2017 - just the highlights (and a few lowlights)

january - the first weeks were a blur, as i recovered from my trump-induced jaw infection. but i was better just in time to go back to the states and participate in the women's march in washington, d.c. the day after the spray-tanned satan's inauguration. sharing that experience with old friends, husband and the child was unforgettable.

february - coming down from the high of the women's march. it's such a dark month in these northern latitudes, but there was a trip to the uk to do a bit of reconnaissance for later film shoots. i also gathered the girls for a much-needed drink & draw evening. since for me, it's really about the food, i made homemade ramen. yum.

march - brussels for a few days, showing off our lego ship in front of the european parliament during european shipping week. a bit of quality molly time in the greenhouse. i popped down to the shipyard in germany where we were building two new ferries. i had a bit of time for creativity - making soft guns for our spring exhibition with the theme of paradox. oh, and i might have turned fifty.

april - the child went to prom, the garden went in, we had rhubarb coming out of our ears, and we did a grueling three-country shoot for a video. while we were waiting, we managed some fish & chips in cleethorpe, a rather traditional little seaside english village that tasted slightly of faded glory and sadness.

may - probably the most action-packed month, as you can see from the mosaic. two weeks in the us, doing major cleaning in our mother's house - there were tears and laughter (that was just spreading dad's ashes in some of his favorite places), a reunion with old greenie, dad's boat, that my sister bought back for $100, kayaking with mom and a hurried trip to a doctor to have a throat abscess drained (no photo of that, thank goodness) just in time to fly home to denmark. back home, the first kittens awaited us, along with the garden and glorious yellow canola fields. there was even time for a weekend project - painting an old chest with the wonderful annie sloan chalk paints. and i tried the fabulous gasoline grill burger for the very first time. simply the best burgers in the world, hands down.

june - a yoga retreat, mark-marking, a reunion with old friends, gardening, seeing lea thau, my favorite podcaster speak at the royal library, wildflowers in the ditches, gorgeous kittens and the first meals from the garden - potatoes, strawberries, swiss chard and kale. yum! spotting some perler-bombing in copenhagen and lifting the world's largest lego ship down into the dry dock at the maritime museum of denmark. in all, pretty eventful and good.

july - a holiday in lithuania - it's a hidden gem in europe, i tell you. highly recommend! then home to berries - blackcurrants and red - and kittens growing up and more kittens being born. and a blissful three-day ceramics course with the fabulous nina lund. my hole-y rock collection grew and i found a creative way of displaying it on a rusty old piece of wire i found and there was yet another trip to film in the uk.

august - filming the lifting of some seriously big objects and working with an awesome team. then back home to the garden in full swing. a kickoff trip for a new team sailing back and forth to oslo - pretty cool when you get to use your ship as a meeting room. then MORE kittens - this time, charlie had six - that was too many and so we resolved it would be her last batch. a wonderful weekend getaway with my creative friends down in højer, a new-to-me corner of denmark - it rejuvenated my soul after a rainy, cold summer. and lastly, a wonderful visit from an old friend who we met when we were in macedonia.

september - bob is growing up so fast. i prepared for an exhibition of my photos at the local library. we visited hjerl hede, a museum with examples of houses through time on a rare nice late summer day. a return to the yoga mat after too long an absence. quality cat time. a trip to the beach with another lego friend. some pretty regular work in my art journal, which i took up again after the retreat at the end of august. and some autumn flowers from the garden. and rounding out the month winning a european digital award in berlin for our lego ship project. awesome, except for the 12 hours it took to drive back from berlin.

october - the leaves started to fall. but there was time for some sunny days in the garden in the company of my garden kitties, molly and her granddaughter bella. the first of the amanitas. an apple tart. time spent reconnecting with old friends (and bunnies), some additions to the wardrobe, enjoying the comfort of kittens after slicing my finger on a french press that exploded in my hands and sent me to the emergency room for six stitches. more quality time with cats. and another reunion with an old friend who gave a wonderful lecture on creativity. it occurs to me that this may have been the year of reuniting with old friends! that's a rather magical realization of putting together this end-of-year look back.

november - husband ran for the city council, as a member of a new party. alas, he didn't get in, but he learned a lot from the campaign and he showed that he's not just going to complain about the politics, but do something about it. there was much time spent with the best batch of kittens we've ever had - frannie outdid herself with these lovelies. but now they've all gone to their new homes and are being loved there. a tiny little project was worked on, but more about that in the new year. gemma and gretchen - it was hard parting with them, but i can't keep all the kitties.

december - the darkest, rainiest, coldest month. but still there was joy - in the form of a whimsical monkey from skinny laminx, a hilarious "welcome" mat, handmade gifts to myself (earrings, a candle holder inspired by some primitive church paintings, sweet little wonky blue pots), an irresistible seasonal highlighter from chanel, learning how to make flødeboller and a lot of time spent in the center of copenhagen, working on a passion project that's also part of my job. for my christmas present, husband made great progress in the kitchen and we actually cooked out there on new year's eve! love the orla kiely wallpaper we chose for the backsplash! and just before christmas, we went out and chose a tree - bickering all the way, as per tradition.

when i think about it, 2017 seemed hard - i think because of the relentless awfulness of the madman at the helm. it wasn't a year in which i slept all that well. but when i look back at it like this, in pictures (and yes, i'm still taking a daily photo, tho' most were with my iPhone this year), it was also filled with joy and laughter and pleasure - much more than i realized. i bid it farewell with more affection than i thought i would. and greet 2018 with open arms. happy new year!

i resolve not to resolve

with the dawning of a new year, i always ponder whether or not to make resolutions. i'm not so good at them, you see. and so i was thinking that this year i'd make some that i can keep...like drink more wine, watch more netflix, eat more and exercise less, never dust, buy more stuff. those would be pretty easy. but is that what i really want? i could throw in a harder one, like "start smoking," which would be a bit of a challenge for me, since i really have no desire to do that. but i wonder if those are actually resolutions at all.

but still, the blank slate of the new year beckons new thinking.

we could spend the summer as vikings, dressing the part, going from one of those viking festivals to the next, cooking over open fires and learning to dye wool with nothing but pee and wildflowers. husband wasn't that keen on this idea, since he's got a new saw of which he's rather enamored and was thinking he'd need an awfully big trailer and a pretty long extension cord to haul it around to the viking festivals.

we could volunteer to help with the ebola epidemic in africa. but alas, we have no medical training and who would feed the horses and provide the service level the cats have come to expect while we're away?

i think about going on a writer's retreat and getting serious about that book. sadly, i fear it's already been done (tho' i wouldn't have made up some crap about "disney sex" if i'd written it).

maybe i just need one of those silent getaways where you don't speak for a week.

or perhaps i just need to reread my own manifesto and leave it at that.

when my cooking mojo returned and we ate our way into 2013

the holidays returned my cooking mojo to me. i will admit that it had been a bit lackluster around here in the kitchen of late, but a brined turkey stuffed with rye grains for christmas and a new year's feast of epic proportions (i didn't get shots of the 6 different appetizers) changed all that. i'll be blogging all the recipes on the long-neglected domestic sensualist blog in the next couple of days.

but i will admit it leaves me feeling like i may never need to eat again. or at the very least, that a detox is in order. maybe i need to unearth my juicer.

here's hoping you all had a wonderful new year's eve and are enjoying the beginning of 2013.

goodbye 2012

and the sun sets on 2012...and this is my 2012th post. i don't have anything profound to say. no big resolutions. no big revelations. no big reflections. i've read some good books this year. i've made some good food. i've had some great conversions and laughed a lot. i've done some things i previously didn't dare to do and i should undoubtedly have dared more (or believed more). i took photos every day, but i didn't really progress anywhere in my photography. i loved some cats. i spent time with horses. here at the end of the year, i went on a buffy the vampire slayer marathon (more about that soon).  in short, 2012 was another year. full of ups and downs and in betweens. i learned. i grew. i wasted some time and i used some time wisely.

perhaps a declaration is in order (tho' i'm still unwilling to call it a resolution)...i intend to believe more in 2013. and do more of following husband's example and just working on through at those moments when believing wears thin.

happy new year, one and all. may you eat good food and spend it with people who make you both think and laugh. that's what i plan to do.

the flow of laziness

jægerspris slot

the home of some or other countess danner who was the mistress of some or other king

(undoubtedly named frederik or christian).

she surely spent a lot of time in a state of somnambulant laziness,

hanging about, waiting for the king to show up.

i've very unwisely spent the next-to-last day of the decade in a state of somnambulant laziness. i slept in 'til almost 11 (bliss). i braved the grocery stores, just as everyone (including myself) was hamstering (direct translation from danish) for the days ahead when the stores are closed - but i was so relaxed from all that sleep that the lines and the crowd didn't even bother me. i bought food for a new year's feast. i made homemade lemon curd for a passion fruit roulade that i'm going to make tomorrow. i picked up some great hummus sandwiches from sundwich, a local sandwich place. mid-afternoon, we watched hercule poirot (he really gets a lot of grief for being belgian). i baked a loaf of bread on which i sprinkled sunflower seeds. i did four art journal pages in a state of total flow (thank you clary sage).

and i did it all in a very advanced state of relaxation. because i know that we're not running around with anything that we HAVE to do for the next few days. we're making our own leisurely new year's dinner tomorrow - some gorgeous madagascar prawns (was so relaxed i didn't even think about food miles). a beautiful beef roast with all the fixings, the aforementioned lemon curd and passionfruit roulade, a bit of champagne - just for ourselves. after all of the running around and hectic feelings of christmas, we're bringing in the new year in an utterly relaxed style at home. and i guess i've reached a point in my life where that sounds just perfect.

here's wishing all of you exactly the new year's eve you'd like.

the naughty noughties

what a decade it's been. we've gone from monica lewinsky to sarah palin. ken starr to osama bin laden. clinton to bush's non-election in 2002 to obama. from the Y2K scare to the triumph of the iPhone. september 11. the asian tsunami. wars in afghanistan and iraq. from the skeptical environmentalist (bjorn lomborg) to an inconvenient truth (al gore). from the matrix to avatar. it's been an eventful decade.

my friend zuzanna wrote not long ago about all of the words that are forever changed by the decade, so i won't repeat that, tho' i did argue in a comment that the word "bush" is forever changed. we do things differently now than we did at the beginning of the decade. we blog. we google. we tweet. we have clever phones and GPS and digital photography.

although i think that forty is the new thirty, i spent the prime years of my life thus far in the noughties. i had a daughter. i accidentally worked for microsoft. i traveled the world. i had a good decade. but i'll admit, i'm ready for the new one to begin. i'm ready to leave behind the excess. the striving. the constant accumulation of more stuff. i think the decade ahead will be a simpler decade. we'll do more for ourselves - growing more of our own food, learning more, remember more of how things were once done. we'll return to a place where we can simply do more things for ourselves (sewing, canning, making cider are on my list). or at least that's what i hope.

i hope a lot of other things too, but only time will tell.