Festivitas

Okay, I'm finished with my pity party, and feeling a bit more on top of things after making it through E's birthday party preparations. I'm trying not to let the fact that one kid complained to me "This is the most boring birthday party EVER" get to me. I know that E had a grand time, and, as far as I could gauge, the other six boys were having fun too.

I had fun making "godteposer" (the little gift bags of candy that kids always get at birthday parties here). I decided to give in to the Christmas season and came up with this:

Contents: pepperkaker, Smørbukk caramels, brente mandler, and miniature candy canes.

Eivind requested brownies instead of cake, so I stacked brownies on a plate and stuck candles in the pile. It wasn't elegant (and I totally cheated and used Betty Crocker boxed mixes!!! Don't tell my Mom!), but combined with vanilla ice cream it was pretty popular. We didn't have any planned activities, and for the most part, it seemed to work out great (the killjoy kid being the exception). The boys (yes, I'm afraid it was all boys) E invited are super sweet and enthusiastic. One of them had a notebook and pencil along with him (his mother tried to get him to leave it behind, but he insisted), and he wrote down all sorts of useful information, like the names of the guests who had arrived. Forfatterspire? They're all so quirky and smart and unedited at this age, that it's really fun to observe them. Two of the dads (whom we know pretty well, but who didn't know each other) stayed for coffee and we adults had a nice time chatting too.

I had been really stressing about this birthday party, so it's a big relief to have it squared away.

Hurra for meg

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was a very mellow, very nice day. First off the sun was shining, for which there is certainly no guarantee in Norway in September. I woke up early and was excited to bang out my thoughts on my new book plan. On Friday I had a major conceptual breakthrough. I realized that I have another book gestating that is not the cabin book. This other book, which is on Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the production of meaning, is begging to be written. I have a strong feeling that I can get it done by December of this year. The cabin book just isn't coming together, and I think it needs more time to percolate in the background. So now I have a chapter outline for the new book and I've gathered together all the related work I've done on Peer Gynt (which turns out to be a lot) and apportioned it out into the right chapters. I have over 70 pages and a very clear plan for the rest now. That was a great way to start my day. How exciting to discover that I have nearly half of a book written!

Once the guys were up and running we drove down to the local Kiwanis Club barn sale and I scored in a big way! You have to understand that I am a real tightwad, I hate being parted from my kroner, and that I live in a country with ridiculously high taxes on consumer goods. Things that would cost $2 in the US sell for closer to $20 here. This makes furnishing a home a difficult challenge. I have been looking for a table cloth that fits on our very wide table when it is fully extended since at least Thanksgiving time last year. There is just nothing out there, but in the stacks of linens upstairs in the Kiwanis barn I found one, and not only is it big, but also new and clean and really nice: 100% cotton in lovely, deep blues from Habitat that will work with our colorful Fiestaware dishes.

I have also been looking for a pepper mill since we moved here in December 2008. I see them in stores all the time, but I am just not going to pay $40 dollars for a freaking pepper mill. The fabulous Kiwanis had three to choose from. I took the least garish and gunky one. It had an irritating label stuck on, but after soaking the mill in hot soapy water for 15 minutes it scrubbed off like a dream, and now I have a sparkly little pepper mill:

KE thinks it's hideously ugly, but clearly he's just plain wrong about that! How can someone who barely ever uses pepper be expected to appreciate the glory that this is?  I paid 30 NOK for both the table cloth and the pepper mill -- just under $5 right now. Now that's a price I can live with, and it was the best birthday present I've had in I think five years! Okay, so I'm easily amused and "billig i drift" (cheap to maintain) as they say here in Norway.

We went grocery shopping (thankfully painless) and then I baked myself a cake and made pizza on a gloriously sunny afternoon in our kitchen, with the door to the patio wide open. After the pizza we took a walk around the neighborhood. We were feeling bold, so we scoped out the yard of the abandoned house that we desperately want to buy. That only made us want it more, so on the way home we were scheming and trying to figure out how to make that work. I know it's possible to find out who owns a particular property, and I'd like to contact the owners, but we have a lot of financial stuff to work out, and plus we need at least one of us to have a permanent position. It is totally my dream--an old house on the verge of collapse--combined with KE's dream--perfect solforhold (a quintessentially Norwegian word that I don't think has an English equivalent. It means "sun conditions"--meaning how early the sun shines on the property in the morning and how late in the evening at all times of the year. Norwegian are--quite justifiably--obsessed with solforhold) and a little bit of a view of the fjord. Sigh. Want want want want want. I would be willing to sacrifice a lot to buy that house. Since we can't do it, we went home and consoled ourselves with birthday cake.

It was the same cake I baked last Saturday for KE's birthday (yes, we're exactly seven days apart, born in the same year). Last weekend I tried out the ginormous stand mixer that KE insisted on buying for baking bread. It ended up producing a huge amount of big, awkward parts to wash and a cake that wasn't even close to properly mixed (seriously, it looked like a failed marbled cake, with random chunks of yellow cake in what was supposed to be plain chocolate). This time I baked in my usual way, which is to say by hand, and the result was much better. The cake was as light and fluffy as the machine mixed one, but it was actually blended. I like being a Luddite when it comes to baking. The icing was chocolate too, with a few tablespoons of coffee in it. I hate coffee, but I do love coffee ice cream and chocolate-coffee icing. Yum. KE and E sang both "Hurra for deg" and "Happy Birthday" and a good time was had by all.

I finished nearly everything on the Lanesplitter skirt last night while watching MPGjr (cringe)--now all I need to do is buy elastic for the waistband, sew it down, and it's done. It turned out to be a size large rather than medium, and I think it probably would look better on if it were a medium, but I'll still wear it. Pictures to come, once the elastic is in.

Rein energi

Today we had E's birthday party, and boy was it a hoot! We invited the grasshopper group from preschool, and four of the six came. This is the first time we've had a "real" birthday party with a group of kids, and though we were a bit apprehensive it worked out pretty well. After all, five-year-olds are pretty darned good at entertaining themselves:

Notice the whoopie cushion on the chair. That was the most popular gift. By the end of the two hour party the kids had blasted big holes in it. By the way, the Norwegian word for "whoopie cushion" is "prompepute," which I find unbearably cute ("fart pillow").

Yesterday I finished the back of the Drops Highlander sweater, and spread it out on the floor with the front to see what it looked like. KE walked by and commented that he might like to have it for a crazy kick-around sweater. I was thrilled, since I've been trying desperately to come up with a new sweater that he would like. At first we thought I could just add length, for him, but since I wasn't super happy with the way 0-228 was knitting up and since I was clearly going to have a ton of yarn left over, it was no big deal to rip it all out. Enter 85-3! I don't know why I didn't think to search the men's patterns before. Of course now I'm a little worried there won't be enough yarn, but that's all part of the excitement, I suppose.

I didn't get a chance to photograph the first attempt, but here's what 85-3 looks like in-progress:

Pretty wild, huh? It will be fun to see KE in it, especially since everything else I've knitted for him is so drab.

Hurra for deg som fyller ditt år!

My little boy turned four today! We've been down in New Mexico visiting family, and we just finished opening presents. Let me take a moment to say what a sweet boy he is. Right now as I write he's sitting at the dining room table with his grandpa playing with a new set of Legos that is way too advanced for  him (age 6-8), but which he absolutely loves. So nice to hear them chatting away together like the best of friends...totally worth all the effort to bring him down here!