the view...

...from sunday night.

~ chickens can fly way better than you think.

~ weekends are too short.

~ ticket to ride is the best game we've come across in a long time. it's a real, old-fashioned board game, where you sit at the table as a family. kind of risk meets the railroads. awesome.

~ so many good books, so impossible to read them all at once.

~ it's really good to have horses on the property again.

~ a smattering of snow makes a huge difference on how light it seems outside.

~ there's a lot of violence on buffy, but most of it seems necessary. it's what happens when you live on top of a hellmouth.

~ i'm glad i don't live on top of a hellmouth.

~ it's lots of fun looking at brochures for brand new cars. neither husband nor i have ever had a brand new car. it'll be the first in our family in generations. and today, we ruled out the ford. and by we, i mean husband, because i didn't go along and didn't want to. tho' it's fun, it was way better to stay home making things together with sabin.

~ facebook can be fun at times. and really make me laugh.

~ pinterest has ruined the acronym DIY for me. (i may have mentioned this before.)

~ whenever i do an outdoor activity with husband (helping him with heavy lifting, stringing an electric fence), it makes it feel like we are really in this together. not to say that i don't otherwise feel that, but i feel it acutely in moments of manual labor. and on friday nights when we talk over our week over a bottle of good wine and a nice dinner.

here's wish you all a good week ahead. i've got that sunday evening feeling and i'm ready to face it head-on.

things i don't get...

there are many things i don't understand, but i thought maybe throwing out a list of the ones vying for attention in my head at the moment might help turn off the obsessive counting thing that's also going on in my head (what is that about?).

...how the sun has shined for ten days straight in denmark without that ever having happened previously in the nearly 13 years i've been here.

...why they say global warming is a bad thing (see above).

...why the victoria & albert fabrics weren't hotter than they were.

...sherbet pips mania (even as i admit, i fell for it too (can you say charm packs?)).

...photoshop textures (there should be a law against using too many at once).

...the popularity of said photos on flickr.

...what it is that makes a photo popular on flickr.

...why we don't regularly wear hats.

...botox.

...why they stopped making boston legal.

...why the people in this house are completely unable to return the kitchen shears to their rightful drawer.

...the incomprehensible vanity of pretentious "poets." (wish i dared to provide a link.)

...why both the mailwoman and the garbage man skipped us yesterday.

...how i managed to take about 50 photos in bright sunlight at 3200 ISO.


getting all that out should help the counting somewhat.

*  *  *

this is very clever.
and this is making me long to go to istanbul.

and here's what the new blogger dashboard looks like:

i hope it comes  to all of you very soon, i love it! tho' the new compose space is a bit more word doc-like and thus slightly intimidating in all of its space, but i'm already getting used to it. and i do wish the labels would pop up with suggestions from your previous labels, like it did in old blogger (i'm still hoping they fix that). there's also that thing that it's back to publishing posts at the time you began them, rather than the time you hit "publish," which is a throw-back to way, way old blogger. i'm also hoping they fix that.

so far this week...

~ i bought a product called "hobby skum," which in and of itself, i never thought i would do...not imagining that scum could ever be a hobby. but with it, i made this little mattress to make sabin's built-in bench more comfy:

bench for watching t.v. in sabin's room
it has storage underneath (which isn't quite finished yet)

~ i finally got enough of those little styrofoam bead thingies to fill the handmade fat boy beanbag chair for sabin's new room. you need WAY more of them than you think you do. so many, in fact, that i maybe should just have bought her a real fat boy. she's always got it out in the living room, tho', as you can see here:

iPhone AND iPad in action.
super cheerful blue fabric from Ikea

i got these fabulous new cheery postcards from syko on etsy. you may know her from her scandinavian stitches book.  a little late afternoon sunshine broke through onto them, just as i took this photograph. i'm all about brightening up my environment these days in an attempt to make spring come faster.

i began to read an article that i thought was about the fashion culture of holy warriors, but which turned out to be about how they dare to be suicide bombers. and here, i thought leave it to the danes to want to discuss jihadist fashion during copenhagen fashion week. the misunderstanding arose from misreading the danish modkulture as modekultur for the linguists among you.  it actually was a very interesting article about a woman named ann-sophie hemmingsen who recently finished her Ph.D. on the attractions of jihadism in which she investigated the reasons that young muslims raised in the west turn to extremist branches of islam and are willing to give up their lives for the cause. turns out it's not out of any burning religiosity, but more about finding a group with a strong identity, being part of a counter culture and feeling like they belong. hmm. sounds pretty human to want those things.

~ i spent a good number of hours today without electricity, since a nice electrician was here, changing out our 1940s switchbox for a modern one with fuses and everything. i thought i would be paralyzed if i couldn't use the internet or the sewing machine, but you know what? i was just fine. and had plenty to do.

~ i marveled once again at the superiority of the british when it comes to crime shows. last night, it was a new one i hadn't seen before: criminal inspector banks. just excellent - strong, complex characters and a great story. no dazzling camera tricks and no one was wearing prada.

~ i found husband's growing stash of screws and nails. and let me tell you, i clearly do not yet have enough fabric.

~ speaking of fabric, i had a strange conversation with my mother in which she did not understand my fabric stash. she, the queen of stashing in general (jello or cake mixes, anyone?), claimed she had never bought fabric for which she didn't already have a project in mind. i was incredulous to say the least. and i refused to send my half yard of robert kaufman metro cafe mixers, even tho' she was going to sew something for me. happily, i found an etsy shop with some left and had it sent to mom so i didn't have to part with mine.

~ i learned listening to the radio that our DNA is 4% neanderthal. that explains so much.

what have you learned this week?

random list of happy things

happy right now...

~ about bright colors of paint in sabin's room.

~ that in my dreams, i can confidently use parts from one polaroid to repair another.

~ that in my dreams i apparently have a  polaroid.

~ that the t.v. is off and the only sounds i can hear are the cat purring and myself typing.

~ that i have a big stack of fabric i just cut to begin a new quilt (#3 this year) tomorrow. this one's in red.

~ that my sister's friends are way weirder than my friends (case in point: one of them, who is not jewish, is holding a bar mitzvah party for her husband, who is also not jewish. isn't that just weird? and possibly objectionable or at the very least culturally obtuse.).

~ new moo cards are on their way.

~ that i did all of the items on my list today except for one (and no, there were not only two items on the list).

~ that matilde (our horse) is gleefully covered in mud and loving it.

~ there was a bit of sunshine today.

~ i went running this afternoon and am amazed how much energy it gave me.

~ and i didn't die of a heart of attack by the side of the road (you know i usually run only when chased).

~ sunset well after 5 p.m.

~ bloggy lists to clear my head.

hope your day was full of small happinesses.

letter from home or just another random list to clear my brain

stepping in and taking a look around, brushing a few cobwebs out of the corners, killing some flies...and i'm back! we had a wonderful vacation and it was great seeing friends and family and horses and kitties and antiquing and taking 2,795 photographs (not including film), but i'm glad to be home. we came home to a sold house (as you undoubtedly gathered from the goodbye poppelvej post) and are very soon the official owners of one that needs to be torn down. the wheels are in motion on that front as well (turns out it IS possible to rent a bulldozer).

i realized today when i was feeling irritable and rather restless, that it was because i haven't been writing. writing is how i process all the stuff that's going on and when i don't get it out, i become a bearcat (in the words of my father). i tell you, blogging is cheaper than therapy. so in the interest of getting it all out, i give you a few things i learned while i was in the US the past two weeks...

~ it's not possible to wear a multi-strength contact in one eye and a regular one in the other. not if you want to see. or stand upright without nausea.

~ an 8MB memory card holds 1257 photos (using a nikon D300 and taking jpegs at full resolution). that's not enough.

~ the best place to look for treasures is amongst your own stuff.

~ the best way to learn how water and wind behave when they're together is to be on the river.

~ antique prices are totally arbitrary.

~ it is impossible to get normal, real milk for your coffee in an american snack village (my nephew's name for those big roadside gas stations full of snacks and praise jesus shirts). you can only get 14 different flavors of sweetened fake creamer or half and half that comes in little plastic thingies that don't need to be refrigerated.

~ there are no hot beverages smaller than 16 oz. in an american snack village.

~ there are no cold beverages smaller than 40 oz. in an american snack village.

~ if you drink said large beverages, you will need to stop at the next snack village to use the bathroom.

~ cherry is the flavor of choice in the US. and cinnamon. and they are the same color of red.

~ it's no wonder chrysler was doing badly, they're making tanks (badly) disguised as cars.

~ it's time to reread the brothers karamazov.

~ even if actually holding the iPhone 4 to speak in it renders it useless, i will still buy one the second they release them in denmark (by which time they've hopefully fixed that little problem, tho' honestly, i'm willing to learn to hold it with my left hand).

* * *

this weekend, i'm off to a horse show in germany with a friend. i can't wait to see how horse shows are done on this side of the atlantic. wishing you all a lovely weekend!