100 happy days :: day 97

lilacs.

they're my favorite flower.

my favorite scent.

and they're in their full glory right now.

tho' i swear this batch smells a little bit of cinnamon.

magical thinking

magical thinking. that illogical connection of disparate events in the mind. i think it's hard not to do it sometimes, both with good and bad things. the sparkle unicorn fairy waved her wand and the sun burst through the clouds at last. i stuffed her in my dark pocket and it clouded up and began to rain. a lump of adorable plastic does not have the power to make the sun come and go. i know that rationally, but sometimes you can't help but look for connections.

i wrote on facebook a week or so ago that i had a longing for people to just spontaneously drop by. right after, two different friends did so. there was arguably an actual cause and effect relationship there since they had read my post on facebook. but since then a couple of random folks have also dropped by. a charmingly toothless man, wearing an old-fashioned helmet and driving an ancient moped (words you never thought you'd see strung together) stopped by to see if we still had a saw for sale that was listed on our craig's list equivalent. i had a surprisingly delightful and funny conversation with him that gave me happy energy for several hours afterwards.

then, last evening, as i wandered the garden in the golden hour sunlight that the unicorn sparkle fairy had called forth, another stranger parked in front of the house and came up to me. he asked if he might try fishing in our lake one day. we chatted a bit and i agreed that he could. now, he and a friend just came and knocked on the door to say they were going to give it a try (despite the steady drizzle caused by the unicorn sparkle fairy still being in my coat pocket). i don't know his name and i'm probably not going to invite him over for dinner, but these are exactly the kind of random human encounters that i have been missing. have they come to me because i put it out there in the world that i wanted them? or would they have happened anyway?

who really knows? magical thinking.

100 happy days :: day 51

unicorns spotted among the anemone, including one with a very rare golden horn.
 (i think she may have been hanging out with space unikitty.)

but seriously, taking a handful of minifigs into the garden and setting them up and taking their picture is definitely a happy thing.

try it, i'm sure you'll agree.

especially if the light is good.

legography lately

i don't know what's happened to my words. they dry up in my head before i can coax them out my fingers, but with the light returning, at least i'm inspired to take some whimsical photos. it's probably also helped that we've actually had some snow. we hoped our lake would freeze enough that we might even be able to skate, but it thawed all weekend, so alas that isn't going to happen. but at least the ice was still solid enough for the minifig skater. the unicorn sparkle fairy continues to be my go-to fig, but i'm also having a bit of fun these days with batman. and getting quite a kick out of those aliens from series 13.

what's helping you through the shortest month?

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i hope these guys are finland's entrant in eurovision.

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it's never too late to discover LEGO, as this blog proves.

thank you, amy for introducing him to LEGO and for sharing with me!

a case of friday arbness

my head is full of all sorts of random things, so in the interest of clearing it out so i can get on with some important work on a big project, i thought i'd share them with all of you...

~ there was a little dog with an underbite that was always in front of our main street grocery store when i was a kid. i hated that dog. he was terrifying. i think he belonged to one of the checkout ladies. to this day, when we want to indicate displeasure around here, we stick out our bottom teeth and do the "mean dog" face.

~ discussing ideas is probably my favorite thing to do in the whole world. it helps me think things through and get lots more clarity on the ideas. sometimes, i have so many, they jumble up in my head until i write about them or discuss them with others. i'm super lucky to have a variety of people that i can call on when i need to think things through. husband being the main one of them, but there are others. and they know who they are.

~ i got such a chuckle out of reading this tongue-in-cheek review of the new super heroes set with wonder woman and her invisible jet. in the comments you'll see that some of the other readers weren't quite so charmed. to them i say, relax and don't take things so seriously.

~ speaking of LEGO, this new blog is shaping up to have some intelligent views on our favorite plastic brick. ok, so there are only two posts so far, but both were well-argued and obviously carefully researched.

~ i'm so enjoying my kerosene fragrance sample tin. it's fun trying a new scent every day! i'm wearing copper skies today which, despite its lush description of amber and tobacco, is definitely not me. it starts off with a dusty, powdery toilet paper kind of vibe and deepens into the kind of sickly sweet scent of a chennai slum. i will allow that it probably smells great on someone else with very different chemistry than me. and less memories of sickly sweet chennai slums. kind of amazing how scent can call up memories quite unbidden.

~ our friends at #stuckinplastic reported on some troubling take down notices received by some legographers on red bubble this week. i wonder what the implications of this are on the enormous community of people out there taking photos of minifigs? once we buy them, can't we play with them however we wish?

~ i realized today (yes, i'm a bit slow) that facebook bores the shit out of me.

~ we had this amazing frost all day today (see above photo of of the unicorn sparkle fairy - hey, i made a MOC!). :-) it's the kind of frost that comes from a freezing fog. and it's the first time this winter of ours has had any beauty in it whatsoever. it was a welcome change.

~ it's the child's birthday on sunday. and she's off on a one-day ski trip to sweden at midnight tonight, but will be home to have cake on sunday. i can't believe she's nearly 14.

i think that will about do it, so i shall wish you all an awesome weekend. remember to stop and photograph the frost, will you? and always carry a minifig in your pocket.