Being Thwarted By Swedish Appliances: Part 1

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 31, 2026] ©2026

One of the benefits of living abroad is that one has the opportunity to experience how people in other cultures live.  Also to be thwarted by their appliances.

Olof and I met when we were 17 spending our senior year of high school as exchange students in Brazil, a life-changing experience for both of us.  Exactly 40 years later, we arrived in Stockholm for what we dubbed our second “Senior(s) Year Abroad”.  It was meant to be an eight- month work assignment but turned into two years. Fortunately for me, the Swedes aren’t exactly balls of fire when it comes to deadlines.  I was delighted; it was the best two years of my life.

What we weren’t prepared for when we arrived, however, was being stymied by the appliances in our apartment.  It’s not like we were in a third world country.  We’d been operating stoves and washers and dryers all our adult lives.  But our first week was characterized by cold food (we couldn’t work the stove) and 500-degree wet socks.  (More on the latter next week.)

When we first arrived in Stockholm in the dead of winter, our “fully furnished” apartment didn’t even have so much as a roll of toilet paper or even a shaker of salt, all of which we had to acquire on foot at the closest market. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff we needed right away was pretty heavy or bulky:  laundry soap, dishwasher soap, milk, toilet paper never mind coffee, cereal, and actual food.  One thing we concluded is that it is amazing how much stuff you’re willing to do without when you have to lug it home a considerable distance on the perilously icy sidewalks. We would make a list every day prioritizing what we needed most.

We ultimately managed to acquire a Swedish shopping trolley with which all of our shopping was done for the next two years.  It’s amazing how the smallest things can make such a huge improvement in your life.

Given our lack of groceries, our first at-home Stockholm meal had, by necessity, to be really simple.  I decided to poach some salmon in water with salt and pepper (my entire spice collection at the time.  It was so exciting when Italian seasoning made our shopping list cut.) Only I couldn’t turn on the stove top.  Our La Jolla stove had been fondly dubbed the Star Ship Enterprise for its complicated control panel. But the Swedish stove top stymied both Olof and me in its simplicity. I should mention that my husband has a degree in nuclear physics from Cal Tech. He was very clear he was not going to be thwarted by a mere appliance.  Until he was.

The Swedish stove top had only four symbols – a plus sign, a key symbol, a vertical line and a horizontal line.  We pushed them all repeatedly and nothing happened.  Surely the landlords would have told us if the cook top didn’t work?  A very hungry hour later, for reasons unclear to both of us, the next time I touched the vertical line symbol, some red lights began blinking.  Must be all in the wrist?  We were then able to make the burners heat up with the plus symbol. But we were not sure we could ever replicate this experiment.

But ultimately, my Swedish stove top and I reached an understanding. It really was all in the wrist. The Star Ship Enterprise, our digital stove in San Diego, required one to press fairly firmly on its display or it wouldn’t respond.  In fact, there were times when I tapped the Start button on the stove only to come back a half hour later and discovered that it hadn’t come on at all.  My Swedish cook top display, however, was the polar opposite: a high-strung prima donna with pretensions of being a sound system.   Press its little buttons with any conviction and it had a complete snit and wouldn’t perform. It wanted the faintest possible tactile connection.  In fact, I think it preferred that you just wave your finger tip vaguely in the area of the control you wanted and your aura would communicate with its aura. But if that’s what it wanted, that’s what it got. If there’s nothing else we learned there, you don’t argue with a Swedish appliance.

Another thing that initially puzzled us was the bedding in our fully-furnished apartment.  All we could find in the apartment were small single-bed blankets for our king-sized bed. Clearly an oversight.  I went in search of a king-sized comforter at the various Stockholm department stores and was surprised when I couldn’t any.  I finally queried the bedding department lady at Åhléns who was genuinely puzzled as to why I would want a blanket that big.

Couples, the bedding lady explained to me, should each have their own separate top sheets and duvets. So nobody is fighting for the covers, she added, as if this were obvious.  So nobody is snuggling either, I thought at the time, thinking I finally understood Sweden’s negative birth rate. The sales person and I stared at each other across the counter each thinking the same thing: “Their system is completely screwy.”  But as Olof and I traveled through Scandinavia some months later, we got our own separate duvets all the way through Norway too. 

Stay tuned next week for Swedish Appliances Part II: “Laundry Times” and fried socks.

Email Overload - The Peril Of An Election Year

[ "Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published August 17, 2026] 2026

I've written before about my husband Olof's and my different political persuasions. It's been the source of a lot of lively discussion at our dinner table over the years. It's also a familiar dynamic for me as my mother was a liberal feminist Democrat and my father a conservative Republican. I was fortunate to have the experience of a lot of spirited but respectful debate.

But Olof and I are now facing a different problem. We both hate our political parties. And I mean profoundly. Olof, a lifelong Republican, hasn't voted for or contributed to his party in a long time. He is still holding out for the Republicans to return to what he thinks of their former glory.

I, of course, think they never had one.

Unfortunately, however, he refuses to change his official voting status to "Declined to state"  as I did with the Democrats some years back solely for self-defense. Having two political parties in the same household was resulting in some 25 or more political robocalls to our landline every day in the months before elections.

I should also note that even changing my voting affiliation, it only reduced the robocalls by 25%. The Republicans were the major perps.

Of course, most people have solved this problem by doing away with landlines. But even though 95% of the calls that come in on it these days are announced as "spam risk," I m attached to the concept of a landline even though I almost exclusively use my cell phone these days.

In previous election years, I used to love to play with all the relentless Republican fundraisers who thought they were calling a friendly number only to get me. "Do you think that marriage should be between one man and one woman?"  they'd query when I picked up the phone. "HELL NO!" I'd yell before summarily disconnecting.

Unfortunately, disconnecting modern phones isn't nearly as much fun as it used to be. There was always something so inherently satisfying about being able to slam down a telephone receiver. Clicking an Off button or worse, tapping some wussy touch screen does not give one the emotional release that the solid connection of a plastic receiver on a telephone base could ever give. No wonder the whole country is so full of pent-up anger. For that reason, until recently, we still kept one wall-mounted landline with traditional receiver in our home for use during election seasons.

But lately I've made contributions to several Democratic candidates not realizing that my email in-box would become buried in emails. It's even worse than all those robo-calls. "Unsubscribe"  can't keep up with it. Can't I just contribute to persons whom I support without my email address, and apparently my soul, being sold to sites I never signed up for?

I'm starting to feel hostile about it.

OK, I was already feeling hostile even before. I voted for our current San Diego mayor and City Council member for my district. And have lived to regret it. In my view, they seem to have been kidnapped by aliens. How else to explain one incredibly stupid decision after another? The trash fee debacle. Balboa Park parking fee fiasco. Removing requirements for parking in new construction. And the piece de resistance: closing restrooms in the height of summer in our most populated public parks.

Seriously, the mayor and City Council ought to be relegated to porta-potties for which they have to pay a fee on user-hostile machines. Or maybe even no porta-potties at all. Their reserved parking spots should be turned into bike racks.

I'm beginning to wonder if candidates for public office should have to pass a common sense test. Public restrooms should be an inalienable right, probably only left out of the Declaration of Independence for lack of invention yet of the flush toilet. Otherwise, I have every confidence it would have been included. Voting to close them down for budget reasons should be an automatic exit from office.

I've mentioned before that both Olof and I have voted across party lines on many occasions over the years. Plenty of Republican candidates have had my vote, and certainly lots of Democrats have had Olof's, especially in recent years.

But what happens when you think your party, with the exception of specific candidates, has totally failed you? Where is the "None of the Above" party? The "Anybody but you guys"  party? The "If you re an incumbent I would vote for a homeless guy before you" party?

Instead we've got the Parties of Pusillanimity. Both Olof and I often wonder out loud what our fathers, who fought in World War II (Olof s father was a Navy pilot in combat in the Pacific) would have to say about all this. We're pretty sure we know.

I realize I'm sounding like everyone's crabby curmudgeon relative they're afraid to invite to Thanksgiving dinner. But I'm desperately hoping that this new party can show up by 2028. You've already got my vote.

But in the meantime, please, please please, leave my email alone.

Please Stop Beeping

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 10, 2026] ©2026

I’m trying to decide when our lives became controlled by beeps. When I was growing up, I don’t remember anything that beeped. Now I can’t think of anything that doesn’t. I’m frankly feeling over-alerted. 

An all-too-popular game in our home between my husband and me is: Name That Beep.  Is it coming from inside the house?  Or is it a trash truck or city vehicle backing up outside?  If it’s inside, did somebody (he knows who he is) forget their coffee cup in the microwave?  Or did I set a timer on the stove for some reason? And, of course, that’s becoming part of the problem.  What reason? Not only figuring out which appliance is beeping, or, if it’s the oven timer, but why I set it in the first place. 

If you’ve got a Smart phone, you know the difference between the email message beep and the text message beep and the “loved your text message reply” beep.  My computer alerts me to new emails as well.

When my husband Olof does the dishes and wipes the digital panel on our stove, it will often start beeping. As an engineer (and, more to the point, a guy), he isn’t about to admit that he has no idea why. While smashing it with a hammer after it had been going off for a half hour seems like a perfectly sane option, he will finally wander into the bedroom and announce, “There’s an incoming message from the Planet Klingon.  I think it’s for you.” 

This range, I should mention, was the only one west of the Mississippi that would fit into our space when our former KitchenAid range crumped during the pandemic.  One of its many negative features is that it is really easy to knock into the burner control knobs when cleaning up after dinner dispersing gas into the air for an entire night.  After the first time that this happened, I invested in a gas detection meter which mysteriously goes off on occasion even when we are just cooking something on low heat on the stove.  Probably unwisely, we’ve learned to ignore it.

Fortunately, our carbon monoxide sensor is much better behaved.  And we would definitely not ignore it.

An increasingly common beep is the low battery signal on the handset of our ancient answering machine. Definitely time to get rid of that thing.

We’ve had to replace most of our appliances in the last five years, and frankly, are not impressed with the alert features that seem to be standard now.  Our refrigerator beeps if the door is left open more than a minute while you’re unloading groceries into it.  Somehow, I managed to go 23 years with the last fridge without that feature and never leave the door open even once.

Our new microwave, alas, just won’t shut up.  It will beep into the next millennium until you remove whatever it was you put into it.  It will not be ignored.

Despite the fact that I have tried to disable as many beeps as possible, I have still managed to add a few.  After the fires in January 2025, my granddaughter, whose LA home came perilously close to burning down, installed Watch Duty on my phone which I think informs me of fires even in Los Angeles.  It goes off multiple times per day. Fortunately, it’s a distinctive sound so I can ignore it with, “OK, just a fire.” 

I feel bad about it, but I’ve disabled the Amber Alert from my phone.  That alert scares the bejesus out of me.  Could they turn that thing down a few hundred decibels?

I also signed up for the Shake Alert which alleges to give one 20 seconds notice of a quake with a magnitude of 4 or greater.  What’s confusing is that we already have this in the form of our aviary birds who give us pretty much the same amount of warning.  Of course, with them, you’re never sure it’s not just a hawk. 

My car beeps when the door isn’t shut tight and seat belts aren’t fastened. One beep I actually don’t mind is the after-market backup sensors I had installed on my 2005 Corolla that beep at me when people with a clear death wish walk behind my car at Gelsons as I am backing up.

There are two beeps that make me truly crazy. One is the beep that your ceiling smoke detectors make when the batteries are running low. Smoke detectors have been scientifically programmed so that those batteries only start failing at 3 a.m. It’s like the faucet drip torture only ten times worse. You want to stand underneath it and scream, “Stop it!  Stop it RIGHT NOW! I’ll get the ladder and change your battery in the morning!” But no, it maliciously beeps on.

To make matters worse, our hallway smoke detector can even be set off by steam from the shower in the adjacent bathroom.  It is disconcerting that it can’t tell the difference between fire and water.

Have we become a country of people who cannot remember anything if it doesn’t beep at us?  Um, yup!  How did we ever survive before? One answer: we obviously didn’t used to have so many gadgets.

Fortunately, some appliances will let you disable the beep alerts. But more often than not, you need an engineering degree and/or a soldering iron. YouTube abounds with videos on this topic.

Should we be relying on beeps less, just to make those ever-aging synapses keep firing? When you look at all those mental gymnastics exercises advocated for older folks, maybe going beeperless should be one of them.  Well, except maybe the ones like smoke alarms that would prevent the house from burning down. 

In the average kitchen, the beeping options are pretty much endless. With so many appliances beeping, will new ones have to start announcing themselves, like “coffee’s ready”?

I hope not. Bad enough that they’re all beeping at me. When they start talking to me, I’m done.  Because I fear I’d start answering.

 

Library Math 101: When You're Too Old To Ever Get Your Book On The Holds Queue

[“Let Inga Tell You”, La Jolla Light, published August 3, 2026] 2026

Ever since I retired, the La Jolla Public Library has become my second home. My library reserve queue is always maxed out and I generally read three books a week. The front seat of my car has library books being transported to and from the library pretty much at all times. 

Being able to read so many books is definitely a corrective emotional experience from my twelve years as a divorced working mom when I read exactly no books a year. I mean, zee-ro. I didn’t even bother with a library card since they unreasonably wouldn’t let you keep a book out for a decade. There used to be library fines and mine would have looked like the defense budget.

My engineer husband Olof reads both e-books and physical books. He likes novels on his e-reader but thinks the graphics are better in those massive 1,200-page techno-tomes he inexplicably considers pleasure reading. As for me, I just like the tactile feel of an actual book in my lap, the soothing susurrus when you turn the pages. 

I have seen first-hand that I am not the only physical book aficionado out there.  Never was this illustrated more obviously than on March 14, 2020 when the Covid epidemic hit and the library announced it would be closing the next day until further notice.  The Riford library on Draper looked like a literary Luddite Fall of Saigon. The librarians were frantically dispensing plastic grocery bags and allowing patrons to check out up to 40 books although I don’t think anyone was actually counting.  Like everyone else, I was dumping books wholesale into my bags according to two criteria: (1) it had a cover and (2) there were words inside.  

One would think that the lack of availability of physical books for so many months in 2020 would have inspired some of us to embrace technology.  But you would be wrong.   Covid generated a new DSM-5 category: People Who Will Just Not Use E-Readers No Matter What.  (There is no vaccine for this.) 

From time to time, we techno-hostile people actually prevail.  Olof and I like to sit outside on summer evenings and read, he on his iPad or e-reader, and me with a library book.  Not infrequently, Olof will have to go in early because the iPad’s low battery sensor is flashing. I try to look sympathetic but it’s all I can do to stifle a snicker.  I never have to worry about the battery on my library book getting too low. 

Now that I’m able to read so much, I’ve had to engage in Library Math.  As in, do I have the life expectancy to get some of the books I want given the number of holds versus the number of copies?  There’s some serious competition out there for the best sellers.

For every book I have on hold, I have 13 days to pick it up after my hold number comes up, then 30 days to read it.  If others are waiting for it, there are no renewals.  So I have to allow that each person in the hold queue ahead of me could take 43 days.

Now, one hopes that they will pick it up sooner and read it faster, and therefore return it faster.  But they might have been on vacation when the book became available.  Or they might not even have returned it after the 30 days.  Now that there are no more library fines there are actually evil low-life reprobates who keep them past due even knowing there are people with limited life expectancy who might be waiting. 

The other skewing factor is “transit time.”  I find that even after my queue number has come up, it can easily take two weeks for the book to actually arrive on the Holds shelf at the La Jolla Library with my name on it. I’m guessing this is a budget cuts issue. This could easily add 14 days to the potential 43 days, or 57 days per hold. 

But removing the transit time from the equation for simplicity’s sake, when I recently put a hold on a best seller I really wanted to read, there were 1211 holds ahead of me on 12 copies.  Those 1211 holds x 43 days per hold came to 52,073 hold days divided by 12 copies which came to 4339 hold days or… 11.8 years. 

This brings up two moot points, the first of which is that holds are only good for one year after which they are cancelled. (The other is that I’ll likely be dead.)

I queried one of the librarians about how rigid the one year hold time is. Will the library computer system automatically cancel a hold after that time as their site says? This person said that they usually recommend that if a person thinks they want to read a certain book, they get on the hold list early. So no definitive answer there.

The library does seem, in their defense, to buy more copies of the most popular books.

But this doesn’t always solve the problem.  Another book I wanted had 1335 holds but given its popularity, the library now had 108 copies.  But 1335 x 43 comes to 57,405 hold days (not even factoring in that pesky transit time) and even divided by 108 copies still comes to 532 days or more than the maximum one year allowable hold time.

E-books are not unlimited but do seem a little faster.  One of the books I wanted had 375 e-book holds x 43 days per holder came out to 16,125.  One of those 58 copies would come up by day 278.  If, of course, I was willing to read e-books. 

So increasingly, I’m finding myself calculating:  do I have a reasonable life expectancy to get a particular book?

If not, maybe it’s time to just buy the damn book then donate it to the library after I’ve read it, increasing the number of available copies for my fellow anti-e-book Luddite compatriots?  I’m hoping they’ll actually put it in circulation.  

On more than a few occasions lately, I’ve done just that. Not only do I get the book a lot sooner, but I consider it my contribution to the local tree-killing physical book community.  (You’re welcome.)