wolves come in the form of pretentious parents

i'll bet little red riding hood never had to deal with mean girls. or their even meaner parents. tho' perhaps wolves come in all kinds of guises. i heard tales yesterday of the awfulness of girls in the seventh grade and the even awfulerness (that's a word i just made up) of their parents. happily, my child was not involved, but i was still shocked.

tales of snotty parents who wouldn't let their daughter play with another girl at her house because she and her family live in a small apartment that wasn't fancy enough for the snotty parents. (i might add that i dropped off said child at her completely ordinary and not at all fancy-looking house yesterday and i wasn't impressed, nor could i see how an apartment, which is all of a block away from their house, was really that inferior.) i hope the child didn't report on our ramshackle, falling down farmhouse to her parents, or she'll never be allowed to come over here again. actually, that's not true, i hope she did report to them, as i'd love a little confrontation on this issue. pretentious gits.

and then there was another tale of a set of snotty parents who bought their child an iPhone 5 in an overtly-stated attempt to make her more popular. happily, it didn't seem to make any difference.

these are nice girls of the pæne pige sort - well, groomed, dressed in a normal, but not over-the-top or designer way. they go to riding and they have long, blunt-cut blonde hair. they appear to be nice girls.

both of these girls ride at the stable where we keep matilde now and at the lesson wednesday, i thought they were riding their own horses. turns out they weren't. neither of them has a horse and they were riding the lesson horses. so much for the pretentions of parents.

what are such parents teaching their children? elitism? snobbishness? in a small, podunk town full of ordinary middle class people? laughable. but i guess you can never underestimate how much people need their albanian. but if their children can't rest in who they are and feel secure, all the iPhone 5s in the world aren't going to help.

a morning wander with the camera

somewhere along the way, i got out of the habit of a morning wander in the garden with my camera in hand. maybe we had such a sunny, glorious summer that i began to take it for granted.

a few days of blustery wind and rain and much cooler temperatures have us thinking of autumn, so when it was sunny this morning, i grabbed the camera and headed out for a wander in the garden. this year, i don't dread autumn like i usually do because we had a real summer. that makes such a difference!

and besides, with autumn comes our raspberries, which are the late sort. the first few are ready, but so far it's only enough for a taste as i wander the garden.

not even enough to toss onto a bowl of yogurt and müsli. but they will come soon enough.

our mirabella tree is loaded this year after not having any at all for the past couple of years. i wonder why that is? i guess the conditions were just right this year. i've already made one batch of mirabella jam from some i got from a friend, but i'll soon make more, as we have a market coming up at the end of the month and i want to sell such things there.

the barley in the field next door must be nearly ready to harvest. but for now, we get to enjoy the golden expanse.

perfect gifts

the best gifts are the surprises you don't know you're going to get. they're the ones that a friend sees and just says, "i know this is so julie, i have to send it to her." i'd rather have that kind of gift than a birthday present any day.

well, today was my day on that sort of gift - there were two surprise envelopes in the mailbox today. one covered in quite a lot of south african foliage stamps and the other with the royal mail.

one contained the elusive mermaid from series 9 of the lego minifigures. i had bought most of the ones available in town but she had proved too shy for me. but molly found her and sent her my way, as a little surprise.

funny how she had to take a trip to south africa and back to end up here with me, 20km from where she originated.

the second package contained bits and pieces of paper ephemera - stamps, small cards and two fabulous old postcards addressed to someone named sabine. perfect! there was a little stash of veronica's beautiful cards and a bookmark i put to immediate use.

but best of all were veronica's experiments in printing with some old 1950s linocut blocks. (read more about them here, where you can see she's moved on to making her own linocuts.) i jumped up and down, saying yes, please send one to me a few weeks ago on her blog. but i didn't expect to get 4 of them! each more charming than the other.

this one, printed on an old dictionary page is my hands-down favorite.

but i like this one too. there's something wonderful and about the brown ink. i just adore them!

and this little row of gnomes - they immediately found a place on the cupboard in the entryway, so everyone can see them when they come in.

here's the back of one of those postcards. sent to bob and sabine in 1978 from somewhere in france, i think. there is another one from california. both mention the weather, so i guess not much has changed.

it's wonderful how a little surprise in the mailbox from friends can totally make your day and probably even your week. and by you i mean me. thank you again, molly and veronica!

girl power in lego minifigure form

medusa (series 10)

librarian (look here to see how someone played around with this one) (series 10)

grandma and her cat (series 11)

girl scientist (series 11)

diner waitress (series 11) (love, love, love her skates)

girl skier (series 8)

bride (series 7)

warrior girl (series 10)

red cheerleader (series 8)

hollywood starlet (marilyn?) (series 9)

fairy (series 8) - awesome detail on this one!

olympic swimmer (series 7)

girl viking (series 7)

girl viking's braids are so cool, i had to show you another shot of her

i shared my little lego minifigure obsession with you awhile ago, but since then, a couple few more have come to the join the fold. these are just some of the girls. it's a rather fun obsession - you buy a packet and don't know which one you're getting. there are communities which report on the minifigures before they come out and which have all kinds of tips for feeling up the packages to try to get the one you want. it's so much fun. i think we're going to need to find another typecase drawer to display them all. tho' half the fun for me is photographing them and finding a certain one that i know someone else wants or will love. like the librarian, i'm taking her to my friends at the library today. i don't have to keep them all in my own collection (well, except for the viking girl and the forest maiden and a couple of others i haven't shown you yet). it's enough to have photographed them, actually.

what do you collect? and how do you keep it under control?

foxy

she wanted to take out our last remaining chicken (she didn't succeed, that chicken is one smart cookie and it's a myth that they can't fly), but still, we fell a little in love with her anyway.

happy weekend, one and all.

words are revealing

epic fail on the first assignment

i'm participating in kylie bellard's fortnight of self-adoration for the next two weeks. she sends a daily "assignment" and there's a facebook group that's full of good, positive energy. i'm enjoying it. although i've already utterly failed at the first mission.

here's what it was (quoting exactly, capital letters and all):

While you’re going about your day today, look at another person whom you’ve never seen before.

Take a few moments to glance at them, and contemplate the fact that this person has had hard experiences, just like you have. This person has cried, and felt angry, and felt like they messed up, and been self-critical at one time or another. This person has felt afraid, too.

What’s it like to take the time to notice that someone else has an inner life that’s just as nuanced as your own?

my first failure on it was that i didn't do it on monday, as assigned. i've lead a hermit-y life for a couple of days and haven't really left the house much or been in contact with any people i didn't know (it's a small town i live in, so sue me). this failure i can forgive myself for.

today, i had a chance to try to do this and i even had a perfect opportunity, where to be able, even if just for a moment, to understand where the other person was coming from would have really helped me. but i simply was unable to do it. and not to defend myself, but allow me to explain.

we moved our horse to a new stable at the beginning of july. the main reason being that it's much closer to home, so it's much easier for us to pop over there. matilde spent the summer out on grass in the pasture and we haven't been over to ride much since we moved her. she needed time off and so did sabin. since school starts tomorrow and there's a nip of fall in the air, we decided it was time to, quite literally, get back in the saddle again.

we didn't really see anyone there when we arrived. some girls were being picked up from a riding camp, but then it was pretty quiet. we saddled up and sabin rode in the outdoor arena. as she was nearly done, a woman walked towards us. she was still some distance away, but i turned and said "hi." to which she responded by turning around and going the other way. i heard her daughter say, "who was that, mom?" and she said, "they must be the new (people)." (people is in parentheses because she didn't actually say it, she just said, "they must be the new," which can be said in danish,  tho' frankly, it isn't very nice.) but we apparently didn't rate a greeting or a chat or even a direct question to find out who we were. apparently that extra 20 feet she would have had to walk to have a small conversation with me was too much.

now, i'm quite accustomed to this sort of treatment after 15 years in denmark, but honestly, there are days, like today, where it really gets under my skin. mostly because i can never make myself understand it. she was walking in our direction, looking fully like she intended to say hello, but when i turned and said hello and she realized she didn't know me, she turned heel and went the other way, without so much as saying hello back. this isn't unusual. but it makes no sense to me. we are both at a stable, we both have daughters, we must both live in the area, so we actually have quite a lot in common, even if we don't know one another. so why couldn't she even say hello to me? especially when i said it to her first?

i tried to put myself inside her head, to contemplate what experiences she had that brought her to the point where she's unable to even have a common sense of politeness towards someone that she's never met before? is it shyness? is it arrogance? is it not wanting to be an inconvenience to me? or to herself? is it that i look like i would bite? or that i might smell bad (she was too far away to know that when she turned back)? was she afraid i didn't speak danish (sabin and i weren't talking at that moment, so she couldn't have heard us speaking english)? is there just a cultural chasm i can't cross? what was it? why couldn't she even say hello to me when i said it first to her?

i feel it as such a negation of my humanity. even as i try my hardest to fight that feeling, reminding myself that it couldn't possibly be about me, because she didn't know anything about me at all. but the fact is that she also didn't want to. she had no interest in me once she realized she didn't know me. and i can't stop myself from feeling hurt by that. nor can i get inside of her head and try to understand it. i simply don't understand. but i also have a hard time thinking that it's really my failure. short of running after her and insisting on introducing myself, what else could i have done?

worst was, it didn't just ruin that moment, but it put me in a bad, irritated mood for the rest of the evening. i snapped at my family. i sighed big sighs. i was exasperated with everything. i felt impatient and restless throughout an evening meeting. it made me uncomfortable in my own skin. i'd love to be able to let go and to understand, but it feels pretty beyond me at this moment in time.