kristinsdóttir

Cool! At the House of Tartan, you can design your very own tartan!

Hmmm. I’m not sure how many millions of dollars it costs to have it woven, but playing with the website is fun.

Pic shows my favorite of the tartans I ‘designed.’

And yes, this is a total self-indulgent eye-candy pigout.

In a radical departure from my usual preoccupations, I bring you this lovely photo from the archives of Earth Science Picture of the Day. Specifically, the photo is totally the property of Someone Else, a very talented fellow whose name you’ll find here.

(how’d I find this? I was helping a model train afficionado find images of silos to help him create a mini-silo replica next to his mini-railroad!)

The most interesting ‘blogs’ (Internet ‘web logs’) have these features:
1. entries are in reverse chronological order
2. unfiltered content — the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog
3. comments from readers
4. hypertext links to the world outside the blog
5. excerpted chunks of attributed text, sometimes at length, from other sources
6. a flip, informal, ironic tone, exemplified by Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox on her personal blog: “I am the editor of Wonkette, a guide to DC politics and culture, sort of.”

Eat Cake was “a superb pleasure to read.” And I loved all the talk of cakes! Almost tempted me to make one. Almost.

Interestingly, Jeanne Ray is novelist Ann Patchett’s mom.

This weekend, I’m going to a workshop at St. Nicholas led by Father Thomas Hopko, the Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir’s Seminary, Crestwood, NY. The title of the workshop is “Death and After Death.”

When Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann went to sleep in the Lord twenty-some years ago, Father Hopko said “Father Alexander’s death has been called ‘untimely,’ and in a human sense it was. As Archbishop lakovos said on the CBS television tribute, ‘He was taken from us much earlier than we thought.’ Yet he was taken from us by God, and in this sense his death was certainly ‘timely.’ With God there are no accidents, and every moment is the right one for everything, including one’s death.”

What a hard thing to remember sometimes!

Additional article on a completely different subject: Fr. Thomas Hopko discusses the Orthodox Christian understanding of homosexuality. He has a new book on this topic, too: Christian Faith And Same Sex Attraction: Eastern Orthodox Reflections.

This is a photo of the latest michiyuki to tempt me on eBay. I’ve been outbid, thank goodness. (I have enough michiyuki already!) I appreciate their roomy cut, and I love the flat design. And the use of color is blessedly different from what we’re accustomed to in the West.

I’ve been wearing them all the time. We western women have so many choices of types of clothing. It’s been great to pare things down a bit and have a uniform.

Storage? Though I sometimes fold them properly, I’ve also been known to hang them between wearings over the screens in my bedroom.

Just bought a book showing designer Christa de Carouge’s stuff. She does these great, huge, blanket-y, drape-y, eighties-ish things.

Cool quote: De Carouge “rejects fashion in favour of style.”

More on style vs. fashion: “Real style depends on the individual, not an industry. Made up of a hint of intelligence, a bit of wit, a sense of knowing — it has relatively little to do with spending money, which is anathema in an era that puts a price on everything.”

At the library where I work, I’m the librarian who orders videorecordings and DVDs. I can’t do this often — it’d be poor judgment to have our library filled to the BRIM with videos on an Orthodox theme when in truth we probably have few Orthodox patrons — but I bought “Ascent to Heaven: a Pilgrimage to the Bethlehem Cave” for our videotape collection. If you know me and you’re interested in seeing this videotape, let me know!

(sorry about the double pics; it’s an error I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix — when I try to delete one, it just won’t budge!)