We got home from the summer cabin this afternoon. We didn’t make all the stops on the way home that we’d wanted to as we were tired and Luna was getting fed up with being in the car. Oh well. We did however stop by Gullfoss (the “golden waterfalls”) and Geysir yesterday. They’re not my favourite places simply because they’re as touristy as places get in this country. Spectacular & well worth visiting, yes, but hidden treasures they are not.
I of course took eleventy bajillion pictures:
Gullfoss
Strokkur (in the Geysir area).
Geothermal pool – too hot for swimming!
On a completely different subject, I forgot to update that Raven does not need glasses. Yay! She was a little disappointed so she got a pair of purple sparkly sunglasses as a consolation prize.
In other Raven news, she’s officially on school holiday for the next month. I have no idea how we’re going to keep her occupied! She’s already bouncing off the walls and talking about wanting to go back to preschool to see her friends. I guess we’ll need to line up some play-dates. She’s such an intense, energetic kid that keeping her busy is no small task. There’s usually a lot going on downtown during the summer (festivals, free concerts, etc.), so we should find something.
We’ve been at a cabin in the countryside this week. I say cabin, but this place is huge! Way bigger than our little apartment. Just wonderful. We’re by a lake called Apavatn. It’s quite close to Reykjavík, about an hour and half’s drive.
We’ve been super lazy here, relaxing as much as is possible with two small kids (i.e. not very much). I feel slightly guilty about how little we’ve done, but at the same time it’s been nice to have a break without feeling like we have to cram everything into our schedule.
Yesterday we took a little drive to some caves in the area.
The view from the bottom.
On the way up.
Caves!
What’s interesting about the caves is that 100 years ago, people lived in them:
Painting of the cave house as it was 100 years ago.
From 1910-11 they were inhabited by a young couple, Guðrún Kolbeinsdóttir and Indriði Guðmundsson, then just 17 and 22 years old. They sold food to travelers passing by. Within a year they had earned enough to move to Reykjavík, and left the caves.
A few years later, from 1918-21, another young couple moved in. During their time there Jón Þorvarðarson and Vigdís Helgadóttir had three children, two of which were born in the cave. Can you imagine? One of the children, Magnus Jónsson, is still alive today. He calls himself The Caveman. Of course.
Looks cozy, no?
Raven was insistent that she was going to find some baby trolls in the cave.
Nowadays the house is gone. The caves are covered in moss, and graffiti carved into the soft sandstone.
I found Luna!
The view from inside the cave:
Remember the horses that were on the road?
The view standing on top of the caves.
I think today we’re going to visit the Golden Circle: Geysir (the original geyser), Þingvellir (Thingvellir National Park) and the Gullfoss waterfalls, so I’m sure I’ll be posting more pictures soon.
This post is inspired by some other blog entries I’ve read recently. Presley at haunting olivia shared some ‘bad’ art (which I think is actually pretty good), and Cassy at knit the hell out confessed about her piles of “UFOs” (unfinished objects). I love seeing people’s work in an unpolished state, whether it’s a work in progress, a quick sketch, or finished pieces that just didn’t quite work out for one reason or another.
Seeing as this is *supposed* to be my art blog and I haven’t had time to draw anything new recently, I figure I might as well share some of my own UFOs.
(Please forgive the not-so-great image quality; I don’t have a scanner. The grey splodges you see on some of the pictures are shadows cast by a dirty window, not parts of the drawings.)
This first one was something I started a couple of years ago to hang up in Raven’s room. My plan was to do a mixed-media drawing/collage. I was going to draw tree branches with cut-paper leaves, and some paper flowers down the bottom.
Girl on a swing
I quite like it, but it came out a bit stiff-looking. The rough preliminary sketch I did had more life & movement to it:
Still, I think it’s nice and want to finish it.
This second sketch is based on a photo of Keith Richards’ hands. I did it in…2003? after years of not drawing. I did it to see whether I could still draw. It wasn’t intended to be used for anything, just a practice sketch.
In a similar vein, this next one is drawn from a photo of Iggy Pop (I love Iggy Pop!). Again, I wasn’t planning on using it for anything, just an exercise. I had to stop because the level of detail was making my eyes freak out. I’ll need new glasses before I attempt something like this again!
Back to drawings for children, recognise this? It’s from Madeline, Raven’s favourite book. Not much to say about this one. Again, it was supposed to go on Raven’s bedroom wall.
“To the tiger in the zoo, Madeline just said, “Pooh-pooh.”
And one last one for (and of) Raven. I did it when she was around 18 months old and at the peak of her cat obsession. It looks better in person – the light was terrible. I need to make the colour a bit more intense, but otherwise it’s more or less finished.
Raven with the dapper Mr. Cat
So those are my unfinished pieces. Now I want to know, what do you have in your unfinished projects pile? (It doesn’t have to be art, it can be anything!) And what’s keeping you from finishing it?
I got my first glasses when I was six years old. As a child of the 80s, I of course chose enormous, thick, fuchsia-pink plastic frames. Hideous. I recall them looking something like this but about 37x more pink. Actually, they probably looked pretty adorable on my six-year-old self, but it didn’t feel that way at the time.
I have a distinct memory of my first time wearing them to school. Everything was fine until we got to the gate, at which point I flipped-the-holy-crap-out because I didn’t want to be seen in them. Even at 6, I knew that enormous pink glasses were decidedly not cool. Thankfully the embarrassment wore off almost immediately, I got over it and life went on. (A year or so later my best friend got glasses too. She chose frames identical to mine and OMG that meant we were TWINS!!1!!11 Yeah, we were pretty rad.)
All of which brings me to the point of this post. Raven’s going to the optometrist (optician? opthamologist?) tomorrow to see whether she needs glasses. She’s been complaining that her vision sometimes gets blurry and she has to blink and rub her eyes to bring things back into focus. So off to the doctor we’ll go.
I don’t think we’re going to have any problems with her not wanting glasses. Quite the opposite – I think she’s going to be upset if she doesn’t end up needing them. She’s been talking about wanting glasses for ages. She sees them as a glamourous accessory, something that usually only grown-ups (such as her very glamorous bespectacled parents) get to wear.
So we’ll see. I’m hoping the doctor will tell us her eyes are perfect, but I’m glad she feels positively towards glasses in case she does end up getting them. I’ll update tomorrow with the verdict!
