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.

Lørdagsk(a)os

What is this, you say? Why an entirely new and unplanned project. The other day E came home from preschool wearing a hand-knit sweater that wasn't his own. Apparently he had gotten cold, so the teachers put it on him. Imagine how horrible that made me feel. The one he wore home was obviously knitted out of sock yarn, and a good weight for indoors. I immediately dropped the linen tunic and dug out my sock yarn. This is what I have come up with: 200 stitches in the round with 2.5mm needles. I'll split at the armholes and probably knit the arms shoulder down. Not sure about the neck yet.

Saturday is always pizza night in our house. It used to be that I made them all myself, but then KE started getting interested. I still make the dough, but he has otherwise taken full responsibility for his own weekly pizza. As you can see here:


Most of the time E isn't interested, but this week he was, so he got his own mini pizza. I absolutely love the way he spread his toppings:

What's up with all the mushrooms jammed together? Meanwhile, my own pizza is exactly the same as it always is. The only change in my standard ingredients in the past five years has been the addition of mushrooms. Otherwise it's tomato sauce, spinach, cheese, onions, and black olives. I know lots of people will think that sounds gross, but I totally dig it, week after week:

The day was a long one. We started with watching the sons of some friends playing soccer at a local tournament, then went to the mall to get slippers and boots. Unfortunately, E is still rather randomly hitting me. It's so weird. Today he went into his room to hide under the covers and yelled for me to come find him. I thought he was playing hide-and-seek. When I lifted up the duvet he smacked me full force in the middle of my face and was furious with me because I hadn't done exactly what he wanted (whatever that was). It bent my glasses.

It really upset me, partly because I got so angry that I had to leave the room, partly because it just hurt so much. I wasn't spanked as a child, and no one has ever hit me. I don't know how to react to what my brain processes as a violent attack, even though it's my own young son doing it. I'm sure I'm not 'supposed' to blog about this kind of thing. Everyone's children in the blogosphere are always perfectly behaved, heartbreakingly creative, exceptionally smart, and artfully dressed at all times. Mine's all that too, but there's no denying that something's going on in our relationship that needs to be worked out. I wonder at times if it's because I'm the one who works away from home, that somehow he's punishing me for being less present in his life.