glorious spring and some random thoughts

the weather has been completely glorious for the past few days. it was 21°C when i got home from work today around 5. i changed into running pants and decided to go out for a nice walk, maybe with a little intermittent jogging. i ended up talking to the neighbor for like half an hour since she was out in her garden when i went past. we talked about a little of everything, including the spray-tanned satan wreaking havoc on the world. she said she wished someone would "do something" about him. me too, sister. 

interesting that my 85-year-old neighbor in denmark seemed more informed and interested in what he was doing than many of the people i encountered while in the us a couple of weeks ago. she's pretty plugged into the local scene as well - telling me that the field across the road will be potatoes this year rather than corn. i think that's good. last year's corn crop was pretty dismal.

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the one thing i like about daylight savings time is having the light at the end of the day. it's 8:30 p.m. as i write this and there's still a glow. i wish we could just stay on this time and keep the evening light. 

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i don't know if you are on tiktok, but i've started making some knittok videos the past couple of days over there if you'd like to check them out. i did my first wip wednesday, which is a thing on knittok. on wednesdays, you just show and talk about all the projects that you're working on. and today, i did a yarn haul video featuring all of the yarn i bought in minneapolis. i'm not a great editor, as you will see, but everyone's gotta start somewhere. i think i'll do one with knitting hot takes next. it's also a thing over on knittok. you know what a sucker i am for joining a new community.

speaking of tiktok, it sounds like it might go away again for the americans, but perhaps trump is too busy inflicting tariffs on remote australian islands inhabited only by penguins to remember it should be turned off. they say the tariffs were calculated by chatGPT, so i guess ai really is going to be the end of things. 

 

the path ahead

so much turmoil and uncertainty in these times. the daily onslaught of revelations from the corrupt cheeto and his merry band of trumpanzees, power grabs and information vacuums at work. it seemed fitting today as i came across this gorgeous, fragrant field of canola (rapeseed), that the visible path was only visible for a little ways. who knows what lies ahead? we humans like to think we can control our outcomes, but perhaps we cannot. i think of all of the times where being pushed onto another path steered me somewhere amazing, and i wonder where i am being steered this time? i can catch glimpses of so much that's awesome, but there are roadblocks along the way. i'd like to navigate them differently than i have traditionally done, but it's hard for me to see how to do that. perhaps by following the opposite impulses. we can and do continue to grow as people, even as we age, we can learn and we can be even more amazing than we thought possible. it's just a matter of clearing the path to get there.

guess where wonder woman and i went?

a fantastic weekend in london. a bit of shopping (mostly involving me sending photos to the child to see whether she wanted various items - what did we do before iMessage?), hitting some bookstores (the wonderful foyle's and an enormous waterstones near picadilly), walking with lizzi (you may know her from many steps sideways and do go check her blog, as she wrote about our day much more pithily than i will) until our feet were nearly bleeding, some legography at big ben and parliament square, lunch, starbucks and a last-minute inability to stop myself from going into the gap (like google, apple and the new york times, they just get me). all of this and glorious sunshine, cherry blossoms in full bloom and a surprisingly delightful stay in a little radisson blu edwardian just off oxford street, not to mention a workshop and meeting some really wonderful lego enthusiasts who were generous in sharing their ideas. in all, it really couldn't have been a better weekend (except that my feet are still a bit reluctant to speak to me after i subjected them to nearly 12 hours of tromping around london in doc martens (so much for those cushiony air soles).

i know i've been a bit absent here in the past week. i was fighting off a cold and that left me zapped for energy.  plus i've been reading a good book (popco by scarlett thomas) and watching a few too many episodes of fringe. but i can feel that i'm missing my daily writing! blogging is, after all, cheaper than therapy and nothing else quite does the trick for keeping me sane like sending all those thoughts which tumble around in my head out my fingers right here in this blogger compose space. so i hope to be back on form this week. for all of our sakes.

oh, and catwoman had to come along too and see the london eye. she nearly blew off into the thames, but i grabbed her in time. that would have been a tragedy.

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and speaking of tragedy, 

i can't get enough of the story of the lost malaysian airlines plane.

what do you think happened?

will they be found safe and sound?

and where are they?

isn't it a job for james bond at this point?

or maybe for catwoman.

baby animal monday

this is peaches - she's 12 days old. just got her eyes open. and is the most amazing color we've ever seen. i can see a bit of her mama's expression on her face. and i call her her, but i have no idea if she's a girl or not.

this is her sister, creamy. also possibly not a girl, but there you have it. it's nearly impossible to tell with bunnies 'til it's too late.

it's definitely spring around here. we've got baby animals like crazy. the first batch of bunnies all found homes this weekend. we've still got the last two, waiting to be delivered over to sjælland, so we get to enjoy them a little longer, but the other four very quickly found homes.

i suppose we'll have to find homes for these little sweeties as well. husband has declared that he won't build any more bunny cages. apparently five is enough.

and here's our other baby animal - the little black chick. s/he is doing very well. i call it a he all the time, but i do hope it will be a little hen. i wonder if the mama even notices the chick must really belong to one of the other hens. she's moved it back into the main henhouse, from their separate quarters. he peeps VERY loudly if he loses sight of her. she spends most days not far from the henhouse, showing him how to scratch and peck and take a dust bath. she's a really good mama. i'm wholly won over. chickens are not as dumb as they might at first seem.

and today, pepchen had four kittens. there will be photos of them soon - the ones i took were either a bit dark or the kittens were a bit slimy. but now they're dry and cute and perfect and mama is tired, but very content. spring is a very good thing in the countryside.

spring has sprung

i hate to keep going on and on about the gloriousness of the weather, but it is, well, glorious. and it's never been this good ever before, definitely not for so many days in a row. at least not since i arrived in denmark in 1998. so i've waited more than a dozen years for weather this good. so yes, i'm probably going to go on and on about it.

with little religiousness left in easter in denmark - it's really about the easter beer and having a whole lot of days off (from thursday through monday), as near as i can tell - i feel pulled back to the pagan traditions on which it was founded. a deep desire to celebrate spring, to wake up from the slumber of winter and to exalt in the buds opening and the trees leafing out and the world beginning to grow again. i feel that desire as i plant strawberries and as i watch the tulips open (at least two weeks ahead of last year, i can see in consulting my iPhoto library).

there are flowers everywhere in the garden and i had to bring a few inside. maybe it's only possible to appreciate such glorious weather when most of the time it's grey and dreary. perhaps it really is true that you have to take the good with the bad, otherwise, you don't really know that the good is good. right?

i think i'll go google pagan spring rituals...perhaps we should dance around a pole or something...in the meantime, happy easter one and all!