Beæret

Det er hva jeg er.

Den godeste Namaste har slått sammen flere blogawards til en ny alt-inkluderende som heter Queen of fucking everything, og jeg er på mottakerlista. Det passer jo fint, for det er nemlig sånn at jeg har en magnet hjemme som ser slik ut:

Bilde lånt fra itskitsch.co.uk
Bilde lånt fra itskitsch.co.uk, som interessant nok har den som "Queen of everything magnet", det mangler liksom et ord?

Det var en ting om meg selv som dere sikkert ikke visste fra før. En annen av magnetene mine, og det tror jeg er favoritten, bærer teksten: “Well, aren’t you just a ray of fucking sunshine”.

Jeg vurderer i grunnen teksten som kandidat for mitt neste geriljabroderiprosjekt.

Man skal vel egentlig skrive litt flere fakta om seg selv i forbindelse med slike utmerkelser, men jeg har skrevet så mange sånne innlegg før at jeg har gått litt tom for ting å si – i det minste trenger jeg “prompts”. Til glede for nye lesere har jeg derfor heller gravd litt i arkivet:

På den annen side begynner det egentlig å bli på tide å skrive en ny 100 things-liste. Enkelte punkter er utdaterte. Noe som er ganske beroligende, det betyr at det har skjedd noe de siste 8 årene…

Og når det gjelder hvem jeg skal sende utmerkelsen videre til har jeg en helt opplagt kandidat: antibloggeren.

Velkommen til awardenes verden, Magnhild…

A sense of accomplishment

I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment today. Before Christmas I received a promotional code for a photo book on photo paper from Japan Photo, and after a little deliberation decided it would be the perfect incentive to finish the very half-hearted start I’d done on an album from the trip to The Gambia in 2009. The promotion ended yesterday, and the album was ordered just in time. Considering I have a tendency to attack these projects with gusto and then have my enthusiasm fade away long before I’ve actually finished anything, having ordered the book feels like a big accomplishment.

Which is nice.

The best thing? I managed to pace myself sufficiently that I’m not sick of looking at and processing photos. The previous photo books I’ve ordered have led to a few moths hiatus on further layouts because of overload towards the finishing line. Not so this time, I think.

Once I get the book, I’ll post a few pictures of the result and get into what exactly I did. In terms of scrapbooking it was extremely minimalist, but a couple of resources need to be mentioned. I’ll get to that.

The next project, apart from finishing the hobby room (where we’ve run into a little problem, more on that later) involves the sewing machine and needs to be done by the end of the upcoming weekend. We’ll see how that goes.

The next photo-related project involves going through my supplies to create a faux Project Life (because I really don’t need to buy any more supplies) to see if I can’t get a “document life as it happens” thing going. If I get my act together, I’ll share what I do.

I dag konstanterer vi

At verden lar seg sjokkere med enkle midler. I hvert fall i følge dagbladet.no.

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Selv er jeg muligens vagt forstyrret av det hunde-puppebildet, jeg vet ikke om jeg egentlig trengte å se det, Dagbladet? Men sjokkert? Nei. Og Andrej Pejic er jeg ikke sjokkert over i det hele tatt, og det later da vitterlig ikke moteverdnen til å være, heller, i følge artikkelen.

Kanskje det bare er Dagbladets ingressforfatter som er lett å sjokkere?

Reading

It should come as no surprise that I like reading. And books. And any art that involves either is immediately interesting to me.

For the hobby-/guestroom we had planned to get a Hemnes daybed from IKEA, furbish it with proper mattresses and quite a few pillows and a good reading light, so as to cater for guests (hence the essential “good mattress”) and reading (pillows and lamp, though the essentialness is a bit overlapping, obviously). The nice people of IKEA decided to have a 30 % sale on Hemnes this week, so we now have one Hemnes flatpacked on the floor, waiting for this weekend when we plan to move the lass into her new room, thus freeing up the space in the would-be guestroom.

Over the daybed, I’m planning to frame reading related “things”. I have som old (well, late 90’ies) ads from Waterstone’s (that I just LOVE), and I have one or two prints purchased off Etsy. I would like some more of the latter, though, so today I’ve been browsing, and tomorrow, once I’ve had time to consider which ones I really like the most, I’ll be putting in a few orders.

Here are some of the ones that immediately appealed to me:

read1

 

“The reader” by Majalin

read2

“Girl reading” by Belafonte (Emma Leonard)

read3

“The boy who liked to read” by TheExtentofSilence

read4

“One Story More” by trafalgarsquare

read5

“Books can take you anywhere” by TheLittleFox

read6“Reading is rad”/”Girl in green socks” by Artisjustfrozenmusic ( Carla Thursday)

Since it’s expected that the lass will use the space as well as us “grown ups”, I quite like the idea of mixing the styles a bit, rather than sticking to a more coherent collection. Since they have a common theme, I think they’ll work together anyway.

Have you seen any reading-themed illustrations lately? Please let me know in the comments, I’d love to get some tips for more candidates.

Janus

Jeg tok bilde av Dagbladet på avisstativet på Gardermoen på fredag. Kanskje jeg får lastet opp bildet også, etterhvert, men i mellomtiden kan jeg jo fortelle dere hva som sto:

Slik var livet i SKREKKENS HUS
– Pyntet med engler
– Delte seng med barna
– Besatt av overgrepsbok

Nå har det seg sånn at Alvdal-saken ikke er særlig morsom. Faktisk forsøker jeg å la være å lese noe særlig om den, for jeg blir bare deprimert. Men, altså, to ting slo meg når jeg så denne forsiden:

1. Hahaha, nå må de snart fengsle alle interiørbloggerne.

2. Sjenker de som skriver avisoverskrifter overhodet en tanke på at barn også kan lese?

Så for å ta punkt 1 først, for vi kan vel trenge en god latter? “Pyntet med engler”! Visste jeg det ikke! Nå har vel ikke engler ennå vært tema i Magnhilds Shabby Fredag, men det er vel bare et spørsmål om tid, siden det helt klart faller i samme kategori som madonnaer, krusifiks, prinsesser og muligens sinkhus. Så hvis det å pynte med engler er en essensiell ingrediens for å skape et skrekkens hus må jo en del damer rundt om i landet være godt i gang. Akkurat det der humret jeg godt over for meg selv.

Journalistisk sett er det selvsagt bare slett arbeid. Det får hele oppsettet til å fremstå som en dårlig vits. Oooh, hun pyntet med engler – cue scary music. Osv. Hadde det enda vært noe de fleste anser som litt nifst – vampyrer eller noe sånt – eller noe som hadde med sex å gjøre – pin-up’er eller fruktbarhetssymboler eller noe. At jeg personlig ville finne et hus fullt av engler litt creepy trodde jeg egentlig at gjorde meg til en minoritet, men tydeligvis ikke.

Men så var det den mer alvorlige siden av saken. Egentlig kunne man vel tatt nesten enhver forside fra enhver tabloid som eksempel, men nå var jeg jo så godt i gang med denne. For jeg gruer meg til snuppa lærer å lese og jeg må begynne å forklare hva krigstypene egentlig sier. Og akkurat her står jo spørsmålene i kø for de stakkars foreldrene rundt omkring i Norge. For både det å pynte med engler og det å dele seng med barna sine er faktisk HELT NORMALT. Ok, i sammenhengen er i hvert fall den sengedelingen noe suspekt, men sånn for seg sjøl er det like lite sensasjonelt som å hjelpe barna å kle av eller på seg, for eksempel. Og hva folk velger å pynte med er da rimelig irrelevant uansett. Nå tror jeg neppe landets 7-åringer siden fredag har gått rundt og spurt seg om mamma og pappa egentlig er slemme siden de pynter med engler, men hva med de som har en kamerat som både har avslørt at de av og til deler seng med mor og som i tillegg har en glassengel i vinduet? Skal vi forvente at unger allerede fra de lærer å lese skal være fullt kapable mediekritikere? Trenger jeg, som voksen og nyhetsinteressert, å lese dette på forsiden? Gir det meg noe, egentlig?

Barneombudet klaget på dagens overskrift på Twitter i dag:

Dagbladet er uendelig vulgære i sitt valg av forside-tekst i dag. “Overgreps-festene” er langt over grensen. Også barn leser forsiden.

Jeg er helt ut enig i den også. Hva søren er en overgrepsfest? Jeg skjønner det ikke selv en gang, jeg har da i hvert fall ikke lyst til å forsøke å forklare det til en 9-åring.

Painting the “pink” wall

20110110_maleUhm. Well, things took a turn for the better at the shop. We had picked out a nice, bright pink, and I’d gone to stand in line to get it mixed while the lass and the husband wandered a bit, and then the lass came running over. She’d found a new colour swatch. And she wanted that colour instead. Was she sure? Of course she was. And I wasn’t about to protest.

It turned out the shade she had found was not available in the paint type we wanted (Jotun Sense – we could have had it in Butinox Green Room, but I used the Butinox in our bedroom and on the doors and found the coverage to be appalling. I ended up with five coats on some of the doors!), however it was a little dark anyway, so a slightly lighter version of the same shade was settled on before the lass had time to change her mind.

The original colour was “5786 Lavendel”. And here I was going to link to the Butinox Green Room colours, but no such luck, there doesn’t seem to be a web page for it. Is it just me or is that a little strange? Aaaaanyway, its not really lavender, more aubergine (eggplant), though not quite as dark as that. And the code for the one we ended up with is 4030-R50B. It’s less pink in person than it looks in the picture, and also darker (it dries darker, that is).

The lass insists on calling it pink, however. She also exclaims how beautiful her wall is. I have to agree, it’s a nice colour. I’m quite happy to be able to call it purple, though.

Shuffling the cards

You know the room where I just tore down the horrid, horrid carpet wall covering? Where we meant to have the hobby/guest room? Well, progress is being made. There is now paper up on the wall where the carpet used to be, the moulding is all white (one more coat needed) and paint is going to come up on the walls quite soon. And on one wall? Probably pink paint.

See, we’ve come to the realisation that we have to move the lass from her current room. We did absolutely nothing in there, luckily, so no work gone to waste. The problem with her in there is it’s next to the bathroom and when someone takes a shower it sounds like a really bad storm or something. Which means we can’t really have a shower when she’s sleeping, whether it’s in the evening or the morning. This is, you could say, a tad inconvenient.

So. Since we’re so good a procrastinating* this realisation came to us at the perfect time, just in time to change the plans for paint in the room we’re working on and move her in there, then we can do a little bit of work on the room she’s in now and get the hobby room set up there. The shower thing will be a problem whenever we have guests, but that’s not going to happen often enough to warrant worrying about it. Once we get around to doing up the bathroom – a few years down the line, probably – we can consider a little measure of noise insulation.

And, yes, pink. I told her we would paint three walls white and that she could choose a colour for the fourth. So far she’s insisting on either green or “girl colour” (jentefarge) with a heavy leaning toward the latter. So I’ve told her she can have pink, as long as she starts calling it pink, not “girl colour”, since there is no such thing. It seems to be sinking in. Well, the calling it pink part, anyway, I guess I can’t expect to conquer the combined force of society’s genderization of colour in just a few sentences, but I’ll settle for the naming part for now.

I’d try to convince her to go for green, except I’m planning on buying closets and such from IKEA in the new Stuva series with green fronts (mainly because the pink and blue are of such insipid hues) and figure it will be easier to match with a pink than finding the perfect shade of green paint. Also, I figure it’s better to let her have SOME pink, then hopefully she’ll grow out of it at some point. If we were to be militantly against it might become an obsession, which would not be a good thing.

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* And boy am I glad we have been procrastinating on this, it would have been a major pain in the ass to discover this after having set the hobby room up with desks, computers, sewing machines and craft supplies. Major, major pain. Procrastination FTW