Solomon Kane

It will be soon time to play a role playing game with a bunch of friends. We usually play with them in a fantasy setting, that I maybe will describe another time...
Anyway, with about the same group of people we are going to start also a game in another setting.

The world of Solomon Kane. Or better, the Savage World of Solomon Kane.
For the moment, we should have been working in preparing the characters.
So, I read some of the setting material that was sent and thought of what character I wanted to be.
I usually play, in a standard fantasy setting, elves druids (even though my first "powerful" RPG character was a strange evil cleric troll - with a past as a gnoll and born as something else that I do not remember - who lived in the worlds of the MUD Tempora Sanguinis 2 at least 10 years ago).
And here, of course, there are nor elves, neither druids.
By reading the setting, I thought that an inquisitor would have been fun. A female one. At the end, I am an inquiring person anyway, so it can't be that hard.
I thought though that it would be nice to try to make something strange for the setting, and that could get inspired by my usual characters.
So, Karura-o, with Garuda (taken directly from the manga RG Veda) will be an humble japanese herbalist. I believe it will be quite challenging to make her live in this world where women are usually not that positively appreciated, magic gets persecuted and let's not speak about foreigners.
We will see how the game will develop and how Karura-o will survive it :)

Accessories for the balcony?

I have not yet managed to complete our balcony project since we are a bit indecisive on how to proceed.
My flowers right now are suffering some lack of sun, it would be nice to have maybe some little table in shabby style, but the space is limited and we don't want it to look it like a deposit.

My idea is to put some spark of color in accessories that will complete the balcony.
We excluded the idea of a carpet, since that would mean a lot of extra vacuum cleaning and I saw some wonderful pillows for our chairs (Rice) but we realized that it would be hard to clean them, and if they get dirty it will be a mess, although they were just adorable.

I then thought about buying some tableware (cuttlery and plates) in melamin, to make it more "easy going" and colorful. But we have plenty of such things already (not in melamin) so it was maybe a bit unnecessary...

We shall then attempt to buy a tablecloth. My suggestion is something colorful oilcloth but right now I can't find anything we both like!
And I don't know if we want to have something that would cover the table completely (but preserving the table) or two table runners that would make the table more elegant, but more risky to get some fancy stain.
I like (still from Rice, Mattias discarded just the first):

Last, but not least: I have fallen in love with these lanterns (Dixie Interiors). I just need to find them because at least one of them must end on our table! There are in white, pink, cherry, turquoise and green.

Hatsukanezumi no Jikan

Written by Kei Toume, this manga has been recently published in Italy as "Vita da Cavie".
It is really a weird manga, which I borrowed from my friend Luca, and it is hard to understand what it is really about for half of the manga. At least, I had some serious problems :-)

I can't say that it is a masterpiece and I am quite happy it is nothing I have bought myself.
However, I found the plot original and I think it could have been developed in a more exciting way. Maybe it lost its charm in the way it has been published in Italy (since before it was part of one of the big "magazines").
The ending seems quite quick and it left me with a "aha!?" when I concluded to read the last number.

I think there is some hidden "morale" or metaphor that  I don't think it is as trivial as one might understand at first. It is a lot about the fact, in my opinion, that humankind lives in a situation on which big companies/few people are manipulating life and the way of living without us being really aware of it, but also the impossibility of some to live in a normal social context (in the last number some were having the opportunity to escape, but fail and are not regretting that option since they don't think they could live differently than what they have been used to).
Some classifies the manga as "scholastic thriller", maybe that is the genre, but I think it is more about criticizing the society of our world.
Or maybe I am just over analyzing it ;-)

Some serious shopping

It was about time that I allowed myself some serious shopping.
I was planning to buy just one pair of jeans at the Replay outlet in Gallarate, but I ended up buying 3!
That is because since it is soon the new season starting, they had to get rid of everything there (or most of the things) with the nice benefit of 50% discount over the outlet price for us.

This is what I managed to find:

• Teena model (flare line), with the nice gradient of the blue tone from dark to light (bottom to up)

• Wendie model (bootcut line) in white 

• Ioko model (bootcut) in denim

I have noticed that similar discounts are available in the online shops - I still prefer to try the clothes on (especially jeans, it is hard to know exactly which one will fit and which size) but the prices are quite tempting anyway!

And the result is...

So, today the table and the chairs have arrived.
It took a bit to mount it (surely  not Ikea mounting simplicity, but at least the table is stable!) and after moving some plants around, we managed to squeeze it out in our balcony!

I hope to find some nice, colorful accessories to use outdoor! It will be great!

Outdoor furniture

As part of the process of making our balcony looking better, we thought of getting rid of the "old" plastic table and chairs we have to get a bigger wooden table, so we can have lunches/dinners there and also sit there with friends. 

So far, we haven't used that much our balcony and we think it is also due to how it looked like before. 

Already now, it looks better, but the plastic table is too small for eating and it is quite unstable.

So we started our hunt for outdoor furniture, considering that this is a sale period and hence, we hit the best prices on the market.

• Plantagen was our first stop. Since we are searching for "organic" material we avoided for sure the plastic items. We also have a brownish floor so we have excluded anything in white (maybe it would fit some extra-white-trendy house of these days). We looked at Nydala. Extremely interesting was to notice that the price between the shop in Lund and Malmö differed of at least 2000kr for the same piece of furniture.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The model in the picture below is not what we looked at: it had straighter legs, but the chairs and the surface of the table is the same. I was not so fond of the chairs because I think they are too much space taking and our area is quite limited and I don't want it to get it too crowded. The table in itself was quite ok and what I liked the most was that most of the wooden furniture was FSC (you don't know what FSC is? Check here, it is really important for the environment!)
• Jysk was the second attempt. We looked at the website and it seemed to have a quite decent collection, so we checked it out. I also liked the fact that the furniture was labelled FSC as well. However, once there we were a bit disappointed. We didn't see such big offer of furniture (we could have asked of course) but we were not impressed by anything in special and everything seemed a bit plain and a bit unstable.  What had initially caught my eye was Vermont. I liked the line of the chairs, not too big, seemed comfortable enough. However the table was just too boring 
  
  
• At Miljögården I was totally hooked upon these amazing chairs! 
  So comfortable to sit in them since you can swing when sitting there and the wood was so fantastic. Also the table was really beautiful! It looks like the Grythyttan chairs are classical swedish outdoor chairs and we could find them at our golf club 's restaurant.  But the prices was just up to the roof and we were really indecisive if buying those or not (it costed 16000kr). We decided to not buy neither the chairs nor the table, since the outdoor furniture is nothing we use so frequently to justify such a cost...(plus, it was not clear if the wood was FSC or not)
  
• Bauhaus was discarded from the start since it seemed they had about the same things as Plantagen.
• Mio was discarded too, since we didn't see anything that we liked from the homepage.
• We finally ended up at Ilva and we looked at a table we really really liked (Luka). We liked the shape being a bit original and it was not too big and not too small. The downside note of all of this were the chairs! From the pictures the chairs looked alright, but we were disappointed once there because they are in some plastic material and we wanted something more "organic". But the discount here was amazing! About 4100kr of discount! Comparing to our "fav" (the Grythyttan one) the price difference made the difference!

Since we didn't have time to go to Ilva again, we checked the website and we saw they have a webshop. 

We were not having any doubts about the table

It has a bit of elliptic shape and I think that is what makes the table really nice. 

But now there was the chairs matter and we decided to go for them anyway. 

They are available also in black and white and I thought black could have been a cool color. But when thinking twice, when it is warm, black will be really "hot" and we will probably buy some pillow that will break the monotony of the brown, instead. I like the line of the chairs, they are also quite comfortable to sit on, I would have just preferred some more natural material.

The webshop was just great. They will do home delivery and we could see that it was going to be scheduled in the period during which we are away. Hence, as soon as the order was made (extremely smoothly, by the way - I was all e-shopping would be so nice!) I sent them an email asking if it was possible to have the delivery done once we would have been back. After few hours I got a reply and that was possible. Great service!!! I really recommend it!

Oat cookies

We are still on the food subject - how surprising.
This time it is about some cookies I have made. Actually I was quite suspicious when I made them because they looked really strange and I had to keep them in the oven 3 times as much as what the recipe indicated.

I took some butter and sugar, mixed them and then I added some oat, flour and some raisins that I have been making boiling for a short amount of time and cut them roughly with a knife.

 About a quarter in the oven at 180 degrees and that was about it.
At the end, they turned out to be quite good. Surprisingly!