finding happiness

pondering happiness quite a lot in the face of the excitement of moving to the other side of the country (which admittedly is like moving from one side of wisconsin to the other and not as big as it might sound). husband is like a little kid anticipating christmas. he actually fell asleep last night with a smile on his face. he's covering reams of paper with sketches of the possibilities for renovations. we're now betting on two horses, as it were, and have given an offer on a second place, since the dog sled transport to northern canada is apparently unreliable, or else the laid back realtor hasn't actually sent a dog sled or any thing else, as we've heard nothing regarding our first offer. not being ones to wait around, husband has now talked himself (and thereby both of us) into the second place being better anyway. and he's right, there are more possibilities for ripping out everything that's there and putting it back in as we would want it.

now betting on this one as well. what's cool is that there's a lake on the property.

and although the first thing it needs is a new roof, that does afford opportunities not afforded by the other place, which recently had a new roof, although the engineering calculations surrounding that new roof are openly suspect in several places. so i think husband is right, the second property is better for us anyway. but my point actually is that even just talking about all of this is making us so happy.

leading me to think about what happiness is. it's an eternal question, isn't it? and we're eternally in search of happiness, tho' i'm not sure we always recognize it when we see it. for me, it's something different than contentment. contentment is a mild, tame form of happiness. a resting, easy thing. whereas, what i think makes us happy, makes us really tick, is having some enormous, seemingly impossible, daunting project on the horizon. i can definitely see that in husband. he's transformed and positively beaming at the prospect of this project. of course, it's also his new job that's transformed him - he was more than a little bored and frustrated at work and just going through the motions. he's looking forward to his new job, but even more, to the new house and all of the possibilities it represents.

these projects also remind me of our strengths - i can see things in my mind and he can build them. i pick colors, he paints them. in other words, i get all the fun and he does all the work. i guess i'll probably spend another summer with no kitchen, cooking on an old stove out in the yard and eating lots of salads. maybe it'll be time to try that raw diet i've long wanted to try. perhaps it will clear my mind so that i'll make good choices on all of those colors that we'll need on the walls in the new house. whichever one it ends up being. at least the waiting paralysis of last week seems to have passed and an excited, expectant happiness has stepped in to replace it. and that makes me very happy.

what made you happy this weekend?

a need for focus

kristina suggested that we do a week of blurry shots on across ø/öresund. she's so good at finding ways to get out of the doldrums brought on by a too-long and too-slowly-waning winter (in fact, she's been doing a whole series on it on her blog of late). and it's interesting how difficult i found it yesterday to go out with my lens on manual focus and allow myself to purposely take unfocused shots. of course i take shots all the time that aren't perfectly focused, but to do so intentionally is something different. at first, i had to also take every shot focused as well as the unfocused one and then i realized that was arguably a symptom of my growing obsessive compulsive disorder (put the pens back in color order, people), and so i took a whole bunch of totally unfocused shots and didn't allow myself to take a focused companion. really weird how difficult and awkward it felt at first. like any new thing, i suppose. but it got a little bit easier as i went along.

and it's interesting how this little assignment underlines exactly how i'm feeling this week - unfocused. i have so much to do that it's really quite silly. i think it's the waiting. we still don't know whether they will accept our offer (i guess the dog sled has not made it to the canadian arctic circle to ask the one party as of yet) on the house and husband's still waiting to see the nitty gritty details of his two job offers. and waiting makes you unfocused. there's so much i could and should be doing, but instead, i spend hours making mosaics of my flickr faves, drooling over heather's home on apartment therapy and stirring up a mushroom and fennel risotto. yeah, i got some laundry done, but once it's in, it requires little from me but the switch from washer to dryer. i could have been packing books or sorting out the attic, but i didn't. and i'm sure that later, when i'm pressed for time, i'll regret it.

spud and bee and blanca got together in london for mini blog camp on sunday and they had a discussion of life plans. blanca has one. spud and bee do not. i think a little bit that my lack of focus is because the life plan of moving to a farm with space for a large garden and a couple of horses that we developed over the past year is actually starting to come true. at least on the meta-level, of course, the details are to be worked out and acted upon. but once you fulfill your life plan, what's the next step? you need a new life plan to replace the old one that came true. i think the picture above is the perfect metaphor for how i feel right now. some bits in focus and some not so much. i need to get those focused bits out of the way and zero in on the fuzzy ones, developing them further. and it leaves me feeling restless and impatient.

we're really going to do this all again

trucks will come with supplies

things will be built

you see, we've put in an offer on this place and it needs quite a lot of work:

don't mind the iffy bricks, they're part of the barn.

REALLY a lot of work.

waiting on pins and needles to hear whether our offer is accepted. and in the meantime, that slavedriver of a husband has gone to pick up boxes, so i guess i'll be packing this weekend. i wish i could just get some pretty shoes, click the heels three times and say, "there's no place like home..." and just be there. :-)

room for a pony

two days. eight properties. so many thoughts swirling in my head. i think i've narrowed the 8 to 4. and can safely say that two are totally and completely out. another one, i didn't actually get to look at due to it being inhabited by germans with whom i shared no language and the scattered disorganization of the agent responsible for the property.  and one ruled out based on the fact that i drove past the wrong one (tho' that one was great!) because someone had written down/told us the wrong address.  and i bought a truly fabulous orange coat (hangs head in shame at violation of year of not buying things) at an outlet i stumbled on just east of the middle of nowhere.

but how DO you decide which house to buy? there are so many factors at play, it seems overwhelming. we want a horse (danish law says horses are social animals and we have to have two, so actually, we want two). we want enough land for said horses and for a big garden. we want a nice barn. we want a house that although it might need some fixing up, is livable in the meantime. we want it to be within a reasonable distance to work and school and grocery stores. we don't want to be too far from other people, but not too close either. we don't want there to be a highway planned through the middle of the property. we want it to be a good neighborhood without too many originaler. there should be a riding school nearby. it should be big enough for my coming fabric shop/café/blog camp HQ. there shouldn't be bits of it falling off. we shouldn't wish that it came with a bulldozer.

the ideal property would actually be the land from one i looked at, the house from another and the barn from a third. where i grew up, my parents found the land, built a basement and moved in the house and barn from other locations, so they combined the things they wanted in one place. i'm afraid with large brick buildings, that's not going to be possible here. so we're going to have to make the decision the old fashioned way. by talking about it endlessly and thinking really hard. sigh.

next steps

i didn't really think that much about how i'd feel when the house was sold. and although the paperwork isn't all signed and agreed, we have an offer and it looks like we can agree to it. so it seems that for all intents and purposes, it is sold. and i feel at once excited and happy and eager and a bit sad and wistful. and wondering how it will all fall into place.

it seems that newly white hallway did the trick.

* * *

strangely, my iMac went all weird this evening and i'm in the midst a total reinstall. thank goodness for backups on the Time Capsule. tho' i'll lose the photos from the past couple days, since i turned off the backup three days ago, when i was tired of the noise one day. not sure what went wrong, but i'm hopeful that all will be well when the reinstall is complete. lesson 1: back up your computer! lesson 2: make sure you have a macbook pro along with your iMac so you're never computerless. :-)

checking out the neighborhood

this enormous sculpture stands at the end of the road which leads away from one of the farms we're looking at. i made husband stop so i could snap a few pictures with the zoom lens from a distance. it stands in all its strangeness on a little hill, with a small shack beside it. i didn't realize it 'til i got the photos home on the computer, but if you look closely down in front just outside that rope that's fencing off the sculpture, there are many little plastic dolls arranged in strange ceremonial homage in the grass.

and just as i was wondering what on earth it was all about, i opened my local newspaper and there was a story about the place. it was done twenty some years ago by an artist named edwin westergren. a swede by birth, he was adopted or at least raised by a family in denmark and ended up on a farm near the large sculpture, making his art. his sons live on the place now, among the now rather overgrown remnants of his sculpture. one son, who looks to be an older man himself from the pictures in the paper, goes around to kindergartens with his soulmate (his words), spreading the joy of native american music to children. as one does if one is an older danish man from the quiet side of the fjord.

it appears we could be moving to an interesting and rather colorful neighborhood. we're taking our favorite polish carpenter (who we would still like to adopt) with us to look at it this weekend, so we're getting closer. we'll just have to hope those people looking at our house this weekend appreciate the new, clean, white, no longer red or artistically balkan, pristine hallway (don't worry, it'll be done by the time they come on sunday). we did leave the maps on the ceiling. we have to have something that's us in this place, we do, after all, live here.

back later with my first week of calendar art journaling and how it's going on that simplicity project. and do be sure to check out the blog camp 365 pool on flickr. it's going very well! and it's not too late for you to join in!

a time warp

i'm thinking of chickens and eggs and which comes first and putting all of one's eggs in one basket and all of those egg-related clichés. 

we've been house-hunting this weekend. we haven't sold our house yet (we're not worried, it will sell and it's being viewed regularly, so no problem there). we don't want to buy another house before selling this one - we've heard far too many horror stories of people who did that and sat with two mortgages for far too long and we're not going to put ourselves into that situation. so maybe it's silly to look at houses, because what if you fall in love with one and then it sells before you sell yours and you have to look all over again? and you always think "what if?" about that house that becomes ever more perfect in your mind, for being out of reach?

on the other hand, if you look at houses, you know what's out there and you get a better idea about what you like and what you want. we looked at 3 places this weekend. one of them, we'd really like to have. we looked at it before and they've actually even just lowered the price. it has a lot of promise and we think it might be The One. we looked at two others. one that is enormous and has a lot of potential, but was also likely to be a complete money pit. the last one we looked at wasn't the house for us, not at all, but i'm very glad we looked at it.

the house is owned by an elderly widow who lived there since the early 50s. her husband, who died 7-8 years ago, was swiss, so there was definitely a whiff of the swiss chalet over the place, with small curlycues around the wooden door frames and phrases in german etched in wood hung here and there on the house. i didn't have my camera with me, as it was again a dark and rainy day, but i don't think it would have felt right to snap pictures anyway, not with her there, weeding and digging in the garden despite the rain and the fact that she must have been well into her 80s. you can see some pictures here on the website, but they have clearly done a major photoshop job on these, as it's never been that light in this house. ever.

the house was like stepping inside a time machine. they had decorated way back when they moved in and then the clock stopped. heavy wooden furniture, dark wallpaper, maidenly twin beds in the bedrooms, a lace-topped baby grand piano with a complicated piece with a german title laying open, low ceilings, vaulted walls, small colored-glass windows. it was like a museum, with both the objects of a museum and the hush and that musty, old smell of ancient books and linens.

stepping back outside, i had to shake my head to bring myself back to 2009. it really felt like entering a time warp. and that was both fascinating and a bit sorrowful. it was so strange to think of an entire lifetime lived in that house, being held there between those walls, preserved, an imprint of time. surely there were memories layered there in the books on the shelves and doilies on the elaborately carved, very upright couches. hints of an earlier time and an earlier sensibility - one both accessible there and yet incomprehensible in some sense.

i wonder if one day someone will look at our house and think the same? will we stand still like that? how does that happen? is it a question of money? or stubbornness? or lack of awareness? what is it? the lady seemed very tough and spry, out in her wellies, doing hard labor in the garden on a rainy sunday. i both admired her and felt resentment radiating off of her. she must have been sad to be facing that she could no longer take care of such a large place, its barns full of beautiful old horse-drawn vehicles and chickens and the detritus of more than fifty years. it must have been hard for her to see people traipsing through her house, trampling her memories with those blue protective plastic covers on their shoes. it made me feel sad and yet i also indulged some of the strangely attractive kitsch that is nostalgia. nostalgia for something which i never experienced, but which was obvious there in the very fibers of the place. i wonder how many of her memories would echo there in those walls, long after she was gone. does a life lived so long in one place leave a heavy imprint that cannot be erased?

such heavy thoughts on a rainy, grey day. so i lightened my mood (and hers), by buying fresh eggs from her, a whole tray of them. and she smiled at me when i told her i wanted some eggs and for just a second, i think it was ok for her that people were looking at her house.

houses and homes

i wish someone had shown me this picture years ago. because then i might have had some inkling of what i was getting myself into. this is my dear husband at the age of 4-5, building his first house. and today, husband still loves doing this, tho' it's not what he does for a living. it does seem to be in his blood.

we built onto our house last year, as you know if you've been reading MPC for some time. we also built (or at least started) no less than six other structures in the garden, one of which is my beloved blue room/studio/writing house/atelier/dacha. you would think that the relief of having that behind us would make us lean back, relax and just enjoy it. if husband really wants to work on something, there is, after all a half-finished sauna to get on with.

however, his little boy builder's heart and mind have moved on. and he now has it in his head that we need to move to a large old farmhouse. one big enough for more than one family so we can share this big place and thereby reduce our environmental impact on the world. i won't go into all of that right now and we are writing about it over here if you want to know a bit more of what we 're thinking. what i will go on about is house-hunting.

in my mind, this dream is a couple of years away (i'm not quite ready to leave the beautiful room we built-on here, nor am i ready yet to leave behind what i see as the perfect kitchen). but i will admit that after we have looked at two available farm properties in the past two days, i'm thinking that i can move things up in my mind. because your house is not who you are and if you are good at making a home, you can make wherever you live into your home. and it would really be quite nice if where we live had a barn for a couple of horses. and was a bit older and more charming than our current house, which was built in 1968.

neither of the two places we looked at are yet THE place, but looking will help us shape what THE place looks like. interestingly, both of them had an air of sadness over them, tho' for different reasons. both were on about 6-7 acres and were from the early part of the last century.

at the first one, the man who owned it showed us around. he was a sweet, smiling and eager person (probably because the house has been on the market for 374 days) and it was clear that he had loved the house and knew it inside and out. he had lived there since 1967, raised his family there and was finding it too large for his needs. we couldn't exactly determine if his wife was still alive but there was a definite woman's touch around the place - antique dolls and a big beautiful old baby buggy - and a woman's leather jacket hanging in the front entry, still, we weren't sure.

the house had a feel of having been loved and taken care of, but the last updates of carpets, floors and the kitchen had happened back in 1967 when they moved in, bringing their grandparents' furniture. husband is normally very able to look past all of that, but the shock of the ancient furnace (clearly predating their moving in by some 25 years) was a bit difficult to look past. it also had that old smell and i don't mean in a good way, like a used book store smells old. it was the smell of paint that hadn't been refreshed in 40 years. and although it was as clean as could be, it was the smell of dust. an old smell, not musty exactly, just the preserved air of 1967. and it left me a bit sad, tho' the owner wasn't a sad person at all - in fact, he was smiling and upbeat and enthusiastic and clearly loved the house.

today's house was a bit more interesting and closer to what we were looking for, tho' they had added on a very strange, cobbled together addition at some point, clearly without the assistance of an architect and quite possibly using bits and pieces they found at the local dump. and that bit happened to contain a rather new kitchen (which, in my view, would completely have to go, as it was awful beyond belief - the absolutely epitome of bad taste in every aspect). there were, however, two 350m2 barns attached that i could picture myself filling with horses quite easily. the air of sadness in that place was because it was clearly the former home of a family that had disintegrated. the wife had taken the kids and moved out and the husband was still living there, half the pictures gone from the walls, rooms half-empty, save two big-screen televisions. you could tell it was just a house now and no longer a home, if indeed it ever had been a home.

i wonder if all of the places we look at will have some air of sadness about them? it will be interesting to see...in the meantime, i wonder if husband can have the sauna finished in time for blog camp 2.0?