moments of perfect clarity

teal blue hair

2013-06-20T08:49:00.001+02:00

yes, i got a bit of blue put in my hair.
if i can't have a blue room, i might as well have blue hair.
i wonder if this is what a midlife crisis looks like?

* * *

as always, terry eagleton makes me think. and laugh. and want to head for the pub.

seeking inspiration in saul steinberg's work

2013-06-19T08:41:00.002+02:00

as i move to the next stage of decorating my torso (it's finally the color i want it to be - funnily enough, based on leftover paint from my beloved blue room), i find myself turning to saul steinberg. a jew who fled europe in the years leading to WWII, he became the quintessential new yorker and was, for years, a cartoonist at the new yorker.

i'm drawn to his simple lines, his use of rubber stamps, his clever fingerprints, his small topographies and the way in which he mixes styles. especially that last bit.

i do like to draw and mostly i draw plants and feathers, but also buildings - barns and houses. i had a couple of steinberg's books from the library a couple of months ago and i snapped these iPhone shots of the things i wanted to save.

there's something about me and inspiration and i never know when i will actually use it, but i am a compulsive collector of things which inspire. but, if you've been coming around here any length of time, or follow any of my 119 pinterest boards, you know that.

i love this passport photo steinberg made with his own fingerprints. a passport is an identifying document, and what could be more identifying than a fingerprint. it's genius.

this seems to have been made of spilled ink - i love the notion that something artistic and beautiful can come of a mistake and i imagine being able to use that on my torso somewhere.

here's some of that mixed style i was referring to - all within one piece. the man in the middle is my favorite. people aren't really something that i draw much, but i'd like to try something like that.

i love the way these small, disparate drawings are connected by ladders and stairs, it has an autobiographical ring to it that i think will be perfect on my torso.

and a collection of meaningful objects - this is the kind of thing i draw in my art journals - just collections of the random things which are lying around the house.

and this use of rubber stamps in an unexpected fashion just speaks to me. i guess i'd better get to work.

what/who is inspiring you?

is this art? a torso project update

2013-06-17T14:51:00.001+02:00

it's time for a little torso project update. some of the creative women from the original torso project weekend met up yesterday to show their finished products/works in progress and to discuss next steps towards showing the work.

the end results are as diverse as the women themselves. as i see it, the common thread for all is autobiography. these casts of our very bodies, frozen in a moment in time, are the canvas for a snapshot of all that we feel has made us who we are, right here and right now.

words, photos, maps, yarn, paint, drawings, color - all have been used to depict the individual lives of each of us. how we see ourselves and how we imagine that others see us. these torsos hold fragments of our memories, our lives, our documents, our experiences. they are there, written on our very bodies.

but i find myself thinking about whether they are art. we used artistic techniques - collage, paint, photography, one person even "drew" in yarn, as you can see above - but did we achieve actual art? which raises the more complicated question of what is art anyway? it's a bit like that old joke about pornography, "i know it when i see it." and i can't help but think that what we made wasn't art per se.

but if it's not art, then what is it? it is expressive. and highly personal. it is storytelling. and a bit of art therapy, in that i think we all found it therapeutic to look within for our memories and stories. but to ask a museum to display our work would be a stretch. a big one. maybe it would be different if yoko ono or madonna had been part of our project - they would lend caché and would have perhaps lifted us all in our visions and our work. one of the most powerful things we did yesterday was that each person shared the thoughts behind their torso. and it made them so much more meaningful to hear people's stories. but art needs to be able to stand alone, as we can't stand them beside at an exhibition and explain them to people.

but the fact is that we are a bunch of creative people in a little town in the middle of nowhere in denmark who happen to have tried to tell a little piece of the story of who we are in the form of a plaster cast of our own bodies. and while a few members of the group are trained as artists, as a whole we are not. we are teachers and office workers and librarians and nurses and consultants and physical therapists and prison guards. and those are wonderful things to be.

what we had was an amazing experience - to make those torsos together in a room of 20+ women. baring ourselves (literally) and opening up our hearts and experiences and stories and sharing them is a powerful thing, a wild woman sisterhood sort of thing. but where do we go with it? we are going to exhibit them locally at the end of august, but i wonder beyond that. they might fit well in a library exhibition, connected to other forms of autobiography, or to part of a storytelling conference. but i honestly don't think we'll convince a museum or a gallery to show them.

here's mine, i'm not done yet. it's filled with words that resonated with me - many in danish, because those are the newspapers that i have at hand. i've given those words first a wash of sepia, followed by a a wash of watered down paynes grey ink, as i don't want to completely cover them. tho' i do intend to cover them to an extent with small paintings and drawings of places and memories that are important to me. but mine isn't art either, but it is a personal expression of me. words are important to me. as is expressing myself. right now, it's darker and more foreboding than i actually feel, which is interesting, but doesn't reflect the hazy vision of it that resides in my head. and that's a big part of the process too.

if a tree falls in the forest...

2013-06-16T23:48:00.000+02:00

...does it make a sound?

a big storm blew through late yesterday afternoon. high winds and driving rain accompanied it. there were branches down on the road here and there and we decided to check our forest today. to our surprise, there was a wide swath of downed trees. i tried to count, but stopped at 35. there are probably at least 50 and it's a clear path, like a tornado went through, even tho' otherwise conditions weren't as we know them for tornadoes in the midwest of the US (instead of hot and humid, it was rather chilly and no lightning and thunder seemed to accompany the storm).

what i wonder is how we didn't hear all those trees crashing down, even tho' we're a kilometer or so away from our forest. it must have made quite a racket.

happy father's day!!

2013-06-16T13:21:00.001+02:00

happy father's day!

if you were here, we wouldn't make you drink one of those lemonade beers.

happy weekend

2013-06-14T22:50:00.001+02:00

the weather's been meh the past few days, so, the front entry, which i turned into a makeshift greenhouse now also has comfy chairs as well so we can have our friday cocktails.

happy weekend, one and all.

flying by

2013-06-13T23:31:00.000+02:00

i can't believe how quickly this week has flown by. it's nearly friday. it feels both like much has happened and also very little. some weeks are like that. normally, i use this space to sort it all out, but at the moment, it seems to all be stuck in my head, so i'm going to bed. a good night's sleep cures anything, right?

wordless wednesday

2013-06-12T12:09:00.002+02:00

kittens four

2013-06-12T00:47:00.000+02:00

i can't resist showing the progress of the kittens after all we've been through. they're nearly 3 weeks old. this is frieda. we may not be able to part with her. she's a little molly. strong, independent, curious, already her own little cat.

this is eleanor. she's enjoying a bath from her mama. that's her mama's tail there in the middle. and a bit of her collar of shame, which is still keeping her from licking her mastitis wound. which is healing at an amazing rate, thanks to fabulous honey-based medicine. i love that it's 100% natural. we need more medicines like that.

and this is perrie - she's the biggest, chubbiest kitten. which is exactly how a kitten should be. she is also best at holding still for her photograph.

this is danielle. she has an uncanny ability to convince me that she has died in her sleep. however, she's just really, really good at sleeping. she's the most outgoing of the kittens. don't let her plain black coat fool you, she's a real little spark.

and those of you with 'tweens in the house know that three of the kittens take their names from the girlfriends of three members of one direction. that's just how we roll.

catching up...

2013-06-10T09:25:00.001+02:00

since we last "spoke," i have...

...gotten up obscenely early to drive across the country. there i had a very entertaining meeting about a potentially very interesting project that i hope to do. on the way, as i was posting my customary instagram photo of storebæltsbro (the 18 km bridge between the danish islands of fyn and sjælland), i noticed that trinsch, long a bloggy friend, was posting a photo of a morning run past the little mermaid. in one of those moments where you're grateful for social media, i suggested that we meet for coffee. and so we did!

i arrived a little early and grabbed a table at the very busy café norden and people-watched while waiting for trinsch. i had a sudden moment of nervousness. we hadn't met before and what if i was a disappointment to her? i ordered a double latte and dismissed the thoughts. she arrived, super cool moustache-print bag over her shoulder, climbed in the window from the street and we started chatting immediately like old friends who were simply picking up the conversation where we left off. it was great! nothing disappointing in it at all, except that we didn't have more time. but i had to get in the car and drive the three hours back home and she was rushing off to see family before flying back to home to israel. in all, a lovely day.

friday brought work and in the evening, an impromptu barbeque with a neighbor. there was much laughter and a bit too much white wine, but isn't that how a friday should be?

saturday found me driving once again across the country, this time to meet with bloggy friend sue, aka rxbambi (as you can see, she hasn't blogged in awhile). she and her husband were in town because they had just finished a cruise of western norway and the fjords. they wanted to go to sweden, so we hopped across another bridge and headed to malmö for lunch and a starbucks(!). that and a couple of new blank notebooks from bookbinder's design made me very happy.

a lovely dinner at nyhavn in copenhagen and a stroll through the city in the most beautiful nordic evening light, made it a lovely day to meet up! denmark was really showing off at its very best. i'd gotten all of the nervousness out of my system with trinsch, so i wasn't nervous meeting sue. we laughed and drank wine and got to know a bit more about the one another off-blog. it made me grateful once again for the friendships that blogging has brought to me. sue and bob started talking to the table next to us at the restaurant and i was also reminded of how giving those conversations with random strangers can be. i do miss that sometimes and it was nice to be reminded of that energy that acknowledging the existence of people you don't already know can give to you. the danes could really learn a lesson from that.

sunday, sabin and i arrived home mid-afternoon and indulged in some kitten time. molly is much better and her milk production is up so that the kittens don't need to be bottle fed anymore, tho' they still have a pavlovian response when they hear my voice (or the theme music of breaking bad, i must admit), and start meowing and unsteadily crawling over to me. sabin intercepted them. molly's mastitis-induced wound (it was a giant hole in her belly, if i'm graphic), is looking unbelievably better. it has shrunk significantly in the 36 hours i was away. that kruuse manuka G honey-based wound dressing is seriously miraculous stuff. the vet is going to be amazed when she sees how much smaller it is. but bottle feeding has meant that these are some seriously nice kittens.

and now i think you're all pretty much caught up. a blog can never encompass a life and all of its nuances, but perhaps there can be a moment or two of perfect clarity along the way. let the new week begin!

what summer is made of

2013-06-05T21:11:00.001+02:00

sunshine and dandelions.

we were fortunate to have the last of the spring holidays, so this wednesday felt like a sunday.

and that was bliss.

wordless wednesday: look up

2013-06-05T00:01:00.000+02:00

precious molly

2013-06-03T22:40:00.002+02:00

my beloved molly dolly. she had her kittens on may 22 - four perfect little girls. she took to motherhood immediately. but motherhood didn't take to her and last week, she developed mastitis. it came on really quickly - she was fine at midnight the night before and when we woke up on monday morning, she was clearly very unwell. i took her immediately to the vet, where they diagnosed the mastitis and gave her both a shot of painkillers and antibiotics. she's been on a course of both since - and i'm getting downright good at popping those pills down her throat. i was worried about her for the first couple of days - she wasn't eating or drinking anything, but by the end of the week, she was eating again. the whole time, she has cared for her kittens, tho' i have been supplementing them with special kitten milk replacer from a bottle, as her milk production was down.

now their eyes are open and they are strong and feisty (this one's hissing at me, which isn't very nice in light of the fact that i'm feeding her milk). on sunday, i noticed that the teat with the worst infection had burst and she had hole in her belly. i called the weekend vet immediately and he asked me how she was doing. other than the alarming hole in her belly, she was actually good - she chased a frog across the lawn as i was speaking to him and she was both eating and drinking and acting much more like herself. so he advised me to wait 'til today and take her in to be seen (kindly saving me the extra charge). when i took her in today, the vet was rather alarmed and said she wanted to put her under and see what could be done. it turned out not to be possible to sew it up, so she's still got an alarming gaping hole, but now it's clean and all of the dead tissue has been taken away. she's back home, a bit woozy, but eating and drinking and caring for her babies. i protect the wound with a clean washcloth while they're nursing, but they're actually pretty good about avoiding it. it's quite astonishing how nature works.

while i was waiting to hear from the vet that she could be picked up, i found this 4-leaf clover. i just looked down and saw it, i didn't even have to search for it. surely it's a sign that molly will be just fine - luck just must be on her side. this evening, she's seeking me out, sitting on my lap as i type this, even tho' it's me who put the collar of shame on her (we've got to keep her from licking that wound). she's got an appointment with the vet every day this week and the vet ordered some salve that contains honey that we'll put on it, to help it heal more quickly. i like that idea.

this little cat has become very important to me, ever since the first time i saw her and i realized today at one point that i had some of the feeling that i had when sabin was born 10 weeks early and we had to feed her by putting a tube down her nose into her stomach. a helplessness and a panicky feeling that i wasn't up to the task. but i was then and i will be now. we're going to get our molly dolly through this one. even the vet says so. but sending some good vibes her way wouldn't hurt.

it's a lilac-scented world

2013-06-02T22:57:00.000+02:00

so much goodness swirling in the air right now, much of it lilac-scented. lilacs are my favorite.

feeling uncharacteristically grateful for it all - both possibilities and just where it's all at right now. husband (i may have mentioned that he's a keeper), the garden, being outdoors, good food, laughter, south african white wine, horses who are part clown, cats who are part dog (read: frankie), netflix, molly on the mend (tho' her mastitis still isn't totally cleared up), fine strong kittens, homemade bread, homegrown asparagus, lilacs, dandelions, green grass, i could go on, but it starts to seem a little insufferable. i guess the scent of lilacs has gone to my head.

here's hoping your weekend was a good one.

taking a dose of my own medicine

2013-05-30T15:14:00.000+02:00

from tuesday's vision wall brainstorm.

today i erased and brainstormed again, all by myself. it's an interesting process.
some of the same things came out and some new.

i find it's helping me hone my thinking.

we're onto something with this vision wall thing.

and at last, this came.

i ordered it like 3 weeks ago from the library and waited with increasing impatience.

on travel and home and the passive aggressive nature of facebook

2013-05-29T13:19:00.000+02:00

this morning, i read what suzanne (eggdipdip) wrote about home and going back and how the reality of your life is never as you imagined it would be. and i also read this charming little new yorker piece on guests, family and growing older by david sedaris. even before reading these i was pondering questions of family, home, visits, travels and belonging.

last week, i got all bent out of shape at my sister, who hadn't shared any pictures, or more importantly, any stories, from the rest of their trip (they went on to london and paris after leaving denmark), except for a couple of iPhone photos sent from the road. for all i knew, she was still combing paris for some raspberry pastries that she had vowed to eat all of before returning home. i'd asked her a couple of times on facebook when she was going to start sharing her photos and got some smarty pants answer about how she was going old school and going to have them printed this time.

the more time that went by with no sharing of stories and experiences and photographic evidence, the more pissy i became. and then it all exploded last week after she nagged me (on facebook) about not handling molly's kittens too much. and facebook, being the passive aggressive central station that it is, escalated things, until we were both mad at each other. and she was issuing "apologies" where in she said she was sorry that i was mad, not that she was sorry she hadn't shared any photos or stories. which is different than apologizing. and possibly could be classified as not apologizing at all. ahh, sisters, they know better than anyone else how to wind you up.

but the bottom line was, that i was feeling left out of the rest of the trip and at first it made me sad and then it made me mad. the timing wasn't right for us to tag along to london and omaha beach and paris, so when they left us after their visit, we had to live vicariously through their travels. and if the ones you're living vicariously through don't share what's happening, what you experience is far from vicarious enjoyment.

then of course, she got home and life intervened and she didn't get the photos downloaded and sorted from various cameras and iDevices and soon several weeks had gone by. but you can never really know what it's like inside of someone else's home life, so if you're far away and not aware of how loan closings and baseball games and trips to the emergency room intervened, you just sit in your own home environment, which is calm and quite uneventful and wait. and grow impatient and a little bit pissy.

which i guess brings me to what this all got me thinking about...that having visitors upsets the natural rhythms of home in ways that are both good and bad (tho' i will say that my family's visit wasn't long enough to have moved on to the bad part, tho' we could have done without the constant references to the 1990 miss south dakota pageant). a visit pushes you out of your usual routines - you look around you with a different set of eyes - suddenly noticing all of those signs with the word "fart" on them again and being reminded that that's hilarious. you end up filled with expectations, both voiced and unvoiced. and when it all goes back to the routine, you feel a little disrupted and restless. and it takes awhile to find your footing again.

it's the same for the one traveling, there's a re-entry period, where they jump back into life at home and maybe find there's not time to download all of those photos and look through to select the ones to share. and meanwhile, you sit impatiently waiting to live vicariously through the rest of their travels, to let them transport you as well for a few moments, outside the confines of home.

the universe seems to be listening

2013-05-28T21:24:00.001+02:00

you know how once you start thinking about something, it keeps popping up right there before you? that's what's happening with the concept of coworking for me at the moment. i also like the idea of global knowmad. what's interesting is that many of the people speaking in this piece seem to be foreigners who are apparently hanging out in oslo. i wonder what affect it's having on norwegian culture?

* * *

it's a little unlike me to share a body-image link, but somehow this piece spoke to me.

and while i was on huff post,
this piece on being more mindful in the face of technology resonated as well.

* * *

and then there was this on overcoming creative blocks.

i liked this quote:

Real creativity transcends time. If you are not producing work, then chances are you have fallen into the infinite space between the ticks of the clock where reality is created.

spring is full of baby animals

2013-05-27T23:57:00.001+02:00

little snowy white bunny

our old pony pinky has a fine little filly

mama mira had 6 babies this time - here are three of them.

salt & pepper

our precious molly's precious babies - 4 girls in one batch!

pepper had only 2 this time - little striper looks like the papa kitty that was hanging around.

sabin has named them harry & louis after her favorite members of 1D.

hen & chicks

we had a trip to the vet today with our beloved molly cat. she was obviously not feeling well this morning, so i called the vet as soon as they opened. they saw her immediately and diagnosed mastitis. she got a shot of antibiotics and painkiller and i brought home pills for the next ten days as well. her temperature was 41°C (normal is 39°C and while that doesn't sound like much difference, it's a LOT for a cat). the vet assures me she'll be fine and that what's best for her is to keep nursing her kittens. she's not sure she agrees, but she's doing so for now. i bought a bottle and milk replacer, just in case. i don't want to lose any of them.

sometimes you just have to photograph a pony

2013-05-27T10:38:00.000+02:00

my facebook feed has been rife with dire warnings of late among my horse-oriented, danish friends. they are all concerned about some woman who has been seen stopping her car and photographing horses in pastures, surely with untoward motives. worst of all is that she looks...gasp...foreign! and as i stopped to photograph this fetching little thelwellian pony along a country road the other day, i realized that maybe they're all talking about me! and my motive is nothing more than to capture a pretty pony in a green pasture filled with golden yellow dandelions on a sunny day. i do not wish to stuff said pony into the back of my stationwagon (together with a sack of grain, some bottles that need recycling and a horse blanket that needs washing) and speed off. nor do i wish to harm the pony or eat it (tho' sabin did recently suggest that this pony ate the others, as there used to be a whole flock of them in this field and this one does look a bit fat). all i want to do is take a picture of it in all of its fetching, photogenic ponyness. i do wish sometimes that people would worry about something important.

* * *

do you realize that what we see and know adds up to a measly 4%?

reverting to childhood helplessness

2013-05-27T00:21:00.000+02:00

i completed a study recently wherein i talked to a whole lot of foreigners who had, for one reason or another, made denmark their home. some came for love, some for work, some to be safe from war-torn homelands. their feelings of displacement and discomfort were remarkably similar, despite a diversity of reasons for being here. i could easily go on and on about it, but this weekend i found myself thinking about one aspect that many of them cited...that of how being in a new place where you don't speak the language and don't understand the culture makes you feel about 6 years old again.

i was fortunate to have husband when i came to denmark, so my exposure to the bewildering new set of sounds that is danish and the general coldness of the culture was cushioned a bit. but i do recall that with many things...paperwork, phone calls, directions (let's just say that the streets in denmark are not laid out in a nice neat grid like they are on the prairies of my homeland) to get places...husband helped me by taking care of things i didn't understand.

and on saturday, when a heavy maglight flashlight fell on his toe and caused it serious harm which necessitated that he sit in the chair with his foot up, trying to stop the bleeding, for most of the day, i realized that i felt rendered incapacitated myself by his injury. not because i had also hurt my toe, but because it felt like i couldn't do any of the things i had planned to do (turning our front glassed-in entryway into a makeshift greenhouse), because husband wasn't there helping me. he hadn't paved the way. the heavy pots were still out back and some of them had old, dead lemon trees in them. the plants were still sitting out back, being whipped by the wind. but he had prepared a wheelbarrow of soil, compost and perfectly aged cow poo for me the day before, so that was ready. but it took me most of the day to realize that i was perfectly capable of getting on with the task myself.

and it hit me that my reliance on him when i came to denmark, for even the simplest tasks (telling the difference between the kinds of milk at the grocery store, for example), had set the tone. i have, in many ways, stayed that child i reverted to, expecting husband to fix everything for me. and i had lost the sense of frustration that it had early on. it was probably because he took on those responsibilities so kindly and patiently, that we just slipped into our roles and stayed there. he is the eternal fixer and i am the one for whom he fixes.

but, i realized that i was perfectly capable of dumping out the old lemon trees and moving those big crocks around to the front of the house in the other wheelbarrow. and so i did it. and i filled them with stones in the bottom for drainage and that soil he had prepared and i planted tomatoes, aubergine and cucumber. and i arranged it all in the glassed-in entryway, so it can be my makeshift greenhouse this year (we're moving the real one, again, again). and almost immediately it smelled moist and fragrant and green out there. and i had a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of being capable. and the plants have perked up considerably since i took these photos immediately after i was finished, so even they're happy.

maybe it's time to let go of that 6-year-old girl again and start getting something done.

blogs are being diluted by other social media

2013-05-26T22:51:00.000+02:00

friday, i wrote a little ditty about the way that social media has diluted blogging over on across ø/öresund. i'll admit that i am quite guilty of it myself - i share small, ostensibly pithy thoughts on facebook in a way that i would have once shared them here in a random list. my photos go up instantly on instagram, so what i'm doing at a given moment is documented there. twitter, i use mostly to share links to blog posts and my instagram photos, but i don't hang out there much. i'd like to use google+ more and i use it to save links to things that i want to find again, because i've learned that you can't depend on facebook for that, with all of their "improvements" coming along and preventing you from seeing more than just what they deem the highlights of your own timeline. but it wasn't my intention to recap that post here...

as i visited molly's blog in order to link to her below, i stayed and caught up. because i've gotten horrible myself about properly reading all of the blogs i once loved. this is partially because people are writing less often and partly because i interact with molly regularly on facebook, so i don't have the same need to click in to see what she's said on her blog because i feel like i know what's going on with her (to the extent that facebook reflects what's actually going on in people's lives (that's probably the stuff of a whole 'nother post)). and really, that's silly. because blogs and facebook are not the same thing and there's so much more depth (usually) to a blog post than to a facebook status update. spending some time reading molly's recent posts provoked me to think and feel and reflect in ways that facebook never does (truth be told, facebook doesn't do much of anything other than make me feel passive aggressive). blogging lets us go so much deeper - into our own thoughts, our own psyches, our own patterns and processes - and gives us so much more insight, both into ourselves and others. i guess i needed that reminder. i've got to get more selective with the time i spend with social media.

* * *

this is a bit frightening, but also hilarious:

thank you, molly.

* * *

fascinating little miniature coffins.

i found them through mr. finch.

who i am not stalking. nuh-uh.

there's a bit more about the little coffins here.

vans: a space odyssey

2013-05-24T00:24:00.000+02:00

how seriously proud of my child am i that she made these awesome space-inspired vans? real, authentic vans were a spotvare (aka a large load fell off a container) in netto this week and sabin said she wanted a pair that she could paint. hey, for 400 kroner (just do me a favor and don't convert that to dollars), i said, "why not?" they were black when she started, but now they're like a total space odyssey. and i have to say it makes me very proud. she used a combination of washi tape (to protect the edges), textile paint, nail polish and nail sparkles to create this starry starry night extravaganza.

if she were to open a big cartel shop, would you be interested in some spacey vans of your very own? totally unique and one-of-a-kind? (plus a matching pair, not just a single - the other one wasn't finished yet and i couldn't wait to take the photo, as the light was fading fast., but she is working on a pair.) as she went to bed, she was already fantasizing about new designs...night & day, rainbows, summer & winter. the possibilities are endless. and they could also come in converse.

universe, are you listening?

2013-05-23T23:41:00.000+02:00

what if it was possible to have a place where you could combine all of the things you want to do in your life? a place full of good energy, inspiring surroundings, nurturing, caring people. a creative place, where you could do business, come up with great ideas, learn new things and spend time with people who make you better at what you do and challenge you in a good way. and what if you could get a cup of really good coffee there? what if that place didn't exist, so you had to create it yourself? and what if there just happened to be a charming old train station building, standing empty, just waiting for you to make it awesome?

and what if it needed a whole lot of paint and elbow grease? would you do it? would you, on the theory that writing is the new praying, write it down here for all the world to see and hope that the universe is listening so that all of the pieces would fall into place to make it happen? would you dare to believe and do all that you could yourself to make it happen? even if people thought you were crazy?

tiny kitten perfection

2013-05-22T21:57:00.000+02:00

our beloved molly dolly, the kitten we got last summer in minnesota, had her very own kittens today. she was a little confused at first, wondering what it was all about, but she soon caught on and promises to be a good mother. there are four perfect little kittens - one black, one striped, one black tortoiseshell and one stripy tortoiseshell - so two girls and two boys. the perfect first batch.

my beautiful people and a lot of great links

2013-05-21T23:39:00.002+02:00

my beautiful people, i haven't shared them with you for awhile.

sabin's fancy hair colors even look cool when they're up in a bun.

and husband, despite needing a haircut (he's had one since), just gets cuter all the time.

how come the same isn't true for me?

that's kinda not fair.

* * *

the entrant from denmark won the eurovision song contest the other night.

happily, i wasn't watching, even tho' i do enjoy me a bit of kitsch on occasion.

it was best to learn of it through facebook updates.

and i did read a bit of the guardian's live blog of the proceedings.
that was pretty hilarious.

best quote from that came during the waiting for the votes bit:

"I'm not saying that this bit is long, but I think I just saw time detach from itself and form a spiral and slowly disappear into the universe."

i kinda like when time does that.

* * *

*sigh* - 1913 was just really my year.

i can't even imagine an intellectual avant garde art scandal happening today, can you?

* * *

still enjoying that article about whether you have to like the characters in a novel.

mostly because of quotes like this:

I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.
--Jonathan Franzen

* * *

this makes me want to draw some maps. maps of me. maps of things i love. maps of life.

* * *

ever wonder where those bloody swear words come from?

personally, i think we should bring nackle-ass back into fashion.