Such a long time....

It's been such a long time since I wrote in my blog.

I was thinking about why, and I think it's something rather particular to my life right now here in Minnesota. When I started this blog I was living in Paris and I always had something to write about. If I wasn't doing anything interesting myself, I could always write about the zillions of things I'd see while walking around the city - wild Japanese tourists, la fete de musique, spotting Luciano Pavaroti out jogging and such. But here in Minnesota there is much less contact with random people and events. If you don't go out of your way to interact with society you don't encounter it as much. Hence I have less random stuff to tell about. I just work in my studio a lot and that doesnt make for riveting reading.

But there have been some interesting things. Spring, and almost summer, are now here. Marco and I spent a weekend camping up north at St. Croix State Park, where we hunted for wild leeks (they look like green onions), dug them up and cooked them. It was SO good to get out of the city, where we have been constantly for months. We also went to Washington DC last weekend. Marco had spent the week there for work with the Gates foundation, meeting with a food and agriculture development foundation. I came just for the weekend. It's an OK city, but you have to be really into politics to live there happily I suspect. The most unusual thing we visited was the International Spy Museum, all about the history and practice of spying. We also toured the Asian art at the Smithsonian museum and strolled on embassy row.

I started making glass jewelery last week. Well, I made one piece, but it had a lot of success. In the first three days of wearing it around I had three people stop me at random saying "I LOVE your necklace! Where did you get it??" The third of these people followed up by sending me an email asking how she could buy it, so I put the necklace (which had originally just been a test prototype) up on my Etsy shop and she bought it right away - less than a week from creation! That was a pretty good sign so I'm going to make more. If you're curious you can see it on my Etsy shop: www.greenlanternglass.etsy.com.

Other than that Marco and I are pretty routine these days. All this routine was feeling pretty stifling for awhile in late April and early May and I found myself thinking a lot about Southeast Asia a lot, getting nostalgic. It's been 7 years since I lived in Indonesia. Can you believe that?? I still dream about going back all the time. The part that attracts me right now is the sparse simplicity of the life I experienced there. I kinda miss that. I had fewer comforts there than I've ever had in my life but that surprisingly made me feel stronger and more alive. Sometimes too much comfort and abundance numbs us and makes our senses dull. The people I knew there were cheerful and social and so creative despite having way less stuff than us in the developed world. I don't mean to idealize it too much, it's not perfect. But lately I miss that.