Links from the bunny trail

Friday links to surprise, delight, and inspire...

- Joyscroll, brought to you by Iceland

Nifty graphics and beautiful scenery, designed to calm your stress—and maybe inspire you to visit Iceland.

- Sorry, Parker Brothers, but there’s a free, online version of Scattergories, no gameboard required.

- Follow along with the friendly and encouraging couple that hosts Art for Kids Hub on YouTube, and learn to draw cute little critters and various other cartoony pics.  I chose Bruni the Salamander Fire Spirit and produced the adorbs little guy in no time.

- This light pollution map is pretty neat.  Put in your location, anywhere in the world, and see how much light pollution you have overhead, and where to go nearby for the best nighttime sky viewing.

Photo by JuniperPhoton on Unsplash

- The upshot of this article can be simplified to four words:  go outside in winter.  But you’ll have to read it to learn the meaning of the Norwegian words friluftsliv and solveggen, both of which should be more adopted in the U.S.  I’m still mad about that lady that judged me for taking my (plenty adequately bundled) baby out for a wintertime walk thirteen years ago.  

Photo by Cecilie Johnsen on Unsplash

- Finally, The Chosen, available to watch a few different ways, but I saw it on YouTube.  It’s an imaginative adaptation of the gospels, but that’s not to say heretical.  I was astonished to see something so faithfully orthodox, and at the same time so cinematically excellent.  I watched all of season 1 and found myself saying I can’t wait to see what happens next! as if I’ve never heard this story before.  I hear season 2 is due out around Easter and you bet I’ll be watching it. 

What amuses and inspires you this week?

Wordless Wednesday

 

How it’s going, week 50

Somehow, despite not being one of the millions of people mourning a loved one taken by covid; nor boiling my tap water in the dark to survive a Texas weather disaster; nor living in or fleeing from a war-torn country; nor wondering how to survive financial ruin brought on by collapse of my small business; nor being audited, indicted, impeached, investigated or publicly derided, I managed to spend several days this week feeling like a total cactaprickle.

I was bored.  I felt trapped.  My favorite out-of-the-house haunts are off-limits.  Unlike the rest of the people on the internet, I don’t have a sustainable, rewarding hobby bringing richness to my quarantine.  I’m tired of the limited songs I know how to play on the piano.  I don’t know how to paint.  I can’t sew.  And when endless Pinterest scrolling convinced me how hard can it be? I found some fabric, traced around my favorite sweater, and went to work sewing myself an artisanal, hand-crafted, diy top, in which I promptly sewed the sleeve inside out and then stabbed myself with a seamripper trying to fix it, at which point I abandoned the project with a bloody hand to find a bandaid.  

So that was fulfilling.

I finally took the long-overdue step of finding some large stylish baskets to corral all our many blankets, to keep conveniently but neatly nearby the couches, in a cozy and inviting, on-trend hygge way...and my offspring are so fascinated by them that they dump the blankets all over the floor and sit in the baskets themselves.  And now I have more blankets on the floor than I even knew we owned.  (And these are not toddlers, people.  We’re talking tween- and teenagers.  Abandon all hope now, parents of little ones.)

And it’s February.

And my options are maddeningly limited.  I should get out of the house, go antiquing or something.  Oh wait.  I could take a road trip and meet up with a friend.  Nope.  Coffee shop?  Uh-uh.  Friendly get-together.  No.  Field trip.  The mall.  I could take up piano lessons.  No, no, and no.

At least I’m old and this era only represents one-fortieth of my life.  For my kids that jumps to one tenth or even one-eighth of their life, and that in their impressionable and unforgettable developmental years.  

Years from now, when I’m dead and gone, they’ll get together and reminisce about the pandemic of 2020/21, how they were trapped in the house with a pricktacactus mother and how they’ve never recovered.  Maybe they’ll laugh about how crazy old Mom was.  

This picture reminds me so much of the picture of Lizzy from seven years ago, below

Circa February 2014

And then their own kids will thwart their last attempts to be stylish and cozy, and they too will dump out their hygge-inspired oversized baskets all over the living room.

And in that day, I hope they can get coffee with a friend and then go antiquing together.  Because that’s more fun than going crazy alone.

Invaluable support bunny.

Snow to the rescue

What mercy to have a snowy February, dropping soft white flakes of delight on an otherwise dreary month, made worse this year by the impending one-year anniversary of quarantine, a teenager impatient to rejoin the outside world, deplorable national politics, and my resulting fragile psyche.

My “Post-Pandemic” list now has 22 items on it.  When exactly one can declare the pandemic “over” enough to do those things is just another unknown.

Thankfully, we don’t have to wait until then to go sledding and otherwise romp in the beautiful white stuff.

Also, I’ll take pleasure in whatever I can wring a little pleasure out of—such as the things saving my life, obvs, but anything else I can think of along the way, like:

- fun books from the library (Chosen just for me! Not required school reading),

- these custom press-on nails that I’m newly obsessed with,

- picking out pretty flowers and heirloom vegetable seeds from Burpee.com for the hypothetical garden I may or may not follow through on later this year,

- and incessantly checking the weather forecast and reporting to anyone in my household who will listen exactly how many inches of snow may or may not come in the next weather event.

It’s inexplicable why anyone would be tired of being cooped up at home with me after only eleven months.

I say, if it must be the winter, of the world and of our discontent, let it be liberally sprinkled with fresh snowfall.