Tagged: obiterphotos

23
Nov
2008

COOOOOOOKIES!

Tomorrow is the Annual AWC Holiday Cookie Exchange, and I’m participating for the 8th year. My recipe criteria this time was simple: easy, fast and no having to go to the store to buy special ingredients. The kids and I spent the morning perusing cookie recipes, rejecting the ones that, despite how good they looked, required things we didn’t have in the house: no oatmeal, no peanut butter, no chocolate-candy centers. Finally, I found a basic cookie recipe and then I tweaked it completely to come up with our very own new holiday cookie! Pretty soon the house was filling...

02
Nov
2008

PARTY PEOPLE

My costume idea was so excellent, but I think it left something to be desired in the execution since no one even asked me what I was supposed to be. When I told people what I was, they laughed their heads off, though, so I give myself points for that. I was a piece of salt licorice, the Swedish candy that makes people around the world shake their heads and say, “EWWW!” I wore a sparkly black shirt and then I spray-painted my top half and my hair black (not my face) and then sprayed glitter all over that. Let...

31
Oct
2008

HALLOWEENIES

One of the biggest problems we’ve encountered with Halloween every year is that Karin wants to have different costumes for each Halloween-related event. It’s hard enough to come up with costume ideas for the four of us ONCE, but when she starts wanting a different costume for the school party, the neighborhood trick-or-treating and the big AWC party, it’s enough to make me grind my teeth. Today she attended a party at the after-school daycare (for once, they got the date right) and because it was cold and rainy, she opted not to wear her surfer costume that is slotted...

27
Oct
2008

JACK O’MASTERPIECES

This year, because ozswede was so kind as to send us a pumpkin carving kit for the kids, I made them do their own dirty work, though I did cut the holes in the tops of the pumpkins and scoop-scraped out the insides (though I had help from Anders on one of them). Usually I have to wield the knife (*evil laugh*) so they draw their pumpkin designs and I execute (HA!) them. Even though they got a packet of ready-made designs in the package they elected to go with traditional jack-o-lantern faces this year, though both of them wanted...

19
Oct
2008

DOC THE CAT

I’ve never had or really even been around such a FLUFFY cat before. All of our/my cats have been either Siamese, tabby or black-and-white shorthairs. Doc’s tail is nearly as big as he is and it’s easily as big as my huge feather duster. He sleeps a great deal of the day as cats are wont to do, burrowing under the covers in one or the other of the kids’ beds and is up in the evening wanting to play. He’s quite friendly and doesn’t seem to be disturbed by any of these strange people he suddenly finds himself amongst,...

12
Oct
2008

SHADOWBOX STORIES

My friend Carol posted about her successful crafty day event that she organized and hosted this weekend for the AWC and in the one of the photos she was standing in front of a shadowbox and I told her I wanted her to show closeups of it so I could see what she had in HER shadowbox. I’ve been a fan of shadowboxes for years, since I was a pre-teen in fact, because somewhere I saw someone use an old printer’s drawer for a shadowbox and I thought that was just the height of cool interior decorating (I was twelve,...

05
Oct
2008

PRETTY PURCHASES

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...

28
Sep
2008

WHY ORANGE IS MY FAVORITE COLOR

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...

21
Sep
2008

TOGETHER TIME

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...