Aebleskivers, antique stores, mother-in-law, and pure, unadulterated yarn greed

Look how cute my writing room looks when it's fixed up as a guest room! I love it. That cute little flag streamer across the bed was made by my friend Chary, out of all vintage fabrics.

My mother-in-law Sharon is visiting from California right now, and we have been out and about, and I have been a bad blogger. Here are Sharon and me:
See the stuffed robot I am holding? What a great find! Because you know what the problem with robots is? Usually they are not very cuddly. But this one is!

Sharon likes to plunder in antique malls, so that's something we often do when she visits, that we don't do any other time. It's fun. We went down to Sellwood, this southern neighborhood of Portland known for its antique malls. It was right after lunch, and for the first hour I was in a groggy, nap-time haze, zombie-ing my way down the aisles. At one point I carried around a mason jar of vintage rickrack for a while, but I was too tired to buy it so I put it back. Then? Coffee. And it was a whole new me. Though Sharon did not end up buying anything, I got an old Griswold aebleskiver pan, along with some old aprons and a cookie cutter and a big '50s diner icecream cone cut-out for the kitchen wall. Fun!

So of course, the next morning I wanted to make aebleskivers, which I had not only never made before, I had never had or seen before. Ha ha! Good old internet, I downloaded a video showing a chef in Solvang, California making them. I'm too lazy to find the link now, but I'll just tell you the traditional Danish method involves using a steel knitting needle to rotate the dumplings while cooking, and that is what I did. It was fun. Takes a while to get the hang of it, but I mostly did:
I started with just a few at a time and graduated to almost filling the pan. I filled the "aebleskivers" with pear sauce from Trader Joe's which is so much tastier than apple sauce. And then we ate them with blackberries, marionberry syrup, and powdered sugar. YUM!

Aside from eat too much, we also went to see The Orphanage yesterday -- it's the new Spanish ghost story produced by Guillermo del Toro. It's great! If you like a scary movie that's not gorey, and not even really TOO scary, but quite creepy and really well made and involves the most fantastic cliffside Spanish house you've ever seen, see it. Really good!

On the way to the movie, Jim finagled himself a stop at the comic book store by pretending solicitiously he wanted to stop at "Tuesday Morning" so his mother could browse there. So thoughtful of him! Incidentally, the comic book store is right upstairs from it! I was groaning inwardly, not always loving Tuesday Morning (it's a bargain store, where you can often get top brands for huge discounts), but then, ha HA! I hit the yarn motherlode!
LOOK at all this gorgeously colored merino wool! All for $2 or $3 a ball! This wicked impulse came over me to buy it ALL so nobody else could have any, and I DID. Well, not all, but I bought all the good colors. It was pure greed!

So that is what I have been up to. Cheers!