Adventures with exploding kiwis

There's no place like home.

Which is where Little Blue Duck was when she became an unsuspecting participant in a strange, strange adventure that may just test the limits of your imagination and disbelief.

It all begins with an apron.

When she's at home, Little Blue Duck enjoys not only the comfort of a real sewing machine, but also all the bittywits and do-dads required to making things with it: scissors, measuring tape (not from Ikea!), boxes of pins and so on. So although her sewing skills are minimal and inferior compared to those of her Momma Duck's, she often attempts to sew things anyway, usually with her beloved mother-sewing-master's help, because life is just more fun in samauri pants.

Which is why she was running around with a box of pins to make an apron with. Which is why she put the box on the kitchen table. Which does not explain the clear, sticky liquid that she found on the bottom of aforementioned box when she picked it up again some time later. She had not seen any evidence of spilled liquid on the table, and this liquid smelled decidedly alcoholic, and there had certainly been no alcoholic liquid spilled on the table - especially as putrid-smelling as this.

She was too tired at that point to be bothered with solving mysteries, and decided to simply clean the pin case and be done with it. What she didn't realize was that the box was not in fact a very well-sealed one, and when she turned it over to rinse it off in the kitchen sink, the lid suddenly came off, spewing pins all over the sink. A few rattled ominously down the drain. Fortunately she was later able to retrieve most of them with the help of a rather large magnet, but that is another story.

The next day, she decided that enough was enough and cleaned the kitchen table. Oddly enough, she found no sticky liquid on the table. Had the putrid syrup been beamed from some other kitchen table by malicious mad scientists of the future? That was when she decided to put the fruit sitting out - a Christmas orange and a kiwi - back into a fruit bowl. The kiwi, the texture of the kiwi - she knew at once something was wrong. It had the internal consistancy of Sparkling Fruit Jello - like a fruity, all-natural stress ball. And a quick smell test verified the sweet smell of fermentation. But it was not until she turned it over that she saw that it had actually split from end to end, and had probably been leaking home-brew fruit wine all over the table for whoeverknowshowlong, unsuspected by the residents of the household, for whom it looked like a mere innocent piece of fuzzy edibility.

Yes, for making sparkling fruit wine on a kitchen table, there really is no place like home.

Krum, they told me..

Viktor Krum
You go for the 'strong, silent type'. All
masculine, ready to protect you in a heartbeat,
all this guy needs is a girl to bring him out
of his shy shell. Some things don't need to be
spoken to be understood!


Who is your Harry Potter love match? (for girls)
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Or could it be just an unhealthy addiction to Bulgarian morphology??? Ah, sweet linguistics!

Confessions of a Duck.

My name is Little Blue Duck, and I write poetry.

Not very good poetry of course, in fact very bad poetry, one might say - which is why I was particularly embarrassed when I discovered yesterday that some of it had somehow mysteriously made it out into The Open. And not the mere Open of, say, a classroom, where it could be perhaps laughed over and casually explained away ("the little green men made me do it") rather the very open Open of my workplace. On the reception desk. Face up. Staring at me.

It hadn't been a very good day to start with, what with the home exam being due at midnight and all, and I had stopped into the building to finish off as much of it as I could after being kicked out of the library. And then to come in and turn on the light and see the incriminating sheet of paper sitting calmly there, laughing lyrically in front of my eyes, singing of the prettiness of trees and the heartbreak of love as I tried to calculate the number of people who could have possibly seen it -

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!




PS the day ended much better than it began, with some very excellent eggnog, lots of friends and a headful of Frostrósir Christmas Carols. And I got the almond in the jólagraut :D (technically a cashew but just as glee-inducing)

Headed off for Winter City tomorrow - Christmas hugs to all!

Háskólaböll

The University of Iceland, as it so turns out, has balls. Hoo boy, does it ever..

The posters started popping up maybe a month ago on bulletin boards across campus advertising this year's "Háskólaball". Event of the year, be there or be square bla bla bla. These posters would not have been so noteworthy really, if it hadn't been for the fact that L #1 was in fact not an L at all, rather a Playbunny in some very festive-looking underwear sitting in the shape of an L. Not even remotely resembling a single member of the female student body as seen to date. Then there was the feature band picture underneath. Sálin hans Jóns míns: the usual 5 or so feature-band-looking guys. The Duck assumes that they too were wearing underwear, given social convention and such, but it was rather difficult to say whether or not they were really festive given that the band members were all cut off at about the waist. Neðanmálsgreinin kom aldrei til greina.

Current poster statistics:
Man:woman ratio = 5:1
Man-foot:woman-foot ratio = 0:1

It was several days later that the Duck was witness to the first public poster-defacing. It was in Árnagarður, and the Duck was going for reasons forgotten down a set of stairs. The female university student in front of Blue Duck, on a cellphone no less, casually reached out with a pen and scribbled a large HA? on the poster in front of her (Icelandic for whaaaa? and many other things for that matter), connected it with a line from the bunny to the bottom of the poster, then walked casually off again. On closer curious investigation, it turned out that the sponser of this hallowed event was none other than an erotic shop. Who seemed to have provided the costume, at least.

Some time passed. The posters did not fare well. It was as if a floodgate had opened. In Árnagarður, someone had pinned a paper over L #1. Travelling on to Oddi, the white spaces on the offending posters had been filled in with various observations and the glaring grammar mistake in the text was pointedly pointed out. Manneskja, ekki markaðsvara: Human, not market meat. Or the Duck's personal favourite: I am a person, not an L! Ég er manneskja, ekki L.

2005 marked the 30th anniversary of Women's Day in Iceland. Things were supposed to be different today. But universities are perhaps staunch traditionalists, slow-moving and resistant to the face of change. That's why universities also have students to correct the balance.

The next morning, the posters had vanished.

PS to the below

Vildi bara bæta við að síðasta færslan var skrifuð í nokkuð vondum skapi; ég átti alls ekki við hvern einasta Íslending í heimi, langt frá því, mér fannst það bara pirrandi að bláókunnugt fólk skuli byrja að tala ensku við mig næstumþvístrax og það skynjaði hreim. Auðvitað gerir það svona til að reyna að hjálpa mér; þetta er bara smá furðulegt stundum.

(og ef einhver sem ég þekki hefur rakst á þetta, ég var alls ekki að meina það um ykkur)