The Further Adventures of Miss Kitten

I’m finally in.
After nearly four years of living in Sweden, I’ve got that Golden Ticket: a permanent (fast lön) full-time job.  I’ve heard countless times that the key to getting a permanent job in Sweden is networking and Swedish. This I can definitely confirm. Don’t even bother applying for full-time work if you can’t speak [...]

I’ve been wanting to adopt a cat ever since I moved Gothenburg over a year ago. Actually I’ve been wanting to adopt a cat ever since Uddevalla, but the conditions then and there were never right. I’d looked into adopting from a local animal shelter or cat rescue, but they always seemed to have some [...]

I must first thank my hosts Mark Base and his girlfriend Erika for their gracious hospitality during my stay with them. I must also acknowledge that I can’t take credit for title of this update. About a week ago Mark posted a Facebook event announcement under the same title. In fact he’s the one who [...]

I love books, but lately I just haven’t seemed to have any patience for novels and fiction. The pocket book (paperback) shop at the the central station in downtown Gothenburg has a pleasantly large selection of English language titles in both fiction and non-fiction.
Along with everything else here in Sweden, books (especially English books) tend [...]

Ever since my professional writing career ended I just haven’t felt like writing very much of anything, which is bad because I really should be writing all the time. It’s the one creative thing that I feel I’m quite good at. I’m mediocre at other creative things: painting, singing, etc., but writing is different.
I’ve been [...]

For three glorious months I was a professional writer. I wrote about one article a week, which was published in due course, and then I was paid for my work. It was the most fun ever.
But now it looks like it’s all over. I received word about a week ago that the website for which [...]

It’s barely September, but looking outside the window here one might guess that it’s really late October. We had a pretty feeble summer here in Sweden and starting last week (the last week of August) I noticed that the leaves were already beginning to turn yellow. No, I thought, it can’t be fall already! It’s [...]

Yesterday, I got my first serious bite from a prospective employer. It was from an English language after-school program called English4Kids, which has locations all over the Stockholm area and recently in Göteborg. The regional manager of the Göteborg schools – who originally hails from the Chicago area – called me at home to tell [...]

I discovered today that Virtual World Productions, the LA-based company for which I work as a journalist covering Second Life, is actually part of a larger multimedia company called LivePlanet, which was (and here’s the really cool part) co-founded by none other than Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Apparently, Messrs Affleck and Damon have little [...]

By now most loyal readers of my blog are aware that I’ve recently lost my teaching job. I wasn’t fired, nor did I quit. I was simply not given any teaching hours/lessons in the coming school year.
Apparently, I’m neither important enough to be fired, nor am I important enough to be informed about the possibility [...]