100 happy days :: day 56

this stylish little foot bridge, connecting the old and "new" harbors in landskrona was named after my late father-in-law on saturday. we went to the ceremony. the ceremony was a bit strange and confusing and it became clear from the passers-by that the bridge had actually been open for some time, as people kept wandering across, just lifting up the ribbon which hadn't yet been cut. there was also an odd potato-head woman who did the actual cutting of the ribbon. since i couldn't really hear that well and my ability to understand spoken swedish is a limited at best, it was unclear to me what her connection to it all was. perhaps she's the one who drove to holland and picked up (stole?) the bridge in the first place. 

because the bridge looks like it could have been lifted out of amsterdam (and quite possibly was), but pretty cool that it can be raised up so boats can sail through. they demonstrated that with a little rescue boat of some kind, which sailed through and then sailed back, to show us all how it works. another weirdness of the ceremony was that i'm not sure they mentioned peter's four children, who were all in attendance. i would have thought they'd have been invited up to at least be close observers of the ribbon cutting, but oddly, they were not. i was left wondering if those organizing it all had ever attended such a ceremony before.

me, i mostly wished there would have been an exciting corpse lying the bridge, leading to another season of broen, that fantastic nordic noir murder mystery series that's a danish-swedish cooperation. of course, that program is about a slightly larger bridge.  but still, a murder mystery would have added a bit of spice to the whole thing.

as it was, probably the best part of the day was that we had a long wander down to the beach and around the castle grounds. we'd been there a lot when husband's two oldest girls were little, so we did all of the old, traditional things, despite the grey day. it was fun to see the three sisters together, talking and laughing and looking so grown up.

in all, a very nice day, seeing family and having more than one good laugh and toasting to peter broberg's bro (bridge). worth the long drive, for sure.

if the glasses could talk

waiting. i imagine these glasses are proud to stand here, waiting for the gathering to begin. they know they're clean and lovely and lined up so prettily. they anticipate the wine and the conversations and the laughter ahead. funny memories relived and new funny memories made. and a weekend gone all too quickly.

no boring lamps

you know how i love me a good lamp, so it's actually quite surprising that a.) i haven't shown you our fabulous triplex lamp before this (it arrived clear back in august) and b.) that our house is otherwise so rubbishly-lit. it's no wonder i just needed new and much stronger reading glasses (to the tune of way more kroner than i care to admit or type). but it is not the fault of the triplex lamp. you may know a bit about it, since bloggy friend ulrika and her husband have revived this swedish classic and are producing them once again today.  ours is one of the first batch (no. 11) and we're thrilled to bits to have it.

come to think of it, i might not have shared it before because all i've taken are rubbish photos of it that do not, by any means, do it justice. i suggest you head over to the triplex website to see some proper pictures of it.

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flannery o'kafka has an awesome feel. 

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ithkuil : the search for a more perfect (rational?) language.

scenes from a weekend

we had a lovely weekend at the yearly crayfish gathering in sweden. we get together with husband's swedish siblings and the danish cousins for a mountain of crayfish, aioli, homemade bread, lovely quiche and tarts and salads and loads of snaps and beer. the danes contribute the alcohol and the swedes do the rest. and it's always an evening of high spirits, interesting conversation and laughter.

such a weekend leaves me feeling fueled to face the week...i hope yours was great, wherever you were.

oh the places you'll go

i don't need these, but aren't they pretty?

(and do i ever want them...)

i didn't go in, but isn't that a fantastic typeface?

(and i'd like to go back.)

i wasn't biking, but these made me wish i had been.

i'm not religious, but doesn't this look like a place you could meet god?

(or at least odin.)

randomness to clear my head*

fitful sleep, filled with nightmares about the environment and global warming, tossing and turning and hearing the alarm even tho' it wasn't ringing. strangely, when i woke up, the bracelet i always wear on my right wrist was on my left one. i don't really remember the dreams exactly, they were disjointed and noisy and colorful yet dark at the same time. there was some kind of planned landing in water (my dreams always involve planes), where we smoothly went under and lodged in the soft bottom of the sea and proceeded calmly to gather our things and get ready to leave the plane as if things were totally normal. at least no wings were sheared off from landing between tall buildings that were simply too close for that--that's what usually happens. and there was something about sabin being missing and me frantically searching for her. i woke up, heart pounding, having to check that she was indeed here, because although disjointed, it was very real. but it was strange to wake up to the life that's going on over here in the (ostensibly) awake world. perhaps i should go to bed before 2 a.m. tonight.

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please check out the wonderful, giving post on how you can help kelaya over on tangobaby. kelaya is a woman who fled an abusive husband together with her three children and because all of the shelters are full, she needs your help. the lovely and talented tangobaby has set up a way for you to do that. because she's just that cool. please go read kelaya's story and do what you can, even if it's only leaving a note of support.

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the poor swedish police, they always seem to have the worst luck. just reading in my newspaper that a 40-year-old swedish count and his 38-year-old girlfriend were brutally shot on tuesday outside his daughter's school in the middle of gamla stan in stockholm. and, as is often the case (remember olof palme and the early days of the anna lindh case, tho' thankfully they eventually solved that one), they have no clue who did it, despite it happening in broad daylight. they brought in some jetset ad exec for questioning (he's friends with the count's ex-wife), but released him again after a few hours.  meanwhile, the count and his girlfriend are in critical condition in a stockholm hospital. 

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interesting:

annual danish military budget: 20 billion danish kroner

amount made by maersk on US military shipping contracts in 2007:
18 billion danish kroner

source: information 

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a few people among my influx of new readers here and those checking out my photostream on flickr have asked me for advice for amateur photographers. ha! imagine that, asking me for photographic advice! i am the most amateur of amateur photographers myself, i'm just fortunate to have access to some good cameras and lenses (nikon, nikon, nikon). and also fortunate to be part of the digital age. when you take a dozen pictures of every subject, one of them is bound to turn out, right?
 

but to be serious for a second, i will say that developing your eye is the best advice i can offer. and carry your camera with you everywhere. everywhere. i take my camera in when i go to the grocery store (that's only partly to do with the fact that it's worth more than my car). i am never, ever without a camera.  and when you do that, you start noticing things...like shadows and light and eyeballs on the trees. 

you also find that you get increasingly fearless in stopping and snapping pictures (i don't do much of that with people, mostly with things, if you take pictures of people, you should ask them if it's ok). you lose your self-consciousness and you get down on your knees to get the right angle, and you stop caring what people might think of that. you may also start carrying a little pouch containing subjects that you photograph in various places.

so my best advice to amateur photographers--take your camera everywhere and be totally fearless. 

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please tell me i did not just hear a CNN weather man say expecially....

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please forgive crappy quality of phone picture

do you ever stand next to such a door on a plane at cruising altitude and feel a nearly irresistible urge to open it? don't worry, i resisted. they were about to come around with cocktails and those great little bowls of posh mixed nuts (no peanuts), so the urge passed.

* * *

and finally, a question: what would your dream job be? it sounds like a weird question to ask in these troubled economic times, but perhaps a bit of creative thinking is warranted these days. what would you most like to do?

*this may become a regular feature. my head seems to need a lot of clearing.

scenes from a wedding

i think the pictures will suffice for now...

ready for the weekend

husband comes home today! we're ready to see him and hang out with him again, for sure! i've volunteered to pick him up at the airport (and no, it's not ONLY because i want a starbucks grande venti latte).  i really can't wait to hear his stories of places with names like belo horizonte. doesn't a place with a name like that sound just wonderful? (more wonderful than clayton, NC, in any case, which is also where he was.)

i'm also looking forward to seeing the D60 and what pictures he managed to take with it. i don't really know what it thought of being sent out into the world without me and i'm a little sad that it's been to brazil and i have not, but i know it was safe in husband's capable hands. i told him he had to take a few hotel mirror self-portraits, but i'm not sure he did that (for some strange reason, he doesn't always do what i say). it's just that the D60 will expect it.

* * *

husband said the other day that we should go to the states sometime this year. 

my response, "oh yeah, i just got a sale email from KLM and there are super cheap tix to joburg, like under 4000DKK or something like that." 

husband said, "that's not the states."

oops.

* * *

watching all of the leaders arrive at the G20 summit in london it struck me that they're there to talk stimulating the world economy and about the environment and such, but they all pulled up in giant, bulky, beefed up armored gas guzzling big-ass cars and vans and SUVs.  is that really any better than the message sent by those assholes from the carmakers who showed up for their first meetings in their private jets? i also thought that instead of "growth" in the subtitle of the G20 conference, it maybe should have said "sustainability." because we can't sustain the kind of growth we saw. we've only got the one planet, you see.

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this is a screenshot of my flicker view stats. check out the spike when my kitchen was on apartment therapy! i normally have a rather steady amount of  views (between 200-400), but that day it shot clear up to 1854. it helped that the moo people tweeted another of my photos that day. i guess i don't really care about any of this one way or another, but i thought it was pretty funny visually.

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this is the weekend where we attend the wedding party for husband's sister. i'm so excited to see what they thinks of their atelierBB goodies. the party will be at the wonderful gamla kassen in landskrona.  these shots are from another party we attended there early last summer.

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note, i've been on a roll of late and put up a bunch of single entries over on balderdash, be sure to go check them out. they're autobiographical, but there's a couple of pretty funny ones.

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they promise sunshine and up to 15 degrees this weekend, so you won't see much of me here. i hope the weather is fine where you are and your weekend is filled with laughter!

just another mundane monday

turns out i was premature in my being pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the fabric-softener scented washing machine repairman. you see, he fixed only one of the two problems and he left a totally NEW problem behind. which i didn't realize until after i did the first load. and naturally, they can't send someone back 'til thursday. grrr. crappy ass miele repairmen. actually, i have to give meile credit, now that i'm naming them by name, the girls on the customer service phone are great and you get to talk to a live person right away, rather than wading through some kind of automatic system and being directed to bangalore or bangulu as they're calling it now. i guess they just don't have very strict requirements as to whether you, as a washing machine repairman, have actually ever repaired a washing machine or might be capable of doing so.

then, around noon, husband called in a panic and asked me to bring him some clothing suitable for fencing. that took nearly two hours to locate said clothing (in dirty clothes pile since washing machine still not fixed) and drive it to him and get back home. note to self: ask husband more questions about what kind of course it is he's attending anyway....

and then i realized that although it was cloudy and dreary as hell in denmark, the sun was shining in sweden and that just seems unfair on so many levels--they've got nicer cars, more style, lower taxes, all the good names on the ikea stuff (the only stuff with danish names is insignificant stuff like bottle openers and the like) and now this:

after that run, it was time to pick up sabin. she did the absolute sweetest thing and completely restored my faith in humanity (which was waning in the face of extreme lack of sunshine) by filling a bag with all of her heinous bratz dolls and announcing that she wanted to take them to school the next day and give them to her friend aleyna, who is a girl from a turkish family (which somehow makes it even sweeter to me, tho' it shouldn't really matter). how cool is that?

and on top of it, she made a crown for the cat out of pipecleaners. i picture build-a-bear clothing on this cat's horizon:

i did very little that was on my list--my excuse being that the hardware store was out of the good firewood thingies so i couldn't warm up the studio without risking life and limb and of course, husband blowing a two hour hole into my day. and i made chicken for dinner--i found a package in the fridge and felt i had to use it up before it went bad, plus the child is a huge carnivore. but tomorrow is another day and we can be vegetarians then.