Elle’s here now. Great to see her again. Feels like such a short while ago we were this tightly knit unit living together, eating most of our meals together, chatting, arguing, and just living a fairly ordinary family life in Malmö. Now nothing is the way it was and though we are all dealing with this odd, new reality as best we can, there’s a part of me that wouldn’t mind rewinding the timeline about a year and appreciating how things were more than I did at the time.

Bitte, a brief girlfriend from the early 1980s (a Swedish gal, but with a German name) once advised me to never regret that which you cannot change. Great advice but nonetheless hard to live by. If we just survive this pandemic, something good will evolve. In fact, I’m sure there has already been plenty of positive consequences. Certainly environmentally.

It’s been like five months since I arrived from Spain and I don’t think I’ve stayed put in Sweden this long in more than 25 years. So at least my carbon footprint has gotten considerably smaller.

My younger sister and brother in Alaska have unfortunately contracted the virus. Both are fine so far and as far as I know, don’t have any underlying health issues. So they will hopefully pull through without too much pain or long-term suffering.

I’ve been subscribing to Apple Music for quite some time – three years? I don’t know. Yet I find myself mostly listening to Groove Salad, the electronica channel over at Soma FM. I’ve been a fan since about 2003 and to this day, most of the tunes on their playlist are still an aggregate of instrumental and easily digestible tunes that work perfectly as a backdrop for when I’m writing. I’ve been doing a lot that today and will continue doing just that going forward. Of my creative vents, writing fiction is by far the most challenging. But it’s also the most fulfilling. The hardest part? Avoiding self-editing while I’m writing. It absolutely kills the flow and distract me from weaving my stories. The image above is a redesign of my preferred radio station’s current logo which unlike their musical theme has not aged very well.