose that more than half the world's adults still live in the same house, flat, hut, palace, log cabin or tent that they have lived in from birth?

I wonder what happens when any of these billion or so people contemplate moving somewhere else. Does it make one crazy and irrational? It must, if you can reckon by the husband, who has lived in the very same flat we live in now since he was brought home from Södersjukhuset as a tiny baby. He's just a tangle of emotion and worry.

Poor guy.

Wait, poor me. Because I have to be a rock.

The Swedish word for the day is yet again, lägenhet, which was the Swedish word of the day a little more than a week ago. Look it up there if you don't remember what it means.

- by Francis S.