Monthly Archive: August 2003

I zoomed around like a maniac bee today, buzzing here and there and everywhere. Had a great time in Malmö at the Festival Lunch. There was a huge group of us, including 5 ladies from the Copenhagen club who joined us. 🙂 We found a table in the shade and took turns getting food. Then walked around a bit, and ended up at a café for coffee and fika a bit later. Fun! I bought my brother’s Christmas present, so feeling very smug. After lunch, I went to the craft stores, and visited the rubber stamp place that galestorm had...

I was so motivated last night I did all of page number 2! 🙂 Thanks for all the kind words about page 1. I stayed home from work today to go play at the festival with the AWC and hit the craft shops to buy a couple of necessaries (plus some new paints) and if it works out, meet galestorm later. Even got to sleep in an extra hour, as Anders took the kids to dagis. Yay, sleep! I need something to organize all my crafty bits, too. Which makes me laugh as I just stripped and repainted an entire...

What the hell is the matter with people?!

Be gentle with me. 🙂 First art project in YEARS. I’m not too happy with the scanner, the piece isn’t nearly this dark, even after playing with it in Photoshop. The background fabric is a green silk shot with red metallic threads. I’m not too happy with the upper right corner, but the rest of it turned out how I envisioned it. The text is a quote from Ruskin and reads: “Remember, that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.”

When I was in high school, I wrote an essay for my English writing class that was itself an argument for removing the letter M from the English language. I wrote the whole thing (2 pages) without using it once. Imagine my happiness today when I found a website dedicated to such writings. They have a name! Lipogram, meaning “wanting a letter.” I love Language Hat. It leads me so many interesting places. 🙂

Someone sent this to me, knowing I love this kind of stuff, and I’ve decided to use it in next month’s AWC newsletter. If anyone tracks down the actual author, I’d be very grateful. 🙂 I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, tough and through; Well done! And how you wish perhaps To learn of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird. And dead; it’s said like bed, not bead For goodness sake don’t call it “deed”. Watch out...

Things I’ve learned from reading Smithsonian magazine today: Every year the U.S. Federal government holds a Federal Duck Stamp contest for painters The Tour de France turned 100 this year Mummified pharaohs in ancient Egypt protected their toes with thimbles of gold Robert E. Lee had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle (not sure I wanted to know this) Standing water in containers as small as a child’s beach bucket or plastic car is enough to provide a breeding ground for mosquitoes I have no desire, whatsoever, to ever visit Korea Got some helpful advice from thesidhe...

At a crayfish party tonight, the discussion somehow turned to whether hedgehogs eat meat or not, (turns out they do, even though they’re classed as insect-eaters), and after talking a little bit about what strange names they have both in English and Swedish, I started to make a joke that Sweden doesn’t have much in the way of fun animals. One woman started to get offended, saying, oh yeah, you have everything in America. And I thought, well, we DO. At least, I mean we have all the animals that Sweden has, and then some. I didn’t mean it in...

Had a lovely sleep-in morning and have been busy since I got up. Ek Family update is in progress and should be finished momentarily. All new pictures from May to present for friends and family back home. We had friends over for dinner last night and in the midst of discussing a mutal friend’s (American) problems with a cheating spouse (Swedish) and the impending divorce, etc., Emily turned to her husband and said emphatically, “You see?! This is why I’m afraid of having children!” Whereupon we all cracked up, but it lead to a serious and interesting talk about the...

Found this great online Stamp Library for collage/scrapbooking! and this journal (1 page, but so worth it) totally cracked me up today: kim_jong_il__