Gratuitous Display of Cuteness

Click on play at your own risk! (giggles)

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I thought i had seen (and heard) everything...

..till Tinsie (find her blog at my links on your right) guided me to the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. I hadn't fell that sick in my stomach even when I had the flu.

Tinsie says that if you were a musician you should be start crocheting if this abomination wins first place. I find it a very sensible idea...

I won't even go into the perils of hosting the video of the song into this blog, but I can tell you that if Barbie had her own TV show, her titles would fall with this music...

St Patrick's Day Is Upon Us!

I won't bother you with the origins of the celebration, after all Wikipedia is your friend, right? What I wanna say is that it's really funny that commercialism has crawled into every little opportunity that people might have to spend money on.

Go to the grocery store; it'll have at least one isle dedicated to Irish (or should I say Irish-American?) related parafernalia. Shamrock, leprechauns, top hats, pots of gold, green tinsel, name it. Along with the obligatory message on everything: "Kiss me, I'm Irish".

I think that the icing on the cake was that we went to the movie theater earlier today, and while we were waiting for our movie to start, the speakers played Irish folk music, just as like they'd play Xmas (sorry, I meant xmaskwanzaanuckah music) music around December.

The Swedish Shoppe

I love Walnut Street. It had all the nice little shops with artisans selling unique items such as Native American jewelry and sculpture, Italian pottery, Latin American woven goods, the list is endless. Not to mention the couple of coffee shops and bars, boutiques and other oddities.

I used to live a couple of blocks away from Walnut, and at a part of the city that when I was snowed in, I could only go shop there (to the Rite Aid or the overpriced Shadyside Market), so, when we moved a bit further in July, I had no practical use for going there.

So, yesterday, hubby and me decided to go for dinner at Walnut Grill, a nice little restaurant with interesting entrees* and huge portions of desserts along with reasonable pricing. After we were done eating, happily stuffed, we decided to look around, since it had been some time since we had done so. And thus, I stumbled onto The Swedish Shoppe.

It's a nice little place run by a very friendly Swedish-American woman, she sells little wooden horses and wooden spoons and painted clogs along with sweets and jewelry and other stuff imported from her native land, all placed together in a way that the shop does not look really cluttered. I get all anxious in cluttered spaces.

I browsed around some, chit-chatted with the owner a lot, about Swedish and Greek men, holidays, how it is like going back home as a tourist. Having claimed so much of her time, I thought that it was only courteous to buy something, even though I had not though of initially doing so.

I picked up a deck of cards with blue wooden horses painted on the back side. I took it to the register and prepared to pay.

And she wrapped it up. With nice blue paper and a golden ribbon. Noone had done that w'out request since I left Greece. It just struck home.

I paid and left, certain that I will be back. After all, there was this gorgeous silver bracelet with amethysts....