Sukkersøtt

I think I'm in a sugar coma. Seldom have I had a less productive day. The only things I accomplished was to finish reading Knut Nærum's De dødes båt (very entertaining murder mystery containing multiple cabins) and skim through Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Synnøve Solbakken looking for the seter scenes. KE and I bought a bag of Twist chocolates while grocery shopping this morning, and downed the whole thing after lunch. NOT good!

Things have calmed down quite a bit with E. Here he is in full swing, playing "knight":

On Sunday we had KE's sister and nephew over in the evening. E loved having the visit. I baked one of my all-time favorite recipes, an apple cake using honey and kefir milk:

I first came across the recipe in a ladies' magazine back when I lived in Norway in the early 1990s. I used to make it all the time the two years I lived here, but haven't attempted it since. It was fun to dredge it up again--it's an incredibly easy recipe, and both tasty and relatively healthy, for a cake.

Though you can't tell it from the picture below, I've been progressing steadily on the sock sweater. I have split for the armholes, finished the back, and am halfway done with the front.

Uh, I think stripes are a recurring theme in E's wardrobe.

Random thoughts on the cabin book: originally I planned on the period 1814-2005 (with two sections, one on the nation-building period and one on the welfare state), but the more I think about it, the more reasons I see to start even earlier, with the Enlightenment period. During a brief conversation with the expert in early modern literature in my department, I learned that the cabin shows up all over the place in the didactic moral poetry of the period (not the literature I turn to first when looking for something to read). The farmer in his cabin is apparently one of the most prevalent and potent symbols in the Norwegian enlightenment. Plus I've already discovered lots of material on the seter (mountain dairy) that relates really closely to the cabins of the nation building period.

It would be great to have three sections to the book (Enlightenment, Nation-Building, Welfare State) for formal reasons. For tactical reasons it would be fantastic to have 1/3 of my book covering the early modern period: that is one of three specializations my department will be asking for in their next literature hire. And for personal reasons, I'm actually really starting to like the period, based on the little bit of work I've been doing on the 18th century writer Edvard Storm over the past month. I've been reading so much material in Gothic type that I'm actually starting to get the hang of it, and my speed is increasing significantly. It's so incredibly cool to be able to breeze through a couple of pages of an 18th century book in Gothic type!

Latest music discovery: Lily Allen. I was intrigued by her song "Fuck You" (the contrast between the sugary sweet melody and voice and the really vicious lyrics) but didn't quite know what to make of it until I discovered that it's an anti-Bush song. Rock on! (ETA: whoops, I may have been overly enthusiastic. Just discovered Dan Bull's open letter to Lily Allen thanks to Jilltxt.) I guess I should also fess up to the fact that my sordid Eurotrash past leads me to totally dig Lady Gaga too. There's something about her deadpan delivery and shamelessly (but self-ironic) commercial sound that I can't resist. No accounting for taste, right? To balance it out, KE's intense passion for Wilco is starting to rub off on me. We've been listening to their first album, A.M., in the car and I love it. It has so many echoes of the Byrds. And of course Eels is still probably my favorite current artist.