On being popular with family

I left Stockholm Friday afternoon with Hemingway, going with my brother and his family to see my parents and help them out with removing some trees from their yard. I rather conveniently managed to sprain my ankle, so I was stuck fixing food and coffee for the others while poor Hemingway slaved away with my family. I think he's so far collected massive family points, both from this and from handling my very talkative American uncle at Baby Bighead's baptism. It's nice when your family likes the people you like too.

I was also very cordially invited by my niece, aged almost four, to come to their house and watch Tonari no Totoro together with her. I've gotta say that I'm rather pleased to have started and encouraged the anime trend that my nieces and nephews are in the middle of right now. I'd pick Totoro or Ponyo as appropriate characters over Barbie any day. I like being invited to my brother's house anyways. He's almost 11 years older than I am, and was one of my greatest heroes when I was small, so it's nice to have a kind of grown-up confirmation that yes, I'm cool enough to be around now. Feels good.

A pretty accurate picture of my niece and I.

On the best breakfast and the birth of Box.

Blog.com's been down again, to no-one's surprise. It's always down. I really should switch platforms to something more reliable. Seriously, what do they do with their servers? Who handles them? Untrained monkeys?

blog.com s staff

Hand-in completed, and after a 14 hour sleepathon, I wake up to this.

Ah, so that' s where he put my phone.