No, I’m not dead, I’ve just been pregnant. I realise this may not really be a hindrance to blogging, but it seems it was for me. As of four days ago I am a mother of two, the kid has a little sister and we’re all doing well. And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that here on the blog.
Indirectly, another baby may well influence the contents of blog posts, though, as with the main purpose of this entry which is to show off a bit of sewing.
Every time I sit down to sew after a prolonged break, I curse myself for having forgotten just how relaxing and rejuvenating I find the activity. A few years ago I managed to attend a couple of whole day “workshops” where a few people from the forum at tettinntil.no met up just to work on our own sewing projects for a whole day. I remember at that time pointing out to the husband that that sort of day – to me – is better than a spa break.
Anyway, some weeks ago I succumbed to sound medical advice and let the doctors write me off sick, and suddenly – well, after a week or so of doing basically nothing – I had energy enough to actually start preparing for the baby’s arrival. One thing I realised we’d need was some sort of middling warm outer wear, as the clothes we have from the kid are all meant for mid-winter temperatures, which are unlikely to manifest i September and October (I hope!). So I had a look through a stack of Ottobre magazines and found a pattern I liked, went off to Stoff og stil to find some suitable material, and got to work. Here is the result, sans model:
I adore both fabrics, and am rather pleased that I purchased a bit more than required for this pattern. I’ve already made a skirt in the striped babycord, and am contemplating sewing a Mei Tai with both fabrics in the panel somehow, I just need to check that I have something suitable for the straps in an appropriate colour.
Every time elections roll round again I struggle to decide whom to vote for. I’ve been a member of a couple of different parties, but never wholeheartedly, and never for more than a couple of years at most. One party has never, ever been under consideration, though. FrP is never getting my vote, even by proxy, which means any party that seriously considers long-term cooperation with FrP is also out of the question (what with having a multi-party system we usually have coalition governments nowadays). I normally land squarely to the left of center whatever I decide, though, so mostly just that issue hasn’t been a problem for me, however some of my friends are facing just that problem at the moment as it is rumored that Venstre might just possibly decide to, well, consider being in a coalition with FrP. Kristine at Haustljos is facing precisely that, and in that context decided to go looking for an answer to “What now?”. The particular test she found was a US based one (as far as we can gather) which yields some interesting results, though perhaps not very helpful ones in a Norwegian context. As Kristine says:
Testen eg tok var i overkant amerikansk, og skulle kartlegge kor rasistisk, homofob, kulturelt amøbe og gunhappy eg var.
Det viste seg at eg var hakket kvassare enn Gandhi.
Well, I was curious, so I took it too. I’m even worse:
This is me, apparently.
Uhm. A little to the left and a little libertarian. Just a wee bit. So, if we’re “sharper than Gandhi”, where’s Gandhi?
The Political Compass' take on some historical figures.
Wheee. This is fun. So, since the election everyone’s talking about at the moment is the US primaries, let’s see who I should aim to vote for, were I a US citizen:
Uh. Houston, we have a problem.
Or perhaps I should say Washington. Anyway, I guess it’s just as well I don’t have to decide which of the US candidates to vote for.
And, oh, those of you that claim Obama is a socialist? I think I can say with some authority: He ain’t. Mind you, according to this it seems Stalin wasn’t either. I mean, I’m in favour of the state having some control, and of essential public services being state owned rather than privatised, but I’m not against free trade as such. Well, ok, perhaps I am, since I’m in favour of regulating free trade, so let’s call it “freeish trade” shall we? Anyway, I’m not against private initiative, which I sort of thought the Soviets were. I may have misunderstood something here.
The overview of EU governments in 2008 is illuminating, too:
The world is mad.
Norway, I suspect, world be just to the left of that middle axis, we’re pretty similar to Sweden, but the poor Swedes have had a right-wing government for a few years now. Not that the difference seems particularly glaring (nowhere near as glaring as it ought by rights to be), so not much further to the left. Nowhere near enough to make me happy.
___________
Edit:
The FAQ is interesting, and contains a point worth quoting under the heading “You can’t be libertarian and left wing”:
The assumption that economic deregulation inevitably delivers more social freedom is flawed. The welfare states of, for example, the Nordic region, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities – not to mention anti-censorship. Such established high-tax social democracies consistently score highest in the widely respected Freedom House annual survey on democratic rank eg Denmark ranks 2, Sweden 3 and Norway 7, while comparatively free markets such as the US, Singapore and China rate 15,74 and 121 respectively (this detailed checklist can be viewed at http://www.worldaudit.org/civillibs.htm).
The weather outside is frightful. Really. I’m not particularly a snow person at the best of times, but even I can enjoy a nice sunny day, not too cold, with a little bit of cross country skiing, cocoa from a thermos and perhaps a fire to grill hot-dogs on. The last week or so, though? Ter – ri – ble. There’s been seemingly constant snow, hail, sleet and rain and every other variation thereof, frequently accompanied by wind, occasionally strong winds.
Still, when I caught myself feeling sorry for myself the other day, I realised it was time for a reality check.
Why? Well, honestly, if bad weather for a couple of weeks is unpleasant and a minor inconvenience, which, believe me, is all it is, that means I’m in a more priveleged situation than the vast majority of people on earth, even many of my neighbours.
Heavy rain to me means wet clothes if I don’t remember to dress for it.
A dry spell, similarly, means the price of electricity might go up a bit, and if we’re at my parents’ cabin we have to be extra careful about not setting off a forest fire (which, naturally, we try to avoid at the best of times).
If it’s cold, I can dress up more warmly, snuggle under a blanket or turn the heat up. If neccessary, I have the money to pay the increased heating bill and to buy more clothes.
Strong winds means it’s better to stay inside, but if I have to go out it’s not a problem.
As opposed to, were I born somewhere and someone else:
Heavy rain means worrying about a flooded house or a flooded field that was supposed to feed my family. Hereabouts it might lead to worrying about landslides.
A dry spell may mean we will starve because crops will fail.
Cold may mean freezing to death or choosing between eating and paying the heating bill.
Strong winds may blow my house down.
And so on. Should we be particularly unlucky, our basement could flood and I suppose wind could blow in a window or one could break because something outside got picked up and thrown against it. Should anything like that happen we have insurance that will cover it, and even if the insurance company quarrelled, we would be able to fix the problem somehow from savings or borrowing from family, or worst case: the bank.
And that’s it. My worst case scenario, regarding weather, resembles a helluvalot of people’s unobtainable dream.
Lego recently unveiled a new series aimed at girls: Lego Friends. Lego themselves unashamedly admit they have been marketing to boys for the last twenty or so years, and that now they are targeting the “other 50%”. They’ve redesigned the minifig, creating the minidoll, and have launched 14 sets to start with.
Some people are up in arms about it, some people shrug their shoulders and wonder what the problem is and some people recognise that gendering toys is not neccessarily ideal but why should Lego be the ones to take to the barricades, they need to make money after all?
I’m a bit torn, though leaning toward the “up in arms” faction, and I’ll try to summarise what I think is wrong (and also what I think is right).
Cons:
The new minidolls: Firstly, they look like Polly Pocket rip-offs. The fact that they are “curvy” and have “breasts” (yes, they do, not cup size DD mercifully, but still) is problematic for a whole host of reasons, but ok, they’re not too bad as these things go. However: Yes, women have breasts. Girls don’t. At last not girls in the target age for these sets. In fact, it’s quite difficult to tell boys and girls apart before puberty if they are wearing “neutral” clothes and hair styles. But I guess these “Friends” are supposed to be grown up? In which case is perhaps having a tree house a bit weird? Mostly they seem a bit confused in terms of age, actually.
What I notice though, is the lack of male minidolls. What, the five girls live all alone as humanoids on a planet otherwise inhabited by yellow-skinned, hard-cornered aliens? Where’s Ken?
Another point about the new minidolls is that apparently the legs can’t be posed separately and the hands can’t be turned, seriously limiting the number of activities the girls can take part in compared to minifigs (and compared to Playmo figures, for example, whose hands can turn when they need to hold the handlebars of a bike). This is both Not Good because it limits play and Not Good because it feeds into this whole “girls should be watchers rather than participators” thing, though I’m (reasonably) sure the latter wasn’t what the designers intended and it’s just a “natural” limitation in the way they are designed. (Natural, but not unavoidable, I’d say.)
The colours: Yes, little girls like pink (this is – overwhelming evidence suggests – because they’ve been conditioned to like pink, but still, they do). And the colours as such aren’t a problem on their own, except in as much as “normal” colours are missing from the series. Unless your neighbourhood has been painted pink as a stunt from Mattell (yes, it happened, google it) you are unlikely to find a whole community made up of pastel-coloured houses. The idea that lego bricks have to be pastel coloured for girls to play with them is ridiculous.
The set themes: I’ll give Lego credit for the Inventor’s Workshop and, grudgingly, for the tree house, but they are a bit like the token minority actor in a sitcom: Including one black character doesn’t make your show “not racist”. The sets are overwhelmingly embarrasingly stereotypishly “girly” and this is Not Good.
Talking about “not racist”, the five friends include the token minority characters. Naturally. Hang on, I went back to have a better look at them. I assumed Emma was supposed to be generic-asian and Andrea was supposed to be generic-of-african-decent, but now I see they both have green eyes. That’s just weird.
What do you mean “the other 50%”? Has it escaped your attention that girls already play with lego? Not all girls, by any means, but do ALL boys play with lego?
If you’re a boy and you would like a beauty parlour set (or a tree house, for fuck’s sake), are you allowed to buy one? Ok, no matter how it was packaged I imagine some parents would balk at buying a beauty parlour for their son, unfortunately, but if it was just another Lego City set wouldn’t the chance have been greater? Even keeping the Friends series but adding a few male mindolls and NOT trumpeting “Lego for GIRLS! FINALLY!” would be a huge step in the right direction.
Following on from that: If you sell a girl a beauty parlour in the Lego City series, perhaps the next thing she wants is the hospital. And then the police station. And then the construction sets so that she can pretend to build more beauty parlours (if you insist, though I’d rather build a mad scientist laboratory or something). Wasn’t “selling more Lego” your goal, or have I misunderstood?
Once upon a time Lego was marketed to “kids”. What happened?
Pros:
I quite like the minidolls to be honest. Yes, there are major issues with WHY they were designed at all, but I quite like the result (except for the lack of mobility). I hope they realise quite quickly that they need to include some male characters as well, though.
New sets. More parts being made in more colours. Yay! And the diner is quite nice.
Uhm. That’s it.
So. I think we’ll call it a FAIL. Which doesn’t mean the kid might not end up with some of these sets, in among all the other Lego (Toy Story Lego has been a favourite with both mother and kid so far, and they LOVE Cars).
Well, I’ve certainly started thinking about Christmas, so I guess it’s about time.
Dear Santa,
Well, I got presents last year despite the fact that we told the lass you don’t exist and so on. In fact, she got presents too, so I’m guessing you’re ok with that, then? With the amount of attention you get it might just be refreshing for someone to ignore you, I guess, and considering the number of homes you need to visit in one night I guess being able to drop things off early and not give a personal appearance is probably a bit of a relief. Anyway, you know the drill:
1. Peace on earth.
2. A laminating machine that takes A3 format. Preferably a decent quality one that handles a bit of thickness.
3. Health and longevity for my nearest and dearest and for the following authors/artists (and any others I may have forgotten): Robin Hobb, J.K. Rowling, Stephen Fry, Jo Nesbø, Ole Paus, Michael Wiehe, Michael Parkinson, Håkon Gullvåg, Lillebjørn Nilsen, Neil Gaiman, Bill Bryson, India Knight, Kate Atkinson, Bob Dylan, Jasper Fforde, Robin Laing, Mads Eriksen, Frode Øverli, Lise Myhre, Richard Russo, Alexander McCall Smith, Nick Hornby and the Top Gear guys. Oh, and Jeffrey Archer, but dear, dear Santa, please make him stick to writing books rather than involving in politics (or, the horror, another groundless libel case).
4. An Overlock. Like this one. Or one of the Husqvarna Huskylocks they have here.
Jeg som synes jeg har blogget så mye i det siste… Det har visst vært på bokbloggen alt sammen.
Slike jenter (en blogg som anbefales) har funnet seg et meme som jeg jo like gjerne kan stjele:
Bok eller magasin
Bok. Surprised?
Kompis eller venninne
Ja takk, begge deler. Jeg har alltid hatt gode venner av begge (jeg hadde nær sagt “alle”) kjønn.
Kjole eller bukse
Bukse. Liker å gå i kjole, også, men det blir mest bukser.
Løst hår eller i strikk Hvis det er langt nok: Strikk. Men nå klipper jeg det før det blir så langt.
Kaffe eller te
Kaffe.
Sminke eller ikke
Ikke. Jeg har sminke. Jeg bruker den sikkert i hvert fall én gang i året.
Billige eller dyre klær
Både óg. Jeg betaler selvsagt helst minst mulig, men er villig til å betale mer for kvalitet og for bærekraftighet (økologisk og/eller fairtrade). Jeg kjøper lite klær, så det er viktig at det jeg finner varer en stund.
Fredag eller lørdag
Lørdag. Men fredagsfølelsen er fin, den også.
Pyntet eller casual
Definitivt casual.
Gulost eller hvitost
Gulost.
Gå eller kjøre bil
Gå. Jeg har ikke førerkort.
Letttbrus eller sukker
Jeg drikker lite brus, men når jeg gjør er det med sukker.
I’ve almost done December Daily for two years now. This year I think I may actually do it, since I’ve started putting a foundation together, which is much further than I’ve ever gotten before. I’m trying to mostly use stash I already have.
I’m a Journal Your Christmas alumni, so I’ll be getting prompts all though December, which is useful. I never actually DID the journalling, but I purchased the class in 2009, so now I get the prompts every year. Isn’t that nice? I’m thinking it will be possible to use ideas from that for the days when there’s little or nothing worth documenting happening (and since we both work full-time I know there will be days where all we have time for is the bare neccessities to get us through the day – I’ll document at least one day like that, but it might get repetitive if every weekday Monday to Friday goes: “Had breakfast, went to work, worked, went home, had dinner, put the lass to bed, zonked out on the couch, went to bed”). Shimelle’s prompts are great and though they are meant for scrapbookers you could also just use any old notebook and write, if that’s what you want. The focus is on telling the story, and not just of THIS Christmas, but of your childhood Christmasses and any other stories you want to tell. The class is highly recommended.
So far what I’ve assembled is an album, purchased with the intention of doing a Week in the Life, and never used for that purpose. I still want to do Week in the Life, but December is soon here, and the album is red. So there. It’s a We R Memory Keepers three ring album for 8,5×11 page protectors. I had a few page proectors to fit, but I’ve put in an order for some more, one of the purchases it’s hard to get around.
Oh, and the album
I’ve also purchased Ali’s overlays and templates. The latter are really great, and I can see myself playing around with them and using them for other projects, too (I tend to resize and otherwise modify templates all the time). Since my pages are going to be rather larger than Ali’s 6×8,5 I had to resize the overlays, but they came out fine. With a little trial and error I settled on resizing to 8×11, which alters the overlay’s proportions slightly, but not so much as to be noticeable. As our printer tends to default to A4 rather than Letter, this meant I could print with the minimum amount of adjustment. I also recoloured to a darkish red. I managed to make do with the cardstock I already had by mixing in some offwhite with the whites (pale gray, pale beige and pale purple).
The printed pages
I’ve also gone through my stash and found some things that might serve as embellishments.
I had two packs of the journal tags, the contents of one pack in the front, the others are still in their packaging.Letter stickers. Always handy.Chipboard
I’ve got a lot more chipboard letters, though not much of it is in the correct colours. The “winter” and “frosty” are from a lot I purchased off a member of scrapping.no a while back, so I have no idea where they’re from, but they are perfect. Well, except for the colour, but the nice thing about chipboard is it’s easy to paint.
Stuff. Might use some of this, might not.
I also dug out some patterned papers and picked out the ones that were both Christmassy and that fit the colour scheme.
Five papers.
From left: Taylor “Ever Green” and Show-Offs “Deck the halls” from Daisy D’s, Fruitcake “Berry Branch” and “Snowed In” from Basic Gray and Holiday Collection “Alpine Snow Lace” from KI Memories. The Basic Gray ones have a near solid colour matching back, I might use those for some days. I’ve since cut strips to fit the bottom rectangle of the overlays from these, I’ll pick whichever goes with my pictures and other embellishments on the specific days.
I’ve got some stuff coming from Bananafish that will definitely be used, too. I purchased some supplies for Project Life from her just after the summer and fell head over heels in love with the wonderful little bits and pieces when they arrived, so I ordered more, including some Christmassy items, which will come in handy.
I really love what Ali is doing with the Hambly transparencies, but I think I’ll make do with making my own somehow (I’ve got some nice thick ones meant for laser copiers). I also like the baseball card size page protectors used to hold stars and other little embellishments, and since I have few of these I may be doing something similar. We’ll see.
(Note: The original sharer on Facebook does not seem to be the creator. If anyone knows who created this, PLEASE let me know. I’d like it as a print.)
It reminded me of something that happened at work the other week which I meant to blog about but never got around to.
We have a cafeteria at work where we eat lunch. I try to bring a packed lunch (most often leftovers from dinner), but that’s beside the point here.
Once we’ve done eating we’re supposed to clear off the tables ourselves, keeping costs down. So we all take our tray and its contents over to the clearing station, where we sort it into rubbish, cutlery, plates, glasses, mugs and trays.
On the day in question I walked there with a few colleagues, as usual, and was clearing away my stuff when the person behind me, a man in his -uhm, guessing here – fifties(?), a man I’ve been used to thinking of as a pretty sensible sort of guy, comments “Oh, I threw the cutlery in the trash by mistake”. This happens, of course. I answer “These things happen, if you just let them know they’ll pick it out again”, finish clearing and start walking towards the door. When I reach it, I realise he’s just behind me, having finished too and walked off without alerting the two members of staff working right behind the clearing station to the fact that there is now a perfectly good fork and ditto knife in the trash.
Why? What possible reason could he have for not saying “Excuse me, I’m afraid I dropped some cutlery in the trash bin”. Is he afraid of losing face? Then why did he comment out loud to start with? Because if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have noticed. And I can tell you: He lost face with me.
If it ever happens again I’ll demonstratively go back and tell them myself.
Not satisfied in ressurecting my book database, inviting a massive updating job, I’ve decided to change my image cataloguing software, too, opening a whole other can of worms.
Once upon a time I tagged my photos in Adobe Photoshop Elements. At some point I started digital scrapbooking and for some reason (partly because of the way PE worked), I decided I didn’t want to tag my digital supplies there, so I purchased ACDSee to handle that job. Which it did beautifully, as long as I bothered to put in the effort of tagging.
Then PE crashed. That is, it refused to start in catalogue mode (this is not what the mode is called, but I can’t remember the proper name) and if I started it in editing mode and tried to change over to catalogue it crashed. I searched for solutions online, and found several, nonoe of which worked. I was faced with doing a reinstall and a rebuild, and figured it would only mean putting myself at risk of the same thing happening again. I therefore decided to change over to ACDSee for photos as well, since it seemed to be working so well for digital supplies.
This was, oh, 3 years ago or so.
The last couple of years I’ve been increasingly tempted by Lightroom – especially because I’d like to learn to handle RAW files. And in August Adobe ran a pretty good promotion, offering Lightroom 3 at half off. So I purchased a licence, and I’ve been meaning to delve into it ever since.
Now, if I’m going to be using Lightroom for editing, it makes sense to have the catalogue there as well, no? Well, I thought so. And so I started testing out importing images. And that’s when I discovered a hitch.
See, ACDSee has this nifty menu option: “Write database info to files”, which I’ve been using regularly. However, it turns out it doesn’t write any info to the files that Lightroom can find. It seems (and I’ve only spent a very little time investigating, so correct me if I’m wrong) it only writes information in its own proprietary format. So, yes, you could resurrect your ACDSee database based on it, but you can’t import it into another program.
Why?
I mean, I can see that it would make the threshold for changing to other software higher if you should find out about it while considering a change, but as I’d already made that decision, it only made me determined to change as soon as possible so as to not waste more effort. And had I known before I started using ACDSee, I would probably have searched for another solution entirely and NOT purchased the software. And I’m unlikely to recommend it to anyone else now – which I would have otherwise, it works well and has a gentler learning curve for amateurs than Lightroom. Oh, and it’s cheaper.
Anyway. I just landed myself with three years’ worth of photos to tag. Sigh. However, I’d rather make the effort now. Portability is pretty important to me, and when the lass decides to unearth her mother’s photograph collection from that dusty old drive in the attic (or from the cloud or wherever we will be storing such things in the future), I want the image data to be readable to her, and the best way of ensuring that is to get it written to the standardised EXIF/XMP, not some proprietary format thingamabob.
Jeg sikler til stadighet (altså, ikke bokstavelig, da, det ville være uhygenisk) over putene til Putegeriljaen. Hva med deg? Enten du som meg har siklet lenge eller dette er første gang du ser putene har du nå TO sjanser til å vinne en pute. Eventuelt en sjanse til å vinne TO puter, dersom du har griseflaks.
