this week in seven senses

i enjoy reading the seven senses substack. the seven senses are the ones that come to mind - see, hear, taste, touch, smell, plus two that are a little more thought-provoking - balance and envision. i decided to try my hand at noting down something from those 7 senses that i experienced this week. it seems like a noble exercise. 

see

i stopped by arken, a modern art museum south of copenhagen. i wanted to see this  lærke bagger popup. lærke bagger is a famous danish knitter who has written two books that are part knitting pattern book and part autobiography. the sweaters in the photo are her "inner child" sweater, knitted by people all over denmark (and probably the world). each knitted with their own colors and their own stories. i didn't knit one (yet), but i'm impressed by those who did. anytime you gather a bunch of similar things together, it's impressive. there are so many stories there in those fibers, you could feel the energy of them all in the room. 

there was another exhibition there by an artist called kenneth rasmussen. he has a manic need to knit plastic bags and it resulted in this amazing installation. doing your obsession in a huge quantity can really turn into something. that's quite reassuring to a person who has currently made it her mission to weave all of taylor swift's albums as tea towels. 

hear

what i'm listening to is a bit mainstream, but that's just how it is. i can't get enough of taylor swift's life of a showgirl. i listen on repeat and i play the songs in order and i don't skip any. my current favorite is elizabeth taylor. but i also really like opalite. i feel like i'm officially a real swiftie now and this one will be my album. i can't wait to weave it.

taste

i made this yuzu curd for some cupcakes i took to a gathering with my old colleagues. it's yuzu season and i ordered two boxes from freshland. it's such a delicate flavor. the cupcakes went over well. and i just ordered one more box. the season is short and i absolutely love the citrus perfume-y taste. i might even go non-traditional and do a yuzu pavlova for thanksgiving. 

touch

this is a little twist of what's left of a warp that was made by a weaver named anne grete buhl. i'm not even sure what she made of out of it, but now i have her loom and some of her weaving yarn. these are silk fibers and i love the colors. and i love how they feel in my hand. i'm sure they contain a story. and now i get the chance to continue that story. 

smell

i'm finding smell to be hard. for one thing, there's no good photo for it. as we opened all of the boxes today from anne grete's home, it released a stale old house smell into the room. they had been in her empty house and she died a number of months ago, so i suppose that's natural. she was battling cancer in her final years and no doubt it developed over that time too. the loom i got from her also smelled like smoke. she had smoked for many years and it had penetrated the loom. i spent hours this summer, cleaning it and scrubbing off all of the nicotine. i wondered at one point if we should just make a bonfire, but i think it's more or less ok now. i think the fibers and fabrics can also be freshened up. 

balance

i've had a few situations recently that have upset or frustrated me. i endured a long drive where the main topic was boring car-related talk. like about the best way to take care of your brakes as well an extensive discussion of the switch from summer to winter tires. towards the end of it (i had forgotten my airpods, so i was trapped in the back seat where it was difficult to contribute (what would i have said anyway?) but impossible to tune it out), i thought about opening the door and jumping out. it was that bad. then last friday, one of the same colleagues made two outrageously sexist comments during a presentation. he thought he was being funny. but it wasn't. it's 2025 and he's a director. totally inappropriate. anyway. the point of these dumb stories is that coming home and hanging out with molly can make it all better. she is my balance. 

envision

my sister snapped this picture of the northern lights this week from the yard of our childhood home in south dakota. the sun has been crazy active and so the auroras were strong. alas, it was too cloudy here in denmark, so i didn't get to see any, but man, have i enjoyed her photos. i feel like they could inspire a weaving. look at those amazing colors! 

daily delight - february 24

i couldn't let the month of daily delights go by without including what's a daily ritual - perfume. even through the pandemic, i put a spritz of perfume on every day. these two, both of which were given to me by my sister, have been in daily rotation. in fact, my barrel from min new york is getting dangerously low. i love its smoky, rich undertone and it's been the perfume of winter. but dirty flower factory by independent perfumer kerosene lifts me up and makes me happy like no other perfume. it meshes perfectly with my own chemistry as it unfolds during the day, the scent subtly changing throughout as i wear it. both of them are somehow related, but very different - maybe it's the deep, musk, ambergris undertones both have. dirty flower factory is lighter and brighter and more flowery, while still seeming lived in and down-to-earth. barrel, more wintery and smoky, like curling up with a peaty islay whiskey on a bearskin rug in front of a fire. i love them both so much and feel a moment of conscious delight every time i use them.

the scent of the summer

you know, if you've been reading for awhile, that i love perfume. i recently read this piece about finding your personal scent in the lenny letter. and it's all about layering. even before reading this, i had taken to combining a couple of scents - at the moment, it's been a rather unorthodox combination of the sweetness of  for her by narciso rodriguez and the spicy, greenish masculinity of vetiver insolent by miller harris, but it's felt like the right scent for me at the moment. i was relieved to read in the article that a note or two of something rancorous is in fashion, since this cold, damp summer combined with living in our old farmhouse, my personal scent is surely laced with a healthy dose of mustiness from the damp that seeps up through the brick walls thanks to high ground water. there's probably also a dash of litterbox needing to be changed and perhaps a vague aroma of spilled coffee thrown in, which may be a note or two too many of rancour.

when we were in lithuania, i ran into these beautiful scents, named after italian cities, in a high end perfume shop. i'm not even sure who makes them. i tend to have trouble with scents and my own body chemistry, as they can turn rather nasty on me, especially if they are full of synthetic ingredients. but i tried, over a couple of days, four of these gorgeous scents and they all just got more beautiful on me. tho' at €149 per bottle, i didn't buy one, having decided we were having a vacation experience, not a vacation shopping trip. but, i may have to try to find them again and buy one, as they were just gorgeous. the packaging is simple and elegant as well. they have everything one could hope for in a scent. maybe this autumn..i think florentia would be lovely when paired with the dusky scent of autumn leaves.

life lessons

how to be a bitch:

1. float into the room, wafting expensive perfume and dramatically flounce down your easel and art supplies.
2. immediately pounce sarcastically on a small grammar mistake (the equivalent of a/an) made by a non-native speaker of your minor language.
3. hold onto that grammar mistake like a nasty little growling drop-kick dog with an organic designer artisan dog biscuit, pointedly bringing it up again half an hour later.
4. when the person who made the mistake (and who is tired from being up half the night watching the lunar eclipse and on top of it, in the throes of PMS) doesn't laugh, sarcastically ask if she's "too delicate to take a little teasing."
5. ask as well, "do you have trouble with the full moon?" in some knowing way that just seems weird.
6. refer to your husband as your consort (as if you're the queen). 
7. disparage the large, successful international company that has put your podunk little nothing town on the map, complaining about the tourists they attract and how the town is filled with their offices, theme park, school and museums and worst of all their foreigners (gasp!). (not to mention their airport, and the public sculpture they've provided...)
8. don't be able to take it when the absurdity of complaining about that is pointed out with a genuine out loud laugh.
9. deny that you said anything disparaging about said company and fluff up your feathers, preening about how your consort was instrumental in it all, including the airport.
10. launch into some insider story about the airport using a bunch of obscure acronyms and referring to your consort's private plane.
11. get in one last snide shot at the grammar while also disparaging the non-native speaker's husband (who is clearly helpless if he hasn't managed to eat dinner by himself) and whom you have never met. 
12. appear as a character in my novel. and wish to hell you'd been nicer.

* the g&t photo is because i needed one after that encounter.

a thousand and one memories

continuing on my niche perfume mania, i blindly ordered a couple of interesting-sounding scents from black phoenix alchemy lab. their scents are oils and very reasonably-priced, so you can definitely chance it and just order up a couple that sound good without breaking the bank. so i ordered kit (it had me at "pen ink") and café mille et une nuits. there are many other promising-sounding scents on the site and they were kind enough to send four samples with my order, so i will likely be going back.

when i put on café mille et une nuits, i was slightly put off by a sweetish, candy scent, but it soon dissipated and settled into a smoky, retro scent that transported me to the afternoons i spent studying at great midwestern in iowa city in the late 80s. like an underlying sweet waffle cone layered with smoky patchouli and freshly-ground coffee that brought to mind images of shopping the secondhand racks at ragstock and wandering into the soap opera for some bath goodies. i was reminded once again how scent is inextricably tied to memory and just a faint hint of an old familiar scent can cause a tidal wave of memories to wash over you. i've been so taken with it, that i haven't even tried kit yet.

have you ever been transported by a scent? tell me your story in the comments below!

MiN New York: and i'm officially a niche fragrance convert

if you've been reading this blog for some time, you know that i love perfume. i've always been a pretty mainstream perfume kind of girl and admittedly, most of my scents have been acquired through the years in the duty free shops of airports around the world. my sister has a good friend who is a scent aficionado and she has sent my sister to small, esoteric shops in paris after some amazing, exclusive scents. so it was no surprise on my recent trip to new york city, that monica had a couple of perfume places on her list. we lost quite a lot of one day of her stay (we won't say why, but a late show at a comedy club and a cheap bottle of wine on top of oysters and foie gras might have had something to do with it), so we chose to visit just one of them - MiN new york in soho.

just peeking in the window of this beautiful shop made me quiver with intimidation. if my sister hadn't been there, i don't think i'd have dared to go in on my own, thinking the experience and the prices would be far above me. i expressed a bit of that intimidation when i came into the dark, warm, richly scented interior, but the people in the shop very quickly put me at ease - one was the president of the company, an attractive guy with longish hair and a cool manner and the two sales girls, with their exotic accents and easygoing, totally not snobbish manner.  they quickly made us feel welcome and as if it was exactly our kind of place. i realized very quickly that i could get used to niche fragrances.

in addition to a lot of exciting niche scents from around the world, they have their own line of what they call scent stories. there are 11 chapters to their scent story book, each with their own personality and heady fragrance. we tried only three of them (your nose can't really take that many more) and we were also trying some of the kerosene scents (more about them in another post).

my sister fell in love with one called magic circus, which the folks a MiN describe as: "Turn of the century, a carnival travels at dusk. A scrumptious gourmand perfume. A splendid wonder swirling in enchantment. Candied nuts, cotton candy, caramel, sprinkled with pink peppercorns, bergamot, labdanum, geranium, patchouli, and woodchips." all of which rings scrumptiously true in the complexity of the scent. it smelled wonderful on her, but less so on me.  it was obvious that my sister needed the magic circus and she serendipitously got bottle number 72 (of 1000 - they only make 1000 of each of the scent stories per year), which is both the year of her birth and her lucky number. it was meant to be. i went away with samples of memento and barrel, as my skin chemistry can be temperamental with perfumes and so i need to see if they go bad on me over several hours (when that happens, it isn't good, believe me).

and in the end, tho' i had decided that i loved the barrel most, but was chickening out on going all the way back down to soho and spending $240 on myself, when my sister called and said, "can you get back to MiN by 6 and pick up your barrel, i've just ordered it for you." i couldn't believe it and told her not to buy me a christmas present for the next five years. but i also jumped on the subway and headed to MiN immediately. there was a film being made on the street right outside of MiN, so i didn't have quite the same slow, drawn-out experience i had when we had visited together, but that was ok, as i wasn't in the market for more scents right then anyway. i did grab a sample of barrel to send to my sister so she could test it out as well.

my bottle of barrel is #86 of 1000. as the MiN folks say of barrel, "Evident in the first sniff, a slight floral opening gives way to bold, beautiful notes that we taste in full-bodied dark spirits and wine. Peaty, smoky, smooth, and earthy, this is the scent of the selfless vessel that rest in halcyon, incubating the finest spirits throughout the years. A complex cocktail of spirits, spices, dirt, tannin, and woods: absinth, coriander, pink pepper, rum, myrrh, orange blossom, tuberose, oak, oak moss, leather, vanilla, patchouli, and vetiver." in other words, deep, dark heaven. and i would love to go back and try some of the other scent stories. i have a feeling my book of scents in nowhere near complete.

using data for good or evil?

today's haul from amazon

there was a time when amazon emails seemed to read my very mind. they suggested things to me based on the things i'd bought over the years and i felt like it was as close to browsing in a real bookstore as you could get online. sadly, they seem to have changed them and they're not like that anymore, now they're just sending me the same ads for crap electronics and pulp fiction that they send to everyone. i feel like we've drifted apart and they don't know me at all. and maybe in some way, that's a good thing. i'm less tempted when i get an amazon mail (in fact, i usually just delete without looking now) and maybe it means they're saving less of my data, so they actually don't know me as well.

many stores in denmark have gotten onboard the loyalty card bandwagon. the one i actually use is matas, which is a shop that sells makeup, perfume and body care products. i like the mails i get from them and i feel like they're using the data about what i purchase wisely, to target the mails to my desires. plus, they have cooperation with other shops, like clothing stores and even the shop where i got my glasses. you earn points when you shop and you can buy things, even nice things, with those points. thanks to my very expensive prescription, i've been able to get a nice hair dryer set, perfume, shampoo, hairspray, nail polish and lotion. they come in pretty packages and it feels like getting a present. in fact, i even gave sabin the hair dryer as a christmas present. it's a loyalty card program that i can get into.

but i'll admit that handing over that card feels a little like i'm voluntarily letting big brother look over my shoulder. if they're tracking my buying habits at the grocery store (you can also have a card there) or in ikea (where they appeal to your altruistic side by donating some miniscule amount to save the children every time you shop) or at h&m, what does that mean in the long run? and what are they doing with your data? do they share it with others? and if so, which others?

i just got a new cartridge for our soda stream in the local imerco (a homewares chain) and she asked if i had a card. i had one at one point, but didn't get it switched over to my current wallet, so i said to her that i did, but that i had just read an article about such cards and was feeling like i no longer wanted to use them. there was another woman in the store who, uncharacteristically for a dane, piped up and said she thought such cards were great because then the stores know what you would like to buy. i would argue that they don't. they only know what i did buy and have absolutely no idea about what i might have actually wanted to buy. they know what i settled for, because what i really wanted wasn't there.

i think with all of the nsa spying exposed by edward snowdon, i am more suspicious of such things. tho' i have no qualms, as i write here on my free blogger blog, and use my gmail in the chrome browser, at turning my every thought and interaction over to google. i am more suspicious of facebook, but still, i give them an awful lot of my data as well. i just can't see that they're using it wisely, as the ads they show me there have never had anything to do with what i like or would be interested in. google, on the other hand, really gets me, which is maybe why i don't find it evil that they have my data.

what do you think? do you participate in loyalty programs? are we already so entrenched in the matrix that there's no way out?

* thanks, bill, for getting me thinking about this. 

bare breasts and bare souls

on thursday, we held an opening reception for our torso project. around 70 people stopped by to see the results. a friend came by, just as we were leaving, with an australian rotary exchange person in tow and i ended up staying another hour, talking to them and sharing a bottle of australian shiraz. it was, in all estimations, a success.

i still think the plain white torsos give the starkest, most artistic impression. but it's true that they are not autobiography in the same way as the others. the expression we individually chose was as unique as we ourselves are and somehow, seeing them all there, hanging together (they're suspended with wire and hanging on hangers), dismissed some of my earlier concerns about whether or not they are art. hanging there all together, representing some sense of community and fellowship and womanhood, it didn't matter anymore whether they are art or not.

i am one of the few who included a look towards the future in the way i chose to express myself at this moment. the sewn paper garland hanging on the inside is my bucket list. it contains goals both lofty (publish a book) and not-so-lofty (befriend a fox).

many of the others covered theirs in photos of their friends and family. despite the central importance of photography to me, i did not want to use photos on mine. i chose instead drawings of places and things that are important to me (chicago, moscow, copenhagen, macedonia) and cameras. there are a few helleristning, because i love those and find deep meaning in their simple lines.

probably most important are the newspaper words that are underneath - both visible and not visible. mostly in danish, mostly because those are the newspapers i had at hand, but expressing fragments of sentiments like "seeking authenticity" and "can the danes be changed in 5 minutes?" and "abnormal is the new normal" and "men are from mars, women from venus, children from heaven and bush is from a very ugly place filled with fear and punishment." that one i'd been saving for awhile.

as agreed, my birth certificate is there, on the inside and you'd have to know what it looks like in order to find it. mine is painted that same blue - a sort of julie blue - inside and out and it somehow represents a kind of peacefulness to me. i also spritzed it with my favorite perfume of the moment (sisley no. 2), so my torso is even scented. each torso is as unique as can be, expressing something meaningful to each of us, but also transmitting meaning to those who come to look. it is an intimate, personal exhibition, letting all of the imperfections quite literally hang out for all to see, but also presenting a coherent whole somehow. a little window into our individual souls, as expressed on our very bodies. pretty powerful stuff, actually.

topography of a life

i'm fascinated by maps. on pinterest, i have a board called topographies, that's full of interesting and inspiring art people have made of maps. but maps are art in and of themselves. they are a representation of a place, not a duplication - a map can never truly capture all that is about a place (borges knew this). they remain but an incomplete illusion. i think it's what makes art featuring maps so fascinating.

just as it's impossible for a map to truly represent a place, it's completely impossible to fully blog a life. for one, no one would want to read it, for another, it's simply impossible to put words to it all. that, of course, doesn't stop people from trying. there are those who blog their breakfast or nightly dinners and then publish books of the photos, in case you missed one of those prosaic shots. there are people who take a photo at the same time every day (or was that just a plot device in a midsomer murder?). or people who simply take a photo every day (i read about a guy who did that for like 30 years).

me, my life and my blog, are all over the place - sometimes it's a craft blog, sometimes a travelogue, sometimes it's about perfume, or raising a child, or living in self-chosen exile, occasionally it's even about politics. but mostly, i blog to think things through, work them out and make sense of the world around me. and it feels pretty real to me. but you can never truly convey what it's all like (especially not the bits inside your head). you can only sketch the outlines. map the topographies of a life, if you will.

i don't share everything, but i do think that because of the immediate kind of person that i am, how i'm feeling is pretty obvious - good and bad. of course there are things i don't blog "out loud" - because they might hurt someone or burn a bridge or get someone (usually me) in trouble (the tales i could tell you of several big corporations would make your toes curl). i also don't blog every worry i have, because to an extent, i want this to be a mostly positive space. but i do blog about those things on my secret blog, because blogging is how i think. or rather, writing is how i think, and blogging is my medium of choice. there's something about that little blogger compose window that just gets the words flowing. and the impossible mapping of a life continues.

the truth: too much perfume

the currents - these are out at the moment and in regular rotation

i've been posting a "scent of the day" on facebook for a couple of weeks now. it was a kind of reaction to some facebook friends who post the song that's in their head when they wake up in the morning and i thought it would be funny. i've written before about my perfume collection but i never really owned up to how much perfume i really have. in fact, until i thought about this whole truth-telling thing, i never dared to count it. but now, i have. and it's not pretty. 47 different kinds.  on the bright side i will never have to buy perfume again as long as i live.

a peek in the perfume box

it took a decade to build up this collection, but bear in mind, i spent a few years passing regularly through an airport duty free. all of it is bought in duty free. not because the prices are better (i think they're pretty similar), but because they have the best selection - at least the good ones do. it's funny, i can pass by a department store perfume counter without even being tempted, but let me loose in the duty free in copenhagen or singapore and watch out!

the large majority of this collection was acquired before i began striving for a simpler, less consumer-oriented life and i'm proud to say that 2011 is almost over and i haven't bought any perfume at all. plus, i only bought one in 2010, so i have improved. i would actually donate some of it, but i'm not sure that the second-hand shops would take partial bottles.

as those of you who are friends with me on facebook know from the daily updates, i actually use perfume on a daily basis - and i don't tend to the wear the same one for two days running. i keep an ever-rotating collection out on the shelf in the bathroom and on the shelf in the bedroom - 5-6 each place - something to suit the season and any potential mood.

there are romantic scents, power scents for difficult meetings, feminine ones and unisex ones. there are ones which are bonded inextricably with memories of certain times and places. there really are only 1 or 2 that i don't ever use...jill sander sensations and calvin klein contradiction. both of those went weird on me when i was pregnant with sabin and i haven't been able to stand them since.

i recognize that this is probably a symptom of a larger disease of the soul, but i feel it's one that's in my past. and the daily enjoyment of my previous obsessive collecting actually lives on in a positive way, so although it was pretty excessive (wasn't everything in the naughties?), it wasn't all bad.

now it's your turn...what are you a little bit obsessive about collecting?

on collecting I: perfume

transitioning to fall

as regular readers of this blog are aware, i have long been struggling with trying to pare down and live a simpler life. i'd like to be less of a consumer or at the very least a more conscious one. but i struggle, because i worship at the altar of apple and i am an avid collector of many things...perfume, fabric, stamps, pretty paper, locks...i could go on.

and the rest of the week, i will go on. because i want to explore my need for collecting, what it is i like about it and hope to get to the bottom of what it is that drives me (or any of us, really) to collect. of course, this isn't the first time i've pondered this, but i want to do it again in the hope that i will begin to be more conscious about it and maybe also to remind me to actively enjoy these things i've so obsessively carefully chosen.

*  *  *

so to start this off, i got out my rather shockingly large box of perfume (to which, i am proud to say, i have not added any new ones during 2011) and changed out the summery scents for a selection of late summer/early autumn scents. i think that scent definitely can help you transition the seasons, so i chose some with darker, heavier undertones to carry me into fall.

i also kept a couple of the summer scents out (sarah jessica parker's lovely and the michael kors island) because i'm expecting that since we've had such a rotten sunless summer, we will actually get some sunny days here in august (so far, that's but a pipe dream).  for example, chanel no. 5 eau premiere is a great transition fragrance - a lighter version of the heavy, serious no. 5, it's perfect for these windy, changeable days where fall and even a few leaves are definitely in the air.  and for the truly blustery, autumn days where there's no hint of summer left, i'm ready with paul smith woman and the tom ford white patchouli.

even if i don't put on other makeup or do my hair, perfume is a part of my everyday. i keep several bottles on the shelf in the bathroom and several in the bedroom. i use scent to lift my mood or to underline it if i want to keep it dark. scent can trigger memories or just give flashes of a feeling you had when you wore it. i wear perfume every day - it's as essential as my glasses. sometimes i wear the same one for a week straight, but more often, a different one - one that somehow matches how i'm feeling or how i want to feel on that particular day.

aside:  what's interesting is that husband also wears cologne every day - he calls it "smell-good," which i find charming despite being dubbed that by a long-ago girlfriend. the difference is that he uses up a bottle before starting a new one, so he's content to wear the same one for several months at a time. he doesn't have the same need i do to collect a wide variety, tho' he doesn't buy the same one over and over again, when one bottle is gone, he buys something new.

but i suppose the moment i enjoyed most of all with my seasonal switch today was that the sun had come out all gloriously golden in the early evening sky and the perfumes looked just gorgeous all lined up on my scale in the evening sunlight.  enjoying the collection, in all its aspects - whether using it or just looking at it - is a big part of what collecting is about.

*  *  *

more collections coming soon...

unnecessary snobbery

there's something i've never really understood.

it's best explained at the neiman marcus makeup counter. you approach, looking to buy the latest trendy chanel nail polish or perhaps some shu uemura mascara or maybe even some hermes perfume. and although you are the customer, the heavily-made-up/coiffed sales girl behind the counter haughtily looks you over and disdainfully asks if she can help in a tone which indicates that despite her position BEHIND the counter instead of in front of it, she is superior - far superior - to you.

what is that about?

how is it that the person there working ostensibly to serve you can act like they're so much better than you? you're the one standing there with the money to buy the item, they're just handing it over. you'd think if they were so great, they'd be buying, not selling.

a much-improved matilde

i recently experienced something similar with the massage therapist we've been using on our horse. before matilde's first treatment, i had the opportunity to watch her working on another horse at the stable. there, i observed her condescendingly asking questions of the owner and then in a superior tone, telling the owner how it REALLY was with their horse. as i observed this, i already had a sinking feeling about her.

when she came to matilde, she also treated me in a very superior manner. without establishing whether i had any experience with horses, she treated me as if i not only knew nothing, but couldn't possibly know anything (i tend to want to interpret this as a xenophobic trait, but i think she's like that to everyone). i could see that even matilde didn't take to her. as she worked on her, matilde was tense, stomping her foot and on several occasions tried to mash her up against the wall (i silently said, "you go girl!") so it wasn't only me who got a bad vibe from her. in fairness, this was partially because matilde was in pain.

she suggested during matilde's treatment that she needed a chiropractic treatment and i have to admit that i was very skeptical, thinking she and the chiropractor had a deal where they recommended each other, to keep one another in business. but, as i wrote here, i went ahead and made an appointment and ended up loving the chiropractor, who was a real veterinarian.

the time came last week for matilde's second massage. the massage therapist was much warmer to me, as i had apparently established myself with her, likely by having used the chiropractor she recommended. i had several opportunities to demonstrate my knowledge of horses, but even as i did so, i was a little put out that i even felt i needed to prove myself to this snobby woman. matilde didn't relax with her until a good half an hour into the massage, so again, the horse showed herself to be a good judge of character (she took immediately to the chiropractor, so she can read people well).

the massage therapist asked to see the saddle we're using on matilde. it is, admittedly, not the world's best saddle. you don't buy an ansur or a stubben for a growing child, as much as you might like to. but it was a brand new saddle and sabin likes it and is comfortable in it. the chiropractor had told us she didn't think the saddle was the issue and thought the extra pad we had bought for it was a good solution until we were ready to invest in another saddle. but miss massage therapist was incredibly condescending and disdainful about it. in fact, she was downright insulting, telling me that i had better not even try to sell it, as that would be completely wrong of me, since it was the worst "riding school crap" she'd ever seen. yes, she really said that to her customer.  and while i do tend to appreciate refreshing honesty, this went too far.

i went home and did some research about fitting of saddles and much of what she told me - about how much space should be between withers and the saddle and such was patently wrong. the more i think about the way she behaved, the more it makes me fume. why does this person, who i am paying to provide me with a service (and especially one that is arguably a luxury service of sorts), have to be such a condescending bitch?

i just don't understand it.

even tho' matilde is doing much better and is like a different horse, i think i'll be finding a different massage therapist for her next treatment.

the fifth circle of hell or weird wednesday gets even weirder

descending to the fifth circle of hell (wrath and sullenness)

my morning found me trudging up a staircase, following a fifty-something woman who had clearly eaten loads of garlic for breakfast, or perhaps just used it instead of perfume. i prayed frantically silently to odin that she was going somewhere else, but no, she was headed to the same classroom up on the top floor that i was. apparently odin was otherwise engaged.

because there is a gap of time between old job and new job, i have applied for unemployment benefits and one of the hoops one must jump through is to attend a two day "competence assessment" course during which one ends up with an online "CV" in a government system (the one which, if you recall, suggested after analyzing my education and experience that i do telemarketing). thus, you know that i have already placed my CV in the system on my own and am, as it were, well aware of my competence(s). so anyway, that's why i found myself following the clearly-afraid-of-vampires woman up the stairs early on a wednesday morning.

myself and 17 others were attending the day's sessions, which opened with the most patronizing 30 minutes of instructions and warnings i've witnessed in as long as i can remember. we were referred to as "unemployed welfare recipients" (very motivating) during the entire spiel, which included a whole lot of references to the apparently given fact that we were looking for jobs as chauffeurs and nursing home attendants (not that there's anything wrong with those things, but i didn't spent nine months on a fulbright in the balkans to lift old mr. hansen from his bed to his wheelchair). anyone who came in late was subjected to cutting and even more demeaning and patronizing remarks about their ability to tell time.

once i realized that i was making serious fingernail marks in the palms of my hands from holding them in fists to keep from screaming, i tuned out the capri- and thigh-length "sporty" boot-wearing woman's patronizing droning and looked around. nearly half of my fellow participants were in their upper fifties, four were clearly carpenters or bricklayers or the like, there were two who looked a bit like me and a few young women who looked like candidates for channel 4's the young mothers program.

the capri-clad woman with her asymmetrical haircut turned us over to an energetic bald man who told us straight away about his messy divorce and life with his three kids, who only spend half the month at his house. for otherwise cold, closed people, the danes surely do share some all-too personal details rather easily. he proceeded to throw every remaining scrap of political correctness out the window in what i eventually decided was a charming way (after i recovered from the shock that he outright called me an asshole for joining that more general union instead of the one for people with master's degrees). he actually said to a young girl who worked part time in a church, "what the hell does a kirketjener (her job title) do?" not really appreciating the irony of swearing about a church. i had to actually cover my mouth to restrain outright boisterous laughter at that one.

one of the women, who i thought i had spotted as a fellow academic, turned out to be a former computer programmer turned papergirl turned failed nursing student who left her 4-year nursing program after 6 years without finishing due to "ideological reasons." i came to feel real empathy for her, because i think she had a soft heart and it caused her to be unable to take the overwhelming reality of the world. on the other hand, i do think there are meds for that.

once i arranged not to be forced to go back for day two (i was clearly in the wrong room and apparently the wrong union), i sat back and enjoyed it. some of the more amusing stories that came out during the day:

~  a girl in her late 20s with two kids and no husband who wanted to be a mechanic because she liked cars (but had no training or skills in being a mechanic whatsoever and no idea how to get them. and she didn't even have a car).

~  a sweet (and very talkative) man of nearly 60 who had spent a lifetime as a salesman and had already applied for 500 jobs (he had a stack of documents to prove it).

~  a boy in his early 20s who said his ambition was to become a garbage man (after he attained the correct qualifications, including a driver's license, which he currently lacked).

~  a real asshole of a (self-declared) dyslexic bricklayer whose phone was in his coat pocket and kept ringing every 15-20 minutes all morning and who actually refused to turn it off or on silent when asked to do so (turned out he didn't know how to do it, so the future garbage man helped him out, but not until it had rung 4-5 times).

i'll admit i didn't get a whole lot out of the day, other than 11 pages of notes in my "blog about this" notebook. so perhaps it was worth it. but thank odin i don't have to go back tomorrow. so i can stay home and write some more about it, because there's so much more to share.

resisting...

it seems that during the christmas season there are many pressures. a whirlwind of gifts and relatives and friends and food and cookies. and you either succumb to the pressures and dash around like a madwoman, trying to get that perfect last-minute present, the last ingredients for the perfect christmas dinner, the most beautiful centerpiece for your christmas table, or you resist all of that.

this year, i'm resisting. for the most part, we have what we need, so we're not going mad with presents (if you don't count the small fortune i spent on new clothes for sabin in noa noa). we've just had our weekend of julefrokosts, so the family and friends bit is mostly behind us. we've been baking for the past week, so we've got a supply of christmas cookies laid in. those lovely people who bring my weekly organic box also brought an organic duck and a big, beautiful pork roast (both essential ingredients in the danish christmas dinner), so we're set as far as the food is concerned. i bought some hyacinths and i'm making my own table centerpiece. so the resisting is going well so far. and in fact, i've even managed to resist  some other stuff:

~  christmas cards - i really don't do christmas cards. this isn't a new resistance, i've basically never done christmas cards. i always find those letters, outlining all of the achievements of the family over the past year and with overly sentimental and possibly hollow wishes for you to have a successful new year (so that your christmas letter next year can too be filled with glowing reports of little johnny's early acceptance to harvard and the like), to be...well...a bit braggy and ultimately empty. there, i said it. maybe i'm scrooge, but i don't want to send out such a letter and honestly, nor do i want to receive them. which isn't to say that i don't appreciate the sentiment behind the cards i receive (which are fewer and fewer each year, as people realize we don't send them back and put us in their grudge books), but i'm not willing able to reciprocate. i just don't have it in me. maybe i'm just bad at polite gestures. (and spud, bambi and bee, i'm not talking about you here...i love that you sent cards, i just didn't send one back.)

~  teacher gifts - i've seen a lot of references of late to people frantically getting their teacher gifts ready to go. and i have to say that we are very fortunate that that's not the norm here in denmark. so no pressure to give an elaborate gift to the teacher to keep her well-disposed to the child. since we didn't HAVE to do it, we did give sabin's teacher (who we love) one of our sweet little birds. and the riding teacher that was leaving also got one. but it felt much better for the fact that we weren't obligated to do it.

crappy picture taken from great distance in dark church at high ISO and then cropped within an inch of its life.

~  nativity chic - spud wrote not long ago about the nativity chic craze sweeping the UK. it sounded like utter madness - people spending up to 150£ on costumes for their child's appearance in the yearly nativity play. sabin was in a nativity play too and all it meant was that we had to roll out of bed rather early on sunday morning. sabin was one of the lesser-known characters - the christmas heart (julehjertet) - and all costumes were provided by the church. on this one, i'll admit i would like to have made an elaborate and much more fabulous costume for her myself, but i am grateful that the setup itself made it easy for me to resist this.

~ keeping up with the joneses hansens - we met a group of new people yesterday at a little christmas afternoon gathering at some friends of ours. there were three other couples there, all chatting and open and really nice (rather pleasantly undanish of them, actually, tho' all were danes). they were talking about trips taken and trips on the horizon. skiing in france just after christmas. a tour around thailand. visits to shanghai for mad shopping sprees. and it surprised me that i didn't feel any need at all to compete. i don't feel the least bit bad that we're going to be home this christmas, with our own crackling fire and the smells of duck roasting in the oven. i like to ski, but honestly, traipsing to france when the snow is beautiful here at home just doesn't appeal. and so i realized that all of that thinking about simplicity is working. i'll admit that maybe i've also reached a place where i'm comfortable in the knowledge of all the places i've traveled and don't feel any pressure to prove anything. and i realize that makes it much easier.

husband's older daughters were here this weekend and they had a lengthy conversation with their mother over what some or other cousin wanted for christmas. they couldn't remember and couldn't really think of anything original to get for the cousin. so they settled upon a gift card to a shop that has perfume and makeup, so that the cousin could buy what she wanted. and it really underlined for me how out of control the gift thing has become. we're giving gifts because we feel obligated to do so. and far too many people don't put any thought into it - they just ask for a list from the person and get them exactly what's on the list. we far too often just go buy the things we like and think we need, leaving there to be nothing we really wish for when christmas comes. and i think that takes the fun out of it for both giver and receiver. how much fun is it to open your gifts when you know what's in them? and it becomes more drudgery than fun to shop for gifts when you're just going down a pre-determined list.

i want to return to a place where gifts are meaningful. where i give because i found or made something that i know is perfect for that person. i'd rather gives less gifts that have more meaning and i definitely don't want to give some lame gift certificate because i can't be bothered to think of something proper to give. if you don't know the person well enough to be able to know what they'd like, then maybe you have no business giving them a gift in the first place? i really think we've come to a bad place in our evolution when gifts have become an obligation. the whole idea of gifts is lost if that's the case.

dismounts from soap box....

i hope that your christmas season is filled with love and laughter and good food and crackling fireplaces and time spent with people you love.

the comfort of collecting

once again this weekend, i sought and found comfort in my craft stash. hours were spent making things by nearly all family members. sabin and her big sister spent several hours making monocules© on friday evening. on saturday, big sister raided the fabric stash to make a table runner for her mother and a pillow for her grandmother for christmas. i continued work on some snuggle quilts for my nephews. and it was all possible because we had all of the stuff right here, at hand - fabrics, clay, yarn, embroidery thread. when inspiration struck, we could immediately get down to work. and i felt justified in my pack rat ways.

and i looked around the house and realized that it's filled with collections of things. of course, i knew this, but i'm not sure i've thought that much about how much comfort and contentment those collections bring to me on a daily basis. from baskets of smooth stones to books to a collection of old (and new) cameras to the books that fill our bedroom and our dining room to the well-stocked perfume shelves in the upstairs bathroom. we're surrounded by our collections of things.

husband and i got to talking about the collections and what they mean. and why we have the drive to collect. husband has a tendency to explain everything through evolution. and he thinks collecting is the modern manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. we don't need to hunt for our food these days, so that instinct manifests in other ways.  i know that i am constantly on the lookout (hunting, if you will) for interesting old locks and counting machines when i'm in the flea markets. and i gather interesting fabrics even when i don't necessarily know what i'm going to make of them - because i might need them for something or other one day. we indulge our hunter-gatherer instincts all the time.

collecting and acquiring is something we've discussed a lot as we try to decide how to approach our year of not buying things. one of the things we're thinking about is that we will only buy second hand (except socks and underwear, i'm sorry, but those have to be new) for the next year - at least for ourselves. sabin, on the other hand, will have to have new shoes and clothes, as fast as she's growing. but me, i can easily go a year without adding to my shoe collection and it won't hurt a thing. we don't have a fully-formed plan as of yet, but we're getting there. and we will undoubtedly find ways to indulge our inner hunter-gatherer and keep our collections dynamic. because the fact is that they also make us happy.

what do you love to collect?

* * *

i wanted to thank you all for your great insight on the photo of the last post. i'm really happy to see new people coming out of the woodwork. on friday, i'll let you know who has "won" the entirely subjective competition for the best thoughts on the meaning of that photo.

oh yay, a meme for blog camp day

lisa-marie at this girl... tagged me for one of those question memes where you answer all of them but the one you like least, replace that one with one of your own choosing and then pass it along. :-) it sounded like the perfect post for a saturday, when i'm hanging out with my blog campers!! (squeal! yay! happy dance of joy!)...so here are the questions (and i'll admit i chopped off more than just one--it was getting too long for me, but i added several easy ones at the end):

what is your current obsession?
thankfully, i seem to have moved on somewhat from the eyeball thing, so i'd have to say stones. rock on, man. especially if the stones also look like eyeballs. that's the best.

coffee or tea?
both - tea in the morning--with milk and 1.5 spoons of sugar, coffee the rest of the day, with plenty of milk (preferably steamed/frothed), but no sugar.

what's for dinner?
tonight, it was one of our favorite dishes--fish (we used rødspætter--one of those ugly flat fish with eyes on top, not on the sides, that i don't know the name of in english) baked in the oven with a lovely mess of grated carrots, leeks and a can of coconut milk. served over rice. it's heavenly. and there's some left over, so i'll be having it for lunch tomorrow. yum. we have a great fish guy in our town, so i try to go there at least once a week.

what would you eat for your last meal?
wagyu beef and a big plate of sushi

what was the last thing you bought?
i'd love to say it was my chucks, but it was four packages of tea, a package of fried onions (ristetløg) and a bag of crisps made of root veggies (so totally healthy). :-)

what are you listening to right now?
sadly, i'm listening to husband snoring, as i turned off the music when he went to bed. most of the day, we listened to america's greatest hits, oddly enough.

what's your favorite ice cream flavor?
i love a really good coconut ice cream and once cried in a thai restaurant in phoenix because they were out of theirs, which was heavenly. once i cried, they actually scrounged up a bowl of it for me. lesson in that: crying to get your way--very effective.

what do you think of the person who tagged you?
lisa-marie's blog is new on my blogdar (like radar, only detects blogs)...i think i've visited her one time previously. i love discovering new blogs and anyone who uses lots of ellipses is cool in my book.

if you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?
i'd go to the seminary co-op bookstore in hyde park, chicago. i could easily kill and hour and several hundred dollars there.

which language do you want to learn?
i'd like to learn afrikaans.

what is your favorite color?

i think this says it all: turquoisey-blue

what's your favorite piece of clothing in your own wardrobe?
my best and fave long & lean gap jeans. (and you thought i was gonna say the chucks, didn't you?)

what is your dream job?
i think i have my dream job, but would like to blog for a living.

what is your worst habit?
procrastination.

if you had £100 right now, what would you spend it on?
books.

do you admire anyone's style?
this is really bad, but i'm drawing a total blank. i love dr. gregory house's style...but that's more a state of mind than a look.

describe your personal style...
this isn't a question. i refer you to my profile description in the sidebar. :-) my style's all over the place, depending on the occasion. i love fake lashes. i have a hugo boss suit. but most of the time, i wear flannel pj bottoms, a comfy t-shirt and the striped gap sweater my sister gave me for christmas.

what are you going to do after this?
sleep (i've scheduled this post, you see). i don't sleep enough what with the fact that you all keep writing blog posts, even when i'm busy and i'll probably never catch up!

what are your favorite movies?
the abyss (afgrunden) (1910) starring asta nielsen
fargo, the princess bride, the castle, napoleon dynamite

what is your favorite smell?
this changes all the time (you know my thing for perfume), but i have to say that in spring, when the air is heavy with the scent of lilacs, that not much can beat that.

cats or dogs?
cats or cat-like dogs (e.g. pugs)

mac or PC?
mac (duh)

tolstoy or dostoevsky?
dostoevsky

moscow or st. petersburg?
moscow

how many questions do you think i added? which ones?


and if you would like to play along, consider yourself tagged. thanks again lisa-marie for giving me an assignment, sorry i kinda tapered off at the end and didn't answer quite all of the original questions...

molly's meme

molly (my very first follower) made up a meme. all by herself. and i mean, why not? someone's got to do it, right? well, she didn't actually tag me for it, but i'm going to do it anyway because i'm the fairy blogmother and i can do stuff like that. and plus, i'm going to pick up my blog campers today and so it makes for an easy scheduled post.

totally gratituous rock shot

here's what molly says about her brand spankin' new meme:

I've always had the problem of not being able to pick a favourite. I don't have one favourite movie or one favourite book, or one favourite food. Life's just a bit more complex than that for me. I'm 75% Gemini  - go figure.


So the idea here is that you list 5 items in each category, a favourite 5 - but not necessarily in order of favouriteness - to show the diversity/similarity/hilarity/polarity/ or extreme same-ness of your personal likes.


And then tag 5 peeps to do the same. And feel free to add or subtract categories as you like.
Down with meme imperialism!

and here are my favorite things....

5 favorite songs (this list would be different if you asked me in an hour or a day):
1. Hotel California - Eagles
2. I think I'm in Love - Beck
3. Citizen of the Planet - Alanis Morissette
4. Express Yourself - Madonna (this song saw me through a bad breakup)
5. My Sister - Juliana Hatfield 3

5 favorite films:
1. Fargo
2. The Princess Bride
3. Afgrunden (The Abyss) (1911 danish silent film--i loved it before i ever even came to denmark)
4. The Castle (it's a hilarious australian film)
5. Napoleon Dynamite
i had total deja vu writing this...but i think it's b/c of saturday's scheduled post (another meme).

5 favorite books:
1. Pushkin House (Pushkinskii Dom) - Andrei Bitov
2. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
3. Wind up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
4. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (just kept this one here from molly's list)
5. What I Loved - Siri Hustvedt

5 favorite crushes (there is a distinct old man theme going on here):
1. David Letterman
2. Hugh Laurie
3. Bill Clinton
4. Todd Benjamin (saw him moderate a panel last week at Nor-Shipping--i'm a sucker for a smart one)
5. Fox Mulder (yes, i realize he is a character played by David Duchovney, however, it's Fox, not David that I'm crushing on.)

5 favorite (random) things:
1. my pet rock
2. perfume
3. iPods
4. my Macbook Pro
5. iPhone

5 favorite things to eat (you knew i was going to have to add one of my own):
1. mango (especially in the philippines)
2. salty almonds
3. homemade pizza with wacky ingredients (pears & salad - potatoes & chicken)
4. watermelon
5. tapas - garlic shrimp, chorizo,...mmm, just thinking about it makes me hungry

and i thought that i would tag three new bloggers that have discovered me i've discovered recently and two old friends:

1.  just jules
2.  marinik
3.  delwyn 
4.  an open heart
5.  janet

and one more gratuitous rock shot, mostly because i put these on flickr the other day, but never blogged them:

yes, i'm a brand hound

on the plane i was reading the hopelessly out-of-touch berlingske sunday lifestyle magazine MS (which strangely doesn't seem to have its own pages on berlingske's website). as i've written previously, my impression is that they keep the editorial staff of the very posh sunday magazine somewhere in an underground bunker where they have no access to the rest of news staff and as such have no idea whatsoever that there's a financial crisis raging.

but to distract myself from the fact that the plane was completely packed and the guy next to me had his elbow firmly planted on my side of the seat (damn those short flight small planes), i lost myself in a one-page article on all of the gorgeous new perfume bottles being designed by industrial designers like ross lovegrove (the new narciso rodriguez essence) and karim rashid (the new kenzo amour) and a must-have clear glass dildo designed by jean nouvel for yves st. laurent last year (see, i said they were out of touch).

and in thinking about the out-of-touchness, i thought briefly guiltily about my pass through the duty free. wherein i bought a new yves st. laurent mascara (the one that makes your real lashes look like fakes (thanks for the recommendation tangobaby)) and a new mac paint pot in painterly (love that name) and looked in vain for the wonderful new prada infusion de fleur d'oranger. i was a little shocked not to find it, as the duty free in CPH is generally one of the better-stocked i've visited (and i've visited a lot of them). so i had to content myself with a couple of spritzes of the sisley 1 and 2 (there's also a #3, but i didn't have enough arms) (#1 and #2 are wonderful and expensive (600DKK/$115 for 100ml), but are now on my covet list (especially #2), which just smelled better and better the longer it was on me.

i found the prada when i got to oslo (which is where i'd seen it in the first place) and because it's a small (read: travelable) 50ml size, i got it and some origins shampoo and conditioner (since that girl failed to pack any).

now that's an awful lot of brands. generally speaking, all of my skin care is origins--youthtopia, a perfect world, make a difference, checks and balances, modern friction--i'm a sucker for those clever names and all of them have scents that i can stand (as in not much scent at all to compete with all the perfume i've got goin' on).  i'm not loyal to one particular brand of perfume, as we well know, tho' i do think i have every scent ralph lauren makes, so that's the closest i come to brand loyalty on fragrance.

i'm a faithful user of estée lauder futurist age-resisting foundation (i love that age-resisting thing). the nail polish i have is overwhelmingly chanel with the occasional mac for the more wacky colors. chanel totally got me hooked way back in the mid-90s with vamp. i adored that color. eyeshadow is all mac at the moment, tho' i do a bit of bobby brown and the occasional dior. eyeliner goes between mac and estée lauder. lipstick is all mac at the moment, but there have been times when it was all estée lauder. (i think it's the same company behind both, so it probably doesn't really matter).

but the fact is that they are all brands, brands, brands. and i've been like this as long as i can remember making my own brand choices. but why is that? i no longer buy women's magazines and the only time i see ads for such things is the odd copy of vanity fair or when i page through the glossy mags at the hairdresser or when i read berlingske's infernal sunday magazine. so what makes me so loyal to the brand names?

i've actually tried with both foundation and eyeliner to go to more off-the-shelf sorts..max factor or l'oreal or the like, but honestly didn't like them as well as i like the futurist--it just goes on better and looks better and feels better (you get that? better.). and as for the eyeliner, many eyeliners will make your eyes water, which just kinda defeats the purpose.  i was a faithful l'oreal mascara user for years until i discovered the yves st. laurent and actually only went looking for it when i could no longer find the l'oreal one i liked (i think they stopped making it).

and i'd like to think that my faithful long-term use of good skin care products has helped me have less wrinkles than many people my age. (nothing to do with living in a place where the sun doesn't shine that much or the fact that i've never smoked. nope. gotta be the youthtopia.)

but am i just a victim of years of advertising and societal pressure which makes me think i need all that product in the first place. or is it just because i would rather douse myself in perfume than shower on a regular basis? or are the brands really better?

what brands are you loyal to and why?

friday confession

i haven't confessed since that first one earlier this month, so i thought it was time...plus, friday confession was polly's original idea with it, so the day is even right.  it is friday, right? i've kinda lost track this week.

forgive me odin, for i have sinned...

: :  i admit this is just another way of doing one of those random lists i love so much.

: : i've used up a rather shocking amount of my kenzo eau de fleur de thé perfume this week instead of showering regularly.

: : sabin and i ate carpaccio for dinner three days this week. plus a soft boiled egg with spears of aspargus dipped into it. we always eat weird raw stuff when husband is away. and yup, that's a super cool heather moore skinny laminx egg cup cradling that egg.

: : i am fighting an urge to go downtown and see if there is anything summery and wonderful in the form of a dress for me. but (aside from the kenzo) i've done so well on extending austerity april into may that it would be a shame to break it here right at the end.

: : and i really want my own pair of converse all-stars, which are apparently affectionately called chucks, but which i can't really bring myself to call that because i am lacking the cultural reference for that name. but that's my own fault for removing myself from that culture for over a decade. i have the same thing with something called "wife beaters" that people keep mentioning. i have no idea what those are. anyway, i want light yellow converse all-stars. i don't know why that color, as i have nothing else that's yellow, it just that the thought of those makes my heart sing. i hope they make them in that color.

: : very often my kitchen sink area looks like above because it's where i draw the line as to how i want to expend my energy allotment for the day. so much for that feature on apartment therapy.

: : i am so relieved that all of my articles are done now and just awaiting the final approvals. and that the feedback that's come in from the various interviewees is very positive. that's a big relief. because my inner perfectionist is one tough cookie to please. and she had her doubts.

: : this week i spent an awful lot of time wearing my old green gap sweatpants and husband's big red gap hoodie, clutching my talisman stone and rocking back and forth in front of my laptop.

: : i took my talisman stone to the bathtub with me. after clutching it in my sweaty little palm all week, i thought it might like a bath. is that weird?  i showed my stone to my mom yesterday on a video chat and she said, "julie, get a life." i thought that was a little bit harsh. and i hope the stone didn't hear her.

* * *

and now for something completely different

i'd like to do a post as cyndy suggested, where you ask sabin and me questions and we post the answers, so please leave your questions in the comments. that is right, isn't it, cyndy?  my questions--with a look on the past and sabin's view on the same questions, but what she imagines her answers will be in the future. as cyndy says, "First car? First date? First day of college? First house? The list is endless..." so think along those lines in coming up with the questions.

and happy friday to all of you. i for one am looking forward to the weekend.