Happy birthday to darcydodo, who has been adding to the joy in the world for 28 years and in my life for nearly ten.

Also, happy fifth LJ-versary to me. I want to write a long post about why I don't think I'll make it to a decade here, and quite possibly not even to a sixth anniversary. But not now because...

I need to get organized to travel to Holland tomorrow! Which means I will get to see rav_hadassah, and cartesiandaemon, for whom it is just as easy to get to Amsterdam as to Stockholm, is going to join us. I am looking forward to a really relaxing long weekend with lovely people.

Right now I have tea and pancakes (every Thursday is pancake day in Sweden. I like this country).

They don't have Remembrance Day in Sweden. This makes perfect sense, since Sweden wasn't involved in either of the World Wars. But it's odd to come into November and not see any poppies.

Just like it's odd to go to villages with no war memorial in the centre, and it's odd to have to consciously break the assumption that people of my grandparents' generation will have service experiences. The phrase "in the war" has almost no referent here. I'm living in a society that didn't lose huge swathes of the entire male population in two successive generations. There was no baby boom here, but rather an economic boom when the rest of Europe was crippled in the post-war period and Sweden wasn't (that was the time when Sweden became a nation of immigrants, because the sudden expansion of industry created a huge labour shortage).

The Jewish community remember the war, WW2 at least, but for them the war is tangled with Nazism and the Holocaust. This week we marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht; there are proportionally more people here who were personally affected than in England, I think. Those who were already in Sweden by the 30s remember what it was like with Occupied Norway on one border, and Axis Finland on the other, and Occupied Denmark just across the water. And the Swedish government allowing the German trains to travel through their supposedly neutral country, and the general atmosphere of relative sympathy for the Nazis (did anti-Communism or anti-Semitism come first? It's hard to say.) But none of that is the stuff I'm accustomed to remembering on this date.

Facebook and LJ reminded me of the date, and having been reminded, made me feel I wasn't remembering on my own. So I am adding my post to what seems like a kind of virtual ceremony.

To everyone for whom the year is about to be new. This year Ramadan corresponds exactly with Tishri, so a blessed Ramadan to Muslims. (And everyone else is welcome to non-specific good wishes too.)

...to MK and Mrs K, who celebrate their sixth anniversary today. It scares me that I have friends my age who have been married that long, and it scares me how long ago 1999 was. And that the Most Adorable Boy in the World will be six before the summer's out.

MK is still chuckling over the fact that pseudomonas and I walked all the way across London due to pseudomonas's "religious fundamentalism", as MK likes to call it. Mainly because he likes to wind me up, rather than because he really can't tell the difference between a strict interpretation of shabbat and a desire to attack people who don't share one's religious views.

Things are going well for all three of them in Melbourne, by the way. I've been chatting to MK over IM a couple of times recently. It's good to see him happy, and wonderful as always to talk to him.

I have spent over 16 hours travelling in the past two days in order to go to my sister's 21^st. This is probably an indication that I'm completely mad, but I'm glad I did it anyway.

( party on! )

OK, so I'm dog-tired and my nose and throat are irritated by all the cigarette smoke which is also making my hair and clothes smell disgusting. But it was a fun weekend and it's very lovely to have the freedom to do crazy things like that!

I just got an invitation from my baby sister to her 21^st birthday! Now, this really shouldn't be news, because straightforward arithmetic would have told me that she was turning 21 this year. But that doesn't mean I was actually expecting it. Buh! Scared now.