the christmas rush

does the christmas season leave you feeling like this?

every year, i vow it won't. and every year it does.

christmas gift panic

would like to feel as calm and peaceful as this photo

every year, no matter what...no matter how much i declare this is the year to be frugal and sensible...every year, panic sets in around december 20. panic surrounding the christmas gifts i've acquired for those near and dear to me. did i get the right thing? the right size? is it the right color? will it arrive in time? but mostly, are there enough gifts?

why do i feel this way? if the gifts were chosen with love and caring, isn't that enough? why do i have to have this sense of panic, which drives me to run out and buy several more gifts in a kind of numb frenzy?

every year, i declare that i'm not going to let myself feel this way. and every year i fail. sadly, this year is no different.

fabulosity all around (and a giveaway)

i'm all for looking at the world differently, with fresh eyes, from a new perspective. wearing orange tights with red shoes and taking photos of my feet against the green grass in front of a snotty spa hotel in skodsborg while i wait for husband. but seriously, i have to draw the line somewhere and that somewhere is here.  apparently nancy reagan gets regular visits from ronnie during which he talks to her. i always knew the woman was nuts. tho' admittedly running the US by astrology does seem better in retrospect than the 8 years of the bush administration.

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A VERY BIG THANK YOU!! so big, i had to use actual capital letters, so that's big. thanks to all of you and your votes, my story will make the print issue of disco underworld. i quite literally couldn't have done it without you, so to celebrate, i'm going to give away one of my helleristning stones.  if you want to be entered to win, please leave a comment on this post. i think i will make an entirely new helleristning on one of my stones from my recent trip to norway, so this picture is just a sample. you will get a totally new, unique to you, very own helleristning. :-)

so, to review: leave a comment to win a helleristning stone on a stone from norway. it's my thanks to you for helping me make the print issue of discounderworld! and speaking of discounderworld, there's a new issue out now, full of cool people and things! you can go read it right after you finish reading here. :-)

my lovely assistant (i haven't decided yet whether it's sabin or husband) will draw the winner on friday.

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did you know that you're limited to 200 characters in labels? it's practically a tweet. i'm feeling restricted!

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and while i was sitting here, killing time waiting for magazine proofs and in between last-minute edits and trying to shoo a bumble bee out of the addition (they get totally confused by the big windows), the mailman knocked on my door. he brought me this:

a package from the fabulous (i know, i'm overusing that word, i can't help it, there's just so much fabulousity) lynne of wheatlands news. and look what was inside!

rocks and toys and cards, oh my!

and lynne's 82-year-old mom made the cards.

i love that!!

these are seriously cool toys!

husband is gonna love these.

and so is sabin.

i might have to hide them and play with them all by myself.

and each of these rocks is cooler than the next!

lynne calls us stone freaks rotsifarians--b/c rots is rock in afrikaans--i LOVE that too!

the flat one is from namibia

the others are from diamond diggings at alexander bay

the red one is a "red luck stone" because it indicates the presence of diamonds (cool!)

and the little one is covered in eyes!!!

i love the little beaded doll too. 

it appeals to my superstitious side.

THANK YOU LYNNE!!!

i love having these little pieces of africa right here in denmark.

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blog camp note:  don't forget about blog camp II scheduled for september 4-7 here in denmark. i have room for 4 and one spot is tentatively booked. all of you north americans should be checking ticket prices right now (i hear air france is having a sale (ha, bad joke, but i couldn't resist)). but seriously, there are some good prices out there, so do book ahead! and if you're coming all that way, we can arrange for spending a bit more time than just a long weekend.  there may be one more blog camp during 2009 in the US--we're in the tentative stage of planning a trip and just might make time for a few days of blog camp fun sometime in the autumn. stay tuned for updates on that one.

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don't forget to check out the latest issue of disco underworld now.

there are lots of cool and creative people featured this month!

giving space for the madness

tons of writing to do (no less than seven pieces to finish), so what did i do today? of course, i cleaned and tidied like a madwoman. no more boxes in the upstairs hall. all of the laundry is done, folded and yes, even put away! i even made a dent in the exploded bomb crater that is my laundry room. but did i finish any of those articles? no, i i did not. did i work on them. yes, but only a little bit. i couldn't sit still when there was so much tidying up to do. tidying up of the kind my cleaning lady doesn't do--she cleans, she doesn't tidy up. there's a difference.

i envy people who live somewhere where there are no ongoing projects. no sauna going up behind their studio, no beds to be planted in the garden, no hallway to be finished, no pizza/bread oven being built their garden which requires the occasional consultation with husband and our fabulous polish contractor who we would like to adopt, no cords hanging from the ceiling where husband is putting up some lamps. people whose houses are in order. they can come home, sit down, relax. they can breathe. they can have a glass of wine and spend an hour with their book.

you'd think with all of the time i spend at home, since i do work at home quite a lot, that i'd be one of those people. but i'm not. most days, my working at home really is a lot of work. most days, i'm really quite focused. today, it wasn't as much work and focus as it should have been, but that's because the deadline looms. later this evening, or tomorrow, the right amount of panic will kick in and i'll sit down and finish all of those pieces.

i'm trying to be patient with myself, to just let this thing that i always do unfold. and hope that it becomes something beautiful...

it's a mad, mad world

evidence that the world has gone mad:

apparently miss universe recently visited guantanamo bay naval base. and loved it. read more here. i can't bring myself to quote any more of it. but she's from venezuela. methinks hugo's not gonna like that.

150 people kill themselves in front of a train in the moscow metro every year. they call it the metro blues. although many stations of the moscow metro are really beautiful, apparently overcrowding and bad air quality are taking their toll. read more here (also from the independent, tho' i read it in my danish newspaper, information.)

politeness remains the norm in the departure email, even in trying times. i admit i'd like to read some really juicy stuff about really honest departure emails. anybody out there got anything good?

meghan mccain, daughter of the 600-year-old GOP presidential candidate blogs. i have a vague recollection of knowing this fact during last autumn's election, but i think i  blocked it out.

todd palin in esquire magazine. hello people, it's over with the palins! their 15 seconds are up.

bushy eyebrows are back. (tho' i admit to not knowing who half the people in those pictures are.) that's like, so 80s. and if you already lived once through the 80s, you don't wanna go back.

random wednesday

i love the rainbow-colored S-train. it makes me happy just to see it. they're usually just plain old red, but a few of them are rainbows. almost makes you like the public transport. and speaking of public transport, i started off my first week of birthday resolutions by speaking to a stranger on the train. in denmark if people speak to someone they don't know in public, they are either drunk or mentally...ahem, shall we say...diminished...in some way. true to form, the woman who spoke to me, while high functioning, was clearly not all there. but, it still counts. even tho' she initiated the conversation.

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gerber daisies were 3 bunches for 50 kroner (that's less than $10!) at magasin. it made it feel like spring or even summer, even if the wind was pretty biting today, despite the sunshine. they look perfect in my ktichen, tho' they got a bit droopy on the long train ride home (made longer by some signal problems that meant we sat between the main train station and dybbølsbro for an inordinately long time):

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i ordered some acrylic waterfast inks from dick blick art supplies in the US the other day, a big whopping $20 worth and they sent a quote on the shipping today (thank goodness they actually sent it for approval). they have the skills of a fence post in finding reasonable shipping. their offers were $38.08 for fed ex or $29.75 for the slow boat USPS (2-3 weeks, they said). all for something which can't weigh more than a few ounces. are they completely mental? do they think they can just take advantage of stupid foreigners who don't know any better? who are they trying to fool here? i'm positive that it wouldn't take more than $10-12 to ship to me and it could be here in a week to ten days with regular international mail.  i think it is a really crappy way to do business, making up what are perhaps too-low prices on the actual items on shipping costs. madness. i'll harvest some squid myself, thanks. 

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sabin's big (half)sister has been hanging out here all week. normally she comes only every other weekend. she's 17 and you'd think it was a pain in the patootie to have a teenager in the house, but with husband in north carolina, it's pretty good having her around. she's made dinners and snacks because she wanted lessons in making The Pasta dish, hummus, and spanish omelette. so lessons she got. easy peasy for me. and she's a sensible, good kid. i hope sabin's this easy when the time comes. 

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that's all i got today, folks. turns out this going to work on the train and sitting in an office all day is kinda tiring. hope your wednesday was less random than mine.

now you see it

saturday was snowy and icy and it was steadily snowing in the evening as we drove home from sabin's best friend's birthday party. then, it warmed up overnight and the snow is nearly gone now 24 hours later. what a difference a day makes!

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and the creativity continued this weekend:

18.  felted soap. yes, you read that correctly. i felted a bar of soap for the upstairs bathroom with beautiful rovings bought last year in this etsy shop:

19.  and i also felted some stones that we collected on our winter beach trips during my sister's recent visit (more about that tomorrow):

i love how they look and even more how they feel, tho' husband and our best friends teased me mercilessly, especially when i took 78 pictures of them in different locations with different cameras and different lenses. there's just something special about the heaviness of the stone under all that wooly brightness.

i also made some fabulous bread, but didn't get to photograph it because it was devoured immediately. bread recipe over at just know where you are.

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and on saturday, a whole lot of TtV photos:

hope you spent your weekend on something worthwhile.

wish me luck

i'm going to ikea.

if i return, i will write a real blog posting. if i do not survive the experience, i want you to know that i loved you all.

terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

husband woke us up an hour early because he'd forgotten change his alarm clock to winter time. it rained. the fireplace wouldn't start. i got my writing done, but it sucks. the hotel website won't load, so i have no hotel for tomorrow. my right elbow started to hurt--kind of a lot--for no reason.

it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

i went to get fabric at the fabric store from hell. actually, it's a very nice fabric store, as far as the fabric is concerned, but the help are all deeply unhappy and wish they were somewhere else, so the atmosphere there isn't good.  that's actually when it really started to go wrong. my mood was definitely dragged down after being there.

i found out my sister is, for some reason unknown to me, on some strange spiteful vendetta against me. actually, the reason is known, it's just too stupid to comprehend. it's because i didn't answer an email to a RANDOM STRANGER that she GAVE MY EMAIL ADDRESS to PUBLICLY ON TWITTER!!! so when said random stranger tells her this today, she emails him back and says this:

"Yeah, weird deal.  I made the introduction thinking you'd have interests in common with her, but she had one of her knee-jerk reactions.  She freaked out at the horrible thought of me giving away her super-secret email address to a would-be serial killer in Central Iowa, though you'd have to cross an entire ocean to go about your crime against what, an email address?  So I got in big trouble for trying to introduce you.  My apologies for the wasted time. Turns out you wouldn't be that interested in knowing her, I guess."

and how do i know this, you ask? because she thought it would be amusing to forward it to me. i guess she knew i was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day and just wanted to help out, in case it was getting brighter.

let me ask you, was it really so wrong of me not to want my email address broadcast on twitter or twinkle or whatever her iPhone version is to everyone within a 150 mile radius of bum-fuck, iowa just so some random stranger could have it and get in touch with me? somehow, i just can't find a way for that to be ok in my head. nor can i find any explanation for my sister's behavior towards me. fine to email him back and say what she said above, it's a free country (for now), but why add the spite by forwarding it to me? why would someone want to be totally disloyal to their only sister and then rub it in her face? i guess i'm just too simple to understand it.

then, just when i thought it couldn't get any worse, i just flipped back to my gmail--home of said address--and it strangely asked me to sign in, saying my email had been deactivated!! causing my blood to run cold (honestly, now i understand what that means). then, i tried again, signed in and had to do one of those little random alphabet thingies and then it went in! WTF? how can all of this happen in one day?

and right when things were looking up a little, because i had just had fun making these cards to put in the mailboxes all along our street, letting everyone know that we're having a children's halloween party on friday night and that they should expect some small trick-or-treaters to be coming by (we have to warn them because this isn't a traditional trick or treat country).  and i had had fun because i got to stamp on the cards and then play with fire--because i burned the edges (my first successful encounter with fire all day).

so now, i think i'll go to bed, i have to get up early and fly to oslo. terrible, horrible no good, very bad days don't happen more than one at a time, do they?

the road to hell..

...is paved with good intentions.

and as the party looms before us, i can see all of my monday good intentions going out the window.

i'm now thinking things like:

1. it's ok if the real floor isn't in the writing house and if the walls aren't painted.
   
2. where can we stash boxes of crap out of sight because there's no time to sort through them and put them away?
3. should we just take them to the dump since we haven't used them for a year anyway and didn't really miss them?
4. my sister can help me take all those bottles to recycling when she gets here.
   
5. mom can make the bread.
6. and the sauce.
7. do we really need to paint the doorframes one more time?
8. cushions? who needs cushions?
9. will anyone appreciate that i ironed the tea towels?
10. why did i use precious time ironing tea towels?

do you think the guests would mind if we ask them to paint?