NadyaN's Profile

WOW that's a ready-made museum. They should keep everything as is! It's gorgeous!

(Is it a sign of the times that I'm actually more impressed that in 70 whole years nobody broke into the place and stole any of her things? My friend just went on a weekend camping trip and her place got broken into...)

Oooh - vegan shrimp!! Thanks for that link up there, I didn't know it existed!

I do miss shrimp from my old carnivorous ways, every once in a while. And caviar. I miss caviar. I don't miss anything else!

The Pyramids one looks easy! :)
The Sagrada Familia would be insane, though.

If I had several hours to waste (sadly I need to find them first!) I'd totally make the Kizhi wooden church one...

That owl is just breath-taking! Such soft details. I love the typography in the background. Amazing work.

I hope that physical keyboards never go away!

Touchscreens everywhere look great in sci-fi movies, but I just fail to see how they would hold up to everyday usage. I personally prefer typing on an actual physical keyboard - with a touchscreen I always seem to poke the wrong adjacent key by accident. Besides, with a touchscreen, I think I'd be obsessively wiping the computer/tablet screen every time after finishing typing... don't have such a problem with physical keyboards.

Then again, I love typewriters too ;)

P.S. those aforementioned parents that taught me to love reading, and lovingly collected and transported all their gorgeous vintage Russian books from Russia to the new world when we moved to start a new life? They both have E-readers now too, and read all new novels in electronic form :)

My parents have a photo wallpaper in their kitchen wall (there was really nothing else to do with it, very awkward huge wall!) and in the media room. It actually looks great and fits the furniture and overall decor of those rooms really well. I had my doubts about it but I think they've turned out to be great ideas for the spaces.

True story:

I worked in a commercial art gallery, and we had a painting of an artist we were representing near our entrance, to show off his work. It was a gorgeous $3,000 painting. The artist had a full-time job in a framing and printing shop to pay the bills. That painting took him weeks to do, because he had so little time to concentrate on his art.

Someone must have taken a photo of his painting from outside the gallery, and wanted to make a cheap print of it, probably because they couldn't afford paying $3,000 for it... They actually walked right into the print shop where the artist stood behind the counter, handing him a CD asking him to make a reproduction print of his own painting!!! The artist called the gallery and told me this.

So yes, people absolutely do find out.

Plants are amazing!
As a child playing in my grandfather's garden, I was always fascinated by how peas and cucumbers sent out these feelers that would coil around something the moment they found it. I enjoyed helping some stray peas anchor onto a twine thread stretched up for them, which they couldn't quite seem to find, and in the following days watched them coil and latch onto it. And sometimes I'd be naughty and try to un-coil one of these coils, poke them, stretch them and see how springy they were :P

That elephant butt one is amusing at least!

Heh, yes Russia definitely has its share of wacky playgrounds - I grew up there and saw some of them. Probably played on some as a child, not even realising how weird-looking they were. :) It was just part of what you saw in playgrounds there! Some were kept up well by the neighbourhood, some fell into disrepair if the local street council wasn't doing its job (which was usually the case.)

Russian playgrounds have some lovely ideas too, though. One of my favourite parks in Moscow had a stone carved slide made to look like a snail shell. It also had wooden horses and a carriage (with a very strangely painted wooden coachman! We kids mostly played on the horses and avoided him) but they eventually fell into disrepair and were taken away.

One memorable winter morning I woke up to find that someone had carved an entire ice sculpture in the neighbouring building's courtyard! A massive Russian medieval warrior's head appeared overnight, made out of what used to be a useless pile of plowed snow. You climbed up into the head from behind and in the front was a slide, down the ice warrior's beard. It was AMAZING fun, and actually was really well-carved. It must have been a local ice sculptor's work, but we never found out who or why or how. It lasted for a couple of days under the winter sun and withstood constant sliding by children from the entire neighbourhood, then local teenagers destroyed it. We were hoping something similarly awesome would re-appear but it never did.