Whenever I go to art or craft fairs, the things I have the hardest time resisting are the things that are embroidered or tapestry or have certain animals like lizards (goodness knows why), moose, horses, dragons, cats and roosters. I don't have ANY rooster stuff and I don't have a lot of horse stuff either, but I'm drawn to them nonetheless. I'm not allowed to buy moose anymore, but they find their way to me regardless; it's not my fault, I swear.

The art/craft fair that we went to last weekend had over 70 exhibitors showing items in every imaginable medium: ceramic, basketry, watercolor, iron, pewter, wood, textiles, lace, felt, crystal, stone, paper, clay, glass, and dried flowers. We went first through the entire fair, looking at everything and mentally marking which ones we wanted to return to. Mom found a glass star that she really liked but ended up not getting it because she was afraid it was too wide for the window she had been envisioning it in. The kids didn't find anything they really wanted, except for a little gift Karin picked up for my mom (a frog on a rock that says "World's Best Grandma" in Swedish, but I found several things, and had a hard time not buying everything that I liked.

The horse vase that I mentioned in an earlier post was one of the things I returned to several times, at a table full of other ceramic items that I was completely indifferent to. She had 2 horse vases, one black and one white, and they were fairly simple things, a foot-high oblong vase with a horse's head at the top on one side and the indication of a tail opposite. They were 600 kronor each, which is about $100: not that much in the grand scheme of things but by the time I got back there, I had already purchased some other things and was thinking that I needed to rein in the wild spending. Now, a week later, I'm still regretting it...but I do have her card and her studio is only a couple of towns over so maybe I'll throw some Christmas hints my husband's way.

But I thought I'd share the items I did pick up, because each of them was beautiful and drew me in somehow. Fine craftsmanship and a sense of color is always welcomed in the things I decorate my home with and each of these has found a place and become a part of my surroundings.

( Pretty Pretty Purchases )

First things first: ( The 20-clove Garlic Chicken Recipe )

Most of the time, when we have visitors or even when we are traveling, for some reason, we find it hard to remember to take photos. All week my mom has been saying, "Where's the camera?" "We have to get the camera out!" and then we get distracted and forget again. But! Tonight, I got out the camera not realizing that actually remembering to get the camera out is the EASY part. Getting one of the sitters to stop TALKING and one to stop STICKING OUT his tongue and one to stop MAKING STUPID FACES is the hard part. In practically every photo, someone's eyes are closed or someone's got their hand across their face or someone else has their mouth open because they were TALKING. Portrait photographers don't get paid enough, is my conclusion. My mother says paybacks are hell.



The only "good" shot from the whole shoot


Lizardmom!

Cracking Me Up 'Til it Hurts: Just the last bit and then READ THE COMMENTS

Also, DON'T VOTE! (thanks to Marilyn for the link!)

Even though I decorate my home with a peaceful palette of pale greens and tend to wear black and chocolate brown and other dark and dusty colors like forest green and eggplant purple, it's orange that is my favorite color. Orange with its bright unexpected blast of color, orange that brightens a day immediately like an adrenaline shot of sunshine, orange that makes you smile and lifts your mood and shines out with a reverberating vibe of energy.

It's the color of pumpkins and Japanese lanterns and clementines and salmon nigiri. It's tiger halves and tabby cats, tiger lilies, monarch butterflies and koi. It's redheads and marigolds, late summer poppies and autumn leaves and bonfire flames.

Orange you glad you stopped by?





Good things should never end: Unlimited Orange

Things to do with orange: Collecting Orange Things

What You Get When You Search Flickr for: Orange

Orange Art/Photography: All things Orange

Cracking Me Up: How My Kids Spent Saturday Night

Mom and I started scouring photo albums yesterday, to collect all my old school photos, and I'm afraid the school-photo-project is going to have to wait a while...turns out of the 13 years I was in public school (K-12)...I only have FOUR of them. How did that happen? I can't even find my senior picture and I have a bleached spot in a photo album where it once resided...what the heck happened to it? Why would I have removed it and then never returned it to its spot?? Very strange.

So, now mom has to hunt them down at HER house after she returns and then MAIL them all to me, because she doesn't have a scanner OR a digital camera. Sorry to get all your (and my!) hopes up for a funny post, but hopefully the anticipation will make the wait worthwhile. Heh.

Tomorrow morning we are getting up at the crack of dawn and driving to Gothenburg for the biggest book fair in the Nordics, along with several other women from the AWC. Both of us are taking empty backpacks....and copies of my 5-page single-spaced books-to-buy list. The kids are spending the night tonight and the day tomorrow with Anders' parents because...strangely enough, they DIDN'T WANT TO GO. To a book fair. Who'da thunkit?

Anders is still in Italy, but my brother and his wife are there visiting him, so they'll be hiking or biking all weekend, so he won't be missing us too much, I suspect. :)

Then, Sunday, we are going to the pumpkin patch to get our Halloween pumpkins. I have not seen an actual sugar beet on the side of the road, but today there was a sugar beet TRUCK on the side of the road so that counts, and it's now officially AUTUMN. Plus, there were pumpkins in our local grocery store, so that clinches it. After the pumpkin patch we are going to a huge art & handicrafts fair with over 70 booths...busy! busy! O! the busy!

What are you doing this weekend? Are you doing the busy, too?

Beautiful Bibliophiliac Belated Birthday Wishes to sealwhiskers!

It's been a bit of a game-playing weekend, which has been really nice, since I grew up in a game-playing family and miss it quite a lot. My husband didn't, though he plays sports (which is not the same thing at all), and in this particular area, his background is winning, since we rarely seem to play games as a family, even though we have an awful lot of them.

Yesterday we went in to Malmö to the castle and toured the museum which is a combination natural history / art / historical museum. Some of the art was fantastic (Carl Larsson's fresco cartoons in the main stairwell) and some was just bizarre...a lot of modern art leaves me cold, though it can be quite clever. The section of the museum that dealt with the building's history was recently renovated and updated and is quite nice, with all the displays in both Swedish and English. The castle has been a fortress, an artillery storage, a mint, a prison and now a museum. The most famous prisoner was the Earl of Bothwell, Mary Stuart's (Queen of Scots) 3rd husband.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Commandant's House, which is also a little museum, but it was under renovation, so the only part open was Zenith City*, a interactive treasure hunt/game. There were little stations like a miniature city standing about in a big room, each one covered with flaps and panels that had clues behind them. You started off with a piece of paper that directed you to your first stop where you read a bit about your character and then had to make decisions about what your character would do. If you chose one thing, it directed you to find a particular place for your next clue, if you choose the other you might end up somewhere quite different.

All of the stories were of the social consciousness type; they had to do with 3rd world countries, poverty, discrimination, gender, etc. Only one of them was in English, so Mom, Martin and I ended up with that one, while Karin and Anders did a completely different storyline. Our story was pretty harsh; our character was a illiterate woman in a developing country whose husband was dying of AIDS. Her choices were always horrible: Funds are extremely low and you don't get paid for 2 weeks so do you borrow money to buy the medicine your husband needs even though it will mean that your son must leave school? By the end of it, my husband was dead, my son had run away, I'd been groped by my boss, had borrowed money and had it taken away again. My brother-in-law had locked me out of the house, and his friends were waiting at the door to accost me when I tried to return home, so I lost the house too, and ended up begging on the streets.

FINALLY, just as Martin and I reached about the same point in the story, having gone different ways to get to it, since we'd made different decisions in the course of the game, we found out about the Widow's Help Network, and found a lawyer who got us in touch with an organization that fights for women's rights, and we snuck back in the house, found a pile of papers that turned out to be the missing will, and won a court case to get the house back. We never did find the son, though, because the museum curator came and kicked us out: they closed at 4 p.m.

It sure engendered a lot of discussion in the car on the way home, though! At one point Martin said, "Geez! Is it really that hard to be a parent??" and all of us laughed and told him YES.

Today we played a game that Mom brought with her (I had bought it back in April, but didn't have room in my suitcase then) called A Moose in the House. It's a silly card game that we had a lot of fun playing, and I can highly recommend it to anyone with children, ages 7 and up!

Anders left for a 2-week business trip to Italy this afternoon, so now Mom and I are on our own with the kids...I'm sure we'll find lots of things to keep us busy (when I'm not working!).

Martin's passport is expiring so we also swung by the photographer's while we were in Malmö and got his picture taken, and for good measure we took one of Karin at the same time for a matching set. People keep asking lately if they are twins. I wonder why: ( Twins? )

*Found a website in Swedish, where you can play the game online, though it doesn't seem like it's the same storyline that we had.

♥ Waking up leisurely, realizing that I didn't have to get up for work, and then reading for an hour before finally arising

♥ Having breakfast with Lizardmom

♥ Sweater weather

♥ Walking through the shopping district of Lund's old town center and finding an absolutely beautiful sweater at Kriss and splurging

♥ Eating at one of my favorite restaurants that never fails to have excellent lunch entrees: chicken filet baked in pastry with potato terrine, sauted vegetables and tarragon creme.

♥ Stopping by Press Stop to pick up some American magazines: Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple

♥ Receiving the 2nd of 5 CDs ordered earlier this week and lazing on the couch in the afternoon sunshine while listening to it: Kings of Convenience — Riot on an Empty Street

♥ Getting an awesome massage from a newly discovered (by Karin!) massage therapist in Flyinge; she hit EVERY sore spot just right

♥ Fixing the perfect dinner: Pan-seared salmon with chili-saffron spice, buttered rice, and sauteed snap peas & kohlrabi, with globe artichokes. YUM

♥ Anticipating tomorrow: lunch in Malmö with friends, more shopping, an outing with the kids and a baked potato buffet dinner party!

My mom's here for a 3-week visit, so expect posting to be lighter than usual...(as if it could be, you say).

:)

Not too long ago, Marilyn linked to a really cool site that allows you to make word maps of text that you upload or that exists on a website: Wordle. So, of course, I popped this journal's URL into the engine and came up with something that surprised me, though it shouldn't have.

The 2 most frequently used words on this here journal, on that day*, were Liz (no surprise there, perhaps) and KARIN. Her name was many times larger than both Anders' and Martin's and it took me a bit aback for a moment, and then I laughed since really, with stuff like THIS going on around the house, why would I be surprised that she gets mentioned so often?



She's leaping off the arm of the big chair, expecting her father to catch her which, thankfully, he does...every time. She's been doing this for a long time, off and on, our own little flying monkey. She's pretty fearless when it comes to the physical stuff, even though she sometimes gives me palpitations. I hope her willingness to leap forward with enthusiasm, knowing that she's got a safety net of love to catch her before she breaks something will stay intact through her life, for all of the metaphorical, emotional and social cliffs she'll need to jump from some day.

I know it's an ability that has stood me in good stead throughout my life. What leaps of faith have you made in your time?

> > > BONUS! Flying** Monkey Video!

*I ran the obiter dictum through Wordle again today and Martin and Karin's name were equal in size, which gave me some relief from thinking I was unconsciously playing favorites here.
**Much like typing "brian" for "brain" (BWAHA! I just did it AGAIN!) I can no longer type the word "flying" without typing "flyinge" first.