hmm, it seems i did have seven more random things in me...

mariA-thérèse of afiori tagged me (last week, oops!) for one of those 7 random things posts. i'm not actually sure there are seven that i haven't previously shared, but i thought i'd give it a whirl. and with a photo for each. because that might distract from the lameness of the seven things.

i love yarn. can't stop buying it, despite being utterly unable to knit or crochet.

just bought this yesterday. 

i am going to try to make one of these 

to match my new orange coat (which i believe i've mentioned before).

that one yarn that looks quite red in this pic is actually much more orange.

i love weaving, despite what happened that one day. byegones, i say.

there is something so peaceful and soothing about pressing the pedals and swinging the thingie (dang, i'm missing terminology here) forward. 

must look up the terms in english b/c the danish ones clearly don't stay in my head.

tho' i'm not that fond of this pattern, mostly because i could never remember where i was.

you can see i messed it up a couple of times.

but these are learning pieces.

i grew up with horses and i think they're good for the soul.

i love pretty ribbon.
and sunshine on pretty ribbon...even better.
got the ribbon here.
the sunshine was sent by google.

i do not miss going back and forth to norway. not one little bit.

i love house-hunting. i think it's really, really fun.
and i can easily imagine myself in every single house, at least during my visit.

i think there's nothing quite like a cotton candy bigger than you on a summer day.

and on that note, i'd like to tag a bunch of new bloggy friends, whose 7 things i'd love to read:

a commonplace life
concerning pancakes
one girl circus
so NOT cool
a crack in the window
the philosophy of KLo
provins
what would julie say...

and i just want to say that i'm really grateful to all these new bloggy faces for commenting on my blog in recent weeks.
changing jobs and house-hunting has seriously cut into my blogging time/energy and i'm grateful you all commented so that i was in turn led to your blogs.
because i always check out the profile/blog of anyone who comments (that's a hint, lurkers).
and i've discovered some great new friends that way.

of course, i still love all of my old blog friends, but i figured you've been random thinged to death. :-)

thanks maria-thérèse for tagging me for this one.

and do check out my tumblr. i'm adding good stuff all the time! and it's so much fun!

tumbling tumbleweed

i have a new obsession. actually, it's not that new, i created my tumblr last december after seeing my friend li's tumblr. but it only occurred to me yesterday (undoubtedly because i'm a little slow) that it's a whole new thing to do with my flickr faves! like this gorgeous grape shot from the ever-talented (and shockingly young if you're old like me) framboesa. tumblr makes it ultra-easy. i have a button called "share this on tumblr" in my firefox toolbar. so you just land on a photo you like and press that and voila, it creates a post to share with the world on tumblr and gives credit to its owner. bliss i tell you, bliss. especially since clicking the pic takes you directly there on flickr so you can fave it for yourself.

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.

weirdness on a wednesday

is that what porcupine eggs look like?

: : still laughing about the fact that last week i was told that i didn't get a job i interviewed for because i lacked experience in a multi-national company working across cultures. huh? and even weirder, the woman who told me this had met me and talked to me for nearly two hours. and a lot of the conversation centered on all of the places i had traveled and nationalities i had worked with for my work with two different multi-national companies from 2001-2007. oh, and the past two years where i've worked in a country other than the one in which i live. oh, not to mention that i've had my entire working life outside the country of my birth. cross culture, my ass. note to self: do not speak danish in an interview ever again.

: : i found a way to cure my stiff neck. i went down and confronted the local manager of Fona, the store where i bought my macbook pro, about the completely ludicrous quote they've given me on fixing it. the funny little man and his failed hairplugs lied to my face, so i didn't get satisfaction on the MBP issue (which i will explain in a different, much more ranty post in the near future), but the adrenalin the whole encounter gave me fixed my neck right up. 

: : trying to convince husband to restage some cute pictures from his childhood, a la this. thus far, i have failed. tho' it wasn't the picture above i was trying to convince him to restage. there's another one of him at about age 3, standing stark naked in the backyard on a quilt. funnily enough, he won't go for an updated version of that one.

: : yesterday, it went from heavy snow to brilliant sunshine in the space of about an hour. i'll take some more of the sunshine, please.

: : my wednesday is only going to get weirder. will undoubtedly share more of that later. it's going to be anthropology, i tell you. observing the natives in their natural habitat. just like a good cross-cultural girl should...

asking what if?

what if?

...we looked at the world from a different angle?

...things just fell into place as they should?

...people got to do that which they were meant to do?

...my neck didn't hurt?

...we knew exactly what direction to go?

...beautiful things appeared, fully formed, in our imaginations?

...the snow melted and snowdrops burst forth?

...the sun shined?

...there was time for all of the important things?

...someone brought me a steaming, fragrant cup of milky, sweet tea?

...the whole house smelled of cinnamon buns?

some of these are already true and i have faith that the rest of them will be...

color palettes from flickr faves

eternally thinking about color. and with my neck so sore, i can't actually sew or really make anything at the moment, so i just dream about doing so. i ran a few of my recent flickr faves through the color palette generator, just to take the temperature of the colors that are speaking to me at the moment.

original photo here.

original photo here.

original photo here. 

original photo here.

original photo here.

what colors are making your blood race?

lions and tigers and bears, oh my

they say that if march comes in like a lion, it goes out like a lamb. and since today is decidedly lion-like with roaring wind and driving slush (yes, slush, not sleet, not rain, not snow, but clumps of slush), i'm going to hold march to it come the end.

i'm completely useless for going on a second day. i woke up yesterday with a crick in my neck that got worse all day. i can't turn my head and definitely can't look down without sharp intake of breath and lightheadedness from the pain. we discussed meningitis last night on twitter, but i don't have a fever, i'm my usual cold-blooded below-normal temperature, so i think i've pinched a nerve or something. and this bone-cold day doesn't help. but it's also impossible to sew or knit (i actually tried to knit again yesterday, since one of the things i started long ago would make a great scarf for my new orange coat) (i haven't mentioned my new orange coat, have i?) or crochet (still haven't managed a granny square - won't someone come and teach me?).

i finished life of pi, so now i've picked up stieg larsson's mænd der hader kvinder, which i read a couple of years ago, but i'm still in rereading mode these days. after the bitter disappointment of the end of life of pi, i had to go back to a reread. i've decided that i refuse to believe the end. there had to really be a tiger in that boat. but i am sad that richard parker ran off into the woods. and what was that seaweed island all about? i guess one would begin to hallucinate if one was adrift in the pacific for 7 months.

and speaking of hallucinations, i wouldn't mind hallucinating some daffodils or snowdrops or crocus out in the garden, but there's still snow everywhere, tho' the slush should melt some of it. in all, it's a rather dreary. my favorite gap jeans are on their last legs and i'm not even sure i can patch them.  i found a hole in my favorite wool sock this morning and so did sabin. we're just so ready for winter to be over. i'm thinking of going back into hibernation 'til spring comes in earnest.