secret 23 - husband is a domestic goddess

i actually had a different secret all ready to go for today, but then husband just expertly threaded a needle for the child. with a 6-strand embroidery thread. a task i momentarily thought him incapable of. because even after more than a decade, i sometimes forget how domesticated husband really is. he can thread a needle, load the dishwasher, cook a wonderful meal, paint the walls and ceilings (even especially the fiddly bits where the line has to be really straight), measure and hang pictures so they're perfectly straight, arrange the liquor cabinet artistically, hang wallpaper, comfort a sick child, doctor a wound, and carry a stuffed tiger all over dublin.  these and many other things that are normally done by the woman of the house.

now, lest you think he's rather effeminate for a viking, i can assure you that he does all the manly man stuff too...lifting heavy objects, building no less than six buildings/sheds in our garden, roofing, mowing the lawn, digging, transporting one part of the yard to another part of the yard, gutting and then entirely rebuilding our kitchen (this took a rather inordinately long time due to about 600 other projects going on simultaneously), lifting and removing an ungodly heavy old radiator, building and then tending the green house, ordering bugs online for the greenhouse (then releasing them there, because i certainly wasn't touching them, i hardly wanted to open the mailbox), killing spiders, salting slugs, opening difficult to open jars and bottles of wine, digging a hole under the stairs big enough to bury a body in (huh, what?)...

oh, and he really is a viking. or at least goes sailing in a viking ship on a regular basis. he's in the red shirt and the rockin' gap hat kinda in the middle.

he does tho', have worryingly girly taste in alcoholic beverages. every time we ordered the guiness and the bulmers cider at our local pub in dublin (we went there three nights in a row, that makes it our local, right?), they handed him the guiness and me the cider and it shoulda been the other way around.

but best of all is husband's sense of humor, best expressed here, in the selection of axes he left out for us when i arrived home with the blog campers.

in short, husband is a keeper. and is pretty much the reason that polly and seaside girl decided at blog camp that they wanted to start a new i need a danish man blog. girls, when are we going to get that up and running?

blog crush: heliotrollop

kim of heliotrollop, this beer, which is very special because it's a blog camp beer, is for you!

i've been a bit absent from the blogosphere in recent weeks and have hardly been managing to read all my regular reads, let alone go in search of new ones. but thankfully my very underdeveloped theory on the sociology of mobile phones post brought a few lurkers very nice new people out of the woodwork and one of them is my new blog crush. i give you the lovely kim of heliotrollop. i'm not sure what that means, but she claims that everything else was taken (which is pretty much why i call myself julochka, so i can understand that).

here are some of the reasons why you should go check her out:

1. she's smart.
2. she's funny.
3. she tricks people into making dinner for her (this would be the kind of skill we could use at blog camp).
4. she hates wal-mart. this alone = instant follow in my book.
5. her mother buys her sweaters that indicate that they've never met (so does mine, tho' you might not have known that, but now you do).
6. she learns from her mistakes. (well, ok, time will tell on that one..)
7. she too is pondering whether she has too much stuff.

seriously people, i'm starting to think that she's me in new mexico. go read her now. and for the love of odin, follow her. you won't regret it.

secret 22 - i'm a bad, bad mom

so, a few years ago, when sabin was still going to her børnehave (kindergarten or pre-school as we'd call it in the states), i was in mumbai, trying on gorgeous sparkling loungewear. just moments after this shot was taken, my phone rang. it was the børnehave, calling to say that sabin hadn't been picked up and well, they'd really like to close, so could i please come and get her. oh the horror!! i was three (and a half) time zones away and may as well have been on the moon, rather than the couple of blocks away i'd have been if i'd been home.  thankfully, while i was on the phone with them, our neighbor girl, who picked sabin up regularly and was a kind of nanny, showed up. she'd been scheduled to pick sabin up that day and had been delayed leaving her real job, so she was running late. so my panic subsided.

but it did cross my mind that maybe i should be there for sabin a little bit more on a daily basis, so that she wasn't the last kid picked up every day from school. it took almost two years for that to sink in and become a reality. but you'll be glad to know that i'm a much slightly better mom today. these days i only occasionally put her on a trans-atlantic flight by herself, make her sit in monkey class, force her to stay in dumpy eastern european youth hostels with no room service or leave her all alone as the only member of our family in the country (just for a few hours).

oh, and after all those gorgeous things i tried on, i didn't end up buying a single thing.

p.s. picture is from december 2005, so hopefully i look nothing like this anymore...hair is quite a lot longer in any case.

the sociology of mobile phones

a couple of weeks ago, i got together with a young graduate student who grew up in the same town i did. she's here studying architecture for the summer (she came to the right place for that--think jørn utzon's sydney opera house). we were sipping iced tea in the garden and discussing her impressions of denmark thus far (she'd been here a week at that point). one remark really stuck with me and i've been pondering it ever since. she said, "there seems to be a really high standard of living in denmark."

she went on to explain why she thought that and she mentioned that people are well dressed (i told her those were probably swedes), they're all out shopping (she's been spending time in the center of copenhagen, so i can see why she thinks this--tho' again, i maintain those are mostly swedes), they have nice bikes (that's true) and everyone has a mobile phone.

the mobile phone thing surprised me a little bit. i mean, of course everyone has a mobile phone. even sabin has one. we don't even have a land line anymore. we are, after all, well into the 21st century.

last week, in dublin, i noticed a lot of people with mobile phones as well. everyone is going along texting or phoning someone. after all, how else do you ever meet someone somewhere? but in dublin, there was a difference in the phones. i saw several people with the old black & silver sony ericsson i had back in 2004 and even older, more decrepit, possibly steam-driven nokias. oh the horror.

and it led me to ponder a sociology of mobile phones. my theory is that the higher the standard of living in a society, the more often people replace their mobile phones to the latest model. i have a friend here in denmark who, every six months, when her "old" phone that she's bound to by her plan is free to SIM unlock, she gets a new phone. she loves having the latest model. and i know she's not the only one. you just have to look around when you're on the train or in a cafe to notice--everyone has a new phone. unless they're trying to be retro (like husband, who is using my 2006 sony ericsson K800i and refuses to replace it until it actually falls apart in his hands--which is what happened to HIS version of that same phone), people generally have the latest, coolest mobile phones.

it was obvious in other ways in ireland that it's not a rich country. not that it seemed poor either. it's just evident that it doesn't have the same economic success of the scandinavian countries i spend most of my time in. people's phones are cool in norway too (and their cars, don't even get me started on their cars). and my point is that you can actually use the mobile phones people have as a sort of thermometer of economic prosperity. if people are prosperous, they replace their phones to the latest models when they come out, even if their old phone is still working. because they want to have the latest, coolest new gadget. in less prosperous societies, people keep their old mobile until it's not working anymore.

frankly, although i am a total gadget hound, the latter model is much more sustainable in terms of the planet (we'll soon be surrounded by heaps of old, abandoned mobile phones). on the other hand, i'm pretty pleased with my iPhone and my brand spanking new HTC Touch Diamond 2. which is vastly improved over the Touch Diamond original that i got back in march. in this case, i had to replace it already because that first phone was rubbish (turning itself off all the time, which nicely cut back on the amount of phone calls i got). and yes, i have two mobiles. one personal and one for work. that's another societal reality today.

look around. what are the mobile phones like your country? it'll give you an idea of how it's doing.

secret 21 - the secrets are exhausting

these secrets...i've gotta tell you. they're exhausting. i cruised along quite nicely until about 16-17 and then all of the things i had scribbled down in my little blog notebook began to seem a little picked through. the gems are taken, the ones that remain (save maybe two) are a bit tame and perhaps even, dare i say it, lame (lamer than that one about never having found the right shampoo, you ask? yes, lamer than that).

oh, i've got oodles of secrets that aren't lame, but many of them have to remain secrets. to protect the innocent. and even more importantly, the guilty. and to keep this blog from getting one of those adult content warnings you have to click to enter (we only just squeaked past that one yesterday). i wish i had something really juicy left, like having posed for playboy's "girls of pan-am" or something like that, but that wasn't me, it was my cousin and as we also learned i never really went for that dream of being a stewardess. oh, not to disappoint, there actually are a couple of rather juicy stories left (not playboy juicy, but juicy nonetheless).

since this whole exhausting month was inspired by spudballoo, who must have been even more exhausted than i am since she dressed up in costumes for all of her secrets, i'm going to tell you that like her, there is one lie among my posts. maybe it's already there. maybe it's not. but once we get to 30, there will be 29 truths and one lie. and i might, just to torture spud, who quite possibly deserves torture for this little venture, never reveal which one was the lie. (just trying to ensure that it's not me she chops up to take home from blog camp, she'll have to leave me alive if she ever wants to find out.)

and if, after this, you still want to do your own 30 secrets, my advice is, pace yourself. it's exhausting.

she's back on that inspiration thing again

like many out there, i was inspired by the women of 3191, quietly, mindfully depicting their lives on opposite coasts. and again like many, i longed for such a project. one which would push my photography. one which would push me to be more mindful of everyday things myself. one which i would share with someone whose photography and view of the world inspired me. and i am so happy that i have found kristina and that project. we were just discussing last evening that we found each other thru the überfabulous sandra juto's blog. and we all know she's very inspiring too - so thanks sandra, you undoubtedly don't know it, but you brought us together. and i'm so pleased with what's unfolding.  both kristina and i were traveling last week and we're sharing our travel photos all week, but first, a little glimpse of the weekend just gone by. do go check it out here.

* * *

as you all undoubtedly have noticed, i travel quite a lot. i need the excitement. i need the pulse. i need to see new things, to experience new things. going away makes me more grateful for home as well. in short, travel is a sort of life blood to me, keeping my perspectives fresh and my eye honed. it makes me tick. i was thinking about the things that i look for when i travel. i find i'm drawn to the familiar...

starbucks only recently came to denmark and it's only in the airport, so i associate starbucks with travel (sorry bill, i love a good starbucks latte, despite what they did to the sonics). and look how relaxing it is!

but mostly, i'm drawn to the strange, the unexpected, the challenging...

and i'm a sucker for a good ruin--tho' this one--newgrange, a stone age site, was a bit reconstructed (in the 60s, can you tell?) for my taste...

there were some marvelous petroglyphs (my beloved helleristninger) there, which i am certain will be showing up soon in my art.

* * *

i've been vicariously watching the results of rachel's latest art journaling course go up in the flickr group and have been doing a bit of art journaling along with it...as you saw last month. and i've got a couple of pages going, where i have created a lovely background and i'm totally stuck on the words. me, stuck on words, imagine that. i wonder why that happens? i'm trying not to obsess about it and just let them come in their own good time and in the meantime, enjoy making pages that will be great bases for the eventual words.

* * *

hmm, what else inspires of late?

there's a lot of shoe and foot photography out there in the blogosphere these days and i'm finding it has made me a little obsessed with both buying new shoes and photographing them. hmm. i wonder if this particular bit of inspiration is healthy? got these in dublin (which you already know if you've been hanging out on twitter). they're super comfortable and they look pretty in the afternoon sun. 

* * *

i find myself going back again and again to look at jude hill's marvelous spirit cloth creations. both on her blog and on flickr. her small quilted stories are so dense with layered meaning that i am just drawn to them and inspired by them. i've worked a bit farther on the first piece that has arisen from her inspiration and still don't know what it will be. i'm using it as an exercise in patience as well and just enjoying the process of watching it unfold before me and trying to listen to my inner muse when she tells me what comes next.

where are you finding inspiration these days?

secret 20 - why i stopped going to the library

warning: disturbing, not necessarily for children content ahead.....

it's ok to turn back now.


although it takes place in a library, this gets a bit ugly.


you have been warned.


continue at your own risk...

when i was at university, i spent lots of time in the big main library. lots of time. i had a favorite spot on the 3rd floor, near the PG stacks. i was there late one afternoon, sitting at my usual table, head bent over the books. i glanced up and saw an overweight, sweaty, rather greasy guy in a sweatsuit, peeking around the corner. this wasn't really that unusual, it being a big ten university in the upper midwest, so i didn't think that much of it.

i got up to go get some book or other and went down the aisle just adjacent to the one he was lurking towards he end of. i was reaching for some book or other and caught sight of him again, peeking around the corner. and now it seemed he was behaving rather suspiciously, because he seemed to be actually watching me.

again, i just thought, "loser, get a life," and went on looking for references to bakhtin and menippean satire. a search which took me to the other end of the aisle he was in and so i went around the corner and glanced up and realized that he was indeed watching me and that he had his sweatpants pulled down and was...you guessed it...having a lovely time with himself (note: not using the correct technical term to avoid coming up in creepy searches and getting a whole bunch of new followers that i wouldn't be that keen on having). right there. in the library.

i must admit that i totally freaked. so freaked that i didn't even shout at him or scream or anything or make fun of him for being small and pathetic (i only thought of that afterwards). i actually ran back to my table, grabbed my things and fled the library. i went directly over to the campus police station, which was nearby and reported him.

i went back to the library together with a police officer and the guy was, of course, long gone, tho' the evidence was right there, clear as day on the floor. ew!! yuck!!!

it turned out i wasn't the first to report such activity by a person fitting his description. i never did find out whether they caught him. luckily, it was almost the end of the semester, so i didn't really have to spend much time there again for several months. because i can tell you it definitely put me off the library.

i never did feel the same studying on that floor again. i'd go get the books i needed and study in a totally different spot. you just never knew after that...

p.s. i didn't really think a picture of this one was appropriate...i hope you agree.