Time Out

I don’t know about you, but I needed a few days to shake myself free of the Sarah Palin performance Thursday night, and there’s no better place than Siever’s Fiber Arts School on Washington Island.

Every two years they throw a reunion party weekend for teachers and students and the island locals.  There was a student art show (I came home with a “Viewer’s Choice” award for my work on The Mother’s Day Project) – and a style show at which I had the chance to prance around all fancy-like in a couple of my clothing designs.  Tons of fun.

Plus, I found a new lodging establishment with rooms that overlook Rock Island.  I lounged around each morning with my coffee and watched the sun rise over the boathouse.  Sweet.

My 5 mph weekend is over.  No more breaks until after election day.

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Postcard Friday

Sit back and enjoy. Norway displays its moody rough edges.

above tree line where winter will begin its arrival in just a couple of weeks

view from the mountain hiking lodge dining room on our second night

this pool of azure water was snow pack approximately three minutes beforehand and, yes, that’s a sandy beach

This location in the mountains was originally a summer farm where young people were sent with the livestock. Not hard to imagine more than a few summer romances were ignited in these surroundings.

Sea level views are just as stunning. This is an early sunrise in Kristiansand, taken from the dock of our friends Bjoern and Annelise.

Next week: Animals!

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Eat This

We did not go hungry – not with Scandinavian hosts whose dinner parties move gracefully from course to course over many hours. Sometimes, it is necessary for the guests to take breaks between courses to sing or dance, and it is not unusual for guests to bring along their musical instruments.

Don’t be fooled thinking the dessert course is the end of the meal. The final course is the passing of chocolate candies and fruit, followed by the early morning taxi call since no one drives if they’ve had even one glass of wine over the course of the entire evening.

pastries in Aalborg, Denmark were tempting

but our hostess presented something even more desirable, this concoction of strawberries, almond cake and cream

In Norway, friends from the town we lived in prepared this late night feast

and we settled right in again as if four years had never passed

In Hamar, old friends started the evening with champagne

a gorgeous dinner table

and a grand parade of shellfish and cold salads

Elizabeth demonstrates the deconstruction of a crab

then assembles the fresh berry dessert while the musicians entertained on the deck

A day later in the mountains, our friend Eva showed us where to find rare and delicious cloudberries

and because eating pure gold wasn’t exquisite enough for our palates, we added fresh blueberries, too!

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Knitting Terrorist Alert

In the early morning hours of Friday, August 8th, an American woman attempted to board a plane to Newark, New Jersey from the international terminal in Copenhagen, Denmark, carrying a bag of yarn and pointy weapons that she was attempting to disguise as knitting needles.

An alert airlines gate agent was credited with thwarting the attempt to terrorize passengers and flight crew with 8.5 hours of aggressive knitting and purling by convincing the unidentified woman to voluntarily hand over her weapons without a struggle.

Authorities have posted this photo at all international airport terminals throughout Europe as a warning to passengers to stay alert for similar attempts to incite knitting mayhem.

one end of a double-pointed weapon cleverly disguised as a circular size 4 knitting needle

An anonymous source close to this story reports that the woman in question subsequently boarded her Continental Airlines flight without incident and was handed the item pictured below, complete with serrated edge.

Although the woman later threatened to use this item on the bio-hazard passenger who coughed for eight hours into her left ear, no outbreaks of violence were reported.

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Scandinavian Yin-Yang

With over 1,000 photos to sort through and edit after our trip abroad, I have vowed to catalog a hundred or so each day. Looks like a week or more of photo blogging will take up this space. If that’s just not your thing, well, just let me say if reader “stats” were something that mattered to me, I would have quit this crazy enterprise long ago.

Meanwhile, mama got a brand new camera from Greatest Husband for her recent birthday and she’s about to lay it on you.

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Geographically, Denmark and Norway lie side-by-side in the North Atlantic and share an ancient Viking history. Still, they couldn’t be more different. Denmark is flat. Norway is mountainous. Their cultures are similarly diverse. What the Danes lack in dramatic landscape, they make up with food, drink, art and music.

Greatest Husband lived in the town of Aalborg for a year in the early 90’s, and we still visit friends in this ancient Danish town whenever we can.

Aalborg street

just outside the ceramic shop

where the Lange family creates cool stuff like this

and this

but our hostess, Bente, is an artist herself and her home studio provides its own sculptural and painterly charms

and summer dinner parties linger as long as the setting sun (shown here at 11 p.m.)

skal! (just imagine the “a” with a small circle over it since my English keyboard won’t spell in Dansk.)

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