the quiet time between christmas and new year's

these long, yet all-too-short days between christmas and new year's stretch out before me, nearly half gone now. i'm working, listening to hours of interviews we've done for the podcast i'm working on at the moment. but there is also time for some long reads, like this achingly beautiful story of home and belonging by jamila osman. these dark, wintery days have that quality where time seems to slow down, after hurtling forward at breakneck speed for most of this year. i can feel that i needed that. but i can also feel that too many days of togetherness are taking their toll. i need some alone time. i find myself feeling irritable and snappy. i love my family dearly and we've laughed, eaten some good food and played cards together endlessly in recent days. but i need them to go away, just for a few hours. or i need it to stop with the relentless rain so that i can go for a long walk. to be alone in my own head, with only myself and maybe my camera for company. perhaps tomorrow it won't be raining...

alone time

being alone? how much do i love thee? let me count the ways...

~ eating spinach for dinner (i start by sauteeing an onion in butter, add spinach and a little dash of cream).
~ i can talk to the cats.
~ using cat voice (not that having other people around holds me back from that).
~ humming to myself and talking to molly in the greenhouse as i plant a few more things in pots, water and pull a few weeds.
~ listening to podcasts instead of watching television or netflix. check out the latest mini season from the heart. binge on millennial, new to the radiotopia family.

~ taking dozens of pictures of kittens.
~ mowing the lawn (while listening to the aforementioned podcasts).
~ folding the last of the laundry (the last of the laundry is such a welcome thing).
~ the privilege of a first read of a friend's novel.
~ talking to my dad in my head as i pick asparagus.

~ picking a lilac bouquet, bringing it in and enjoying the fragrance.
~ going to yoga for two hours every evening during my work week.
~ silence.
~ letting go of negativity and negative experiences...watching and physically feeling them float away in my mind's eye.
~ feeling in touch with myself, physically, emotionally, creatively and psychologically.

~ buttered radishes with a sprinkling of flaky sea salt as a snack.
~ appreciating my time together with others so much more.
~ being consciously happy.

* * *

what do you do when you're alone?

kittens make everything better

there's a lot of crazy out there in the world. some of it is messing about in the ukraine. some of it controls an area of iraq. closer to home, some of it runs the local school. and some of it apparently buys horses for its children in denmark without putting an acceptable amount of investigation and thought into it until it's too late and then they panic and spew all that crazy in your general direction.

we sold sabin's horse matilde several months ago and apparently the new owners didn't get along with her, so they sold her on (that's their prerogative, tho' i'd have preferred to be left out of her madness). i talked to the new owner a couple of weeks ago and answered some questions she had. then today, it became apparent that that new owner didn't really get along with her either, as i was contacted by yet another new owner who apparently passed a whole new level of madness test (seriously, this horse never attracted madness before to our knowledge), tho' i didn't pick up on that at first. for one, i spell way better than she does in danish (which doesn't say all that much for her) and for another, she's a stark raving mad lunatic who, i suspect, is illiterate, because she doesn't seem to have understood a word that i wrote to her. she has morphed a one-time hoof abscess into asthma (really?) and regular massage sessions into undisclosed issues (possibly related to asthma?). unbelievable what desperate, illiterate morons with too much disposable income will get up to. and subject total strangers to.  i can only hope that this too will pass. and that i will learn from it that i should not try to help people, even when they ask for help.

thankfully, i have kittens to play with. because despite what the cat trolls say, it's ok to live in a first world country, have kittens, take good care of them, find good homes for them in the end, but love and photograph them like crazy in the meantime. kittens really can right a whole lot of what's wrong with the world.

just call me greta garbo

it's friday evening and i find myself blissfully alone. husband is attending a party in stavanger and the child took the train over to the other side of the country to attend a sleep-over with her best friend. so it's just me and the cats this evening. and a nice bottle of south african chenin blanc (with just a hint of voignier, as it brags on the label). and possibly a nibble or two of goat cheese.

i am in need of quiet. of my book. of my knitting. of a bit of frivolous television. i must charge up for tomorrow - an event i've been planning and working on for weeks is finally happening. there were wrenches thrown into the works all week and one big one today, but it's all ok now. i am a superwoman problem solver, despite my lack of a cape. as we say in danish, det ska nok gå. but first, a blissful evening alone. those are few and far between, but very, very welcome.

happy weekend, one and all.

* * *

an incredible story of a family who lived isolated for 40 years in the russian taiga.

talk about self-sufficiency.

there comes a time...

in all of my work-at-home weeks, i always reach a point when i think, "today, i shall bathe and get dressed and go forth among people. i shall put these sweatpants and this t-shirt that i've been wearing day and night for the past 3-4 days into the laundry basket and put on real clothing--like tights and a cheery dress. i shall behave like a human being today." it helps if the sun comes out. because cloudy, windy, rainy days only promote my hermit-like tendencies.

and then i was reminded of a place that could well be termed hermit heaven. it's called meteora and it's in greece. it's inland in north central greece, in a strange moonlike landscape, where these porous, harsh, rocky hills suddenly stick up out of the flat plain.

in this strange and rather mysterious place, monks built countless monasteries, high on the peaks.

eight-ten of them are still in operation and open to the public (if you like to climb), but there are many ruins around on outcroppings that look like they must have been impossible to reach. they are, to my imagination, impossibly romantic in their isolation.

there are countless more little caves hollowed out in the hillsides, where individual hermit monks went to be on their own. undoubtedly wearing the same thing for days on end and muttering to themselves and resenting intrusions, much as i do around here.

although i'm not fond of heights, i'm attracted to the idea of being somewhere where the only way to get there would be a ladder like this...

because you could see whoever was coming quite a long ways off.  and the sheer difficulty of it would put most intruders off.

i've been there twice, but feel its allure pulling me back, probably due the amount of time i spend alone, but also because it's a wonderful and mysterious place. maybe that's where we should go this summer.

but first, i should probably get dressed.

it was a dark and stormy day...

blame it on the moon

Rxbambi tagged me earlier this week to do a list of six things that get me pissed. initially i was going to make a list of my favorite kinds of gin, but then i realized it wasn't that kind of pissed.  on that particular day, i was feeling that the world was quite rosy and couldn't actually think of six things, but let me tell you, now i can...

1. big sisters using sabin's mobile - sabin's big sisters have their own mobile phones, but they always go nuts texting all of their friends on hers when they're here, because theirs are the pre-paid card kind and they don't want to use up their own SMSes. i'm normally fine with this because we've got an unlimited SMS plan on sabin's phone, she doesn't use any herself and so it seems ok that it gets used. UNTIL....i learned today that they had subscribed to some stupid spam-like SMS thing that repeatedly sends you texts about a hummingbird and it costs 15DKK every time. that's $3. which translates to $36 a month. which pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. especially because i hadn't looked closely at that bill and it's now the 3rd month the charge appears there (so much for my attentiveness to bills, eh?). i hadn't looked at it because sometimes sabin calls my norwegian number when i'm in norway and i thought it was just that. it wasn't. grr.
2. whipping wind - it's been blowing steadily for two days and i'm really. really. really. tired. of. it.
3. people who send an invitation to a party (that's not a wedding but just an ordinary dinner party) three months in advance - i have no friggin' clue whether i want to have dinner with you three months from now. call me the day before. fokken danes.
4. sexist misogynist dinosaurs in shipping - i don't actually encounter them very often, but when i do, it pisses me off like nothing else. do. not. underestimate. me. just. because. i'm. a. girl. or i shall plant this jessica simpson stiletto squarely in your eyeball.
5. Thuesen Jensen - they're the danish importer of Kitchen Aid products. they have no web presence--their "website" goes to an eLearning log-in thing. they are impossible to contact, no phone number, no email and they are absolute rubbish at service (which one supposes is why they are impossible to contact). they are giving Kitchen Aid a bad name. i have on two occasions now had a problem with the Kitchen Aid food processor i bought last summer. and twice, instead of just giving me a new one and then dealing with it on their end, they made the shop send it in, taking nearly a month to fix it both times. so, i've been without my food processor (which i use regularly) for two of the eight months i've owned it. i just got it back again, with a new bowl on it. why didn't they give me that the first time they took it, since it was the same problem both times. i really think Kitchen Aid should know how bad they are and what a bad name they're giving to Kitchen Aid. i only know their name because i dragged it out of my local shop. and now, i hope that this reference to their name comes up the next time someone googles Thuesen Jensen, because they are complete and utter crap and should have their rights to import Kitchen Aid taken away. when someone pays 3500DKK ($700USD) for their fokken food processor, they expect it to work and if it doesn't, they expect to have a new one that does work inside of about 3 minutes. end. of. story. it better stay fixed this time, or you all will be reading about this on a daily basis. (sorry to threaten you when i'm really threatening them.)
6. people with the wrong priorities - certain family members recently failed to be there on two big occasions--mathilde's confirmation and the party celebrating aunty M's dictionary. i think that's really friggin' selfish and egotistical. you can put off going to your precious summer house where you go every weekend all summer long for things that happen only once in a lifetime. how often does a young person get confirmed (if they're not baptist or whatever)? and how often do you celebrate the culmination of ten years' work? get your fokken priorities straight. there are certain things you are simply obligated to do. these two things were prime examples of them. 

hmmm...it seems like it might be that time that rolls around every month when husband gets really annoying. why do you suppose he does that? speaking of him, where is he and why isn't he making me some dinner?

perhaps i need that gin list after all:

1. hendrick's
2. beefeater crown jewel (in the purple bottle)
3. g'vine
4. bombay sapphire
5. beefeater 24
6. the local indian gin i had one time in chennai (believe me, it was the only good thing about chennai)

on that note, i think i'll go check out how we're fixed for tonic. i know i just bought limes...

greta garbo moment

there are entirely too many days off during the christmas holiday in denmark. it all starts the december 24, which the danes think is christmas, although in truth it is christmas eve and in fact, they even CALL it juleaften, which can only be translated as christmas eve, but still they open all of their presents that day. it continues the 25th (first christmas day--and what the rest of us, who can read a calendar, like to call ACTUAL christmas day) and the 26th (second christmas day, or boxing day, as the canadians call it (not sure what that means, but i do like the idea of it, even if i sometimes accidentally call it wrestling day in a fit of sports confusion)). then, this year, came a weekend on the 27th and 28th. so five whole days of everyone being around underfoot. and i was sick during all of it. then, there were two days where people could have ostensibly worked, but why go to work when it's only two days and you have six weeks of vacation to use up? then it was new year's eve and seriously, who wants to work that day? obviously on new year's day, there's no working, there's just the recovering from the party the night before. and today, which could have again been a potential work day, it's already friday, so why go to work? that would mean showering and shaving and dressing and inconvenient things like that. and then, it's the weekend again. and have i had any peace? any alone-time? any quiet? you may guess that i have not.

and i have grown accustomed to my alone time. for the past year, i worked mostly from home, so i had whole days all by myself in the quiet of the house, with the music i wanted to hear playing in the background. i had at least from 8:10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. alone every day. and apparently, i became dependent on that alone time, because all of this togetherness is driving me a bit batty. there's always noise of some sort...whether it's supertramp (it's a disease husband has and i don't really know how to cure it), or the Wii, or the 600th episode of hannah montana. now sabin's big sisters, who live mostly with their mother, are back and that makes her all chirpy and excited and she never, ever stops talking. and they watch hours of inane crap on MTV, which used to at least play music videos once in awhile, but apparently has stopped that in favor of all kinds of "reality" shows about celebrity homes.

on the whole, it has me feeling tetchy and generally out of sorts. it doesn't help that the laundry has piled up, the bathroom sinks need cleaning, the floors need sweeping, the christmas tree needs undecorating, and we're totally out of foodstuffs (the grocery stores were closed many of those above-mentioned days) and are reduced to toasting the mold off a couple of heels of bread because at this point, frankly a little antibiotic action would probably be good for me.

and i did both bathe and venture out today, along with six gazillion other people who were also out of pasta and milk and eggs and green vegetables after days and days of being holed up in their houses with their families. and, contrary to my desire not to consume, i bought nearly $200 worth of groceries (we were out of EVERYTHING including toilet paper and laundry detergent), some embroidery thread, printer cartridges and a pretty white macbook laptop for K for her birthday, which was new year's eve.  how am i ever going to draw all of that? especially if no one will leave me alone along enough to concentrate on it?

do you sometimes just want to be left alone?