Of late: September Musings

1/ Beautiful relic from the past. In their late 20's here!   2/ Birthday flowers that STAYED ALIVE FOR ONE MONTH.

3/ How I get through my week without crying     4/ A parcel in the mail for our newest friend

5/ Time to admit it's Fall    6/ My first seed babies are teenagers now

7/ Almond milk london fog= my study drug   8/ B makes the best brunches, really.

Of late...(literally, late! Sorry.)

travelogue: iceland, we go (part II)

I said I would write more

photos more

iceland more!

But I can't.

At least not the way I did it in part I.

You see, I am a very, very fickle blogger. I lose steam so quickly, like a molten lava cake that wasn't baked properly. It's a bit overwhelming. I trumpet hard my excitement of getting it all down, have so much resolve to do it, practically roll out the red carpet.

But then I lose interest. I already made you a little film. 

And. Life gets full.

(Life is so very full, at the mo. Not full the way it was in the summertime, but Fall Full, you know? It's so different. It's more more more. More adult, more business casual. More packing lunches and highlighters and taking the attendance.)

So I don't have the time to do a Day 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 itinerary. A part of me wants to. But the stronger majority doesn't, and just wants to lay on her teal couch watching The Good Wife.

Shall we compromise?

Let's.

Of Late: August Musings

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1/ CPH's cacti options are cooler than ours.    2/ I climb caves; I am athletic now

3/ Beauty + Stinky yin and yang   4/ Our living room respite in Aix

5/ Heaven       6/ Bride on the Thames 

7/ 31st bday London edition    8/ #truth

travelogue: iceland, we go (part I)

Are there words that even measure up to this level of alien beauty?

I really feel like I don't have much to offer; that I should just frisbee out the 1.2 million photos we took and paste them on here, leave you to it. Pull the blankets over my head and daydream about how we spent 8 days and 7 nights ogling ponies, waterfalls, lupins, moss, the most delicate birds..

How we whispered about the hidden people, and I half believed that maybe I would get to see a wisp of one, that they would know I was a firm believer and supporter in my teens.

How we shivered every night, cocooned in our sleeping bags, and I thought maybe I would wake up and have turned into a human popsicle.

How we were like the erratically changing landscapes: elated, tired, awestruck, hungry, smitten, angry. I will tell you one thing-- don't expect to come here and remain flat-lined or placid. When you've got all four elements of fire, water, air, earth in close proximity to one another, in one country, the molecules within you shift like tectonic plates.

Or maybe it was just that way for us.

a little film (Iceland)

I am much more a photograph person than I am a video person. Video just isn't in my blood-- my parents have thousands of photos of me as a child, but I've never seen a home movie of me as a baby, or any other age.

So this is new territory, and I'm pretty excited about it. There is something that film can capture that a still photograph inherently cannot. It moves the way your molecules move when you're exploring a new land for the first time.

This new land we travelled to was a surreal, hard, fairlyland dreamscape.
I hope you enjoy it through our eyes.

I hope it inspires you to make a little film of your own.


Song: Six Weeks, by Of Monsters and Men (who are from Iceland!)

(enlarge it for the full effect)


b + j in : iceland from Joann Liu on Vimeo.



Takk for watching.

Words + photos from the land of ice coming up next...

Of Late: July Musings

 

1/ Strawberry basil, fresh lemon and Tahitian vanilla with bffs      2/ Just missing Scott on the double dream deck (AKA Triple D)

3/ A soul cleanser, this paddle     4/ BBQing everything with the siblings

5/ Little hands and little frogs on Saturna     6/ The Greens and an Ella

7/ The tea party of the century for our special friend     8/ This is my Everything.

euromoon (no, euromoon!)

This trip has been at least three years in the making. When I knew we were getting married, I dreamed that at the end of the big party, the big feelings, my shiny new husband and myself would be on a plane to Europe. While others get really excited for continents like Asia and South America, I pretty much only get googly eyes over the Big E.

(I don't know why. Maybe I'm secretly racist. Or maybe I was a colonizer who was afraid of planes and going too far from home, in a past life.)

In late 2012, I started to become aware of Icelandair and their stopover deals-- you can stay in Iceland for a maximum of seven nights on your onward destination to some other European country that the airline connects to. Two countries for the price of oooooone. Bicep + thumbs up emoji!
The closest North American hub to us was Seattle, and I plotted over who to bribe to drive us down to the States.

But it was not to be. School starts early in the Yukon, and so we pretty much only had two weeks for a trip after the wedding. We re-brainstormed and I put aside my Euro ideas for the moment. If you're a regular reader of this blog of mine, you know that we ultimately had a truly lovely mielmoon in Sooke and in New York.