Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy







Fuoriborgo asked me nicely for a credit on my picture that she is showing on her blog. I apologize to everybody whose picture I just showed that I did not go into the trouble. It is a modest pel mel of some of my favorites, there is something to look at for a while in every picture. Happy New Year!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Today on Reading

stinohra

My life has been surrounded by a translation and I need to do some work every day but tonight I was on strike. I read a paper. With a literary section. They had a nice portion of it. I read Linhartová, an essay from the 1980. It is strange to read her in a translation. She wrote a good deal of her work in her twenties, and then, after she left for France in 1968, continued writing in French only. She did not leave, as she said somewhere, for political reasons but for the fact that possibilities of her own language were exhausted for her. In this translation, on poetry, she is more straightaway than in her ephemeral stories from the 60s, however, while reading, I felt like I was walking inside of my own cerebral convolutions.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I baked some Christmas cookies and they are long gone. The same for the inhabitants of the Ginger bread house. We are expecting Christmas presents from Baby Jesus in the mail and they are not coming. What will we do if they do not come?

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

White



It has been snowing all day. ALL DAY. Prague is beautiful in the snow. Only going to the kindergarten in the morning takes a quarter an hour more. Dominik starts to have his own projects, often too crazy to be implemented. Some are nice, we doodled on stripes of paper that he had cut out. I made a design for a scarf. And a headband for an Indian guy. It was a blog worthy outcome.
The tower in the view on our street looks very science fiction. Mostly I do not notice it. Domík even thought that it was New York on the picture. He has never been to New York. But he has lived on this street his entire life.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Aprender a Bordar



A little book on embroidery that I got at Rosa Pomar's. There are far more nice and cute pictures like these in the book. And reading Portugal is fun, I mean for those who do not speak the language. So I do not know if it has some clever tricks how to make your kid start embroider (if you ever wanted to) but I enjoy the pictures and decide whether to try something like this or that. I think that what I like the most is that I actually do not know how to embroider nicely and patiently and this book proves for me that it does not matter.

My husband calls the book A cool hippie embroidery book.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Mikuláš

I liked the garlands that I saw somewhere on someones blog, they were professional, long and cut out with a saw. I was wondering how difficult it is to make one. I made three rows of singing cats and glued them together. They are too many, I am afraid, so many cats singing, it is annoying. They are our St. Nicholas's day garland, they watched the window, where this Mikuláš (Nicholas) left some treats in a sock for Domík.
Usually, Mikuláš comes to your home, accompanied with Devil and Angel, often it is a masked uncle of yours, a kid gets scared, no surprise, three weirdos in the hall, and Mikuláš asks him if he was nice and obedient in the past year and the kid is so frightened that he rather is obedient for the whole following year. Anyway, I find it little too much, lightly said, and we skip it. Just imagine, that Dominik got scared when he saw the sock hanging behind the window. He liked the treats.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Winter

There is a hell lot of snow in Prague right now. It keeps falling down, just like feathers from the blanket. It looks magic, the snow. It is sparkly, as my kid reminded me today. We made a ginger bread house. I think it is the last one that I ever made. It took several days, starting with getting ingredients, going through baking, decorating, gluing it together. I like it. It is big and takes lot of space on our table. It is my art piece. It has tiny mushrooms on the roof. The weird animals around are a fox ans a hare.

We have this painting in our living room in my parents house. It is a reproduction of a Dutch painting and this is just a detail. What is the name of the guy who liked painting frozen lakes? I like the ice and the boats on it.

My little niece painted this snowman this summer. How did the theme come to her mind? I like it, nevertheless, watch out for the birdie in the feeder.

Edited: The painter's name is Hendrick Avercamp, and by coincidence I bumped into this article on him, together with links to his paintings.