good bones

my sister is back home at our parents' house. these days it belongs to her. she had rented it out for the past few years. the people who lived there tore out all the horrible carpet that was everywhere, including on the stairs. i always wondered if there wasn't some nice wood floors underneath all that 80s pile. and it seems there was. 

it's weird to see this room empty and the blinds open. my mother weirdly kept the blinds closed and that room was always so dark. i think she thought she was protecting the furniture from the sunlight. the wallpaper is the same wallpaper my mom put up years ago. it's not too bad, though generally, i have realized that my mom didn't have very good taste. 

my sister is thinking about making a big change in her life and moving back there. i find it comforting to think of her living in our childhood home. sanding and polishing those floors. and bringing it to life again. the house has good bones and it saw our family through many good times. it must be good for many more. 

what i have been doing lately

the paris review podcast just finished their first season and it was luminous. every episode is shimmeringly beautiful - a mix of early writing, archival audio and contemporary pieces read by famous voices. it's literary and deep and gorgeously produced. i was inspired by the jamaica kincaid piece in episode 12 - what i have been doing lately. (you need a subscription to read all of it, but you can hear it for free on the podcast.) and while i cannot hope to compare to her writing, i do feel drawn to trying my hand at it...tho' i suspect mine will have a less dreamlike quality.

what i have been doing lately...by me.

it's 4 a.m. i'm awake, kicking off the covers, it's clear outside and i can see the light of the partial moon illuminating the heavy frost that's on the grass. there are a zillion stars in the clear sky. i reach for my phone. what has the spray-tanned buffoon done now? has there been another school shooting? are those articulate florida teenagers winning or are they being snuffed out by old, stodgy white men? not yet, it seems, tho' they are trying (the stodgy men, that is). bob is snuggled between us, stretching out his long body, trusting that we won't roll over onto him. oddly, husband isn't snoring, which in turn makes me wonder if he's still breathing - i feel a rising anxiety at the thought that he's not and i flash back to a similar feeling when sabin was a baby. he is. as she always was. i don't feel panic at being awake, because i'm taking the day off. i can sleep in if i want. when it comes to it, i don't, because of that gorgeous sunrise you can see in the photo above. instead, i get up with husband and the child, who aren't taking the day off, and then i switch batteries on the camera and go out into the cold, clear, still, very frosty morning to capture that pinkish orange horizon. i breathe in great lungsful (lungfuls?) of cold, crisp, clean air. frannie follows me, rolling and flirting at my feet. molly trots over, her compact little body, covered in thick, grey tortiseshell fur. she stretches up a fence post in her version of a catlike sun salutation. freya eventually shows up as well, tho' i don't see where she comes from. her back twitches in anticipation that i will pet her. i do. i feed them all in the greenhouse and they eagerly dig in. i find it hard to leave the sunrise, it keeps getting more and more spectacular and intense as soon as i turn my back on it. so i go back to the edge of the trees and snap a few more photos. more than once. eventually, my hands are cold and my toes too in my rubber boots and i head for the house. i love the still, cold air. birdsong has begun and despite the frost, it sounds like spring. the birds have sex and light and warmth on the brain. i go in, light a match and put on the kettle to make tea. molly comes in with me, hopping up on her chair in the kitchen. it's her throne. i make a cup of tea and crawl back in bed with karl ove knausgaard's autumn. musings he ostensibly wrote to his unborn daughter, but which amount to deep, philosophical (a)musings on everyday things. tho' they are not poetry, they remind me somehow of neruda's elemental odes. i read a few and never do go back to sleep as i had hoped. i get up and do everyday tasks - laundry, unloading the dishwasher, reloading it, taking out the trash. there is a kind of time for thinking and processing in such mundane tasks, so i feel no resentment or frustration over them. i dress, put on some makeup and then it's time to go get the child. i have to run a few errands before she's out of school - grocery store, h&m. she's in a good mood - there's a party tonight for the whole school. and the sun is out, so her mood is vastly improved from the teenage stormcloud of the night before. we listen to the criminal podcast on the way home and she predicts the criminal's sentence before they even say it. she tells me that in addition to studying criminology and criminal justice in sunny arizona, she will likely go to law school as well. i have a moment of awe, observing who she is becoming and how much herself she already is. i feel more a witness to it than responsible and that feels like a privilege of which i'm probably not fully worthy. we drink aloe water - golden kiwi flavor - and pick up some more at the grocery store because it's delicious and it's on sale. we laugh easily about how much we love the feel of the little bits of aloe between our teeth. we get home and while she gets ready for her evening party, i lie down for a bit with a couple of cats. i don't snooze, but lazily check instagram and post a few of the photos i took earlier. it feels like a luxury. i take her to the train. she's happy - the sun is shining, her makeup is perfect and she's looking forward to a nice evening with her friends. i come home and husband is here, but he has a headache, so now he's lying down. i leisurely make a light supper of fishcakes and homemade remoulade. we greedily eat it all up while we watch john oliver and he makes us laugh and feel better about the state of the world. i sit at my computer and write this and husband surfs the auction sites - looking for an oven and stumbling across other interesting things...a vending machine (we could fill it with affordable art), some rugs and a couch that has potential. it's friday night. it's cold and clear and i am glad to be at home.

* * *

so tired of explaining things to idiots.

* * *

so glad i didn't have boy. 

tho' boys need feminism.

* * *

speaking of things i've been doing lately,

have you listened to the podcast i'm making at work yet?

i could work in my pyjamas every day

while i wasn't completely alone today, there was sunshine and time for a solitary walk. i also helped husband move a load of wood and getting out in the fresh air and stretching my limbs, doing something physical helped - i so often forget to reside in my body as well as my mind. aside from some hours of work (which, since i was home, i could do in my pyjamas), no one really expected anything of me. that, and the pyjamas, were very welcome. i found a little bit of time to read some more long read pieces that i'd been saving. like this one, which, like yesterday's, is also about home. and this one about anna akhmatova. what are you doing to find peace and comfort in this liminal space between christmas & new year's?

at home in my body

my "to blog" list grows, but alas, time has not expanded and it leaves me feeling a bit diffuse and out-of-focus. i always suffer when i'm not writing. but while not writing, my mind has been occupied. occupied by questions of home, being present in my body and dreams of making a podcast.

last weekend, in connection with an amazing art project that i'm participating in with our local art group, trapholt museum in kolding and trekantsområde, a danish artist and a syrian artist, we had an amazing discussion of what home means. it's a question i increasingly ponder these days, as the country of my birth displays distressing signs of madness on the political front. denmark isn't that much better, but they did just regain their status as world's happiest. this, despite rabid right wing xenophobes at the helm. but it all leaves me feeling, once again, a lack of a place that feels like home. at least identity-wise. and maybe i'm also feeling split since my work week is spent away from the house i call home. but that seems to be serving to make our actual house feel more like home base. the place from which i go into the world, stretch my wings (and my muscles at yoga class these days), and soar. i'm loving work and the fun things i get to do there - photoshoots, video shoots, chasing a lorry through the scottish highlands, casting, arranging, planning fun projects. so the split isn't a sad one. and maybe the conclusion is that i now have multiple homes - i feel at home at work and at home, in copenhagen and in the countryside, with husband on the weekend and on my own during the week. maybe we're multifaceted and we have many homes. perhaps the constant is me and thanks to my newfound yoga practice, i am finding home right here within myself, in my own body. and i honestly can't remember when the last time i felt that was, if i ever did.

that fact hit me the other day, as i stretched into minute 5 of a yoga pose, my inner thigh muscles screaming for every bit of my attention. i couldn't remember the last time i really listened to my body in that way. was attuned to it. that it had my full attention. that i was just there, in it, and nowhere else. i really don't know if i've ever been fully in my body in that way before. ever. in nearly five decades. we live so much in our heads these days, it's hard to be fully present in our bodies. but, now, after the major wakeup call of acute and sudden back problems, i'm working on it. and yoga is definitely helping. with regular practice, maybe i'll be able to call my own body home.

on travel and home and the passive aggressive nature of facebook

this morning, i read what suzanne (eggdipdip) wrote about home and going back and how the reality of your life is never as you imagined it would be. and i also read this charming little new yorker piece on guests, family and growing older by david sedaris. even before reading these i was pondering questions of family, home, visits, travels and belonging. 

last week, i got all bent out of shape at my sister, who hadn't shared any pictures, or more importantly, any stories, from the rest of their trip (they went on to london and paris after leaving denmark), except for a couple of iPhone photos sent from the road. for all i knew, she was still combing paris for some raspberry pastries that she had vowed to eat all of before returning home. i'd asked her a couple of times on facebook when she was going to start sharing her photos and got some smarty pants answer about how she was going old school and going to have them printed this time. 

the more time that went by with no sharing of stories and experiences and photographic evidence, the more pissy i became. and then it all exploded last week after she nagged me (on facebook) about not handling molly's kittens too much. and facebook, being the passive aggressive central station that it is, escalated things, until we were both mad at each other. and she was issuing "apologies" where in she said she was sorry that i was mad, not that she was sorry she hadn't shared any photos or stories. which is different than apologizing. and possibly could be classified as not apologizing at all.  ahh, sisters, they know better than anyone else how to wind you up. 

but the bottom line was, that i was feeling left out of the rest of the trip and at first it made me sad and then it made me mad. the timing wasn't right for us to tag along to london and omaha beach and paris, so when they left us after their visit, we had to live vicariously through their travels. and if the ones you're living vicariously through don't share what's happening, what you experience is far from vicarious enjoyment. 

then of course, she got home and life intervened and she didn't get the photos downloaded and sorted from various cameras and iDevices and soon several weeks had gone by. but you can never really know what it's like inside of someone else's home life, so if you're far away and not aware of how loan closings and baseball games and trips to the emergency room intervened, you just sit in your own home environment, which is calm and quite uneventful and wait. and grow impatient and a little bit pissy. 

which i guess brings me to what this all got me thinking about...that having visitors upsets the natural rhythms of home in ways that are both good and bad (tho' i will say that my family's visit wasn't long enough to have moved on to the bad part, tho' we could have done without the constant references to the 1990 miss south dakota pageant). a visit pushes you out of your usual routines - you look around you with a different set of eyes - suddenly noticing all of those signs with the word "fart" on them again and being reminded that that's hilarious. you end up filled with expectations, both voiced and unvoiced. and when it all goes back to the routine, you feel a little disrupted and restless. and it takes awhile to find your footing again.

it's the same for the one traveling, there's a re-entry period, where they jump back into life at home and maybe find there's not time to download all of those photos and look through to select the ones to share.   and meanwhile, you sit impatiently waiting to live vicariously through the rest of their travels, to let them transport you as well for a few moments, outside the confines of home. 

community building takes passion and hard work

i think a lot about community-building these days - both in a work and a volunteer context. this summer, when we were visiting the little town where i grew up, we had a chance to visit the local museum that volunteers are setting up there.

it's housed in a building at the north end of main street. i can't really remember what used to be in there - perhaps it was a garage that belonged to a car dealership? (it's been awhile and my memory is increasingly like a sieve). but that doesn't really matter.

what matters is that the community has come together to create a little museum, showing mostly what the town used to be like (as museums are wont to do). there are beds from the local hospital, mailboxes from the old post office, uniforms from hometown boys (and girls?) who have served in the military over the years, tools, machinery...

there are areas which replicate the local drug store, a local grocery store - which was still open when i was a kid, a home, the local newspaper (which i know a little something about) and they had just begun putting together an exhibit featuring the local jail.

there are all kinds of things which make you feel nostalgic, from bicycles to a horse-drawn carriage, to machinery, tools and even a lovely doll collection that a local family has curated and shared.

local artists have done murals depicting rural life across the decades. the town itself became a town in 1900 when the railroad came. a number of buildings were moved to the end of the railroad line from little towns in the area and platte was incorporated.

i can remember from my childhood that this linotype was still in use. i can picture my mom sitting at it, typing away. not too long after, they updated to some compugraphic machines that she had at the house in a back room. there were two of them (they're not at the museum) - one where she typed everything in, creating a long, yellow punch tape, which was then fed into the other machine, which created the set newspaper columns, which were then waxed and stuck to the page to be burned as plates and then printed into newspapers.

but the old-fashioned way, with type cases and heavy boxes of letters, was still the way it was done within my own lifetime and even my memory.

i do wish i'd learned now to run this press, because people are making beautiful things these days with such machinery (not that i'd be able to check it on a plane and get it to denmark very easily). i can actually still hear the sound this press made, just looking at it, and smell the smell of the ink. all kinds of posters, letterhead, cards, etc. were printed on it when i was a kid. it still works and could be used. if i lived back there, i'd learn how to do use it and do demos at the museum.

here's dad standing next to some of the machinery at the museum. i have a clear picture of him in my head from my childhood, standing up inside the press, fiddling with something or other, covered in ink. it must have been pretty frustrating for him when things weren't working, because he's not really much of a mechanic, but oddly i don't remember much swearing.

that big heavy, marble-topped wooden block table in the middle, i clearly remember standing at, stuffing inserts into the paper, the smell of ink in the air.  i rode countless times in the stationwagon as a kid when my mom drove every wednesday to nebraska to have the paper printed in o'neill before a cooperative printing plant was built closer to home. all those miles on winding roads with bags of freshly-printed newspapers in the back, bring back memories of being carsick and even today, if i take a deep breath of newsprint and ink, i still feel a bit carsick.

another display is of the local pharmacy - eastman drug. it was open when i was a child and the owner was the one who never let me live down calling myself snow white at the random bible school that time. i always dreaded seeing him because he could never forget that.  best about eastman's was that it had an old-fashioned soda fountain, with stools and ice cream and malt machines. that was awesome. there should be more of those around.

for me, eastman's was far more the soda fountain and far less about medicines, tho' looking at the bottles and boxes on the shelves in the museum is fun to see how far we've come. i wish packaging was still romantic and simple like it was, instead of how it is today with so much waste.

i also clearly remember little graff's grocery, run by mr. and mrs. graff. my grandmother liked shopping there best, because it was sweet, small and personal. grocery stores today don't feel very personal and you feel like you have to rush in and out as fast as you can, with your cart loaded to the gills. there was no room for carts in the aisles of graff's.

everything i love from antique stores was reflected in the model home - with an icebox and a big retro stove, wooden ironing board, hurricane lamp, nostalgic dishes. tho' i feel nostalgic when i see these things, i am grateful we have the kind of washing machines we have today.

so as i work on building communities around a new school and a new culture house, i think a lot about what it is that makes communities function. and every time it comes back to the people who are involved. danish has a great word for them - ildsjæl (fire souls) - people who are passionate, driven and care to get things up and running and keep them going. they're hard working, but they are driven by a sense of really caring. every community project needs a number of those.

a change of scenery

a lovely couple of days with friends and family.
in the midst of it, the sad and shocking news from norway.
which i'm still finding quite hard to believe.
it seems so unreal somehow.
incomprehensible.
like everyone else, i'm still processing what i think and feel about it.

but otherwise, i'm feeling relaxed.

it's good to get away.

but it's good to come back home -

to animals

and garden

and one's own bed.

time for reflecting on this project of ours.

this old farmhouse.

this garden, this simpler life.

and feeling at peace with it.

feeling it's right. 

even if it seems overwhelming at times,

how much work it will take before we're really there.

sometimes it takes talking about it.

and sometimes it just takes living it.

but best of all...

i feel a new surge of energy.

new ideas are being discussed

and some old ones are coming to fruition.

sometimes all it takes is a change of scenery.

even just briefly.

what to do on your staycation

eat strawberries (picked in your own garden) with plenty of cream

weed the garden.

go to legoland. twice.

pick bouquets of flowers from the garden.

make friends with a cow.

eat outdoors.

harvest honey from your own bees.

make lots of things from berries.

winter views - a study from two angles

sunrise - december 18

sunrise - december 22

sunrise - december 27

sunset - december 21

sunset - december 22

sunset - december 27

i think i have a new replacement for my troldebakken series - that was the tree-topped hill across from our old house. now, this is the view out front of our house. two views, really, one looking up the road and one looking directly across. in the first set, it's best when the horses are outside. and in the second, i especially love that wind turbine and the electricity pylon off in the distance. and the way a fog often settles in behind those trees. watching what the light and the weather conditions do is a really interesting process. so far, i'm pretty satisfied with the new subject matter.

is your ceiling holding you down?

i intended to write about chaos, but that didn't happen.
sometimes writing is like that.
but i decided to leave this chaotic picture anyway.

hairbrush abandoned on the couch.  all of the couch pillows strewn over the living room floor. a big pile of clothes cast aside after an afternoon of three small girls' game of top model (most hilarious thing i've overheard in ages).  bits of a loom stacked against the far wall. a basket piled high with various half-finished stitching projects. iPad propped up on a child-sized chair. Wii-motes on the floor. just another typical day in our depressing low-ceilinged living room.

i don't spend much time here. the odd evening spent before BBC crime shows. a bit of bunny time on the couch with sabin (and the bunnies). the low ceiling, the sagging wallpaper, holes in the wall, uneven window sills - none of it very inviting. i think it's part of why the room attracts chaos. people come in, they use it and they want to leave again. without putting things away.

leading me to believe that some places attract chaos (because the chaos surely couldn't just be me).

the dismal kitchen isn't really that much better and the ceiling there is very low too. i find i'm content to leave the dinner dishes on the counter, pans in the sink and the oranges in that red net they come in, rather than arranging them fetchingly in the big fruit bowl, like i used to do in my old kitchen. tho' i bought paint ages ago, i still haven't painted those calamine lotion pink cupboards. it just seems like more effort than it's worth when we'll be tearing it all down (hopefully next summer).

i noticed when i was in the philippines a week ago that high ceilings do something interesting to my state of mind. they make me feel calm and peaceful. i think better when i'm not pressed down by the ceiling over my head. i have more and better ideas.  i feel generally more expansive in a good way (not in dress size - tho' eating in the philippines can do that). i wonder if my much more boring less edgy subdued blog posts since we moved have to do with the low ceilings of my current surroundings.

and i think the only thing that makes it ok on a daily basis is that i know it won't be like this forever.  it may be like this for another year or so, as other projects call first...a water treatment unit for our well, a new electrical panel, a new sewage system, finishing the upstairs of the old barn...so many projects. and so for now we have to live with it. low ceilings and all.

or maybe it's just all toxoplasma affecting my brain.

travel and driving and thinking and antiquing

we drove for eight hours today along stretches of not-very-busy interstate highways. and tho' we had three kids in the backseat, they were pretty content with iPhones, a DVD player and a nintendo DS or two, so it wasn't a bad trip, aside from the begging to stop at all of the snack villages (courtesy of my youngest nephew, our family name for those well-stocked truckstops). but there were quiet moments and they enabled a lot of thinking and some crocheting (when it wasn't my turn to drive).

i can feel on this trip that i was in need of the change of scenery that travel brings - new impulses, new impressions, new thoughts. it just realigns you in a way that staying at home can't do (even if you've just moved, apparently). all of the new input brings fresh inspiration and new configurations in the way you think about things.

there's something about being on the prairie that makes me feel nostalgic. it's partially going back home (which will be covered in another post), it's partially telling stories to sabin, and partially the purposeful nostalgia that is wandering around antique shops, plus a little bit of laura ingalls wilder. it's the winds blowing summer grass and seeing as far as your eyes will allow and the golden light of a prairie sunset.

so during those moments in the car when i had time to think, i found myself mulling over the textiles i had seen in the antique shop, the care that had gone into the stitches and the care that had gone into displaying them - they were washed and bright and charmingly displayed. little bits and pieces of lives gone before, lives lived on these prairies - handmade lives. pieces of a time both gone by and one which we find ourselves yearning for to the point where we scribble notes about them in the notes app on our iPhones. so i was thinking of how to marry that nostalgia with the present. how to live with a foot in both worlds. and whether it's even possible....

there's no place like...

as i was packing up the bookshelves in the blue room, i took a moment to arrange these blocks against the beloved blue background. they're letterpress blocks from my dad's letterpress (why didn't i learn how to operate that when i had the chance?). i think they once assembled to spell the name of some or other horse that i had, and i've carried them around the world with me more than once. they're precious and i wouldn't want to be without them, even if they are occasionally jumbled into a box and not used.

moving brings on such mixed feelings. i'm excited and looking forward to the new house and all that we're going to do it to transform it into the house we'd like it to be. i'm going to love having our own lake and a lawn big enough to play football on (not that i want to do that, but knowing that i could is a good thing). space for a horse and chickens and maybe a truffling pig or two, oh and lambs. i'm so looking forward to all of that.

but i've loved this house too and we did so much to it to make it our own and give it our character and leave our mark on it. when we moved in, it was like stepping into a 70s time warp, even the garden looked like some evergreen-covered churchyard, full of low bushes that even looked totally seventies. we leave it transformed and we will miss it.

but as i said when i posted this picture on flickr the other day, we are not our house and we are able to make a home wherever we go. because the things that make a home are all of the things, packed with memory and meaning, that we take with us. even if it is a royal pain packing them all up.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...

from home to mars

aahhh, now THAT's how to start off your morning. a steaming pot of 2/3 earl grey-1/3 lapsang suchong. even better if it's made in a bright cheerful teapot that at least reminds you of the sun (since you doubt it will ever shine again). although the sun isn't shining, the special nordic spring light is coming back. it's most noticable early in the morning, which i suppose will change once we make the switch to daylight savings time.

we live on the edge of town. across from our house is a soccer field and a park where half the town walks their dogs and a little stream with a little footbridge over it. and small grove of tall pines that sing in the wind. but it is still in town. which is why i was so surprised to see that we have a daddy and two mommy pheasants living in our back yard. and even more surprised to see the male pheasant sitting rather high up in a tree:

the pheasant is the state bird of SD, where i grew up, but i seriously have never in my life seen a pheasant up in a tree. he looked awfully pretty with the evening sunset rays shining on him a couple of days ago (hey, that's proof of sunshine!).

i'm trying to appreciate my last week of hanging out around the house. over the past year, as a consultant with a fast consulting gig, i got to be at home a lot, since much of my work could take place here. it was such a privilege and i feel so grateful for the opportunity. i'll still get to work some from home, since i'm working in a different country from the one in which i live, but i will also have an office to go to here in denmark. i'm looking forward to being around other adult people. i'm ready for it. but i am trying to savor these last days of being at home. the kitchen is the room (other than the studio) that makes me happiest:

part of the happiness undoubtedly stems from the fact that it's clean, thanks to the wonderful aelita who comes every friday. which in turn reminds me of this 1924 silent film from soviet director protazanov--aelita queen of mars:

funnily enough, the music someone has put on this version is by the cleaning women

thankfully, our aelita has shown no signs of being from another planet:

tho' frankly, i would rather like dressing up like that. maybe we'll have to have a protazanov/mars themed party. it's just so charming to see a 1924 futuristic vision.

whoa, how did i start with my teapot and end on protazanov? that was quite a leap this morning here on moments of perfectly clarity. but, i never really know where the writing will take me. thanks for coming along for the ride.