still basking in the sparkle of british blog camp

bee called it that fizzy feeling and spudballoo wrote about it too, but i think for me, it's more of a sparkly feeling that i feel when i think about blog camp. so the sunlight dancing on the oslo fjord when i took a little walk this evening after work seemed to embody the happiness i was feeling as i reflected on the weekend.

BBC was different than the first blog camp back in june. which isn't really that surprising, of course you can't duplicate your experience and you only ever have one first time. it was different for the obvious reason that it wasn't at my house, so i didn't have all of the worries about levels of tidiness and preparedness that i had the first time around. it was quite delightful to just get on a plane and be picked up at the airport and proceed to enjoy myself. and although i had butterflies as i came out to a waiting bee, it was just for a second and then it passed.

i guess i was just really much, much more relaxed. it helped that i knew B and polly and kristina already and that we just picked up where we left off the last time. it also helped that i got there a day ahead of the others and bonded with bee. the impatience of waiting for spudballoo made us quite antsy for the last half an hour or so, me constantly glancing over polly's shoulder and her jumping up to look out the window whenever bee's husband's game shook the house a bit from above (he's got some good speakers on his computer in his lair). but at last we saw this sight...

not a great picture, i realize, but i didn't take time to change to motion settings and just dashed out to capture the moment.

once spud arrived, it felt like things could really begin. bee had stretched out her lunch preparations (she is a brilliant cook and makes a really mean salad) and the timing was perfect. there was a big rush of words over lunch, as we all felt the intensity of being together and wanting to tell everything and ask everything immediately. looking back, i'm not sure any of us ever really properly took a breath, we were in such a rush to talk to one another.

maybe it's something the blogosphere does to us. we sit in our little lairs wherever they may be (mine's currently in a boring hotel room in oslo), tapping out our words and thoughts in isolation, but actually being quite social people. as bee put it, we're sociable loners, so although we are quite happy with our own company (as long as we've got a macbook and wireless (or maybe that's just me)), once we get together, we feel desperate to catch up on the social side of things. so out tumble the words in a huge flood.

this blog camp, as many of you - desperate for updates - noticed, didn't involve much blogging (or camping for that matter, not that we've ever meant camp in that sense). we tweeted some (those of us with iPhones - which was four out of six), but we didn't blog. and we had the password to the wireless and everything, but we were simply too busy talking. and talking. and talking some more. maybe it was also because we had one less day together than at the first blog camp and so we didn't want to "waste" any of our precious time together staring at our screens.

another of the joys of blog camp is, i have to admit, the prezzies. since i was sick the week before, i didn't get to make a present for everyone this time, but i did bring along some goodies - really special chocolate that i bought at the chocolate research facility (yup, that's the name of a posh chocolate shop) in singapore. the packaging was so beautiful (that's what's in the background of the picture in this post) i didn't need to wrap them, so i tied a little wooden viking ship that i acquired at the viking market the previous weekend around them and gave everyone one of the little scrabble tile necklaces that sabin went into overdrive producing a few weeks ago. i happened to have some little tags that said charming, intelligent, adventurous, humorous and inspiring on them and i stamped the name of the person who best suited those words on the back of each one. can you guess who got which one?

overall, with the second blog camp, i feel an evolution of the concept happening and i'm fascinated to see where it's headed. the first time, there was an element of performance to it and that was totally absent this time. we were all just being. enjoying being together. although we ate great food, drank awesome coffees and had glasses of lovely red wine, all of that was secondary to our just being together. really, truly present in the moments we had. sparkling. illuminated.

please do use the links above and go read what everyone else is saying about their experience. i'm sure that together we are capturing some of the sparkle and fizz that was.

that's a lotta palaver

i have spent my entire day getting to oslo. you'd think that would be quite difficult, in light of it being under an hour's flight away. sadly, it wasn't. everything that could go wrong did. metro issues, rebooking of original flight due to missing first one (see aforementioned metro issues), my bag (containing absolutely everything, since i didn't feel like carrying anything but my purse) took the flight after mine and i had to wait for it at the airport (during which time i almost collapsed from lack of food and latte), delays due to tracks under repair near the station i was going to once i got to norway....i could go on, but it's still too depressing and there's no sense all of us being depressed. at least it gave me plenty of time to do lots of processing (aka scribbling of thoughts in my little notebook) of the wonderful blog camp weekend. so i hereby totally change the subject to that.

on twitter, TFM dubbed BC 1.5 British Blog Camp or BBC, and we loved it, so it will hereafter be referred to as BBC, at least by me.  i was reading gail collins' column in the IHT this morning and she said something that resonated with me as i bask in the afterglow of BBC, "whenever anybody asks you to do something off the wall, you should try to do it - unless it involves being unethical or a two-plane connection." from all that i learned at BBC, i would have to wholeheartedly endorse this as a kind of general life philosophy (especially the two-plane connection part).

because if you think about it, going to a stranger's house in another country for the weekend is a bit off the wall. although we don't feel like strangers here in the blogosphere thanks to the very personal nature of blogs, there is still  chance that someone might present themselves as other than they are. however, i felt certain that i knew bee and that we had a lot in common and that she would be as i thought she was. and indeed it was true, only of course, even better.

from the moment i arrived and we greeted one another like old friends with a big hug, we didn't stop talking. i told her that the only thing on my agenda was to spend a bit of time in a bookstore. so we did that, after we had a lovely lunch and a long walk along the river in a town not far from her house. the whole time, we talked and talked. we told our stories. it was a bit like opening a floodgate for both of us. the words tumbled out. we hardly paid attention to our food, which was excellent or even our coffee, which was lovely.

when i think about it now, it was quite astonishing how much we both had to say. and how urgently we seemed to need to tell one another our stories. in person. i'm not sure why it was. in one sense, it was like a rush to catch up. even in the bookstore, i hardly wandered around, we spent a bit of time by the cookbooks (oops, bought four), but even then, we didn't stop talking and laughing and talking some more. it was quite extraordinary. a real palaver.

we'd had a late lunch and when we got back to bee's beautiful home, i settled my things into the cheerful orange room (which oddly enough, i failed to photograph, tho' that's for the best since it belongs to her very private daughter, tho' i will say it had a gorgeous orla keily duvet cover that practically leapt into my suitcase) and we had a cup of tea. as we chatted away about being mothers, the mysterious behavior of teenagers, the delightful behavior of tweens, schools, books, laura ingalls wilder, cookbooks (i bow to bee's collection, she beats mine by a long shot, tho' those four i bought helped a little bit). of course, we also talked about blogs and the ones which inspire us. funnily, enough, the blogs the two of us tend to read don't overlap that much, so i can tell you, i have a whole new list of wonderful places to discover.

while we chatted, in the back of my mind, i was thinking about the ways in which bee had both retained a lot of her americanness and also had absorbed a lot of englishness--the tea, the public (which are private) school talk, the driving on the "wrong" side, vocabulary. i found myself wondering in the back of my mind how much americanness i retain (i suspect it probably came out a bit in bee's presence) and how scandinavian i have become. because i think it's hard to tell about ourselves. we're so inside of ourselves, aren't we? how do we know? i was a little disturbed by the thought of exactly how far i now am from americanness (and how far i feel inside of me from danishness), because it leaves me with that strong, melancholic sense of what i always call that mid-atlantic feeling - adrift in the middle of the atlantic, not belonging (by choice) either place.

but that makes it sound like BBC made me sad, which is far from the truth. being together in person with these amazing women gave me so much energy (that was lucky in light of today) and so much inspiration and much to write about in the coming days. so stay tuned for more.

yay for blog camp 1.5 in the UK!!

i'm off to blog camp 1.5 near London. do follow what we're getting up to over here...and happy weekend one and all!

oh, and be sure to check out the little giveaway that's going on over here.

who is gonna miss me?

there was much whining and pouting last evening when i informed the child that i would be away at blog camp 1.5 this weekend. which means that her father is taking her to riding lessons on saturday and sunday. she informed me that far is utterly unable to saddle the horse and he has to enlist the help of the "horse girls" (hestepige, clearly one of those few words that's better in danish) who are standing around, waiting for the chance to help with such things. this is apparently quite personally embarrassing for sabin, who is still too short to saddle lizette, the horse she rides now on saturdays, herself. you can see lizette is quite a tall danish warmblood. i think she's lovely, but it's true that sabin wouldn't be able to saddle her all by herself. so she needs far. i hope he doesn't embarrass her.

it is nice that she'll miss me, even if it's just for my ability to saddle a horse.

* * *

another one who will miss me is lila. our cat. she's my buddy and every night when i come to bed, she jumps up and has 15 minutes of very close, in my face love. then she jumps back down on the floor and goes to sleep. she's been even more affectionate since our trip to dublin, when she was locked outside and cared for by the neighbors. when we came back, rather than seeing us as villians, she saw us as her kind liberators and loved us even more. lila showed up at our house last year and sometime last summer, i started feeding her and named her lila. actually, she told me herself that was her name. she's a super nice cat, tho' her fur gets nasty in the spring when she's shedding.  and she likes to bring mice in the house and set them free.

this one went down a mouse-sized hole in the wall behind the t.v., where some pipes for the radiators stick up, and wasn't seen for 6-7 hours, when it reappeared and much panic and gathering of a pink butterfly net ensued and it was removed from the house. because lila sees it as her role to bring them in, present them to us and then wander off.

i can assure you that this one was just playing dead - look at it. the drama. it deserves an oscar. seconds later, it hopped up and scampered off behind the bottle box. and you can see lila has already lost interest in it, so she's not even properly appreciating his little mouse oscar performance. i'm sure they'll deal with at least one of these this weekend while i'm away.  it's our own fault, we leave the doors open all day on these warm days, even if it's raining.

* * *

and although i hope husband misses me a little bit - we might briefly meet at starbucks the airport when he comes in from newark and i head off to heathrow - i'm sure they'll get along just fine.

reflections on the blogosphere and real life

it's back to school time. back to work (tho' technically i was working in singapore last week). back to daily routines. and back to the airport - tho' today it's husband who is going (to north carolina, via chicago, oddly enough). me, i don't fly 'til friday, when i head for blog camp 1.5 in london.

looking back on the past month, i realize how busy it's been. i didn't really have time off, since i haven't officially earned any yet, so our small holidays were sneaked in here and there along with work. but we did manage to add three new starbucks mugs to our collection, so three new places were visited - KL, amsterdam and dublin. i didn't get a new singapore mug, tho' they had some that match this new series, because i already got singapore years ago. it's rather fun to have the style of the mug reflect the period in which you first visited the place. and i won't at all devote any reflection to the implications of the cultural imperialism of starbucks in places as different from one another as KL and dublin. me, i'm just grateful for a grande latte, loungey, comfortable seating below the herstal lamps and free wifi, wherever it's found.

* * *

over the past couple of weeks, where i have been largely away from the blogosphere (at least from the reading blogs side of it), i realized a few things. the blogosphere isn't as different from real life as i thought it was. there is lots of drama, catfighting, petty annoyances, pettier obsessions and women being hard on women (why do we do that to ourselves?). happily, that negativity is easier to avoid than in real life, since you can just stay away from the places where it's going on and there's no danger of actually running into someone you'd rather not run into. and there's so much goodness going on in the blogosphere--things to inspire, make you laugh, things to learn, things that make you think there is hope for the world--that it more than makes up for the negatives. maybe it's just normal that in cyberspace, as in real life, we make friends, keep some of them, grow apart from others, move on and make new friends. i'm not sure why i thought it was any different online than offline, but somehow i did.

* * *

and speaking of new friends, in singapore, i got together rather spontaneously for a quick drink with a blogger who i haven't known for that long...kim of measure of all things. kim is a south african who lives and works in singapore. she very good-naturedly allowed herself to be subjected to our questions about how on earth she can take living in the plastic world that is singapore. and she did confirm my suspicions that singapore is a great place to be an ex-pat. it's safe, clean, it functions very well and there are cheap flights to more exotic, real destinations in the region. i still have half a mind to spend some time there working at some point. it is difficult for me to imagine being from cape town tho' and wanting to be anywhere but there, but on the other hand, i do love a good adventure, so it was great fun to meet kim. and for that opportunity, i am very grateful to the blogosphere. and if you really want to both crochet and be really inspired in a really brainy, deep way, you must read kim's latest blog post. and take the time to watch the video. it's blow-you-away amazing.

* * *

this time of year, as summer transitions to fall, i always feel reflective. and i think that transition is an apt word. also here in the blogosphere. when i look back a year, things have changed a great deal. that's partially due to BoN, but i think it's more natural and organic than that. i think that here in cyberspace as in life, we make transitions. new interests that we write about bring new readers and we make new friends. some of the old friends drift away because at the same time, they have moved to different interests and have new readers and new friends on their own blogs. some blog friends endure and sadly, some do not. some go to a place that you simply can't follow. but the beauty and wonder of it to me is that there are always new blogs to discover, new connections to make. and i've noticed that i have a lot of new people leaving comments and i'm really happy for the discoveries of new blogs and new perspectives that gives me. this is not to say that i don't love comments from the old crowd too--i'm just trying to say that i love the expanding sense of community. so thank you ALL for your comments, they're wonderful.

i have found some really good friends here in this bloggy world. and i've drifted away from others. but there are a few, that although we've drifted apart, i know our relationship would prove to be cat love and at some point, something will again strike a chord and we'll be back to our wonderful, deep level of friendship that we had developed. because in some sense we do get to know one another quite well here, don't we? the medium of the blog is very personal and diaristic at times (sometimes nauseatingly so, admittedly). we simply reveal so much of ourselves through our words and pictures, even if those pictures don't necessarily show us. the things we choose to share (or not share) speak volumes and in many ways, we are laid bare for all to see.

maybe that's why failed friendships in the blogosphere hurt as much as they do. we've revealed ourselves, left ourselves vulnerable and open. and when we're rejected or worse, ignored, it hurts that much more. or maybe i'm being too deep and philosophical - forgive me, it's a rainy monday - maybe real life simply intervenes and it's so much more compelling than online life that people just drift away. or maybe it's just that sometimes you feel all vibrant and sometimes you feel like earth tones, so as i said, more natural and organic than anything else.

* * *

at the end of the week, i'll go to blog camp 1.5 at Bee's house in england. Bee is one of several soul sisters i've found in this bloggy world. she and i are the same age, we both married a european man and uprooted ourselves from the land of our birth. we both abandoned Ph.D. studies before the dissertation stage. she has daughters and so do i. strangely enough, we even have an LNG thing in common. i feel i already know her so well and i know that from the minute i see her this weekend, we'll be completely at ease together and we won't even come close to running out of things to talk about. i have that wonderful feeling of anticipation of meeting her. the one where you want to capture that first time moment because you only have a first time once and you want to treasure it so you can mull it over later.

so i'm really looking forward to the bloggy world and the real world converging once again this coming weekend when B, polly, seaside girl, kristina, spudballoo and me get together at bee's house. and i'm certain that i will not be disappointed.