If you have been in my presence at any time in the last month, there is probably no way I haven’t already regaled to you every last detail of my Nordic Dreamvacation at least once. I can’t just forego converting it to blobbovision, though, so here goes. Træna! Træna, I learned, is actually a municipality of thousands of tiny islands off the coast of Norway, including Sanna, which forms the dramatic silhouette you see above. Lying just below the arctic circle, Træna sees sun 24 hours a day in midsummer, and each July is host to a music festival on the islands Husøy and Sanna which lets people like me, who are not year-round Arctic fisherpeople, experience all the adjectives depicted above firsthand. /// continue reading
I may be mommy-ing it up down in Park Slope day-to-day, but I think the G train owes me a special caboose or something due to the time I spend commuting for friendship to the upper and northeasterly limits of this borough. One of the more special ways I falsely claim residency on the North Side has been to participate in my pal Kristen’s collaboration-fueled mini-magazine The Bushwick Review. It’s a really wonderful mash-up of visuals and words, created by people within Bushwick and far without, that Kristen has thoughtfully compiled into three editions so far. Issue #2 has just come out; the third drops this summer! I’m so happy and honored to have been part of each one. /// continue reading
Shown here approximately life-size are the custom rubber stamps I made as x-mas presents for some of my very best pals. It took some work to achieve this most pleasing result. First I formulated the most suitable imaginary nickname for each pal. The next step was to lovingly design them each into a one-inch square of appropriate typography, a mix of machine- and hand-made. Then I took the designs to Casey Rubber Stamps, one of my most favorite places in the universe, and two days later I had the stamps in my hands. I actually jumped up and down at how well they came out. I then picked out some corresponding ink pads while listening to Mr. Casey and his intern squabble about the necessity of the most miscellaneous objects collecting dust in his tiny store, paid for my goods, and was on my way.
Last week the names you see above and I convened at a fancy restaurant on a snowy evening and I finally got to hand out the stamps. They were a success all around! It filled me with happiness. Our waiter let me have a blank guest check so I could gather all the marks in their assigned colors to take home with me (and post on my blob). In the meantime I hope all their owners have been stamping everything in sight!
One pleasant Sunday a few weeks ago a big bunch of my friends and I escaped our urban surroundings in favor of my parents’ llama farm. /// continue reading
Did you know that the longest single-word palindrome is saippuakuppinippukauppias, a Finnish compound that means “soap cup seller?” I don’t know what a soap cup is, or if people actually sell them, but there is a word for it in Finland just in case. While the Finns – and Dutch, too – have the most impressive single-worders, I found (not wrote – I wish!) a bunch of amusing English palindrome phrases to embellish those pictures I mentioned my last post on the ol’ blob. Sometimes they’re nonsense like the above, but sometimes they fit the photo sort of perfectly. /// continue reading
