winter solstice: the darkest day of the year

i don't know about you, but if this is indeed the last day of existence as we know it, it surely is taking its time. i'll admit we're taking it quite stille og roligt as they say in danish. in fact, i'd say we're downright making plans for the future. husband signed a contract for a new job today - it starts january 2. it's the kind of job that comes with a car, which is new for us and a little bit exciting. he doesn't know yet what kind of car he'll get, he's still letting it all sink in, i think. i'm voting audi, but i suppose he'll get a reliable toyota of some kind.

a cleaning/decorating/rearranging frenzy is building inside me, but first i have some sewing to finish for christmas. a couple of lovely, warm snuggle quilts for the big girls and maybe a fun bag or two if i get really ambitious. but what it means is that i think that the world will be here tomorrow to rearrange and that it will still be cold and people will need to snuggle up under a blanket.

we cut down a tree a week ago (it had to go anyway), but we still haven't brought it in and decorated it. i think we might not, actually, as horrible as that sounds. we're going to møn for christmas (one of our favorite places in denmark) and we won't be home anyway, so it feels a little bit like it doesn't matter. i think this old, rather uninspiring house stands in my way at times. in a way that makes me slightly depressed. tho' i'm trying to keep that at bay here in the christmas season. hmm, maybe a cheerful, warm tree, with twinkling lights would have helped...

speaking of christmas, i am perhaps feeling slightly humbug about it. sabin has done nothing but complain about her daily christmas calendar. there were a lot of tubes of paint in it, but i thought it was a fun way to give her art supplies. apparently, it was too boring. and it makes me feel bad that i'm raising a spoiled brat who can't even be grateful. i suppose it's my own fault, but it does rather depress me nonetheless. how can i wrest her from the grip of a consumer society? all we hear on the news is that we need to start "using" again, which means spend money on stuff. but really, we have all the stuff we need.  i declared that i didn't want anything for christmas and if people insisted, it should be something from a second-hand shop or flea market. i sincerely hope they listened.

maybe those mayans knew what they were doing, setting the end on the solstice - it is the darkest day of the year after all. it can only grow lighter from here.

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worst words of 2012.

i think she missed out noms and FTW and that she insufficiently blamed pinterest for curate.

here's just an excerpt: "Epic. Adjective. Unless you're describing The Iliad or The Odyssey (and in a high school or college English class), choose anew, friends. Don't make me say this again in 2013."

feeling ranty (or am i a woman yet?)

i'm feeling a little ranty (i blame caitlin moran).  so avert your eyes.

rant #1:  i'm still fuming over the far-too-expensive ferry ride we took on mols-linien from ebeltoft to odden a week or so ago. as any of my FB and twitter pals know, due to my obsessive photographing of it, there is a rather large bridge (18km) that takes you to the devil's island (sjælland), but for fun, we thought we'd take an alternate route. mols-linien had been bragging in their ads about how if you took them you'd skip fyn (the island in the middle) and how they had cheap tickets over kattegat. turns out those cheap tickets that compete with the price of the bridge (220DKK or about $42) have to be ordered at least 7 days in advance. so much for spontaneity. and so much for truth in advertising, because that's definitely not clear in the ads. nor are any of the prices clear on the mobile version of their website. which i found worrying as i tried to check departure times/prices as we got closer to ebeltoft. turns out if you don't book in advance you pay the OUTRAGEOUS sum of 775DKK ($147) for the hour-long crossing. and this doesn't come with anything. you then have to pay 3 times the normal price for a sausage (every ferry ride must include a sausage) and a coke, so they are definitely adding insult to injury. my advice?  AVOID MOLS-LINIEN like the plague. there is NO value for money. none at all. and their little high speed ferries are ugly.   take that, mols-linien.

rant #2:  as you know, we live out on a country road. it's paved and the speed limit is actually a shocking 80km/hour.  however, most of the people who are going past (i don't have a radar gun, so i can't prove this) are going at least 120km/hour. it's INSANE. there are people out for a run, or walk or bike ride and the cars scarcely even slow down. in fact, most of them don't slow down. someone's going to get killed and i hope it's not me, my family, our cats or our hedgehog. i do, however, hope there is a fiery crash where one of those speed demons rolls multiple times and i can stand and laugh.

rant #3:  as you gathered, i continue to read caitlin moran's how to be a woman with a mix of the fascination one would feel to see the aforementioned crash and indignation at how in one breath she can claim to be feminist and then refer to women as chicks.  and then i fall a little bit in love with her when she says that lady gaga is the most exciting pop artist since madonna. so i'm torn by her. her writing is like rock 'n roll - it's loud, it's in your face, it makes me feel hyper (and ranty) and it's just really good. but a lot of this shit she's saying is just pissing me off.

ok. ranting over. for now.

EDITED:  wait a minute, hold everything, i totally forgot to rant the main rant!!!

rant #4: getty images. grr.  last week, was pleased to receive a flickr mail telling me that the good folks at getty images had selected a number of my photos and would like to license them. they're mostly ones of the old kitchen, the blue room and sabin's two bedrooms, plus one of my rainbow snail. so, i made haste to the getty images website to sign up. the sign-up is all very official and of course, asks you a lot of questions about your details - address, paypal account, where you pay taxes. and because i live in denmark, i was not able to sign up as anything other than a non-american. i've run into ameri-centric sites before (hello there, eBay and yes, i mean you, best buy), but none that actually wanted me to commit perjury in order to complete the invitation that THEY sent to me. after three days of going back and forth with several different "customer support" people, i finally agreed to commit perjury. yes, i wanted to sell my photos THAT badly. but seriously. i must not be the only expat american living abroad who has ever licensed their photos through getty images. and i think it's downright bogus that i had to pretend to pay taxes somewhere else in order to accomodate a faultily-crafted website. boo. hiss. getty images.  that said, get to selling my photos, will you?

and now i'm done ranting. for now.

a need for focus

kristina suggested that we do a week of blurry shots on across ø/öresund. she's so good at finding ways to get out of the doldrums brought on by a too-long and too-slowly-waning winter (in fact, she's been doing a whole series on it on her blog of late). and it's interesting how difficult i found it yesterday to go out with my lens on manual focus and allow myself to purposely take unfocused shots. of course i take shots all the time that aren't perfectly focused, but to do so intentionally is something different. at first, i had to also take every shot focused as well as the unfocused one and then i realized that was arguably a symptom of my growing obsessive compulsive disorder (put the pens back in color order, people), and so i took a whole bunch of totally unfocused shots and didn't allow myself to take a focused companion. really weird how difficult and awkward it felt at first. like any new thing, i suppose. but it got a little bit easier as i went along.

and it's interesting how this little assignment underlines exactly how i'm feeling this week - unfocused. i have so much to do that it's really quite silly. i think it's the waiting. we still don't know whether they will accept our offer (i guess the dog sled has not made it to the canadian arctic circle to ask the one party as of yet) on the house and husband's still waiting to see the nitty gritty details of his two job offers. and waiting makes you unfocused. there's so much i could and should be doing, but instead, i spend hours making mosaics of my flickr faves, drooling over heather's home on apartment therapy and stirring up a mushroom and fennel risotto. yeah, i got some laundry done, but once it's in, it requires little from me but the switch from washer to dryer. i could have been packing books or sorting out the attic, but i didn't. and i'm sure that later, when i'm pressed for time, i'll regret it.

spud and bee and blanca got together in london for mini blog camp on sunday and they had a discussion of life plans. blanca has one. spud and bee do not. i think a little bit that my lack of focus is because the life plan of moving to a farm with space for a large garden and a couple of horses that we developed over the past year is actually starting to come true. at least on the meta-level, of course, the details are to be worked out and acted upon. but once you fulfill your life plan, what's the next step? you need a new life plan to replace the old one that came true. i think the picture above is the perfect metaphor for how i feel right now. some bits in focus and some not so much. i need to get those focused bits out of the way and zero in on the fuzzy ones, developing them further. and it leaves me feeling restless and impatient.