(He asked so often that Anna used an aikido calendar to mark off the days. Not the usual behavior for 5-year olds. Anna just today unearthed and tossed the calendar.)
The gifts this year felt well-chosen, with lots of good surprises coming from knowing each other well. J got some excellent games, and gift certificates to buy more games. I got Anna a scholarly book on RPGs, which hopefully isn't terrible, and a gift card for the art store, where she will have to buy things for herself. Anna got me a basic Swedish textbook, because while Duolingo is entertaining, it's unable to teach the rules for things like making plurals or (much worse) combining plurals and definites:
- en kvinna = "a woman"
- kvinnan = "the woman"
- kvinnor = "women"
- kvinnorna = "the women"
It's funky and different from English, without being excruciatingly difficult, but reverse-engineering it from examples is tiresome.
Anna also got me my own set of metal dice for our family Dungeons & Dragons game, including a bright red one for my character who has some sort of fire elemental in his ancestry, and really enjoys and is quite skilled at setting things on fire. (J created him for me some years back. His name is Sneaky McStabStab, he has a pet rat named Bitey, and he hates seagulls because seagulls killed his parents.) Anna also took pity on my musical obsessions and got me a tenor guitar, an obscure instrument experiencing a bit of a revival.
I can't play that, but I'll eventually be able to play this:
It's a lovely, fun little thing to play.
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