Glow

Glow, originally uploaded by blue eyes.

We've been dusted again with a light snow though the threatened super-cold snap has yet to show. These grasses in front of the Government House on Lækjargata have got it made, gathered as they are around the heat of a flood lamp. Even in the coldest dark, they seem to suggest, a warming glow can be found.

Thanks to all who took part in the voting. We doubled my tally in just under forty eight hours, and now the polls are about closed. We didn't win, but we showed strength and hope. That's democracy in action!

Iceland!

Iceland !, originally uploaded by blue eyes.

Iceland Eyes is a finalist in the 2008 Weblog Awards in the Best European Blog category! I just found out today and voting ends tomorrow, so cast your vote HERE for your favorite Icelandic Photo blog, Iceland Eyes!!

And thanks to whoever nominated me...what an amazing compliment! Of course, it's all about you, faithful readers...big thanks for all the support you've given me over the past four years!!

On a more important note, my prayers are with those suffering in the Gaza region. This blog has stayed intentionally politically neutral over the years, but in this case I think it's important to keep in perspective that there are innumerable events and situations the world over that need to have the light of global awareness shined upon them. A blog contest may seem frivolous in comparison, but the fact of blogs is that they have given voice to millions, and have helped to engage the shift of consciousness that we are all, as world citizens, now experiencing.

We are all in this together...there is no separation.

Light

All the emails, all the love from around the world, readers who wonder if we're still alive, surviving and I'll answer here a resounding Yes. The lights are still on in Iceland, we've eaten well over the holidays and as I write hundreds of thousands of króna worth of fireworks are going off in celebration of the 13th day of Jól. Christmas is over, the last santa goes back to the hills, the decorations come down, but the glowing soul of our nation shines on.

New

Happy New Year to All!

May you blaze forth into a Prosperous Future in 2009.

(photo of the Ægisíður New Year's Eve brenna, or huge annual bonfire, courtesy of Dan and Addy)

Jólaball

Tis the season for a holiday photo. This is from our little one's first playschool Christmas Party. Santa brought mandarins for all, and we sang and danced around the pretty tree. Classic stuff. Ho ho ho!

Still

At the edge of the huge parking lot of the largest power strip mall in Iceland, out in the Grafavogur neighborhood, ground water pouring out of the newly dynamited terrain freezes into pretty little ice sculptures. The stores, Toys 'R' Us, ILVA, Rúmfatalagerinn and The Pier, are essentially empty, though, after a year's worth of hype surrounding, among other things, their massive square footage. A woman working at ILVA, an IKEA-style furniture store recently gone bankrupt in Great Britain, told me that industrious Faroe Islanders had bought the franchise, as well as the entire strip mall, without leveraging any other capital. A clean purchase, she said, not based on stocks or futures or ridiculously lofty loans. Good on them!

The Faroe Islands are the new black.

Fire

At the same time as the most recent Saturday afternoon protest rally, 8,000 souls strong, a fire burst out in an abandoned house on my street.

I won't, just don't have the energy, to go into the whole bureaucratic shenanigans surrounding this house in the recent years, like the owner being granted a permit to tear down which the neighborhood cottage society challenged even though the house is infested with little cement beetles because they didn't like the owner's plans to raise the height of the new structure he had approved by the city to the same height as the building next to it so instead it's been an eyesore, all beaten up and tagged, and has been used as a flop and a squat that all the local kids knew about and now its even uglier just when its very likely that the owner will no longer be able to finance teardown and reconstruction and all because some people think anything built pre-WWII has automatic cultural value.

But whatever, I'm not going to go into it.