Blomstring

KE's flowers continue to bloom and bloom. He has done a nice job of planning the beds so that something is always opening up. Just as the peonies are fading, the fire weed and delphiniums are coming into bloom. Love the soft colors together. The peonies were as big as E's head. I'm sorry I didn't get a snapshot of that!

I have officially declared my Ibsen article finished and just now sent it off to Nordic Theatre Studies. And last night I started reading Hamsun's Under Høststjærnen (1906). It is just so darned good. I read the whole thing with a lump in my throat, which is how I know that a text really resonates for me. Today I start on En Vandrer spiller med Sordin, the follow up book. I know I won't like it as much, so I'm a little hesitant to start.

The back of the Gathered Pullover is done and I should be able to knit up the fronts and sew it together in the next day or two. Yay!

ETA: Yay, it's done (too hot to put it on right now here in Norway, though...)!

Bøker

Yikes. I looked at two of my regular blogs today and both of the authors were writing about books that are in preparation to come out. Meanwhile, my own second book festers and wanes. It's been more or less done since March 2007, and over two years later I still see no signs of it being published any time soon, despite the fact that I actually have a publisher for it! None of the three articles I revised this winter have come out yet either. So tiresome. Or rather, I'm so impatient. Boo hoo.

Of course I'm supposed to be slogging away at book number three, but that just doesn't seem to be getting off the ground. Little projects keep getting in the way, and though most of them are at least tangentially related to the larger project, it sure doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere.

I'm closing in on finishing the Ibsen article. I think one more day of revising and I'm probably at a point where I can submit it to a journal. I spent a couple of minutes today checking out potential journals. The university system in Norway has a two-tiered ranking of publishing venues (journals and publishing houses). You get a lot more "points" (a.k.a. "money"!) for your home department (and thus you) if you publish in tier 2 venues rather than tier 1. I had originally thought of submitting to Ibsen Studies (duh, it's an article on an Ibsen play) but that's only tier 1. I discovered a journal that I've never even heard of before called Nordic Theatre Studies that is tier 2, so obviously it's worth submitting it there first, since the pay off is larger for the same amount of work. And if it gets rejected there I can always still submit it to Ibsen Studies of course.

If I can just get this thing off my desk, then I can dive back into the Hamsun paper that has been on hold since March. I just picked up the books at the library so I can start reading them again. it's the first "wanderer" trilogy that I'm going to write about: Under Høststjærnen, En Vandrer spiller med Sordin, and Den sidste Glæde. They are by all accounts "bad" Hamsun novels, but I love them dearly for all their weirdness. It is such an interesting period in his career--the transition from the proto-modernism of the 1890s to the reactionary realism of the interwar years. From just reading the first 10 or so pages of Under Høststjærnen I can tell I'm going to have a ton of material to work with!

Yesterday E and I took most of the day to go to the Technical Museum. He had so much fun on the preschool field trip there that he has been asking about going there ever since. We had a really nice time, and he was so patient and good throughout the long travel time to get there. We had to take a 5-minute bus ride, a 25-minute ferry ride, and a 30-minute tram ride each way. He really got into the museum displays, and though he claims that driving the cars was his favorite part, I think he actually had the most fun at the telephone display. They have a bunch of old phones hooked up to an internal switchboard, so museum visitors can call each other from various booths. It was a fun day! (I admit I had another garter stitch shawl with me to work on, so I didn't lose patience once.)

Confession: there was another big Garnstudio yarn sale at Tjorven. I have been coveting the Drops Lin yarn for half a year, and at 40% off I just had to get some. I bought 14 skeins of black 100% linen. It's so glossy and smooth--much nicer than the Louet Euroflax I bought in the fall. It will be such fun to experiment with the Lin. I'm thinking a loose tunic, and if there is any left over a crocheted traveller's bag.

Putekrig

I write this on my laptop at our new kitchen table! It's so lovely to have one that fits the space we have to work with, finally. It took a long day of furniture shopping, a session combing www.finn.no, and a long drive to some guy's house to get it. We ended up with a very plain oiled oak table from IKEA, purchased used for half the price. It looks like this:
Like I said, very plain! We don't have new chairs yet, so at the moment we're just using some old mismatched ones that don't look all that great. We're kind of thinking about buying four of these, though we're not sure yet (that's light blue, not white):

In the meantime, KE was very kind and oiled and tinkered with the sewing machine until he got it to work flawlessly, so I was able to pick up the great outdoor pillow/cushion project again (without trauma, even!). I got three of the five slipcovers sewn and one of the two patchwork pillows sewn. Well, that's not entirely true--the machine seams are done and I need to whipstitch the openings on all of them. For right now, this gives a hint of what it will look like:

And here's a before shot of the cushions that KE bought a decade ago. The fabric is starting to rot and the foam is coming out. Time to cover them up, dontcha think?!


Still working on the Gathered Pullover. One sleeve done, the other half done. I have knit past the cable pattern and have divided the front and back at the armholes. I'm working on the back while I mull over how much higher I want to start the neck opening at the front.

Avledet

You would think I would practically have finished the gathered pullover, since it is such a quick knit (and I have indeed come pretty far) but you would be wrong.

No, I suddenly got it into my head that I simply had to make a patchwork pillow case for our outdoor furniture. We have a pretty solid table, chairs and sofa that we use all the time. The set is about 15 years old, as are the cushions. Unfortunately the cushions are really starting to wear, and I planned to cover them with the same unbleached linen that I bought at IKEA for our living room curtains. Even more unfortunately, it turns out our sewing machine (which has been in storage since 2004) isn't feeling very good, so my attempt to sew up the very simple slipcovers for the cushions was foiled. Yet another of my attempts to sew with a machine fails!

I've been looking at all the patchwork pillows that Alicia Paulson makes on Posie Gets Cozy and thinking "I can do that." After all my Grannie showed me years ago how to do simple patchwork square. And so I did:

I sewed them together by hand. I'm going to make a simple back out of the same unbleached linen that the cushions will (eventually, when I fix the machine) be covered with. It was fun and easy, so I'll probably make another.

Yesterday evening we had the end-of-the-schoolyear party for E's preschool. We had a picnic at Hellviktangen (the best local beach). Everyone brought their own dinner, but shared cakes, and the kids ran around, waded in the fjord, and fished for crabs. The preschool teachers had put togther big folders of all the kids' artwork and distributed them ceremoniously, like a diploma. Those kids were so proud! All of them, E included, sat right down to look at their own art and show it to their parents. Very fun, especially when the folder is almost as big as E himself!


ETA: The geraniums bloomed. And the color is.... RED for both of them. Despite being a red-hater, I'm surprisingly cheered by them:

Vi skal ikkje sove bort sumarnatta

It's real summer here in Norway!

What better than knitting and dreaming and planning out on the patio?

Diverse

I finished knitting the Whisper Cardigan last night, and the end result is an "ugh" I think. I'm not wild about the blue, since I'm in a total drab/neutral phase right now.


I'm going to need to do the bind off over again, but am feeling bummed about the project so I'll need to let it stew in time out for a few days. Some people on Ravelry have suggested doing a tubular bind off, since that is supposedly more elastic than other types. If I do that, then I will have learned three new things, which probably makes the project worth it in the end. The other two are 1) that it is vastly better to pick up dropped stitches with a crochet hook than with the knitting needles (I dropped a lot of stitches on this project) and 2) how to wrap the end stitches on short rows so that you don't get a hole in the fabric.

It is with great gusto that I tore into the next project, yet another sweater that everyone on Ravelry has knit, the Gathered Pullover from Interweave Knits.

I don't really have a good answer as to why I keep knitting the same things that everyone else is knitting. I suppose it's partly because they are appealing designs and partly because I consciously or unconsciously want to share in some kind of group experience. At any rate, I think this will be the last of knitting super popular projects for a while, and I can go back to my life of the obscure.

Today was a brilliant day, 24 celsius and beaming sunshine (hence the terrible photographs from 8pm this evening). I walked down to the ferry this morning, which is a brisk 25-minute walk, and had all sorts of ideas bubbling in my head. I'm pleased that the living room is starting to come together, and even more pleased that KE has agreed to go furniture shopping tomorrow.

KE and I had a rousing (at times strained) two day discussion trying to define what "art" is. He had that as an assignment for his last ever undergraduate course (yay!), which just started this week. It is fascinating and a little distressing how good we are at talking past each other some times! But as always, it ended up being stimulating and satisfying.

Pliktoppfyllende

Just caught wind of the news about Nevada Senator John Ensign, who apparently had an affair and paid off his mistress, her husband, and their son, all of whom were members of his staff. Ouch! This from a one-time higher up in the ridiculous Promise Keepers organization, leader of the campaign to impeach Bill Clinton, advocate for "opposite marriage," and critic of Alaska Senator Larry Craig for playing footsie in a men's room.

Now don't get me wrong. I have no illusions that politicians on the other side have any more integrity. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I have to admit that I just totally love it when the utter hypocrisy of conservatives like Ensign is exposed like this. The only difference between the two parties is that the Democrats pretty much don't bother to preach morality as they're dinking around, while for the Republicans the moralizing appears to be mandatory.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling exceptionally virtuous. I actually picked up the Whisper Cardigan and got the ribbing done, after having taken an extraordinary amout of time to pick up the correct number of stitches. I don't know why that was so difficult for me. I'm onto the back now, with only 7 inches of plain stockinette to go... Yay!