so many things to ponder

whoa, it's been awhile. things have been busy. it's been a pretty intense period and there's no end in sight. i've been trying to take creative breaks - a lovely weekend away with my creative group, the yearly trip with my weaving group, going to weaving, going to a gourmet knitting day, a pampering event with a friend (think facial and foot bath), followed by an art show and a really nice lunch, several work trips to copenhagen - but it has all left little time to think about personal writing. i miss the way this space allowed me to process things and it would be nice to get back into the habit. odin knows there's plenty to process.

today, as i made dinner - a roast chicken, jerusalem artichokes freshly dug from the garden and some roasted beets, plus a salad with avocado, mango and tomato - i found myself pondering topics to write in the way that i used to and it made me think it would be nice to be back here again. 

things that crossed my mind...the need that everyone seems to have acquired to have a diagnosis, the latest james bond, growing older, the individual nature of grief, what lumke would have wanted to be could she have chosen anything, how to best talk about kitchens from a warm, sympathetic perspective, the natural order of adjectives (thanks, molly), an obsession with growing things from seeds extracted in the kitchen (see the mango plant above, which i started myself), old friends i got to see again this week, sharing what i love about copenhagen, our upcoming trip to arizona (i SO need a holiday), tomorrow's make-your-own-ravioli dinner with friends, what tattoo to get next (i'm thinking a cactus), the chestnut man on netflix. so many things to ponder and write about.  

i think i need to start blogging again like it's 2010 and no one is reading. because, after all, it always came back to me. and it's extremely likely that no one is reading.

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wow, what a story that was released on the day of the seafarer a few months ago (yes, i started this post awhile ago). tales of politics, containers, big tobacco, cancer and whitewashed company histories. i worked for maersk for 5 years and never even heard a whisper of this - only that sealand represented the great maersk move towards containerization. that and the banana plantation that they bought somewhere in africa to push containerization of bananas, which were hauled on refrigerated bulk carriers before containers came along. 

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a national geographic piece on adult fans of lego that, if you ask me, doesn't give enough credit to the actual fans themselves. 

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best ad for wearing a bike helmet ever. the danes are just so good at these things.

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fantastic cooperation between marina abramovic and wetransfer.

hello there, my neglected blog

it may seem that i've turned my back on this blog. the days go by and by and with each of them, i think that i will finally sit down this evening and catch up. and then life intervenes and there's dinner to make and stalls to clean and horses and cats to feed and lawns to mow (yes, we're still mowing, it's been that warm) and speeches to give and pumpkins to buy and books to read and netflix to watch and entryways to tidy and work to do. and somehow, i don't find myself in front of the computer to blog. and i miss it. my sanity misses it. my inner sense of well-being misses it. so i think i'll just have to pick up the threads and go on and not worry about catching up. eventually, one day when i'm hungry, i'll do another post of new york food, as there's much more of that to share and i'll write that post that's rattling in my head about the differences between seattle and new york. and through writing it all, i'll work out what i think and i'll find my way back to myself and this space. because this space plays a great role in keeping me in touch with myself. and that job is far from complete.

one of the reasons i've had a hard time sitting down to write is because a great tragedy befell the great majority of photos that i took on my recent trip. i had downloaded them along the way into iPhoto on my work computer because my memory card was nearly full and i had all of new york ahead of me. with the jetlag and everything else, i didn't get them moved over to my backup drive when i got home on the weekend. then, on my first monday back in the office, i had all kinds of computer problems and went over to IT for help. and their solution was to delete my profile and create a new one. and in doing so, they wiped out my entire computer. and all of those photos that aren't anywhere else. luckily, most of my nyc comiccon photos were uploaded to flickr, but i hadn't had a proper chance to go through any of the ones i took in seattle, so they are all lost. 

luckily, i took a lot of shots with my new iPhone 6, because it was easier and it has a great camera, so i'm not completely without photos of my trip, but i did suffer a devastating loss of the sculpture park in seattle and the good photos of chihuly, aside from the few i uploaded for my daily photo project, thinking i'd do the rest later, when i'd had a proper chance to go through them. i can tell you that the loss of those photos has awakened me in the night on more than one occasion over the past few weeks. we trust so much to bits and bytes these days and i trust so much of my memory to my camera, that i feel like there may be great gaps in my memories of my trip without those photos. technology is not entirely trustworthy and neither are those guys in IT. back up your photos, and/or send them into the cloud, it's the best advice i can give. and i intend to take it myself in the future.

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love these lamps.

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i forgot how much i love design for mankind.

erin is just so delightfully, unpretentiously real and authentic.

she even makes homeschooling sound ok.