The beautiful blue days came to an abrupt end today. As Harald and Roger hammered away at the roof of the shed, the rain started falling. We were having lunch, watching Roger hit nails then wipe the handle of his hammer, attempting to retain his grip on the increasingly wet tool. Eventually, the roof secured, they gave up.
Don’t be fooled by the above photograph. It was still raining but given I had to go out and unlock the stuga, I figured the image was essential.
And so the day continued into the night, while the morning had been fine. In fact, as I sat in class looking out of the window, the sky was largely blue with nothing like any threat of rain.
It was an odd day in class. First Djuma had to leave because, I think, one of his 17 kids was unwell, then the Internet left for unknown reasons. Karin came in and interrupted Ninni to tell her that online was offline. We were reduced to using the plastic hand held mock clock to read out and tell her the time as she moved the hands around randomly.
It followed our attempts to write a letter to someone mysterious called Sophie.
I was well impressed by Ghufra who normally sits quietly, barely speaking above a whisper. She was suddenly and unexpectedly quite vocal as she described her flat to Sophie including the objects in each room.
I think her eager participation was due to her continuing to attend each day. I’m so used to seeing no improvement in most of my classmates that this was a bit of a surprise.
Of course, as soon as we started reading and writing, any improvement quickly subsided.
We had to add commas and ‘ands’ in a big block of text that was full of short sentences like: “I wake up at 7am. I go to the bathroom. I clean my teeth. I have a shower. I eat breakfast. I watch some TV.” etc, etc. I didn’t find this particularly difficult. In fact, had I had enough spoken Swedish, I’d have debated some of the decisions made by the class.
Anyway, class was okay – Ninni is always fun – even without the Internet and I managed to learn a few new words. Now I just need to retain them.
At home, we finished off the paleo loaf I made yesterday and listened to the FATN Magazine recording that featured my latest Letter from Sweden. This has become a ritual. Mirinda doesn’t listen to the recording until it appears on the FATN website.
It’s not normally the day after I publish it on mine but, there you go.
