What's making me happy now

For those of you waiting with bated breath to learn the fate of the muvv, I'll say it's coming along.  That's about all I'll say.  It's a mixed bag.  I've decided it will be mine (ahem) because with all the weird ambisexuality, it's not a great fit for my husband's hand.  It's not really a great fit for a human hand, come to that, but it works better on mine.  I'm working on the half-fingers now, which really aren't too tough, and I'm doing a fairly capable job of picking up the stitches along the fingers, something that made me quake with fear when I first read the pattern.  I'm also pretty proud that, aside from mixing up the stitch counts for the men's vs. women's size, it looks pretty decent for a first attempt at a hand covering-type thing.  Once I finish the fingers, I'll have to go back and pick up stitches to make the flap and then finish the thumb, and THEN start over on the ones that (hopefully) will actually be for my husband.  Progress has slowed a bit over the last few days because I'm horribly sick - another sinus infection.  I don't know whether it's funny-as-in-ha-ha or funny-as-in-kind-of-sad that as few posts as I've made over the past couple years, at least a couple of them have been made in the throes of a bad sinus thing.  I did break down, after fever and swollen lymph nodes hit, and go get an antibiotic.  I think it was partially due to denial, but also to the fact that I'm still nursing the kiddo and only want to take medication if it's absolutely necessary.  Apparently I didn't get started on it soon enough to prevent feeling even worse for a day or two, but hopefully things will be looking up soon.  Naturally, the kiddo has chosen now to pop her first year molars, so I've been up and down with her every 30 minutes or so for the last couple nights.

I always enjoy it when bloggers share what things are rocking their world at the moment, so since I've not had the mental energy the last couple of days to write anything for this space, I'll throw out a few of the things that are rocking my world these days.

I'm a huge fan of Björk, going back to when I was in high school and came across The Sugarcubes' newly-released record Life's Too Good.  My friends all thought I was nuts - nobody else seemed to like it much, but it remains one of my favorite albums to this day.  Every so often I dust it off and groove out all over again...  Screwball and totally uplifting.  Here are two of my favorite songs:

I'm a re-reader for sure, and I love visiting again and again with books that touched me somehow.  One of my favorite winter re-reads is Smilla's Sense of Snow, probably on my all-time top 10 fiction list.  On the surface a thriller, this book has metaphysical depths and passages of such astonishing beauty they leave me breathless.  I tend to think that it is in fact author Høeg, and not Smilla, who has the real sense of snow.  His descrptions of snow and ice in all their myriad forms are so vivid that I grow cold as I read.  Adding to the chill is the pervasive theme of alienation and the sobering colonial history of Greenland.  The plot itself takes a back seat to the storytelling.  Just beautiful, in a strange and lonely way.  I love to burrow deep underneath the blankets for this one.

Keeping up with the kind of chilly theme, there are the wintry tones in the breathtaking photographs of Hendrik Kerstens.  They remind me a lot of the gorgeous Xteriors series by Desiree Dolron, also a Dutch photographer.

    
Lotta Jansdotter designs the kind of stuff I go nuts for - clean, organic shapes that somehow have a bit of a vintage feel about them.  And apparently I'm a little slow, but I had no idea that IKEA sold fabric.  Really cool fabric.    

Some blogs I'm loving right now:  Crafting Japanese, a site about Japanese craft books.  I've always found the Japanese aesthetic sensibility to be fascinating.  This blog has patterns mostly for things only the "fantasy me" would wear, but that are a lot of fun to look at nonetheless.  Then there's The Zero Waste Home - probably not realistic, but highly motivational.  And then there's the sadly defunct Saartje Knits.  Thank goodness for archives.

Stay warm!