we have signed the child up for a trip to st. petersburg with something called the ungdomsskole (youth school?), it's a public institution that's associated with the regular schools and they run a whole bunch of different after school activities and trips for kids from 7th to 9th grade. this is the first time they've planned a trip to st. petersburg and believe me, it shows. it seems that those organizing the trip haven't got the first clue about what it takes as far as visas and advising which clothes to take and how much money to take (they advised that the 12-13 year olds have a good selection of credit cards with them). and tho' i'm normally a very laid back traveler, this time it's driving me absolutely mad (both in the sense of crazy and of angry).
they even changed the dates of the trip slightly, but haven't published that anywhere - their website still has the old dates. they claimed to have sent the children who are signed up a text with the new dates, but both my child and her friend, who is also going, have received no such text. they guy in charge continues to insist they did. such a stupid lie is unnecessary. just admit you're a bit disorganized and didn't get it sent. don't keep lying about it when we can see the proof right there in two telephones. what's really stupid about it is that we need those correct dates for the visa application.
in order to get the visa, you have to have an invitation letter from someone in russia. in this case, the hotel where they will stay. only then can you fill out the application and apply for the visa. oh, and you must deliver the visa application to the embassy in person, you can't send it in. the embassy won't really say exactly how long the visa takes - if you pay extra, you can have it in 4 days, but it's likely to take anywhere from 7 - 14 days to get it if you don't pay extra. since they are set to leave october 15, time is ticking away. do you think we've seen the invitation letter from the hotel? no we have not.
do you think we've gotten a convoluted mail with some instructions about health insurance cut & pasted into it from the russian embassy website? yes, we have. is that the most important thing? no it is not. do you think this is causing me to pull out my hair? well, you would be right about that.
they held a meeting for the parents and the kids who are going on the trip on tuesday evening. i couldn't go, as i went to the salon allison park evening. but husband and sabin went. they met the three adults who are going on the trip - one is a bossy belorussian, one is a russian from st. petersburg who doesn't share a common language with the rest of the people going on the trip and one is a danish guy who was apparently heavily bullied by the belorussian throughout the course of the meeting. they showed some kind of only moderately informative power point with some pictures of what they would see and talked extensively about which credit cards the children should bring. they may have had some advice about what clothes to pack, but husband didn't write that down. he did, however, write down the following:
they will see: * 4 shoe stores * 6 candy stores * 1 newspaper kiosk they will spend 3 days in their hotel room.
nothing about culture was mentioned.
they are responsible for buying their own lunch, tho' breakfast and dinner are included.
this does not help me keep my hair. tho' i'm pretty sure most of it is a joke (except that thing about the lunch). he also drew a strange little picture of what appears to be a llama peeing. but i'm not sure what that has to do with the trip.
at this point, i actually have my doubts as to whether the trip is even going to happen. i want it to happen. i love the idea of my 12-year-old seeing the hermitage and the winter palace and the peter & paul fortress. i want her to walk the streets of st. petersburg and soak in the onion domes and see the canal where rasputin's body was found and feel the history that is lurking in every corner. all of this even tho' i am a moscow person. that flock of amateurs had just better get their act together and make this happen. a flock of amateurs, that's one of those danish phrases that maybe does translate.
sabin hereby purchases poppelvej 24 (our old address and what she decided to call her treehouse), y17 belch city (bøvseby) for the totally crazy sum of:
25 danish kroner ($5)
according to the transaction and ownership of the above-named, the following apply:
~ a key will be delivered with the deed.
~ adults may enter the property, if they ask nicely and bow deeply.
~ the fireplace (outside, in front of the treehouse) may be used by the owners of the adjacent property if they bring a small oak tree as thanks.
~ no trumpets may be played after 5:23 p.m.
~ no cows, horses, buffalo, starfish or whales may be kept on the property.
~ air balloons may not land on the roof of the building.
~ the building may not be moved to ground level, but must remain a least 1.5 meters over the ground, but no higher than 30,000 feet.
~ only far (supermann) can make structural changes to the building.
~ sabin may decide the interior decoration of the building and outdoor areas and does not have to do what her mother says with regard to these areas.
~ the building may be painted on the outside if far (supermann) says that it's necessary. sabin can choose the color, but it must be either swedish red, black or green.
when everyone has signed below, and the 25DKK is paid, this deed is in effect.
signatures from buyer, the king of belch city (bøvseby) and the sweetest mother in the world.
* * *
husband is such a keeper.
the treehouse has already been taken into use as a center for secret potion production, harry potter-stylie.
first, thank you to everyone for your sweet comments about husband. he really is that cool. and maybe it was a little bit bragging to write about him, but i don't write about him that often, so he is a bit of a well-kept secret. of course he has faults, but they are pretty minor...he can misplace keys like no one else i know (except maybe this girl), he puts away dishes as if he doesn't live here and then when he's not around i can't find anything, and he has an uncanny knack for losing (and getting back) his wallet. and yes, he is pretty cute.
oh, but there is one more fault, i really wish he'd do something about his teeth...
*graininess of picture due to not having changed very high ISO setting from nighttime photography the evening before...and thanks for the teeth, TFM. :-) they were a big hit.
* * *
just wanted to share a bit of the stitching that sabin and i have been working on. i love so much that if i'm doing something, she wants to do it too. while i've been stitching on my circles, she's been embroidering free-form flowers in rainbow colors on squares of linen (you can also see, thanks to new giant-sized pictures, that she got a bit of chocolate on this one):
she's also embroidering bits of fabric to white linen. we've decided we'll incorporate all of her embroidery into a little lap quilt for her to use this winter when she's watching t.v. like her mother, she's a sucker for a nice blankie:
it's relaxing to sit and stitch while watching our nightly episode of a touch of frost on TV2 Charlie, the old people channel. i'm still working on my liberty circles, watching them unfold and waiting to see what they become, a process which i feel uncharacteristically patient about...
i got my bits of liberty fabric in this etsy shop, all cut into little squares already for quilting, i just trimmed them into circles. i haven't seen liberty fabrics here in denmark. i was inspired to search for liberty fabrics by the fabulous and übercreative margie of resurrection fern. (aside: über seems to be my word of the week, eh?)
but last night, i began on another little pair of capris for sabin. she loved the embroidery that we did by necessity on the blue ones after she ripped them, so we're doing some embroidered patches on these as well:
i love the design of this heather rossmendocino fabric (we've got it in blues too--no surprise there, tho' i do wish her fabric company would use higher quality cotton, it's a bit thin for my taste, but the design makes it worth it anyway). i ordered it from this etsy shop--fabric worm. they ship super quickly and it's at my doorstep in no time. i have to order it online since i've not seen these fabrics here in denmark.
we're going to a birthday this evening and it's about an hour's drive away, so i've packed my stitching supplies into my sweet little tiny happy zip bag that the wonderful kristina gave to me at blog camp.
i haven't even had the heart to take the tiny happy tag and kristina's MOO card off of it. it seems so fitting to use melissa's bag for my stitching supplies, as she is an embroiderer extraordinaire. i hope a little of her embroidery karma rubs off on my work.
* * *
i have to share the cake (#60 in the evidence of creativity) i made yesterday for our neighbor's birthday. our neighbors are a lovely retired couple who are like grandparents to sabin. they love having sabin hang out there and sabin loves to be there, and it makes my life much easier, so as a thank you, i made a strawberry meringue layer cake from nigella's forever summer cookbook, for else's birthday.
don't look too closely at those slightly burney edges, the instructions said to leave the cake in the pan to cool, but i think it was just a little too long in the heat of the pan for the delicate meringue. dang, these big pictures really magnify faults, don't they? moving on quickly to the next picture...
sabin picked the rose and the lavender in our own garden. our strawberries were finished, so we did buy the strawberries for it, but got some of the last danish ones of the season down at the green market.
* * *
i'll leave you with this lovely, summery song, by Goldfrapp, which i found thru sucae sounds. i hope your day has the feel of the day in this video and frankly, i hope mine does too:
i actually had a different secret all ready to go for today, but then husband just expertly threaded a needle for the child. with a 6-strand embroidery thread. a task i momentarily thought him incapable of. because even after more than a decade, i sometimes forget how domesticated husband really is. he can thread a needle, load the dishwasher, cook a wonderful meal, paint the walls and ceilings (even especially the fiddly bits where the line has to be really straight), measure and hang pictures so they're perfectly straight, arrange the liquor cabinet artistically, hang wallpaper, comfort a sick child, doctor a wound, and carry a stuffed tiger all over dublin. these and many other things that are normally done by the woman of the house.
now, lest you think he's rather effeminate for a viking, i can assure you that he does all the manly man stuff too...lifting heavy objects, building no less than six buildings/sheds in our garden, roofing, mowing the lawn, digging, transporting one part of the yard to another part of the yard, gutting and then entirely rebuilding our kitchen (this took a rather inordinately long time due to about 600 other projects going on simultaneously), lifting and removing an ungodly heavy old radiator, building and then tending the green house, ordering bugs online for the greenhouse (then releasing them there, because i certainly wasn't touching them, i hardly wanted to open the mailbox), killing spiders, salting slugs, opening difficult to open jars and bottles of wine, digging a hole under the stairs big enough to bury a body in (huh, what?)...
oh, and he really is a viking. or at least goes sailing in a viking ship on a regular basis. he's in the red shirt and the rockin' gap hat kinda in the middle.
he does tho', have worryingly girly taste in alcoholic beverages. every time we ordered the guiness and the bulmers cider at our local pub in dublin (we went there three nights in a row, that makes it our local, right?), they handed him the guiness and me the cider and it shoulda been the other way around.
but best of all is husband's sense of humor, best expressed here, in the selection of axes he left out for us when i arrived home with the blog campers.
in short, husband is a keeper. and is pretty much the reason that polly and seaside girl decided at blog camp that they wanted to start a new i need a danish man blog. girls, when are we going to get that up and running?
husband is incredibly patient. it's one of the many reasons that he's a keeper. this boy has absolutely stunning patience. he can toss a ball and swing a jumprope for hours. he can direct large groups of small children through intricate treasure hunt after intricate treasure hunt, patiently gathering up the stragglers and making sure they have fun too. i love to watch it, even while i know it's utterly impossible for me.
but the best example of his patience is a little teeny tiny oak tree in front of our house. it's about half a meter tall now. he calls it the thousand year oak. and he doesn't mind that he won't be here in 1000 years to see it (at least not as who he is this time around). we found it in the woods a couple of years ago when it was about 20cm (8-ish inches) tall. it still had the remnants of the acorn attached to its fledgling roots, but he carefully brought it home and planted it (in kind of a dumb spot) in front of the house, next to the driveway. and he thinks it will be a magnificent tree that will still stand there in 1000 years, but it's just beginning its 4th year now.
we make fun of him for it, but i kind of hope he's right.
sabin went home with a friend to play last friday after school. when it came time to pick her up, i realized i'd not been to that friend's dad's house before and i didn't know where it was, so i had to call him and ask the address. when i called, he said that the girls were about to grill sausages and so i could wait 'til later to pick her up. ahh, the sudden freedom of a few extra hours to myself and from the responsibility of having to have that friday evening meal ready. bliss.
husband came home rather late and we started some coals for our own dinner and then went to pick up sabin. her friend's dad lives a little ways out of town on a small farm. they have two ponies and a couple of extremely wooly sheep. he was in the midst of cutting up a couple of old trees that he had knocked down with his big giant digger machine thingie (i think that's the technical term). i wish we'd been there to see that. he had a big bonfire going and it was there the girls had roasted sausages for dinner. yum. there's just something so good about food cooked outdoors.
while we were waiting for the girls to finish up playing, we got to chatting with the dad. he asked if we'd like some of the wood. husband couldn't believe his ears--free wood for our two woodburning stoves! how cool is that? so he eagerly accepted and spent the entire weekend going back and forth with a trailer and pretty much cleaning up those two trees.
and he had plans for them, that didn't just involve them ending up as firewood. husband often has grand schemes in the garden. like a little fireplace area for roasting marshmallows and bread on a stick (snobrød, in danish):
and using some of the thicker bits of tree stump to line a new vegetable bed in the upper garden:
we have serious slug problems here in denmark, so we always have to think about raised beds and areas of sand/gravel that slugs don't like around the outside of the beds.
another cool thing that sabin's friend's dad showed us was an old fiat abarth that he had recently finished restoring. i'm not really into cars and know very little about them, but this was just too cute:
the light wasn't great in the garage, so these shots aren't as good as i'd have liked them to be. but you can see from the person standing at the back exactly how TINY this little automobile is. i know mr. bean's car was a morse mini, but this reminded me very much of mr. bean. he started it up and it was LOUD! it would be SO much fun to go down the road in it. super cute.
it was a glorious weekend. sunshine and definite scent of spring in the air. time spent with an old friend i hadn't seen in ages. freshly-baked bread for dinner. a major clean-up/air-out of the studio. gathered a whole lot of stones on the beach (some of the ones below we had before, so not ALL of those in one go), but plenty of new materials/inspiration.
why yes, that is a metal basket full of rocks hanging out conveniently just outside my studio door.
do you think it's possible to fall madly in love with a rusty old pickup that's sitting by the side of the road?
gorgeous polish embroidery found at det blå marked in haslev. major treasure!
evidence of sunshine in my studio today. it looks so beautiful shining on my sari. i had the sari out, looking at and wondering if i should just have a bollywood party or turn it into something else...
and these, the coolest (and starting to be biggest) 8-year-old feet on the block. she's so hip with her red converse all-stars.
and the first report of brazil just in from husband: "so far, brazil looks like the balkans in the jungle."
i found that hilarious beyond belief.
if you've been to the balkans, you would too.
more tomorrow. our time changed today, so i'm going to try to adjust.
so far, it's been great, but i'll be sorry tomorrow morning.
