We have a children’s comic in Sweden called Bamse. He is a very kind and incredibly fair brown bear. He has great friends (a turtle and a rabbit) and a family consisting of his wife, three kids and his grandma. This grandma makes Dunderhonung which is a man made honey that makes Bamse very very strong. He is then consequently known as the strongest bear in the world. As a child I loved Bamse, and I wasn’t the only one.

Swedes are usually quite secular people but growing up in the countryside, I attended gatetherings for small children in church every week called children’s hours. There would be people there who had education to take care of children who played with us, we had some snacks and we also talked about the bible. Some Sundays, there was a service called family service in our local church, which was aimed at a younger audience. Lots of children were baptised during these services and there was no formal sermon. Our vicar was a very kind and child friendly man so he loved talking directly to us.

I was four years old when this happened during one of these services. The vicar had baptised a baby and we small kids would sit in front to watch and he would always show us the baby who was now a member of the congregation. We loved it. This time, the vicar talked directly to us about god.

Vicar: You know, children, God is very very strong. He can do anything! He is the strongest in the whole world!

Me: (in the very audible 4-year-old’s voice): NO, Bamse is the strongest!!

My mom, who sat in church a but further back, wanted to fall through the floor but the congregation and the vicar laughed hard. I have, of course, never been allowed to forget this, although it was 40 years ago.

I’d just had a laparoscopic tubal ligation (keyhole surgery to clip my fallopian tubes) and I woke up in recovery in significant pain. Looking back, it was probably an 8 or 9 on the pain scale – I was having significant difficulty thinking about anything else and was involuntarily moaning and gasping.

The attendants caring for me gave me both fentanyl and morphine, but it didn’t seem to be relieving my pain in the slightest. So naturally, I was still moaning, gasping and crying.

My attendant’s sage words of advice?

“Stop crying.”

Yeah, thanks for that.

(Our house often gets Jehovah Witnesses, and I never answer the door. My sister, who lives with me, used to be a JW, so she answers the door. She also never had a filter much and will talk your ears off.)

JW: “Hello, do you have a moment to talk about God?”

Sister: *BIG SMILE* “I sure do! Come on in!”

(They talk, and my sister starts arguing with the JW, saying that they shouldn’t preach that God’s name was Jehovah, and Jesus’s name wasn’t Jesus. The poor JW was being humiliated in front of her son, whom she’d brought along. They really start getting into a debate about the Bible and it’s meanings, and finally the JW leaves by practically running out. My sister told me later that she hopes another JW could visit, so she could give them a tongue lashing about the Bible, I told her that I doubt they’ll return after having their a**es handed to them.)

When my Aunt was little, she had horrible teeth. She would clean them twice a day and they would never be nice. One time the dentist decided that it must be her mother’s fault. So he ran up to my grandmother and started screaming at her. Telling her that if she didn’t take better care of her daughter, he would call CPS. He ended saying “you should meet the mother of the boy in the other room” to which my grandmother had the satisfaction of yelling back “I am the mother of the boy in the other room!” He never got on her case about my aunt’s teeth again.

It’s been really, really hot lately, and my car AC isn’t working well. I spot a display of caps (like baseball or trucker caps), labeled, COOLING HATS. This is what the tag says:
1. soak hat in water
2. wring hat out
3. wave hat in front of face and feel the cool