goodbye steve

i woke up this morning to the news of steve jobs’ death - fittingly enough, i read about it on my iPhone. i didn’t know him personally, but yet i feel truly saddened by his death. it’s not even that it was that unexpected - it must have been really bad for him to step down from the helm of apple in august. and yet someone like him seemed somehow invincible. but he wasn’t and i feel shock and sorrow. and i’ve even shed a few actual tears. 56 is far too young to die.

for all my joking about worshipping at the altar of apple, there is some truth to it. since college (except for those years where i accidentally worked for microsoft), all of the computers in my life have been macs. i even remained faithful during the PowerPC years (tho’ those were the years of apple without steve). now, as i write this, i’m doing so in a cute little café, latté at hand, on my MacBook Air, connected to the ‘net via my iPhone as a personal hotspot. a large portion of my identity is connected to my ownership of apple products and even more importantly, to being seen with them.

what a breathtaking legacy steve jobs leaves behind. what his vision did for design and how we use and identify with technology in our everyday lives is nothing short of stunning. but i think what worries me most is not what will happen to apple - they surely have some of the most creative people in the world working for them - but that i don’t see anyone on the radar who can even come close to his innovation and vision. and it makes me wonder where we’ll be without him, in general.

where are the visionaries? the real innovators? the ones truly unafraid to think differently and push us in new directions? like real philosophers, true innovators are thin on the ground without steve.

he will be missed. by the whole world.

i woke up with a headache

i woke up with a headache. i blame the abrupt shift in weather.

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these photos were clearly taken before the weather changed...

the saddlemaker, who is actually a saddle fitter, is coming today, but already we think the used passier dressage saddle we're trying out is MUCH better than the other saddle we had. we'll see what she says about it tho'. who knew so many problems could be caused by the wrong saddle?

matilde is already quite fuzzy. i suppose she knows something we don't about the coming winter. and it doesn't bode well. 

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thanks to my headache, i don't have much more, so i'm off to make potato leek soup to try to feel better so i'm coherent for the saddle fitter.

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in the meantime, check out these:

the chef's garden

and the men-ups!

make hay while the sun shines

those WIP stitched-up photos

autumnal solids

soft, supple leather

i confess that i have been led astray from my creative endeavors by glorious autumn weather. when the weather got good last wednesday, i abandoned my post at the sewing machine and went outside. i've only come back in to do things that were absolutely necessary (laundry, meals, making sure the child takes a shower), but otherwise, i've been out with the horse and the bunnies and the chickens and the child. puttering in the garden. helping husband clear an area to plant some grapes and some special cider apple trees that we ordered. ok, i didn't actually help that much, but i discussed where it should all go before i settled down in the hammock with a book.

however, i do have all of these lovely materials, waiting patiently for me on the table in my makeshift studio and they promise rain tomorrow...

monday fizzies

you must go see what happened on the roaming gnome's first day in denmark.

and stay tuned for what happens next.

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speaking of happening, there seems to be a lot happening in ePublishing.

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speaking of self-published books - check out this delightful bobbaloo book by my friend pia!

bobbaloos, food, cake and coffee - what's not to like?

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have you noticed that if you sneak up on firefox, it freezes?

and by sneak up on it, i mean flip to it from another program, like iPhoto.

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loving this awesome idea.

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looking through my 365 tumblr makes me happy.

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here's hoping your monday was fizzy too...

eggcellent monday

you know it's going to be a good day when it begins with one perfect egg, still warm from the chicken.

turning off the inner anthropologist

i'm finding that i'm developing a work-related injury as i work on this piece on the danish welfare state. it's an injury more mental than physical - i simply can't turn off my inner anthropologist. everywhere i go, i'm observing and analyzing (i suppose regular readers of this blog know that this is actually nothing new), but it feels somehow different. it's become more systematic, perhaps, than my usual musings.

last evening, i attended a large party and had occasion to do a lot of anthropological observation of the natives in their natural habitat (if indeed their natural habitat can be said to be a rather large exhibition hall transformed into dinner seating for 7700 people and the swedish 90s band roxette). and in my observation (and mental application of various theories), i realized that playing the role of anthropologist tends to make me hold back from participating fully in the moment myself. i end up sidelining myself as mere observer (at least i restrained from scribbling notes in my little notebook, tho' it was in my tiny little purse and i was sorely tempted). so while i gain a great deal from the experience in one sense, i come away from it feeling that i wasn't truly there, except in some abstract theoretical sense (filtered heavily through bourdieu).

and while these clinical anthropological skills are all well and good for the purposes of the book, i do hope i can achieve some degree of being able to turn it off again - because it's making me effectively miss the party.

saturday musings

we're on the third day in a row of absolutely glorious weather...clear blue skies and golden sunshine, plus it's about 23°C, which pretty much couldn't be more perfect. everyone is talking about how they're soaking it all in, for the coming darkness ahead. it's so glorious it almost feels like that's possible.

it's one of those saturdays, where you run around, doing a lot of small tasks and thinking a lot of small, not very profound thoughts. you know days like that, right?  thoughts like....

~ who decides the smell of things? i accidentally bought some detergent tabs that i thought were for the dishwasher, but they turned out to be for washing clothes (luckily i read the package and didn't find this out the hard way). and after years of buying detergent with no perfumes (i started when sabin was a baby), it is so strange to have the clothes smell so strongly of a scent chosen by someone else. yuck. but throwing them away seemed worse (i had opened the package before i realized the mix-up, so i couldn't just return them to the grocery store) than using them up (tho' with this scent, i'm no longer so sure about that).

~ the way you're treated at the beginning of a job is so important - if your computer and phone and office are ready and they give you a big bouquet of welcome flowers and invite you to their big annual company party on your first day, they've pretty much set the tone haven't they? (all of this just happened to husband. and shall we just say that there's a vast difference between vestas and siemens wind power in this area. and by the way, vestas wins.)

~ you can never underestimate the righteousness of danish women. nobody can do righteous like they can. nobody.

~ we're (and by we, i mean husband) scraping the horrible nasty plastic paint off the house that the morons people we bought the house from painted it with. it was catastrophic for the bricks with that paint and a house that had always been washed with white chalk and not painted. sometimes i still feel so ANGRY at those people and the cheap, nasty solutions they came up with around this house.

~ the roaming gnome arrived at my house today. looking forward to seeing what adventures he gets up to. and if you'd like me to send him to you next, just let me know, as you too can host this little adventurer.

~ what do you wear to a party with 7700 other people (none of whom you know), at which roxette is going to perform? (who even knew roxette was still alive?)

~ we're now up to three eggs a day from our chickens. they're still pretty small, but each egg makes me unaccountably gleeful.

happy weekend, one and all....