What a week. First Barack Obama wins the election, to everyone's great relief. "Congratulations," I was told by various coworkers and acquaintances. As if it were my doing. And yes, I did do my small part, although I'm registered in DC and DC always votes democratic, so I'm not sure how exactly my little vote made a difference. Still, I could do nothing but beam about it.

But then there came the sting.

All those nasty hateful anti-gay ballot measures that passed. What is it about gay marriage that scares a majority of the straight population into adding amendments to state constitutions? Is there any way to stop this from happening or do we just have to wait until the WWII generation kicks the bucket? While I'm not surprised really, it is nonetheless dismaying.

(Which is not to say that Sweden doesn't have its own problems with gay marriage: the current center-right coalition government has been trying to convince the hold-out party - the Christian Democrats of course - to sign on to a coalition-sponsored resolution to make marriage gender neutral. But they've finally given up and will instead let it go out as a general resolution for members to vote on. I'm not 100 percent sure I understand exactly the difference between these things - in Swedish one is proposition and one is a motion and I don't remember which is which. Anyway, it is certain to pass since of the seven parties in Parliament, the only party against it are the Christian Democrats, which also happened to be the smallest party and make up a tiny minority. It's expected to be up and running by May 2009. How's that for a bit of Swedish political arcana for you?)

Still, I keep the faith. My remarkable parents are fighting the good fight, doing far more than I have ever done to further the cause of equality for the whole GBLTQ sandwich segment of the population. And my dear friend L. is making his way on a book tour, plugging his history for teenagers - Gay America: The Struggle For Equality - which should be in every damn city and school library in the country. L. was in fact signing the book at Barbara's, which curiously enough just happens to be my parents' local bookstore in Oak Park. And my mom, as always, doing her part, buying copies for the library and the public schools, and for the PFLAG group that she founded, and for herself of course.

I salute you, L. And you, too, mom.

There, I'm done proselytizing.

The Swedish phrase of the day is andas ut. It literally means breathe out, but I think a better colloquial translation would be breathe a sigh of relief.

- by Francis S.

I may as well admit it. I have become my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Wills.

I realize I've become Mrs. Wills because I keep finding the word "crater" used as a verb in the New York Times, and all I can do is cluck my tongue. Not out loud, I mentally cluck my tongue. But very vigorously and at length.

Crater the noun and cratered the adjective I am familiar with, but since when did crater become a verb meaning "collapsing"? I blame John McCain, who David Letterman reported - over and over - that McCain had cancelled his appearance on the show because "the economy is cratering."

So why is everyone at the New York Times suddenly obsessed with cratering? Here and here, for instance.

Isn't it amazing that with everything happening in the world, I find myself complaining about some stupid little grammar point, as if it weren't actually me witnessing the birth of a new verb.

Please save me from my curmudgeonly self.

The Swedish word for the day is krater. It is the noun crater in Swedish. As far as I can tell, there is no verb form.

- by Francis S.

So the big news this week in Sweden - other than deep economic woe - are the Nobel prize awards. This year, after the Secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl made some snide remarks about Americans being too focused on American culture to be great writers, it came as no surprise that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the prize - well, no great surprise to the many who bet that he would win at Ladbrokes.

"I have a strong suspicion there has been a leak in the system this time," said Horace.

Feh.

And I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of Le Clézio until several days before the award was given out, when his name was bandied about in the Swedish papers, no doubt by book critics who were beneficiaries of the leak that Horace was talking about.

What I found most interesting was that Horace revealed to Sweden's No. 1 daily Dagens Nyheter that the Swedish Academy has in recent years used sort of "half-code" names for nominees: Chateaubriand for Le Clézio, Little Dorrit for Doris Lessing and Harry Potter for Harold Pinter.

Harry Potter?!?

Am I the only one that thinks that some of these names show a certain lack of imagination on the part of the committee? Surely, Horace, you could have come up with something better? Is such a group of lame namegivers really capable of choosing who should get such a fat prize so full of prestige?

I guess smart gamblers will be skulking about in Den Gyldene Freden - the restaurant where the Swedish Academy officially hangs out - in the future and listening in on conversations to see if anyone drops odd names in peculiar fashion.

Although to be fair, it isn't as easy at it seems to come up with clever code names. What would you use?

The Swedish word of the day, which is actually tangentially related to the topic if you look at it sideways while squinting your eyes, is illusionsmåleri, at the request of O., the daugher of C. the fashion photographer. Interestingly, English doesn't have a word for this, we borrow from the French: trompe l'oeil, we say.

- by Francis S.

Lying in bed, in the white, white room at the Hotel Opera in Valencia, the husband napping fitfully beside me, the shades low and the sun burning behind them, it was everything I never did when I lived in Spain ten years ago. For one thing, one night in this hotel cost as much as one-month's rent for my little room in Edu's apartment ten years ago. All my great insecurity, living in Spain ten years ago, gone and I felt as if I'd arrived. But it felt melancholy all the same. Spain has such a strange effect on me.

We were there to watch the popstar do her thing before an audience of 65,000 - she'd given us the tickets, since she was opening for Our Lady of the Perpetual Rebranding, and we couldn't pass up the opportunity, flying down and arriving a couple of hours before the concert. Wrestling our way backstage through the clueless security, we gossiped and watched the popstar have her makeup applied in her little trailer. Not meeting our Lady of the Perpetual Rebranding, who hasn't even bothered to say hello to the popstar, not even after ten concerts.

She put on quite a show.

The popstar, I mean.

As for Our Lady, I was rather disappointed. It was like Las Vegas for awhile, all glitter and kicking and posturing like 13-year-olds, but then Our Lady sang off key. I can't abide people singing off key. And someone should tell her that she needs to cut that shit with trying to play the guitar. She looked as if it was all she could to keep her head above water because the guitar was dragging her down, down, down. We left before she was finished. To avoid the traffic.

Back at the hotel, a couple of boys recognized the popstar, gushing and almost squealing outside the elevators. We paused to take a picture for them, boy then popstar then boy, before going up to our room.

We woke the next morning far too early and after wandering around the city - the husband lived there once when he was hardly more than a boy himself - seeing the old city gate and the cathedral and the mad monstrous and beautiful buildings of Calatrava, we went back to the hotel to rest. But with the husband napping fitfully next to me in that white, white hotel room, all I could think was how different it was ten years ago, and how very good that things have changed.

The Swedish word for the day is upplevelse. It means experience.

- by Francis S.

Mrs. W. came to visit, arriving the day after we got back from New York. We'd just spent three days with her and Mr. W. in Boston, so it was a luxury to have her stay. And then she prolonged her visit, so she was with us nearly a month. The perfect guest, Mrs. W. is. And what makes the perfect guest?

First, the perfect guest gives massages to both hosts - and the perfect guest is a trained masseuse, so they aren't just any old massages, they are deep and long, and if you request feet only, you get feet only.

Second, the perfect guest can take care of herself. She makes herself at home, but she cleans up after herself and even cleans out the plastic bags under the sink.

The perfect guest leaves little friendly notes about her whereabouts, half for information and half just as a gesture of affection.

The perfect guest gives you a goodnight kiss on the cheek and a hug.

The perfect guest is impressed with your cooking and religiously writes down recipes on her laptop while you cook, in between helping you out by chopping vegetables if you let her, because to be honest, you aren't much of a team player and it isn't just anyone you let in your kitchen while you cook.

The perfect guest loves to knit on the sofa while you play the piano and then patiently listens to you explain how the Goldberg Variations work and why they're brilliant and finds them as amazing as you do.

The perfect guest cries at your favorite sentimental movies as you watch together, eating chocolates and little sour candies.

The perfect guest finds your friends fascinating and not only listens well, put comments thoughtfully and laughs at all the right places.

Sadly, eventually the perfect guest will have to go back to Boston, to her husband, who no doubt has missed her dreadfully.

The Swedish phrase for the day is vi ses igen snart. It means we'll see each other again soon.

- by Francis S.

The restaurant was full even though it was a Monday night. Or almost full. It being Chelsea, there was a Eurotrash section in the back, but the rest of the place was boys, boys, boys. And I guess the old confusion about the difference between Eurotrash and gayboys is true, because somehow they put us in the wrong section.

Are we that obvious?

Next to us, a British couple were mooning over their food, and on the other side a table of three kids of indeterminate orientation sat on the banquette side of the table, all facing the same way.

"They're high," the husband said to me in Swedish, smirking a bit and sucking on his mojito.

Swedish is handy that way, although you can get burned. You never know when that table next to you is actually undercover Swedish. Swedes are everywhere.

So we sat in the Eurotrash section, watched the boys in the rest of the place whooping it up, gossiping and laughing and having a gay old time.

It was in the middle of the main course - chicken in Pipian sauce for me, lamb for the husband - that the husband saw, out of the corner of his eye, a mouse run down the corner of the banquette on the other side of the Brits. The female member of the couple caught my husband's eye, astonished.

"It was a mouse," the husband said.

"Are you sure it wasn't a cockroach?" the woman asked.

"I thought it was a spider," her companion said.

"It was definitely a mouse," the husband said.

When they came to ask us how everything was - the service, as always, is astonishingly good compared to Stockholm service, which is blunt and perfunctory at best - we told the waitress we'd seen a mouse, but discreetly. Within 30 seconds, the hostess was sitting between our two tables, apologizing at length. She went back to her post, we went back to our meal and the mouse reappeared, this time at our end of the banquette. And this time I saw it. It was definitely a mouse.

The hostess came back, with a letter for each couple giving us 40 dollars off the meal or a later one if we wished.

The kids at the banquette, who had not seen the mouse, squirmed. "What is that, Is it because of us?" the cute boy with his arm in a cast asked. "Are we being too loud and obnoxious?"

"No," the husband said. "Are you high?"

They broke out laughing. "How could you tell?" the boy asked, sotto voce and almost flirting.

The husband just gave the boy a look.

The Brits next to us, non-plussed by the mouse, told us to order the Valrhona chocolate cake. "It's delicious," the woman said. "You know he proposed to me three years ago at this very table, this very day."

We congratulated them, and the kids at the banquette congratulated them, and then I suddenly realized that it had been nine years ago to the day that the husband had proposed to me, which I shared with everyone.

Our engagement anniversary and we hadn't even known it.

"Congratulations," the kids sang out again. "Congratulations."

Yes, yes. Congratulations to us.

As we walked out the door, drunk on wine and bloated with food, we stopped by the hostess and told her all was well.

Pshaw, I said. It's not like it was a rat...

The Swedish word for the day is förlovningsdag. It means engagement anniversary (well, and engagement day, too).

- by Francis S.

I can hardly believe it, but I started this blog seven years ago today. That's a very short time in people years, but in blog years it's an eternity - an awful lot of the people who were around when I started have long since disappeared or moved on to other stuff, including paying blogging gigs.

I was so good at keeping it up for so long, but I know I've been slacking off more and more over the years. I keep promising myself that I will do better, but then I never really do. I'm lucky to get in two posts a month.

But never fear. I'm not about to give up without a fight.

So, happy birthday little blog. May you live long.

The Swedish word for the day is sju år gammal. It means seven years old.

- by Francis S.

The first glimpse of Svalbard was a couple of mountaintops poking through the dense cloud cover. Snow-capped and not very sharp, they looked like little islands in a sea of foam. Then we cut through the clouds and there it was: the bay off of Isfjord, the little hardscrabble town of Longyearbyen, and finally the airport.

It looks like Wyoming on the ocean. Uh, but with glaciers and no trees.

The first day, we took an open boat up the fjord, packed into our survival suits and looking through our goggles, the sea not terribly rough, the sky grey and low and looming, the cliffs beside us jagged and with a colony of murres diving and fishing all around. Abandoned mines and villages line the fjord, melancholy, beautiful in their ugliness. Then at last we came out from under the clouds, and the sea was suddenly deep blue, the sun intense, and we could at last see the tops of the mountains. The guide took us all the way out to the end of the fjord, to the old radio station, which has been converted into a lonely hotel, at the tip of nowhere.

"The problem is that during the spring and summer, the only way to get there is by boat," the guide, Klas, told us. "One time, I had to take people back to the airport in the middle of the night and the sea was so choppy, they threw up the whole way and had to get right on the plane soaking wet and exhausted."

(For some reason, there's only one flight a day in the afternoon, and the rest of the flights are at 3 and 4 and 4:30 a.m., depending on the day of the week.)

The next day - although it all seemed like one long day of course, with the sun rolling around the sky instead of rising and setting - we climbed up a high ridge overlooking the town. The clouds rolled in and rolled out, all ghostly and magical, and we drank water racing down from somewhere far above us. When we reached the top, with Longyearbyen spread out below us, and beyond that the bay and more mountains, I could barely look down.

"The reason we have to have guns," said our hiking guide, Marthe, with her rifle casually slung over her shoulder, "is because in 1996, two girls were climbing up over there- " she gestured to a high ridge on the other side of the town, "and they ran into a polar bear. One of the girls jumped over the side."

We - the husband and I, and the sea captain and the children's book author - gave a collective gasp.

"But she was the one who survived," Marthe said. "Just a few scratches. And now we always have to have guns outside the town."

"So the lesson is that if you run into a polar bear, jump over the cliff," the children's book author said.

Unfortunately, I would be the girl who got eaten by the polar bear. Jumping over a cliff is not something I could do.

We walked down the other side of the ridge, onto a glacier, avoiding the really wet spots, hopping over streams of icy water, picking our way through occasional piles of rocks and looking for fossils of leaf marks, and eventually making our way back to the car and the town of Longyearbyen.

The Swedish word for the day is ishavet. It means the arctic ocean.

- by Francis S.

The husband has been gone for over a week, and I'm getting punchy. I've distracted myself by going out to the country house of the children's book author and the sea captain, dinner with A. the TV producer and C. the fashion photographer, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, bad TV, work, Wikipedia (have you ever heard of silent film star Sessue Hayakawa, who was a kind of pre-Rudolf Valentino, making $5,000 a week playing heartthrobs? It seems early Hollywood was both more and less conventional in its tastes and portrayals than I ever imagined) and Youtube (how come no one ever told me before about Helen Kane?).

But enough is enough.

The husband comes back late tonight, and none too soon.

The Swedish word for the day is älskling. It means sweetie.

- by Francis S.

When we arrived at the bus stop with the cat doctor and his boyfriend in tow, a group of fellow party-goers were already there. We were on our way out to the countryside for a Fifth of July party given by the children’s book writer and the sea captain, and everyone was thankful that the bus strike had ended that morning, just in time.

But then the bus never arrived. So we ordered three cabs to take us to land’s end, over three bridges and as far out in the Stockholm archipelago as one can drive, with Stockholm’s public transportation system footing the bill (how great is that?).

Things were well underway once we arrived, the hosts pressing drinks in our hands, the guests a wild mix of folk from lands near and far, the food vaguely or not-so-vaguely American, hamburgers and hotdogs and chocolate cupcakes with coconut frosting, everyone wiping their mouths with the American flag napkins.

Sometime late in the evening, hundreds of beers later, as I sat talking to a woman who is an agent for a bunch of small clothing labels in Stockholm, another woman who is one of the designers of the clothing labels came in and sat down next to us.

“My boyfriend just peed on 49 trees,” she said. “In one pee. He won.”

The clothing agent looked at me and gulped. We looked at the boyfriend in his long grey sweater and bangs hanging in his eyes.

“Ew! Didn’t you get pee all over your shoes?” she asked the boyfriend.

“Only half over them!” he said, laughing. “No, no, just joking.” Then he looked down at his shoes. “Well, half joking.”

In the morning, it turned out that something like 23 people slept over, including three roommates – two men and one woman – who had slept, wearing matching flannel pajamas, under a canopy set up outside.

We took the ferry back into town, everyone silent and worn out, the cat doctor and his boyfriend jet-lagged still and the husband terribly hung over from an excess of single-malt scotch.

Did you like it, I asked the cat doctor.

“Fun was had by all,” he said.

The Swedish phrase for the day is femte juli. It means Fifth of July.

by Francis S.

It was a Sunday, but the theater was sold out. We were on the list though, so we hadn't had to worry about getting in.

And there we were, standing with a couple thousand screaming, singing, sweating fans, singing and sweating and even screaming a bit ourselves. The pop star was radiant, raw, possessed - by the music, by us, by the power she had over everyone in the room. Next to us, teenaged girls screamed and laughed at each other for screaming, and sang along with nearly every song; in front of us, boys with perfect bodies hugged each other, swayed with the music, their arms waving above their heads, and sang along with nearly every song. All of us dripping with sweat and a bit out of our minds. It was so very Bacchanalian, abandoning ourselves ecstatically to the moment en masse (and some were surely enhancing their ecstasy with, um, ecstasy, no doubt) like Maenads, although maybe not quite as bloodthirsty.

After the singing was done and we had invaded the filthy and dingy green room, we dragged her down with us to the stage door where she signed papers and posed for her fans while we waited, and then we all went to a restaurant in Soho that serves dinner and fancy-schmancy cocktails (in former days they would have been bedecked with paper umbrellas, but no one does that anymore) after midnight.

I drank my first cocktail in a few gulps, still floating on it all (which is quite something for a guy whose most-played song on his ipod is an obscure aria from Handel's Semele).

"You were just so amazing up there," I told the pop star. "I'm so proud to know you." And I gave her a kiss on the forehead.

She beamed back at me. "Thank you," she said. Really, what else could she say? And she gave me a squeeze.

Then we ate our late dinner - there were twelve of us in the end - and drank our cocktails and took stupid photos of each other and laughed loudly and long - the pop star laughing loudest and longest - until it was finally time to jump in cabs and go home to bed.

London is so much fun.

The Swedish word for the day is överlycklig. It means overjoyed.

- by Francis S.

The thing about this time of year, when it never quite gets fully dark, is that the light is like a drug running through your veins. I feel all hopped up on light, buzzing with it and unable to quite settle down fully at night as I go through the apartment turning out lights at midnight and see that the sky in the north isn't black, but blue and the apartment is in fact glowing with it once the electric lights are out.

It almost seems a pity to be taking the long weekend - today is Sweden's National Holiday, which became a bank holiday only recently - to fly to London, where it will undoubtedly be grey and raining.

Almost.

The purpose is to go see our friend the pop star, who has become the biggest little thing out of Sweden, do her thing at a club in Soho. All with a big group of most of our best friends, Swedes and Brits alike.

What more could you ask for?

The Swedish word for the day is blå himmel. It means blue sky.

- by Francis S.

Is the inside of the elbow a minor thing of beauty, in some cultures at least? Or am I getting fact confused with silly lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan?

Whether or not it’s erogenous or beautiful, the crook of the arm apparently has its own culture. By culture, I mean bacteria. According to the New York Times, researchers have discovered that the skin on the inside of the human elbow contains six very distinctive bacterial cultures. Which somehow brings up the idea of the other definition of culture, and conjures images of the body as a world of its own. Think of all the rich and complex cultures living their rich and complex lives on top of us. And all the dirtiest places are undoubtedly the richest and most complex. Like the, uh, mouth for instance.

But the metaphor sort of breaks down if we imagine that each of us, world that we are, walks around with similar cultures in similar places. As if duplicate earths existed, billions of them, all with their own versions of Sweden and Botswana and Belize and Vanuatu, the same but different.

On the other hand, the article talks about the National Human Genome Research institute has realized that studying just the genomes that we contain is missing out on all those genomes of microbes that we depend on but aren’t technically a part of our bodies. Which conjures something completely different: maybe we are actually a little bit like our own first impressions of ourselves after we’ve made our way out of our mothers’ wombs, when we can’t differentiate between what is us and what is the rest of the world.

And now I’m sounding like a college student in the aftermath of a particularly fat and juicy spliff.

The Swedish phrase for the day is utan gränser. It means without boundaries or without borders.

- by Francis S.

As we passed under the Aqueduct of Valens, the guide explained that it was Atatürk who had changed the name of the city from Constantinople to Istanbul when he formed the republic. "Istanbul means 'I go to the city' and it is what many people called the city already," the guide said.

Well, I went to the city all right, with all its mosques and the magnificent Hagia Sofia, and the ancient Grand Bazaar which is still impressive, the spice market, the eerie Basilica Cistern, the Topkapi Palace with its tranquil gardens of Gülhane, and the other elegant buildings lining the Bosporus. This is one of the many great things about working for a Swedish company in Sweden: company trips to take the baths at Budapest, or ski the slopes in the Swiss Alps, or wander around one of the fabled cities of the world, Istanbul, which was Constantinople, and before that, Byzantium.

I even managed an evening with an old friend who lives there, who showed me around Beyoglu and Tunel where you must walk in between cafe tables to make your way through the narrow winding streets. And on to Tarlabasi, where he lives, amid prostitutes and thieves, a district that apparently horrifies all Turks he meets.

"The wierdest are what I first thought to be ugly little old village ladies working as prostitutes. Then I realized they were actually men dressed as little old village ladies," he said. "There's something for everyone." And then he chortled.

Now I just need to convince the husband that we must visit in the autumn.

The Swedish word for the day is förtjust. It means smitten.

- by Francis S.

It was inevitable.

I had to look up the word awning.

Not because I have forgotten what it means, but because I suddenly thought that it also maybe meant idea or notion, as in the phrase "I have no idea" or "I haven't the faintest notion."

The reason is simple: The Swedish translation of those phrases would be ingen aning, which to my American mouth comes out sounding very much like the word awning. Well, the last part comes out sounding like awning.

And now I'm certain that I've been using the nonsensical English phrase I have no awning from time to time.

O, the shame.

It makes me worry that I'm losing my English while not really getting any better with the Swedish. Sure, after nine years I'm fluent and even comfortable with the Swedish language, but I still make mistakes, mistakes that I myself can hear almost every time I open my mouth.

I guess my brain has just reached its language capacity, it can't hold anymore. I can't insert anything more without taking something else away.

Dammit. It's such a little brain, all things considered.

Now, just because I'm feeling generous today, and intent on proving that my brain is still functioning full force, I'm giving you a separate Swedish phrase for the day, above and beyond what I've already given: på köpet. It means in the bargain.

- by Francis S.

The distance was no more than about 200 meters between the chapel and the chateau. It was called a chateau, but it was more a glorified rambling farmhouse than a castle, with wings and rooms and sets of apartments and offices and the biggest kitchen I've ever seen built onto it over the years, formal parterres in the front, a tennis court hidden behind hedges in the midst of an ancient grove of almonds, and a wine cellar with nearly 500,000 bottles of wine. And it had my three qualifications for a perfect house: back stairs, a dumbwaiter and a secret room accessible through a set of sliding bookcases in the library (a room which turned out to be our bedroom for the stay). The weather was glorious - sunny during the day, but just short of hot, a blue sky clear but for a single cloud, as round and small and endearing as a bumblebee.

The Danish priest, who had been imported from Denmark down to Provence for the occasion, complete with that old-fashioned white ruff that only Danish priests still seem to wear, led the way to the chapel. The baby in his arms, the rest of us followed him down the front walk under the bare plane trees, out through the gate, down the road and up to the chapel, which was tucked away up a road going through the vineyards, in a clump of trees.

Stuffy and dim as a crypt, all 120 of us packed into the single room, with its low vault and crumbling stone walls, candles burning in every available nook and cranny. God only knows how old it was.

I understood barely a word of the service - Danes swallow the ends of words, so it just sounds to me like a slew of vowels with a few consonants tucked in for good measure - and the psalms were even hard to sing, the melody going unexpectedly this and that way. It went on almost too long for me, a feeling of claustrophobia was setting in when at last the service was over, and the baby was christened, and everyone streamed back out into the sunshine, congratulating the parents and his older sister, cooing over him and walking back down the dusty road, through the gate and up the walkway past the gardens, where wine and cheese and pate and all kinds of good French comestibles awaited us, and we celebrated until long past midnight, the baby sleeping fitfully on account of the crowd and not because he at last had gotten his true name: Sirius.

Me, after the onion soup at 1:30 a.m. or so, I slept like a prince in the secret room, the husband next to me, snoring lightly.

The Swedish word for the day is dop. It means baptism.

- by Francis S.

And so, the annual changing of the number in my biography at left. Fifty approaches, I can see it on the horizon.

The Swedish word for the day is fyrtiosju. It means forty-seven. Although to be honest, I don't know whether it's correct to insert a hyphen or not in either language, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

- by Francis S.

It was another dinner, in honor of the visiting mother of the children's book author, and about when the lamb tagine and couscous had almost disappeared from our plates, we got onto the subject of teeth and braces and dentists. We went around and around about who had had braces, who had the best teeth and whether it was smart to have your wisdom teeth removed or not.

"When I was in fourth grade," the sea captain said suddenly, "I stopped brushing my teeth for a year."

We all paused, forks poised mid-air.

"What?" the husband said.

"Well, I decided that dogs never brushed their teeth and it never hurt them, so why should I brush my teeth?" the sea captain answered.

"But how did you keep it from your parents?" the children's book author asked, incredulous.

"It wasn't easy," the sea captain said. "Plus, I liked to eat sugar cubes. When I finally went to the dentist, I had eight cavities. And that was that."

We roared with laughter.

The Swedish word for the day is tandborste. It means toothbrush.

- by Francis S.

The rain in Spain does not stay mainly in the plain. It hits the mountains and the coast, too. At least it does in Marbella, Spain's answer to the posher parts of Miami Beach. Of course, there was sunshine there as well, and the husband and I each managed to turn our own particular shades of pink.

I hadn't been back to Spain for eight years or so. But it's the same - the arguing, the promenading, the little coffees cut with milk, the cured hams, the tile floors, the tiny bird-like old ladies in sweater sets and knee-length wool skirts and sensible shoes with low heels (who have replaced their mothers, long-dead, who wore heavy black widows' weeds), the strange love of creepy public ceremonies, from the painfully slow Holy Week parading of saints by men disguised in peaked black hats to homo-eroto-quasi-fascisto-pseudo-military displays of other men shouting weird orders at each other as they march 20 meters, back and forth, on a small stretch of street with hundreds watching.

Spain has such a peculiar pulse, fluttering and sluggish at the same time. Odd, that. If Spain were a person, she would be one of those types who rushes around the apartment madly cleaning, only to fall exhausted on the couch before jumping up to clean some more.

It was only four days - we were celebrating the 60th birthday of the mother of A. the TV producer. But it seemed much longer and so far away. Especially when we got back to the coldest weather of the year in Stockholm, and snow.

The Swedish phrase for the day is röda dagar. It literally means red days, which are how holidays are marked on Swedish calendars, and has become the commonly used expression for public holidays. Of which there are two for Easter: Good Friday and the Monday following Easter - and in many cases, an extra half a day before as well, since offices tend to let people out early on days before a holiday.

- by Francis S.

What makes this year's Eurovision Song Contest different from all other years?

This year, the husband and I are going to the dress rehearsal of the finale of the Swedish competition, Melodifestivalen.

I expect it will be as trashy as ever. And it's going to be hell, because I can't bring a blanket into the arena to pull over my head when the singing is just too awful to bear.

Check this space for updates.

The Swedish word for the day is paljetter. It means sequins.

- by Francis S.