JOIK is an Estonian producer of eco-friendly candles and spa products. Their products smell so good you cannot believe it. All of the products are handmade in Estonia and, apart from the candles, they are all made from 100% natural ingredients.

I have their grapefruit-tangerine body lotion with carrot oil and every time I use it I fight the temptation of eating the whole thing. It just smells so good! And it leaves your skin so smooth and soft. I love their products. The body scrub with coffee and brown sugar looks like something you can spread on bread and munch away. I want it.

I have done a little bit of beading myself, but only a little. I made earrings, necklaces and bracelets from beads and silver wire, but only a few came out the way I wanted.  I found a beading artist who makes really beautiful things: Emily Gray. Her homepage is here. Here’s a few examples of her work:

I also found a really beautiful necklace by Jennifer Smith-Righter, an artist specializing in silver jewelry. Found it here. The rest of her work is not really to my taste, but this necklace is cool, don’t you think?

I love his take on this song. And also on Massive Attack’s Teardrop.

I fell in love with Kings of Leon about six months ago. Now I have had time to absorb their music and see if it was just a fling between us or if we have potential for a long-term relationship.

I have to say, the butterflies are gone. Listening to them has lost the spark it had when we first met. Our dates used to be stormy and passionate. But that loss of rush comes with any relationship, doesn’t it? So now that the blind crush period has gone, what is left?

LOVE

Yes, we have love. We have struggled, fearing the moment the high would lose its edge. This has meant days, even weeks without each other – on purpose – avoiding each other so as not to reach that feared moment, to postpone it indefinitely. But the rush we felt with our bodies when we first met has been replaced by reasonable calculations which have allowed us to conclude that life without each other would be such a sorry state of being that we would be better off dead than separated.

So here we go, my love.

Found it here. I can almost taste it. It looks so good that it’s self-abusive to look at this picture without having anything in the fridge to compensate for the absence of such… wonders.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups (225g) plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 cup (110g) caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup (80ml) sunflower oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 ripe bananas, mashed
• 65g pecan nuts, roughly chopped
• Butter and honey, to serve

  Makes 1 large loaf.

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line the base of a 900ml loaf pan.

Sift the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar with 1 teaspoon of salt into a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine the egg, oil and vanilla.

Add to the dry ingredients with banana and pecan and fold until just combined – do not overmix.

Place into the loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes or until golden. Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then remove, and slice thickly. Serve spread with butter and drizzled with honey.

Found this recipe here. This looks… so yummy.

Ingredients

• 2 large navel oranges, (choose oranges with unblemished skins as the whole fruit is used in this recipe)
• 5 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups (250g) caster sugar
• 2 1/2 cups (250g) ground almonds
• 1 tsp gluten-free baking powder*
• Pure icing sugar to serve

Makes 1 cake

Method

Preheat oven to 170°C. Grease and line the base of a heart-shaped pan.

Place the two whole oranges in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer, covered, for 1 hour, ensuring that the oranges remain covered with water. Drain and cool. Chop the oranges into quarters, discard any seeds, then place the chunks into a blender and puree until smooth.

Beat the eggs with the sugar until thick, then add the orange puree, ground almonds and baking powder and mix well.

Pour into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour. Leave the cake to firm up in the pan for 20 minutes then turn out, remove the baking paper and turn over to finish cooling right way up. This cake definitely mellows with a little time and can be prepared up to 48 hours in advance.

To serve, sift icing sugar on top and decorate with orange zest and almonds.

This is a picture. Looks like it’s from some movie. I’d like to see that movie. I wonder what movie it is. I like the chick. Reminds me of someone. I wonder who.

I am crazy about this song right now. Six months ago I did not care for it, but recently something clicked into the right place in the musical corner of my brain. I have listened to it innumerable times now and if this continues I might even feel awkward.

I have not seen the series, but I am planning on watching it.

Right now I am talking about the movie. And even though I have not seen the series, I understood the film (which I honestly cannot say about Battlestar Galactica). I really enjoyed watching it.

I’m tired. Cannot think of anything else to say other than that it’s humorous, it’s adventurous, it has action, it takes place in the future and Mal is just too sexy to look away. He does kind of remind me of Han Solo though… And when you think about it, Han’s ship was kind of a wreck as well… Hmm…

Who cares. They’re both hot.

Stina Persson is an illustrator living in Stockholm, Sweden. Although I don’t think too much of her acrylic/ink pieces and there is something about her subject matter (beautiful girls just… being beautiful girls, I guess) that is holding me back from loving her work, I love what she does with watercolors. I mean, look at these:

How could you not like these? Got them from Stina Persson’s homepage.