Liberty on 10th Street

Gardening in Brooklyn - The Ugly Truth

2011-06-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

"Here's the deal - I need some low shrubs for a corner tree bed that can withstand not being watered, car exhaust, lots of dog (and sometimes child) pee, trampling, abuse by high school kids, and lots and lots of cigarettes."

At first, the woman stared back at me, mouth on pavement, panic in her eyes. Slowly, her eyes moved out of focus, beyond my head, and began to scan the acres of annuals, perennials, trees, shrubs, herbs, veggies, and garden gnomes.

"You don't live around here do you?"

"Nope, Brooklyn".

"Gary. GARY!, can you help this woman please"?

Luckily, Gary was used to dealing with "city folk" and was able to set me up with a few nice shrubs and plants for our tree bed. (A note on Gary, his experience with "city folk" was extremely rich people who had large roof decks in Manhattan, which is not us either).

A few months ago, as part of their plant a million trees campaign, the City dug up our stump and planted a little linden. They very carefully moved my rather sad container shrubs and very carefully uprooted my just emerging bulbs, and placed everything off to the side. The freshly mulched and top soiled tree bed has been barren ever since, slowly gathering weeds and the ire of the block association (I kid!).

I knew I needed to plant something but hadn't had the time. While home in NJ, I stopped by a great nursery (Rostlers in Allendale) and picked up a carfull of plants that would tolerate not being watered and being peed on. Bayberry, a thorned and beautiful bush was a natural choice as were some sedeums and a big spiky thing that promised to send up an ostentatious 5 foot bloom in the late summer.

Bathroom update

2011-06-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

The bathroom is finally, mostly, almost done (if you don't could proper caulk). This was not the smoothest bathroom renovation but we're so happy to finally have all of these random people out of our house. I once held the idea that we would be happy to live in a fixer upper that existed in a constant state of flux but definitely definitely not.

The tile is really lovely and the floor tile is great. The chrome fixture are like a naughty older aunt with some dementia - always nice to have around but in need of constant attention - and I'm still compulsively wiping them down after every use (not at all like I'd treat an aunt). We have mixed feelings about the paint - the husband thinks it's fine and I sometimes,kind of hate it. I certainly don't hate it enough to find a painter, choose another color and give my house over to another contractor as they hemmed and hawed for two weeks.

Bathroom Update

2011-03-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was joking last night that I've become to most boring person in the world because the most interesting thing happening to me right now is our bathroom renovation. That isn't totally true (work is going well) but the bathroom does have the most visible progress.

The tub is in (and is incredibly comfortable) and the tile is 75% up on the walls. The glass tile is beautiful and despite our best efforts is the exact same shade of blue as the hall bathroom.

On the garden front, I put in bulbs last Fall and they are starting to come up. Right now they just look like brownish green nubbins but I post some photos when they get a little more interesting.

Bathroom Progress

2011-03-05T02:51:00.000-08:00

We're at the halfway point after having been side tracked by all of the repair work that needed to happen downstairs. All of the rough plumbing is in, the tub is in and has the surround and the radiators have been swapped out. All of the sudden it looks like a real bathroom!

Next week will be devoted to tiling and we'll really see if we made some good choices about tile and fixtures. Something about the order of all of this seems wrong. I'm sure there is a way to put together a computer model to help us visualize how the tile will look on the wall but right now we're just finding comfort with the fact that we usually pick good looking things.

One of the more exciting and tiny projects are the radiators. The one in the bedroom was comically large so we swapped it with the appropriately sized bathroom one. All this means is that we can get the wall back and actually put stuff there.

I'll be away next week and hope I'll come home to a mostly done bathroom!

Bathroom Progress

2011-02-27T08:59:00.001-08:00

Nothing too exciting is happening other than a lot of plumbing, the walls are starting to come back up and the bathtub is up. I hope we're at a point where pieces start to come together rather quickly as the husband might lose it completely if he has to keep sharing a bathroom with me (and all the workmen).

I like these pictures because you can see the burn marks on the original plaster and lathe. We think that this was originally the kitchen and that this is the impression from the original stove. It would be scary if we didn't expect everything in our house to be wackadoodle. In contrast to the electrical, the burned boards seem rather pedestrian.

A Wander on the West Side of the Canal

2011-02-20T16:37:00.000-08:00

What I've Been Up To

2011-02-20T07:43:00.001-08:00

I've been up to a lot lately and while I'm a bit sleep deprived and certainly lighter in the wallet, our many projects are moving along nicely.

You wouldn't notice too much action in the bathroom and that's because they've been patching the bathroom below us from all the damage in the wall. They've started on the plumbing and reframing some of the walls. We now have all of the fixtures (sans toilet) and tile waiting to go and I think have made all the major choices.

At work, we launched a website . When I pitched my vision for this department, no one said anything about a website. I'm a big believer in digital outreach and a well curated list of resources but building a website from scratch with a major deadline was not what I signed up for with this position. Luckily, I had a great technical team who was hugely supportive, patient, and willing to catch my typos and bad ideas. I now maintain a professional blog where I write about education and not my bathroom.

My stuffed staph infection that Ab gave me when I was sick a few years ago. Staph watches over meet and is an instant conversation starter that signals to people that I am not the serious, scientific side of the Academy.

Work has very much settled down and we are just executing all of the programs and plans that I designed in the Fall. I can legitimately say "we" because I was able to hire someone to run one of the programs in the department and that has made a world of difference. I feel a tremendous amount of pride in my after school program and often get a bit teary when I talk about it.

I've also read some amazing books since the holidays. Everyone is sick of hearing about the
Frank: The Voice by James Kaplan but I also read Susan Collin's Hunger Games Trilogy, Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken; Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stonee; Hazel Rowley's Franklin and Eleanor (which was not nearly as good as Doris Kerns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time and many more. The Kindle app on the iPad has made me into an even more voracious reader, a feat I never thought possible. The weather has been so cold and dreary that the only true solace is a nest of blankets on the couch and a good book.

I also read Sam Kean's great book "The Disappearing Spoon" and then got to meet him at a talk he gave at work!

And for a bit of randomness, I wandered around on that freak 60 degree day and found this amazing homage to Michelle Obama on a shopping bad at Pearl River:

And we went bowling for a birthday and I found that the husband can really bowl.

End of Day 2

2011-02-09T18:39:00.001-08:00

So today I hauled a lot of trash and then went to work. That is all.

Meow.

2011-02-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

A silver oak piece of furniture to store stuff in and frame around the medicine cabinet.

This may be too blonde (from restoration hardware)

With just a slightly ornate train rack for towels from Restoration Hardware?

Now I'm just cutting and pasting in the whole West Elm catalogue

At the End of the Day You're another Day Older

2011-02-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

It's been a productive day one. All the tile came off the wall, the sink is out, and most of the fixtures are purchased. Tomorrow is more demo and more hauling. The dumpster is set to appear at 9am. Our building is taking bets on how long it will take the neighbors to fill it to the brim with their own stuff.

I originally misordered the first tub so trooped over to Park Slope Plumbing to fix my mistake and see what else I could order. I worked with Bob Gomez and he was pretty amazing, knew the inventory really well and actually gave me his opinion. The biggest challenge was the tub as we wanted a deep soaker that will fit in a small space and be acrylic. We had a tough time finding something that maintained the size and wasn't over our budget.

Bob found this guy from Fine Fixture at the same price as the original Kohler Archer that we originally chose. It's the only tub they make and is comes in very limited sizes (I think small and big).

Next we moved on to the vanity. (You have to imagine that the husband and I are emailing, sending pictures, and talking on the phone and Bob is patiently waiting). We both liked the metal console but most of what we found was extremely expensive. The sink we both fell in love with was "at least $7,000". We told him we wanted a metal console but "less old lady" and he immediately pulled this one from Empire Industries. I'm not sure how it escaped my googling but I didn't find it online. (The website is empire-industries.com if anyone is looking) We loved this one in the cheaper white china top and it came in our size. No brainer. And the cheapest one that we liked. Huzzah!

By the way, here's what an "at least $7K" sink looks like. Swooooon! It's Kallista's ONE.

You may notice that I'm not giving specifics on price. It just makes me squicky to talk about money. I'll say that Bob gave us really good prices which I think we a reflection of their usual business practices, the fact that we bought everything together, and dropped our contractors name a lot. The best part of Bob was that we went through the show room and I pointed out things that I liked and he pointed out things that worked with what we had chosen all together. When I balked at price he found similar things at lower price points and helped me decide what was worth spending money on. For example, everyone will see the sink faucet but not the tub faucet. Or the fact that the lines of the spout were really lovely on the more expensive version, but a tub spout isn't expensive so spend the $50 to get what you want.

Ah, I'll show you those:

Sink Faucet by Danze

Tub spout by Groeh

Shower Handle by Danze

We need to get accessories and a toilet but the accessories can wait and we can't do anything until the floor comes up and a plumber looks at the dreaded toilet. We didn't find anything terribly exciting behind the walls other than things being overdone in some areas and underdone in others. There was something that looked like fire damage but it was so rotted out with water that it was hard to tell. Surprise!

I also cleaned out a lot of basement. I have to admit that throwing out other people's unwanted stuff is cathartic.

The destruction begins

2011-02-08T10:22:00.001-08:00

I opened my front door this morning to 5 guys (and one lady) and all their gear ready to destroy our bathroom. It is very slow going but as they're destroying I'm cleaning out the basement.

I suspect that the previous owner, the one responsible for the crazy toilet, was a bit of a hoarder and today I'm hauling all his old stuff up and out. Unfortunately, he seemed to be a hoarder of boards with rusty nails and broken IKEA furniture. I'm pretty sure I should go get a tetanus shot this afternoon.

Checks written, tub ordered

2011-02-06T05:34:00.001-08:00

After our big tile breakthrough last weekend we've been on relative fire on the bathroom project. We settled on a price, picked a start date (Tuesday!) and started making choices.

The bathtub has been the number one priority in this renovation. When we moved in, we were saddened by the tubs. They look fine but have no slope in the back and are not very long. This means that the only slightly comfortable position is ramrod straight, legs extended. For me, a voracious bathtub reader, the uncomfortable baths mean that I can get through about one page of a New Yorker article without wanting to get up and go somewhere else. But in the deep, dark, frozen tundra of winter, the only really civil place to read is a nice steamy tub with a glass of white wine and a few pretzel nubs. For the husband, a soaker by nature, this uncomfortable tub means lying fetal position in order to get a good soak in. Not ideal, optimal, or even really acceptable for a relaxing soak.

So, when confronted with this bathroom project, we choose to get the proper tub for our lifestyle. But... well there are a lot of buts, but they boil down to the fact that we live on a 4th Floor walk up and cast iron is very heavy.

We settled on a couple of candidates (Kohler has a really good selection of 5' tubs) and a number of people told us that you need to lay in a bathtub before you buy it. Well the only place I could find the tubs was a very fancy design studio in Manhattan. While my parents raised me right and I can completely fit in at a fancy design studio in Manhattan, this particular day I was wearing my rubber boots, jeans, and my big puffy coat and brown pompom hat with lots of bags. Given the weather, my coat and hat are beginning to get that rumpled homeless person look and the rubber boots are brightly polka dotted. Add my giant purse, gym bag, and drugstore bag of tissue boxes and, well, you can see why they weren't too keen on taking me without an appointment.

They were gracious enough to take me without an appointment and although no one would make eye contact with me, I got to slip off my Wellies and throw myself into these cavernous tubs (coat, hat, bags and all). These suckers are deep and they made me feel like a small child in a normal size bath.

So after selecting the tub, the Archer 5' drop in tub in white, I needed to go about actually purchasing it. Ab and I needed to drop some clothes off at the donation bins at Lowes and wandered inside and pretty quickly found someone to help us. He was very helpful, gave us a quote, and potential delivery date. Done. We needed to stop by at Home Depot too so we headed down the block.

Let's just say that shopping at Home Depot is a little like supervising detention as a first year teacher. Everyone who works there seems to hate you and no one seems to have the job of helping you or answering questions. Needless to say we ended up leaving our quite full cart in the middle of the checkout lane and walking out in frustration.

The final chapter of the tub saga was a quick stop off at a large local plumbing shop, Park Slope Plumbing. If you know anything about my life, you should know that this should have been my one and only stop to find this tub. I walked in, they gave me the best quote of the day with a good delivery date, and told me to say hello to my contractor. So, we got the tub!

Bathroom Tile

2011-02-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

Gut renovating a bathroom with a few weeks lead time isn't the easiest thing in the world. We ended up scrapping our original ideas (spa-like and black and white subway tile) for something pretty different. The husband found a wonderful cobalt 3/4" hex tile

(Image Found at
http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Classic.Tile.And.Marble.inc.718-331-2615/picture/view/1481000)

And then we chose a frosted, white (almost green seagrass) glass subway tile to go with it.

(Image from http://www.mytilebacksplash.com/3x6whitefrostedglasstile.aspx)

Once he found the blue we quickly converged on the light glass tile but it took us at least an hour to decide between 4 slightly different shades of glass and another hour to choose frosted or clear. There was another woman in there with us most of the time choosing between 5 identical looking tiles as well which made me feel a wee bit better.

For bathtubs, we're looking a couple of acrylic, rectangular soaking tubs.

For sinks, we were considering a metal console sink with white top. This one is way too big but has the right look. It's from Pottery Barn and I find it lovely.

Or,

(Image from http://ladacorp.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=60&product_id=213)

Something very simple, modern and in a warm, reddish wood maybe. I think that would warm up the room a bit but it's hard to tell without the floor tile.

More Snow!

2011-01-28T04:24:00.000-08:00

The snow from Christmas has never really melted leaving huge grey, dog stained piles at every turn. Yesterday's snow just added insult to injury. I can't remember the last time we had this much snow around for so long. I also can't express my gratitude for my Wellies ($15 at Target) and their amazing ability to let me slosh through the slush even when it's ankle high.

Here's Ab posing with the snow!

Our very typical Brooklyn block, posing with the snow.

The Dreaded List

2011-01-27T05:22:00.000-08:00

The reason I call it my dreaded list is that every time I start one home project I automatically start listing all the other things that need to be done. Some stuff needs to be done, while other stuff is a pipe dream. Unfortunatly, most of the current list needs to get done:

Front Bathroom (Gut Reno)
New tile on floor and walls
New sink/vanity
move toilet plumbing from wall mounted to floor
New Toilet
replace drywall
Paint
new light
new storage cabinet
replace radiator

Front bedroom
pick paint color and paint
repair cracked plaster
replace ceiling fan
replace radiator <-- needs to get done
fix electrical sockets <-- should get done

Small bedroom/office
get new desk for husband
decorate

Hallway
replace gross track lighting

Back bathroom
Replace light fixture
recaulk tub

Kitchen
recaulk tile
recaulk sink
repaint ceiling
replace dishwasher

Living room
replace ceiling fan

Roof <-- a whole other story
Fan situation <-- a whole other story

Snow!

2011-01-26T18:53:00.000-08:00

Everyone appears to be reeling from the snow. We hunkered down on December 26th and watched the blizzard ruin our dream vacation (I just yesterday unpacked my bag). The most striking images of the storm, who's snow is still on the ground here, were the City buses just abandoned in the street. I'm still amazed at the site of a stuck bus at 6 am filled with people who had spent the night in the bus.

We're still not sure what happened but where we are was completely abandoned by the City with no plows, salt trucks, or tow trucks for a long time. In a fit of cabin fever and desire to get out, we literally shoveled our street so that we could get the car out. Abandoned buses and shoveling one's street, not something you think about when you move to Brooklyn. I guess we did get hit with a tornado earlier this year, so I guess anything is possible .

The Money Pit

2011-01-23T08:42:00.001-08:00

When we decided to buy a place we considered (for about a second) buying a fixer-upper. I harbored dreams of restoring someplace, of gracing a hulking burned out shell with my good taste and to be learned on the job handiness, and of a type of urban homesteading that someone who is bored with their job can dream about. My husband, saw nothing but trouble and quickly swung our real estate agent in the direction of historic but in good shape homes.

When we bought our place, we knew it had character and that it was in excellent shape and I thought it would remain quirky with cosmetic issues forever. That was very naive of me. In addition to the apartment being over 100 years old, the previous owner was a bit of an urban homesteader, DIYer himself and we're now dealing with those delusions of gradeur in this bathroom project.

It's hard to know what work he did himself and what was done in the 1984 conversion but here are some pictures of our soon to be ex-bathroom:

Here's an overall shot. You can see that we have really nice light in the room from a huge window. There are also very high ceilings. That's about all the nice parts. You can see how uneven the tile is in the bathtub area and how awkward the toilet is as it juts out into the room. The mouldings around the tub are completely rotted and someone painted the grout on the floor at some point and it's now grey.

When the contractor came to look for sources of leaks he pointed to the tub/shower fixtures, cracked grout, old silicone caulk, illogical plumbing on the sink, and the world's weirdest and poorly installed toilet.

The vanity/sink was on it's way to be replaced anyway since the doors are falling off and it's installed in a way that makes it impossible to clean.

The world's most basic lighting fixture and medicine cabinet that was hung incorrectly and now gapes open.

Ah, the toilet. You can see the half-inch gap between the toilet and the wall, the missing bolts, and insulating foam that was sprayed in there to compensate for the fact that it wasn't set into the wall properly. I don't want to blame the previous owner for all of the mess here. The room drops a full inch from the tub to the toilet, a consequence of settling. The plumbing juts out of the wall instead of the floor meaning that any toilet that goes in there will be loyal to the wall and not the ceiling.

The toilet itself inspired one of my favorite quotes "This is the type of toilet you install if you have very serious health problems or need to flush large buckets of golf balls." Given our delicate plumbing, this thing should never have made it through the front door.

There's also no ventilation in the bathroom, which we can fix when the roof is replaced. Did I mention that we need to completely replace the roof?

Worst Case Scenario House

2011-01-22T04:43:00.000-08:00

I love our house, I really do, but sometimes it feels like she's out to do us in. First the tornado, then the roof, and now the master bathroom needs major work. People always remark about of wacky doors, usually something like "every door in your house is a different, hideous color!" and I explain to them that the previous owner's painted them to ward off bad luck. Obviously, he took any good house mojo with him.

The bathroom issue came to our attention when our two-stories down neighbor mentioned a drip in his bathroom. Since the neighbor between us had been gone for two weeks, it was obvious that the problem was coming from us. When the contractor came over he pointed out about 10 different sources of the problem including cracked grout on the walls and floors, a toilet that looked like I got really drunk and installed it with foam insulation, an unlevel toilet pipe, and a sink that was falling apart.

We new these things existed but faced with about a month of work to make a not great bathroom look still not great, we decided to tack on another week's worth of work and gut it. A further inspection revealed tons of damaged plaster and drywall, a floor that sloped an inch in four feet, and a radiator that's about 3 times too big for the room.

So in the middle of our extremely busy lives we now get to do a bathroom reno but at least we have two bathrooms! If I could speak directly to the previous owner (which I've considered doing), I'd tell him to lay off the DIY. A love of spray foam and duct tape should be symptoms of not being very handy.

Prospect Park Wander

2010-10-31T07:26:00.000-07:00

It feels like Fall is finally here and to celebrate we wandered around the nooks and crannies of Prospect Park. I'm pretty familiar with the park (especially the running loop) but had never wandered into the deep interior between the Dog Beach and the running Zoo. There is a beautiful hilly bramble that transports you from the mean streets of Brooklyn into the woods of the Catskills.

After the bramble, we headed to the zoo. Despite my love of zoos, I had never been to this one and had heard it was lovely. We stopped by the carousel and the historic house before heading inside where we saw the Sea Lions, petting zoo, and the unnaturally creepy picture of this sheep. If you haven't seen the movie "Black Sheep" I recommend at least reading the summary online.

We finished up with a nice walk through Long Meadow and were treated to a beautiful sunset on the way home.

WTC Progress

2010-10-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

Just in case you were wondering... I can no longer see the Statue of Liberty without leaving my office chair.

Weird Weather

2010-10-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite parts of my job is our perch at the south end of Manhattan with a view of the harbor and ocean to the south, the far reaches of NJ to the West, the GW Bridge to the North, and my fair Brooklyn to the east. It does a lot of alleviate my anxiety over working at the World Trade Center. While the view of the City and its surroundings is spectacular, the real beauty is watching the weather roll in.

Except when that weather includes hail storms and giant clouds of fog that envelope the Hudson.

First the giant cloud of fog. Despite my attempts to convince my office mates that it was the "end of days", the fog simply rolled from the harbor, past our building, and into the Village where it broke up and wandered away.

My thoughts went immediately to "The Mist" or some weaponized trash fire from New Jersey. Everyone else in the office just snapped pictures and went back to their work.

Peter got stuck out in the storm and said it sounded like the subway car was under attack. I just thought that someone was throwing baseballs at our windows. The next morning, my tomatoes and coelous were shredded and the street looked like someone put Kermit through the woodchipper. It's hard to take a picture of an undifferentiated mat of green slush but here are some attempts.

Considering that the tornado and the hail storm made targeted attacks on Park Slope (and parts of Queens), I can't help but feel like the Gods Must be Angry. So, in my defense, you can see why I was a bit worried about the cloud of fog.

A beautiful day and a tornado!

2010-09-16T17:37:00.000-07:00

Oh. What a beautiful day!

It does appear to be getting a little bit cloudy. La La La!

It does appear to be getting a bit rough out there!

WTF is going on!

MASSIVE HAIL AND COMPLETELY SOCKED IT!

This is the part where the giant cranes start swaying, swinging back and forth really close to my window. That building was cleared and locked down tight.

La La La, oh blue sky! looks good. Wait, what did you say? A tornado? Nah, that's just a tornado warning.

Nope. A f%^king tornado ripped up our block this evening, ripping down trees and smashing cars. Other than a lot of water in our open windows and a blown in window (defenestration!!!) all is well in our little happy street.

2010-09-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't been doing much more than working the past few months but I did manager to get out for a nice run along the Hudson. I stare at it all day long and it is so beautiful in the later afternoon that I couldn't resist taking my run after work along the water. You can't tell in the pictures but it was really hot and I used the excuse of taking pictures to stop a lot.

The path that I took is across the Vesey Street Bridge, turned south at the water and then jogged down through Battery Park City until I hit the Ferry Terminal.

This is looking north up the Hudson, West of the WTC site

Looking South, that little thing sticking up is the Statue of Liberty

Battery Park City is built on reclaimed land and was designed for mixed use: housing, businesses, parks, and tourists. It is swarming with tourists, commuters and has a lot of little restaurants and bar tucked into the scenic parks.

The Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The camera phone makes everything in the not so distance seem really tiny. Don't be fooled, the SI Ferries are huge!

Blame Work/WTC Progress

2010-09-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

I've heard some grumbling from the peanut gallery that I'm not posting very often. And while that it true, I've been forsaking posting to earn money to pay for my expensive gardening habit. As you may know, I switched jobs back in July and have been pouring my heart, soul, and every ounce of brain power into getting this new venture up and running. It's been very rewarding but have left little time to garden and cook.

So, as a consolation prize, I've been taking pictures out my window at work. You may notice from the pictures that I work at the World Trade Center site and have the most bittersweet view on earth. When I wander around my office I have a 360 view of NYC from 40 stories up. I can see the GWB to Coney Island and spend a lot of time watching the ferries and helicopters stream by. When I look down I see the pit of the World Trade Center. It is an engineering marvel, a construction site the likes of which I've never seen. It is also a mass grave and site of unquantifiable sadness and horror. I thought I would get used to it but I find myself avoiding the windows with the most complete view and positioning my chair as to avoid looking in certain places.

Here is a series of shots (taken from my camera phone) of the progress of WTC1. There is an amazing Flickr feed of the progress http://www.flickr.com/photos/wtcprogress for you to check out too!

Tree Bed

2010-08-24T03:45:00.000-07:00

A year or so ago the City came and took down a dead tree in front of our building leaving our tree bed a bare doggy toilet. Despite efforts to plant some small annuals by the neighbors, it continued to be tempting acreage. The problem was the dogs, the rather large stump that took up most of the surface, and an unknown time frame as to when the City would come and give us a new tree.

I don't begrudge the neighbors letting their dogs go to the bathroom in there, I guess it's kind of like a little vacation, but it was obviously planted and maintained with a fence around it. I knew in order to keep the dogs out, I needed to get a taller fence. I spent much of the summer wandering around hardware stores looking for a solution but most places didn't have anything short enough or attractive enough. (Orange hazard fencing was about as close as I came). I had a fantasy of sharpening one end of some bamboo sticks and creating my own fencing but that seemed like a potential hazard if someone pulled it out. I finally found a very simple solution at the big box hardware store down the street: decorative, thin wire fencing. Light, easy to stick in the group and above knee height to make it hard to jump into.

I should also note that one factor in planting this is teenagers. Our stoop and block are frequented by roving bands of drunk, bored teens and pre-teens. It is not uncommon to find upended plants, beer bottles, and other teen romper room trash to be strewn about our street. For example, over last weekend someone pulled a vacuum out of the trash someone where and went to town on smashing it in front of our building. There is a very good chance that they will destroy it. Knock on wood, kids have been pretty good so far.

Okay, fencing and dogs taken care of. Next the stump and potential new tree. I knew we couldn't take the stump out ourselves. It likely has deep roots that run under the sidewalk and it would take a professional to remove it out and a likely redo on the sidewalk. I'm going to leave that to professionals. I decided to just buy some very large pots and treat the tree bed like a 4' X 8' container garden. If and when the City comes, I can move the pots to someplace else.

Once I figured that out the rest of the thing was very easy. I went down to one of my favorite stores, Liberty Gardens in Red Hook and explained my project. Like a good wine store, a good nursery should be able to just tell you what you should buy. Full sun, full wind, top of the hill, dogs, teens, cars, and trash? Mix of annuals, perennials, evergreens, and flowers? Relatively inexpensive? Needs to all fit in a minicooper?

Check, check, check, and check! Once I purchased the plants and got them home it took me about 90 minutes to get the fencing in, plants and shrubs transferred into larger pots and arranged in the tree bed. I've gotten tons of compliments and thank yous (though I'm sorry I didn't get it done in time for Greenest Block in Brooklyn) and I'm quite sad I hadn't figured it out before.

I'd love to have planted everything in the ground but this was honestly the right amount of time for me to have spent on this. I encourage everyone to container garden their tree beds. Most around our block had the basics of wrought iron fencing up and some dirt. Make sure you don't pick expensive, flashy plants, make the containers as heavy as possible and I highly recommend the thin wire fencing.

Summer's Finally Here!

2010-06-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

Summer is finally here! And I get to take two weeks off before starting my new job. That's right, I'm leaving AMNH and beginning a new adventure at the New York Academy of Sciences. If you ask me what I do, I'll probably stammer a bit and mumble something about science education. I'm not inarticulate but my work is fairly difficult to describe and doesn't fit neatly into a few words. My stammering is actually an attempt to be polite because I love what I do and don't want to bore people to death. But, if you're interested, I'll talk you ear off.

This new job can be described pretty succinctly, I'll be starting a K12 outreach initiative for the Academy. Meaning that the Academy does science and would like to positively change K-12 science. That sounds pretty simple, right? I feel extremely lucky that I was able to find a new job in a timely manner given the current market and I can't wait to get started and not blog about it on my gardening/cooking blog.

In other news:

- I have a new niece. She's a baby and is totally adorable. Everyone is very happy and Walter, the dog, seems to enjoy guarding her. Sonny, her brother, is being a great big brother and I'm very pleased that he learned to "pet nice" before the baby came along. In this picture, Walter is both guarding the baby and watching tennis. He's some dog.

- I'm once again enjoying the heck out of the world cup. Last world cup I was writing my dissertation and this one I'm off for a few weeks. I wish I could say that I planned all of this but no, it's just a happy coincidence.

- I still have another week off and hope to do a few neighborhood tours. We took the ferry to Governor's Island last week. While I don't recommend the NYC Beer Festival, I do recommend ferry rides in the Hudson.

- The garden is going great. I had a big haul of basil and have tons of tomatoes on the vine. I added some worms to my window boxes but haven't seen any sign of them. More pics to come on the plants.

Sunset

2010-06-03T03:57:00.000-07:00

I know I have some folks who read this that like sunsets. Here ya go.

A few things I've learned...

2010-05-31T08:15:00.000-07:00

I probably write this post after every major planting but I'll write it again because it makes me feel wise. This is my third season of gardening at our apartment and every year I get a little smarter and a little less likely to get pulled in by flashy plants and flowers.

I used to consider what I was doing as container gardening but this year I've decided to rebrand myself as a "window box gardener". The basic principals are the same (a bound and set amount of soil) but there are some very distinctive differences, namely the window boxes are bolted to the sides of our house and are therefore immovable. Aside from some pots down on street level, my windows are my gardening destiny and no matter how rough the conditions, they are there to stay.

On a practical level this means that I've given up on some of them. That's not to say that I don't plant them but I really just put plants in them that require zero maintenance. Three of my front window boxes are quite extreme: full sun, zero rain, high winds, and a lot of pollution from the bus stop. They are also in our bedroom which means I need to wake up the husband to water them in the morning. As you can imagine, I value my marriage more than my window boxes. My first season I planted one box with sedums (hens and chicks), pretty flowers, and some raspberries. Everything but the sedums died. The sedums are still alive and well so I decided to just plant the other two with some more sedums and call it a day.

As a side note, I planted geraniums there last year and they did very well for themselves. The nursery only had a few geraniums so I planted them in one of the other front boxes.

This lesson: If you can't maintain them just buy plants that don't need your attention and call it a day.

My other window boxes are much more accessible, aren't full sun, and do get rain. These are the boxes that I actually garden in and got the full treatment of tomatoes, herbs, and some flowers. I also refreshed the soil with some plant food and turned the soil.

If you haven't gardened on the 4th floor of an apartment building in Brooklyn, you may be under the impression that you won't have any pests. I'm not sure if it's just me or some bad karma on our building but we have plenty of pests, mostly aphids. On the flip side, we also have lots of pollinators who are happy to work their magic. But if I've learned anything it's to not get too attached to plants, they get eaten, squashed by pigeons, fall to their death, and sometimes dry up when you go on vacation. Don't buy expensive plants and try to quash any infestations before they get out of control.

Ditto for the plants that I put at ground level. The first year we were here I didn't plant anything downstairs but last year I put out a few pots and planters. I also spent a lot of money on this little endeavor only to have the neighborhood kids pull them out. I think when this happens you can go one of two ways: shake your fists and decide that the neighborhood doesn't deserve your gifts or just buy cheaper plants. I waffle between these two poles but decided to put out even more plants this year.

So for this lesson: don't get too attached to your plants, do your best to keep them alive, and don't get too bent out of shape and mourn the future when drunk teenagers pull your plants out, you too were young and mischievous once.

Finally, if you're just starting out, buy some geraniums. They're hard to kill, don't need a lot of attention, and look great. Every plant, whether you've spent hours planning your arrangement or it pushes through the cracks in the side walk, makes the city and your neighborhood a bit more livable and we could all use a bit of that.

5th Ave Fair

2010-05-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

The 5th Ave fair is a real fair, not one of those fake fairs that they have in Manhattan where the same vendors roll out their boring tired stuff week after week. Some of that shows up in Park Slope but much of it is local bars, restaurants, musicians, and shops that turn the sidewalk into their store. They also have small rides, carnival games, and you can drink beer on the street. Our friends always come out in force and we were lucky to have Alex and Cleo with us (both were just months old last year and now they're stealing each other's juice). The best part is that all of the restaurants open stands and you can just buy little things here and there and stuff yourself with everything from pulled pork to margaritas.

As always, a good time was had by all and of course I took some pictures.

Miami

2010-05-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a quick trip to Miami with some friends. We spent most of the time lazing about, reading, chatting and enjoying not being at work. I did pry myself up from the beach towel one day to wander around South Beach and take some pictures. The light wasn't great but I managed a few decent shots.

After a long photo hiatus, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things and hope explore a few new neighborhoods in the coming weeks.

Happy Spring

2010-04-25T16:20:00.000-07:00

Happy Spring! We had a string of very hot weekends and now that it is actually spring, it feels like cold, dreary winter. It has been a busy and stressful spring so far. Lucky for you I don't write about my professional life on this blog but let's just say it has been a roller coaster. I've been quite unsettled and mopey the past two months, in fact, I've felt a bit like the world is fighting against me. I've realized, through the help of my best friend, that last spring was quite similar because there are so many markers around my dad's death: last meals, last movies, those sorts of things.

As always, my friends and family keep me going by offering endless conversation, hugs, always well timed phone calls and emails, and the reminder that while I've lost two really important people, there are so many still around (and another niece or nephew on the way!).

We've decided to hold off on the roof deck for a while. The cost of getting the bare minimum of what we wanted was just too high, even after splitting it a couple of ways. Plus all of the estimates came with the caveat "if we don't find asbestos", a terrifying phrase.

The window boxes are good but the beer hasn't been working out. We've had tow skunked batches so far but hold out hope for our third.

To continue this random list, I accomplished something that I had always dreamed about: I turned a double play in softball. I know that sounds silly BUT it was one of those physical goals that I've had for myself. Most people want to run a marathon or something of that nature but I don't share those dreams, I just wanted to turn a real double play (not the kind where you catch the ball and step on the bag, those are a dime a dozen). So thanks guy playing shortstop for cleanly fielding the ball and tossing it to me and thanks guy on first for catching my pretty decent throw. To be honest, I actually turned two double plays in last weeks games, for thanks again shortstop and first and thanks to the girl who stopped running because she thought that there were already two outs.

Under the Snow

2010-03-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

Some of my fall mums survived the winter and have little green starts. I trimmed them back and we'll see if they survive. I also planted some seeds late last fall and one of them seems to have survived. It may be a sort of freakish suspended animation, I'll let you know.

Homebrewing

2010-03-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

A bunch of people have asked me about the process of homebrewing and I decided that you really need pictures to understand what is happening. Here are just a few quick snapshots to give you a sense of what is going on in our apartment:

These are the grains. They are literally grains that are mixed and cracked. For us beginners you pick and buy a recipe and they give you everything you need.

You steep the grains in a large mesh bag. We didn't have a proper bag the first time we brewed and had a rather hilarious conversation about the use of some argyle stockings, pantyhose, an athletic sock, medical gauze and a bag that some stereo equipment came in. The second time around we bought what looked like a knit cotton stocking. I still vote for the argyle stockings but I am seldom right in these situations.

You remove the steeped grains and then add a whole bunch of other stuff provided by the nice store down the street. You choose a recipe and it feels like a cross between cooking a really fussy and messy recipe and a chemistry experiment. As a chemistry teacher I find the instructions provided by the nice store down the street horribly written and lacking key details. I am tempted to bring back my annotated instructions and offer to fix their recipes. We have a bunch of books and the internet is a good resource but we are still winging it a large portion of the time.

You spend a lot of time sitting next to it as I am demonstrating in the picture. The stakes at this point are really high because you have a large pot filled with boiling liquid as sticky as melted sugar. When it bubbles over it bakes on and takes a lot of scrubbing and cursing to get it off. Luckily, you can completely dismantle our stovetop, a feature that I was unaware of at the time of purchase but am eternally grateful for after this experience.

The house also smells like a brewery which is a mix of wet dog and wet farm. If you grew up in NJ, you may recognize it as the smell of Newark Airport, which has a brewing facility right next door.

Finally you transfer it to this lovely glass carboy. There are a lot more steps along the way but I only included those for which I have good pictures. Our first batch, a Belgian, is taking a time out to "think about what is has done" (according to my lovely husband). We bottled the chocolate stout last weekend. It tasted like beer and will hopefully carbonate properly (unlike our belgian). If it's good we'll share with everyone, if it's bad, we will never speak of it again.

Seedlings

2010-03-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

The weather is always so unpredictable this time of year. A few weeks ago we were under feet of snow, last weekend it rained for what felt like weeks, and the past few days have been t-shirt and shorts weather. I resisted the urge to run out and buy a bunch of plants this weekend but I did get my seedlings started.

Last year I bought this mini greenhouse system and failed in my task of starting plants from seed. I think I have a black thumb in growing houseplants but a perfectly acceptable green thumb in anything outdoors. Instead of spending money on some large plastic tray and dehydrated soil pods I resurrected a trick that my Auntie E told me about, using egg shells and cartons to start seeds.

It's as easy as it seems to set it up but it does help to eat a lot of eggs. I eat two soft boiled eggs every morning and delicately crack the shell and scoop out the runny delicious yolk and white and end up with a cleaned out shell. For the past few weeks I've been saving those shells. I tucked them out of the way but apparently they broke my husband's "no experiments in the house" rule so I felt like I had to transition them from what looked like a science experiment on growing mold to a gardening project.

I nested two shell halves and filled each one with some loose soil. I dug a shall hole and dropped in a seed or two and covered the seed with some soil. I then wrote the type of seed and the date planted on the top of the carton. My main concern is watering them enough for them to sprout but not too much that the paper carton gets gross. We'll see what happens.

First Gardening of the Season

2010-03-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

I'm sure if I looked back I would see that every mid-March I just in the car and head down to the nursery and prematurely buy some plants. I just can't help myself! Most everything was closed so I ended up at the horrible big box store down the street and got some pansies and a small azalea bush. When I got home I cleaned out the tree bed, pulled the old decorative cabbages and trimmed back the surviving plants.

In spite of the large amounts of trash, dog poop, and lord knows what in the tree bed, the bulbs were beginning to push through, the vinca had survived and the ground was crawling with worms. I really need to get in there with a rake and pull out all the leaves before I decide what to plant. It will take a while to get a tree from the City and I'd love to do something interesting either with tall grasses and other plants. The easiest thing would be to buy some small bushes but that isn't terribly interesting.

I'm starting to formulate a plan for my window boxes. My succulents continue to do well so I want to put more of them in my front full sun, full wind, and zero rain window boxes. I'm also going to start some lettuces and herbs in doors. Last year's indoor starts were a complete failure so this year I'm trying a different approach. I'll post some pics when I get it set up.

All in all, I'm very excited for my first dirt manicure of the season.

Homebrew

2010-02-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

Guys, we just made beer. I got the husband a kit for Christmas and I had been harassing him to start for weeks now. We have some friends who do it and even though beer makes me sick it seemed like a good hobby for us to do together.

We traveled to the newly opened Brooklyn Homebrew a few blocks from our house and got the ingredients for a Belgian beer. The recipe is a cross between a chemistry lab and a Julia Child complicated recipe and we quickly determine that while we had the ingredients, the kit that I bought didn't have a number of important items. This led to a hilarious debate over whether some gauze, argyle stockings, old athletic socks, ugly purple pillow case, or stereo part bag would be the best choice to replace the soaking bag and the use of the packaging to replace a sampler.

Luckily we had two pros on hand and called Jon and Aaron a couple times, but of course, only to confirm that what we were doing was right. The actual brewing of beer is not hard but it is laborious, time consuming, incredibly sticky, and smells like a barn. They also make a big deal about sanitizing everything but the methods they follow are kind of hilarious to anyone who has ever stepped foot in a lab.

We'll wait a few weeks and see how it comes out. I'm in charge next and am going to see if they have any recipes for wheat free beer recipes.

Mushroom Sausage Ragu for a Cold Winter's Night

2010-02-05T05:30:00.000-08:00

Two forces converged to create tonight's dinner: I randomly bought some Quinoa Polenta and I found a post on thekitchn.com for a hardy sausage mushroom ragu. Actually, two other things happened: It's been really cold in New York and I left work at the incredibly early hour of 5:30. This had more prep than usual but can easily be scaled back to reduce the prep time.

This is one of those recipes where if you have the right ingredients and don't burn anything too badly, you can build the recipe by taste. The recipe is an approximation of an dish I build on the fly and could easily read: brown sausage, saute mushrooms, mix all back together, roast portabellos, make polenta according to directions, etc.

Mushroom- Sausage Ragu on Polenta
Based upon Gourmet's Parmesan Crusted Polenta with Sausage- Mushroom Ragu
Serves 6

8 T olive oil
1.5 lbs spicy sausage, taken out of casing and separted into chunks*
3 clove garlic, minced
4 cups mushrooms, sliced
2T parsley, chopped
1T thyme, chopped
1 t tomato paste
1 cup red wine
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 large can crushed tomatoes

Heat up 1 T olive oil in a large saute pan on medium head, brown the chunks of sausage. Remove sausage and set aside. Add 2 T olive oil and minced garlic until it's golden brown. There was a pretty big mess of fond (the browned bits) on the bottom of the pan which is ok as long as they don't get too dark. Add the mushrooms and stir around to coat with oil. If you need more oil add another T, you just want to coat them not drown them in oil. Saute until they begin to wilt and give off their water, about 5-8 minutes. Scrape up all the brown bits with the edge of a wooden spoon and stir into mushrooms.

Add tomato paste, chopped parsley and thyme, and red wine. Simmer over medium heat for 3-5 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste. Add crushed tomatoes, stir and simmer for 5-8 minutes or the tomatoes are incorporated into the sauce. Add the sausage, check salt and pepper levels, cover and set aside.

Make polenta according to the directions. I used one of the polenta and quinoa tubes and added it to instant polenta after it was done. I added lots of salt to the polenta water, pepper, and basil flakes.

Roasted Portabello Mushrooms
3 large portabello mushrooms, cleaned and destemmed
4 T olive oil
pepper to taste

Preheat the over to 300F. Coat both sides of the mushrooms with olive oil. I like to pour about a T on the side with the gills and make sure it is really coated. I also add a dash pepper. Place on cookies sheet covered with tin foil and roast until easily pierced with a fork, about 15-20 minutes. Remove and let cool.

Once you have made all the parts, place a portabello on the bottom of the shallow bowl, add one heaping ladle of polenta, and one heaping ladle of ragu.

* I used half spicy Italian sausage and half vegan Field Roast Italian sausage. They had similar flavor and slightly different textures but I would happily just use the fake sausage again.

Blogging Update

2010-02-04T06:09:00.001-08:00

I'll be blogging about our new potential project at Brownstoner

Not Another Deathaversary

2010-01-16T07:03:00.000-08:00

I'm aware that I'm a bad person when it comes to dealing with Adam's death. He wonderful and loving family have reached out to me, written really nice cards and letters, and even made a special trip to visit when I was in Colorado and all I've done is defriend them on facebook. I know, in theory, that I owe them better. I know, in theory, that I probably owe a few people better but, in reality, I'm just not ready to give as much of myself as I used to.

I think part of the issue is that I'm consistently enjoying my life again. I'm not back to normal but I've settled on a new normal where I can take care of myself, worry about my closest family members, and focus on some long term goals. I'm really pleased that I can consider not buying the right size coffee filters a bit of a problem. I'm pleased that I don't obsessively clean the tile grout. and I'm really pleased that instead of staring at the TV I'm going to Yoga, running and out with friends.

The reality is that I just don't want to deal with more death and when it's not right in my face I can push it aside. And for now, that will have to do.

Boo Hiss Cancer

2010-01-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

Okay so now I need another resolution. Turns out that I didn't have that many posts about dealing with death. I labeled the ones that I found "boo hiss cancer" (because it hurts less when you're cutesy) and you can now see that link to the left. So if you've lost someone to pancreatic cancer or sudden heart attack or are just dealing with a loss, you can now read through my experiences.

Hmm, Okay 2nd Choice?

2010-01-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

Well apparently I already do a good job "pushing back" and telling people exactly what I think (this is why my book group claims that I hate everything and do to fair I usually do hate everything).

So my new mini goal/resolution for this blog is to go through a put tags on everything. While I sure there are people who only want to read about my fabulous taste in pillows, I suspect there are more people out there who might want to read what I wrote about losing my dad to pancreatic cancer (boo hiss cancer). I'm also starting to absorb losing my friend Adam almost a year ago to a heart attack (boo hiss heart attacks) so perhaps they'll be a few more posts about death (and won't that be nice).

I don't pretend that what I wrote is great or insightful but I do know that its honest, raw, and represents an arc for someone to follow. I've shared large chunks of it with friends who have lost someone and I think just reading someone else's perspective helps to give permission to whatever is going on in your own head. I'm sure loss can be generalized by an academic or a counselor but when it happens to you it is nothing but specific to you and your relationship to the person you lost. My reaction to losing my dad and losing Adam were totally different to one another. They were radically different to losing my step-grandmother years ago. And to be fair, I'm still a bit scarred from losing Spot and Scotty. And I'm sure they are different than your loss but I'm sure having a single moment of "yes me too!" has value.

I'm a big fan of organizing content (not my house though) but I've been very good about avoiding this whole organizing task. I've made it a resolution to push myself but the truth is that I'm not ready to reread or even look at those dates on a calendar. I've come a long way but I'm no masochist so I'll take my sweet ass time on this one.

Clearing out the Plastics

2010-01-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

Normally when I see hair on fire reports about levels of pollutants in the environments I just think to myself "not much I can do about that". For whatever reason the recent reports about the inadequacy of our legal protections against water pollution, endocrine disruptors in products, and high levels of pharmaceuticles in the environment have made me totally paranoid. Gone are my days of drinking unfiltered tap water and carelessly microwaving food in plastic containers. This Consumer Reports study just sent me over the edge.

Consumer Reports look at BPA levels in canned products

In an attempt to make a few small changes I bought a few glass containers to take their place. They're good looking, shatter resistant, freezer proof and can be microwaved without the top on.

See they're nice!

But I then realized (after I had paid $14 for it that I had the same thing already at home, in my recycling bin.

Ah the Holidays

2010-01-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

For Christmas we got my sister's cat Diego stoned on catnip and for New Years we ate lobster, subjected me to scrabble, and tortured a stuffed bunny who I think is named Clappy.

Holy Sh!t We Finally Got New Pillows

2009-12-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

I know I know it's not at all a big deal but if you had seen (or smelled) our old pillows you will understand why I am so excited. The Husband bought the Perfect Pillows into our relationship and I brought a pillow that we not so affectionaly call the beaver pillow. We had a few more that we acquired over the years and they were all in pretty horrible shape. The beaver pillow was matted in a totally gross way, the perfect pillows were shreaded, and one of the random ones was missing a large section of itself. The down was also a bit musty.

They were kind of a disgrace but obviously well loved. I wanted to replace them before Thanksgiving and we had houseguests and I dragged the Husband all around the city looking for the perfect pillows. Obviously, I failed and we were stuck with the shreaded pillows until this weekend.

We were out in NJ and went up to Tice's Corner, a small upscale strip mall on the NJ/NY border. The husband headed to the Apple store and I went to exchange an extra small shirt my mom had given me (thanks for both the awesome, beautiful shirt and the vote of confidence in my bosom mom!). As I zipped past the store fronts I saw a not so bad pillow in the window.

When I got back to the Apple Store I said to the husband "I can't believe I'm going to say this but Pottery Barn has some okay pillows. Want to look?" I quickly added "There's no sales tax in NJ and they're on sale and the ones that we have are really sad those I love your ones and hate the beaver pillow". He, being a good hearted soul, agreed, and we quickly picked some new pillows (as seen below).

I'm happy to report that they look just fine, are very comfortable, and the long thin ones we got as extra good at snuggling with while sitting in the big overstuffed leather chair. They're not perfect, but they're just fine and they don't smell or look like beavers, so bonus.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-12-27T14:05:00.000-08:00

If you ask me about my year, you will most likely get a earful of belly aching about death, destruction, and Kate's very naughty nervous system. I don't advise it. In some regards 2009 was as horrible of a year as 2008 and it was piled upon the horribleness of 2008. But, if I stop and sit down in a moment of quiet reflection, many things about 2009 were quite wonderful. It is only because of those wonderful pieces that I think I survived the past few years and I can only hope that when the death and destruction slows down or hits slightly less close to home, I can somehow or another pay those good things forward and reflect good instead of just absorb it from other people.

Some great things that happened this year:

- New People were born (welcome Alex, Jacob, Cleo, etc) and more are on the way!
- I made a lot of new friends (which I hadn't done in a while)
- We spent a lot of time sitting outside on our roof laughing with friends
- We made some great changes in our house and we love spending time here, perhaps too much time!
- Some much needed traveling together and alone
- Another stellar year of friends and family
- Some incredible professional highs

I don't give much thought to resolutions. I think my last one was to buy a couch and it was 2002. I do however think a whole lot about what I'm doing and how I could do it better. In the past few years this means a focus on skills like listening and writing. Now you may be tempted to stop me and tell me that I am good at neither listening or writing and I would tell you that this was about growth, not objective measures. (Meaning I'm a hell of a lot better than I used to be). The skill that I would most like to cultivate this year is to become a better skeptic and develop more of a push back personality. I don't mean that I want to be more of a bitch but I do want to take the skills that I've developed as a mentor and editor and apply them to more situations. I guess I want to raise my standards and demand more from people. I want people to think of me as someone who tells them the truth (and not in a bitchy way).

I would also like to keep a few things going that I started this year.
- Since September I've been running with a friend of mine 2-3 times a week.
- I've been eating many more vegetarian meals in an attempt to reduce my food footprint (not because I don't love meat)
- I've cut way back on my red meat consumption

Some new resolutions:
- Start shooting more photography again
- Develop a budget and a sense of what I spend money on
- Watch less TV
- Remember everyone's birthdays, anniversaries, etc
- Find a steady volunteer thing, the coop sucks up my volunteer time and I'm not sure it's worth it

I've come to expect each year to include a major death or very bad diagnosis and I think death, like saggy tits, heart burn, and yelling at kids to get off my lawn, is one of those things that you must accept as you get older. My biggest resolution is to keep living a life that makes me happy, proud, and strong. I want to make sure that when life changes I've squeezed every bit of goodness out of it.

Now that it's been a year and a half after my dad's death, this lesson, live as much of life as possible, had sank into me and changed my world view. I thought the hole that his death left (and I'm now starting to feel the hole that Adam's death left) would never be filled and I still believe that it won't be filled entirely. But if anything is going to fill it it will be new experiences, warm summer nights, staying up too late, decadent food, incredibly good books and I can never underestimate the power of snuggling. It's the little, itty bitty things that make up a life well lived that have yanked me back and I am so grateful everyday for those who taught me about them.

So, I'm very excited about 2010. What a decade! I'm so much happier, better, saner than I was 10 years ago and I hope that the next year offers some great stuff and less not great stuff. Merry Merry Happy Happy and I promise I'll pull in those dead plants and holiday decorations very soon!

Party Like It's 1999

2009-12-23T09:17:00.000-08:00

So Abby and I had a holiday open house last weekend. It was pretty rad. We were sitting around at 5 pm, watching the snow start to accumulate, and convinced ourselves that no one would show up. Very quickly, much quicker than we ever imagined, the place filled up, quite to the brim. It turns out that while few people wanted to take the subway or bus to our house, everyone from our neighborhood was very excited about walking through the snow and then quite content to settle in for the evening.

I've never thought of myself as someone who likes to host parties but after 4 or 5 big parties at our house I find that I really enjoy it. I enjoyed it even more this time because I got to plan the party with a pro (Abby) and we had a great mix of people.

The husband, who is wise and wonderful, suggested that people leave their boots out in the hallway, perhaps the best decision of the year!

Plant Tree

2009-12-23T09:04:00.001-08:00

I've been yearning for a Christmas Tree for a few years now but haven't actually gotten one. This was the first year that I decorated anything for the holidays and I was determined to be festive and blah blah blah. The husband, knowing that I lose interest in things after a few minutes or a shiny thing, convinced me to wait a week before getting a tree. He, as usual, was totally right and I talked myself out of a tree in about an hour. My rational: we live on the 4th floor with tiny stairways, have no decorations or lights, and don't have a stand. I also knew that I would want a tiny one, due to the no lights no decoration thing, but the husband would want one that was in proportion to our house and it would be huge. So I bought some garland and wreaths and prepertrated my holiday "joy" on the outside of our building.

But, the need for a christmas tree reemerged when I started wrapping gifts and we decided to decorate Plant. Plant, who has always been known very affectionaly as Plant, is a lemon tree who has been with us for probably 6 years. He started off a stunted little nubbin of a tree while we lived on 15th street. The husband took over and the thing blossomed (not literally but like a malnourished child who finally gets over rickets). He very lovingly waters and cares for Plant and it has made it through 2 moves and a stint at Abby's office. This is perhaps only important because our other house plants have met horrible torturous deaths (sorry mom). Yes I do have a lovely "garden" but I can't keep a house plant alive for more than a month.

So the husband had a very definate decorating plan for Plant, a single ornament and here it is. It also became obvious that Plant is growing into a Tree and has hit some sort of adolescence. So Plant may soon be renamed Tree.

Isn't he festive?

Rebellious Teenage Years

2009-12-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

For those of you who don't know, I graduated from college in 2000. We endured these horrible questions about what our graduating class would have to endure as the "millenial" class, I'm pretty sure none of us saw this coming.

In spite of my incredible education I missed the announcement that we only had a few short weeks until the decade was over and we headed from our not so innocent adolescence into our rebellious teenage years. I've written extensively about my past few years and I thought it was high time to reflect upon some of my favorite things about the past decade. They were not necessarily invented in this decade but they rose to prominence or scale since I graduated from college, and they've made my life radically different. In no particular order, I present to you, the awkward, gawky adolescence of this millenium graduate.

* Lycra/ stretch jeans. I don't know about you, but I used to dread washing my jeans. They would go from soft and supple to hard and scratchy in a thirty minutes. While their not perfect and still take some breaking in, it's only about 30 minutes and they are good to go. For us curvy girls, this had made all the difference in the world.

* Genetic barcoding. I went to a great undergraduate institution but despite all that education my biology degree was essential obsolete due to the genetics revolution. I don't even recognize most of biology without trying really hard and one of those reasons is that most biologists, even the ones that do what I always wanted to do, are geneticists in some way or another. A quick lay definition: you can take a living creature and compare its DNA to another's in a giant database. The ability to extract the DNA is not new but the ease of comparison is startling. Thanks genetics for making the first 21 years of my education totally obsolete.

* Blogs. You're reading this so you obviously get it, right? While the internet/Internet has radically changed almost everything about how we get and receive information, few of these things enhance my life like blogs. I never knew I like looking at puppies, interior design, or some statistician named Nate Silver but I look at those things everyday, sometimes all day (that would be the puppies). Looking back I never thought I would have access to so many opinions, styles of writing and capturing images, or communities as I do now and I'm not sure what was there before blogs? Smaller locally-oriented communities? 'Zines? Graffiti? Self publishing maybe? Never before has any idiot with an internet connection been able to put their ideas out there and find an audience, even if that audience is just her mom.

* Cheap data storage. I bought a terrabyte drive for $159. That's like the aircraft carrier of storage and it's filled with thousands of digital pictures, multiple copies of my dissertation, three or four full TV series, and a few random word documents. I suspect that cheap data storage had made much of what we do online possible but for me it means not carrying around those silly square disks, now i carry round or thumb shaped ones.

* Reality TV. I'm not sure if its good or bad. It brought us Top Chef and So You Think You Can Dance but it also brought us America's Next Top Model and Hidden Potential (two time sucks that I admit to). I think these will shade on the side of good but only because of my next choice.

* DVR. Oh.So.Good. It's not the fast forwarding of commercials that is great, it's the ability to watch what you want whenever you want. And that oh so awesome moment during a sporting event when you spouse shrieks from the other room "Meg you have to see this!" AND THE GAME HAS BEEN PAUSED. Of course I never really watched TV before the DVR...

Ok, more to come.

Some Holiday Decorations

2009-12-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

I really got in the holiday spirit last weekend and bought a whole bunch of garland, some wreaths and enough christmas lights to satisfy a sorority house. They had been wallowing in our garage all week and I finally was home, on a sunny day, and in the light and put them up. I should say that I am not crafty, I'm somewhat anticrafty, so I've learned not to do anything that requires skill, style, taste, or thumbs. I wrapped the garland, hung the wreaths and decorated the hell out of one of our window boxes (the window box lights really made my husband question this whole thing).

I may not be crafty but I am tenacious and at least my corner smells a little bit better (on a windless day if you put your face right in the pine).

Some Thanksgiving Pictures

2009-12-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Twee or am I getting old?

2009-12-06T14:47:00.000-08:00

I just find my niece, nephew, and the dog that I dog sat for to be too cute. Like they could out cute a fluffy bunny or that surprised kitten on youtube. My niece spends most of her time rolling, trying to crawl and laughing. My nephew came to the museum where I work and ran around looking for owls. When he found them (as seen here) he ran back and forth going "who who who". Molly, the dog, is kind of a disaster and this is her trying to jump in the Gowanus Canal, something I don't think her owners would really appreciate.

Next thing you know I'll be wearing sweaters with angora cats on them, yelling at kids to get off my lawn, and running around shoving my phone in people's faces telling them to look at my nephew. Actually, I already do two of those things but I'll leave it up to you to guess which ones.

Updated Kitchen Pics

2009-12-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

I resisted putting up good pictures of our finished kitchen because I wanted it to be a surprise for my Mother In Law. Here are a few. Note the beautiful magnetic knife mount. That was a hard fought battle against the tile and against the most unhelpful staff at giant box hardware store down the street. I have to admit, I would not have been sad if, in the process of pre-drilling the holes, the Husband had cracked the tiles to pieces and we had to replace the whole thing.

And here is a bad camera phone picture of the kitchen in action. It is exactly how it should be: messy from a festive evening of cooking and celebrating.

Update: Thanksgiving Still My Favorite Holiday

2009-11-28T15:46:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving has come and gone. Again! This was the first year we have hosted Thanksgiving and it felt a lot like a rite of passage. The food is so traditional and deeply sentimental, everyone has their own idea about how things should look and taste. Everyone's grandmother did it the right way and everyone's family tries their hardest to carry on the traditions of turkeys' past.

As we scrambled about cooking and cleaning, we realized that the reason you get all of those seemingly ridiculous wedding presents is for this type of day and this type of day alone. The giant platter, the random place settings, and the good silverware were all lovingly hand crafted for this day. No pressure or anything.

We were lucky enough to host the Husband's family. My mother in law arrived with her should-be-famous apple and pumpkin chiffon pies and my sister in law arrived with all of the sides, an army of french bread, and of course, my most favorite niece.

I had to prepare the turkey, stuffing and salad. For the first time, I was incredibly nervous about the turkey and stuffing. I make roasted birds all the time but I just couldn't conceptualize this. And stuffing, what exactly is that? (It's kind of like a bread pudding but not really). I finally settled on a few recipes and with some psychological counsel from my mom stopped hyperventilating enough to buy the ingredients.

I realized that the conversation with my mom was what this was about: the multigenerational passing of knowledge, hard fought knowledge, about these traditions. And before the cooking even began, I felt thankful for this excuse to cozy up to my mom (via my office phone) and let her download all her years of knowledge (nuzzle nuzzle).

Despite my nervousness, I up early and realized that I really did need to put the turkey in right away. Really? Right now? At 10am for a 4pm dinner? That seemed utterly absurd but that's what the directions said and if it's anything that us science types are good at it's following directions.

I got what seemed like a monster turkey, 14 pounds, and wrestled with it for a long time. I had to give it a bath, slather pesto under the skin, massage it with oil and garlic, stuff it with aromatics, and pluck a few errant feathers out of its tail. Needless to say, I got pretty intimate with the thing. I was just about to stick it in the over when I realized that the wings were sticking out in all directions.

"Mom"
"Yeah Meg, Happy Thanksgiving!"
"Mom, what do I do about the wings? They're sticking out and will burn. What do I do about the poor little wings"
"Alright, here's what you do..."

Needless to say, she talked me off the ledge and aside from my quizzical "You want me to make sleeves for it?" we got it done.

After the turkey wrestling match (which I won BTW), I began the only dish I knew how to make. The mashed potatoes. A bit of boiling, mashing, mustard, butter, milk, salt and pepper, they were done and resting comfortably on the sideboard.

I had to run out and take Molly for a walk but when I got back the bird was in able hands, the house was vacuumed, and everything but the stuffing and salad were set.

I don't really want to talk about the stuffing, it was fussy, underseasoned, and not worth saving. I've decided it needed mushrooms and that's all I want to say about that.

We had a somewhat magical moment with the gravy with my mom on the phone, my husband's mom at the stove, and me yelling "I know how to make a roux" as if I was trying to get the teacher to call on me. The gravy, by the way, turned out exceptionally good.

Finally, things devolved, as they always do, to a word game. This year Bananagram was introduced and was throughly enjoyed by all, except me, who happily shoved sweet potatoes and corn bread in my mouth.

It was a fine holiday, only marred by my needing to work and a stomach that limits capacity. It is still my most very favorite holiday specifically because of the tradition, the family time, and the general ability just to hang out with one another. I would also like to praise our new furniture, which performed exceptionally well. The bookcase served as a perfect sideboard and the new kitchen things did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Hooray all around and on to Christmas, I just bought 40 feet of garland, two wreathes, about a million lights, and 50 cable ties! For the first time I feel festive!

Quick Recipe for you!

2009-11-23T05:58:00.000-08:00

It's that mad mad holiday/crazy work season again and I haven't had a lot of time to compose my thoughts for the blog. I finally took some nice pictures of the new kitchen but haven't had a chance to edit them, they're coming I promise!

I did have a chance to throw an impromptu birthday dinner for my friend Michael (Happy Birthday!). This is my favorite type of entertaining, quick, easy and full of good cheer. We decided to do the dinner around 5 pm and everyone showed up at 8. Hilleary made a yummy salad with goat cheese, persimmons, pomegranate seeds and a shallot vinaigrette and I threw together a quick spinach, salsa, and cheddar fritatta. It doesn't get any easier than that menu and we made it all while everyone was sitting at the counter and I was cooking. Our wall removal/counter renovation achieved it's intended outcome, I could cook and enjoy my party at the same time.

To reinforce the easy dinner, I made the easiest dessert imaginable: Roasted Figs with Marscapone and a Balsamic Vinegar Reduction. One of my guests is diabetic so I wanted to make something rich and special without a ton of sugar and flour. You could pretty much do this with any fruit. I love treating peaches this way but I imagine pears are delicious too! You can also substitute creme freche or vanilla ice cream. I had mine without the cheese and it was just as delicious!

For 4 people

10-12 Fresh figs, halved
1 T olive oil
1/4 cup Marscapone
1/2 cup good balsamic vinegar

Preheat the oven to 350F. Slice the figs and lay them out on the cookie sheet. Brush them with the olive oil and roast them until they start to shrivel ~30 minutes or so. As they're cooking prepare the balsamic glaze (see below). When they're done, let them cool.

When cool, spoon out a small (or large depending on taste) amount (1/8 teaspoon) of the marscapone on the top of each and then spoon over the balsamic reduction. I served them in those japanese soup spoons but they could easily be put in a bowl. I placed a candle on Michael's and we all sang him the birthday song.

Balsamic Glaze
1/2 cup good balsamic vinegar

In a small sauce pan (I use my cast iron 8" saucier), slowly heat the balsamic. Stir until it reduces by about 1/2. It should be thinner than maple syrup.

I'm thinking of making this again for Thanksgiving but adding some bacon to the top.

Like a laboradoodle

2009-11-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those crazy few weeks at work only made worse by two things. The presense of outside collaborators and a wonky computer. It's hard to underestimate the pain of arriving at one's desk really early to prepare for a 9am meeting only to find out that your computer account is locked and that the IT people don't pick up the phone until 9am.

We have a set of collaborators who's only aim in life seems to be to create a jargon and after a particularily hellacious jargon creation session (that went on for 5 hours and seriously all we did was talk in jargon) my lovely boss came up with a new bit of jargon, as seen on this post it.

A collaboradoodle- its like a collaboration and a poodle.

It doesn't mean anything except to represent those lost hours of your professional life when you walk out of a meeting with nothing but the creation of a mythical "action plan" and something about as useful, a mythical poodle.

That extension written on the collaboradoodle, that's IT number just to remind myself how much working in a PC world ruins my life, one collaboradoodle at a time.

Go Yankees!

2009-10-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

So this pictures offends me in two ways. One my sister Kate is so photogenic it's offensive. Two my husband is perfectly willing to take a nice picture with Kate.

To prove my point:

Something truly terrifying for halloween

2009-10-31T14:00:00.001-07:00

We have this enormous closet (we call her Red on account of the red door, the hall pantry is green on account of the green door, etc) and it is truly an organized persons nightmare. On our final walk through, my father looked at Red and said "How can people have so much crap" and well, I'm ashamed to admit that it looks almost exactly the same now as it did then.

I just organized it a few months ago (yes, this is organized) and I hope that apartment therapy's next project is the giant red closet with so much stuff cure because doctor, I need the cure.

Trust me, that part looks better blurry.

Before Pictures

2009-10-31T13:46:00.000-07:00

Well I did things a bit backwards. I wrote about my big cleaning purge in my previous post and have now found my before pictures. Note the stacking! The clutter! The general state of disarray! To be fair we are in the middle of the great wall project of 2009 but I have to admit it usually looks pretty similar to this. If you want to see the afters look at the next post.

Kitchen Cure

2009-10-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I signed up for apartment therapy's Kitchen Cure. They send you instructions, you follow them, and send them documentation of your progress. The first week's assignment was to clean out your fridge and pantry and then wipe everything down.

This was easy and some what terrifying. We've lived here a year and a half yet we had stuff that was a couple of years old. Note to self, don't move frozen food. I also discovered things that I keep buying every time I shop. Kidney beans (for soups and chili), chocolate bars (for what ever), and fish sauce. Nice combo. I need to go on a good restocking the pantry run down to Fairway to restock the shelves for the winter. In the summer most of my cooking is from fresh ingredients but in the winter I turn to the pantry and freezer for most of my ingredients.

This morning I decided it was time to put all the stuff back that I had moved for the wall demolition. I had gotten into some bad habits and wanted to make a clean break. I also discovered how poorly organized everything was and decided to declutter and relocate (which was the assignment for week 2).

Bad Habits:
1. Not having a place to store everyday cooking items like olive oil, salt, pepper, tea, etc. These things lived on the counter top but were always making a mess and cluttering things up. It made cleaning the counter tops annoying and turned the only usable counter space into a mine field of things to knock over.

Before this was just a place for tupperware but by adjusting the shelf and moving things up a little I could accommodate the everyday items.

2. Keeping every possible kitchen utensil out on the counter. Again, cluttered and dusty. I used AT's classification system of daily, weekly, and monthly (or less) and separated out my utensils. Everyday ones went in the top drawer (garlic press, wine key, can opener, and tongs) while weekly/monthly stuff went below (spatula, silicone brush, meat thermometer, lemon squeezer), neatly organized into wooden thingys. The stuff I rarely use, it super specialty (like a lemon zester, frosting spreader, grapefruit spoon, and duplicates) went into a small bin in the pantry. I use a lot of this stuff but I decided I should sacrifice a cluttered, kind of gunky gross space, for the sake of having everything right there.

3. Stacking things in precarious ways- Just plain dangerous in a way that made me avoid using those items. I shifted a lot of stuff to this random, awkward cabinet over the stove. I realized that this is where all the stuff that we only use with company and that isn't pretty should go. Extra mugs, dishes, and some specialty dessert dishes were all nicely stacked here, out of sight but not out of mind.

This freed up a lot of room in the main dish cabinet to actually put the things were used daily and weekly in a safe, easy to reach place. We have very tall cabinets and I am always tempted to climb on the counter to avoid getting the step ladder. I hope that rearranging things will make me less tempted to do that since the things I need all the time are within reaching distance and the things that I don't need all the time, well, quite frankly if I need to get them down there will probably be guests. And those guests will make me less prone to do dangerous things.

I did the same for our very deep, tall corner cabinet. I followed the same pattern while organizing as I went along. I have a habit of putting things in things (like non matched serving utensils in the salad bowls) and both losing them and dumping them on my head while looking for something. I made a "nothing goes in anything rule" to reduce the head trauma.

As I reorganized everything, I realized that I had basically booby trapped the whole place for my husband. This may explain why he refuses to take serious pictures with me.

So blah blah blah, declutter, wash, dust, recycle. Rinse and Repeat. I should also note that I cleaned everything (with cleaning products!) and am pretty sure that nothing had been cleaned since the kitchen was finished 10 years ago. I had cleaned all of the lower cabinets after the great mouse infestation of 2008 and was very happy to see no mouse poop this time.

I'm a slob and have a tendency to leave things everywhere. I also recognize that I don't follow any organizational scheme and organization schemes basically lead to losing things, tucking them into places where they will never see the light, and general mayhem and clutter. I have switched to a bin system for most of my organizational needs. This means that instead of folders and filing cabinets, I have switched to bins and piles. I know, it makes my accountant and work colleagues very nervous, but if I just put it in a contained pile I won't outsmart myself.

My work piles

In the kitchen, the bin system sort of gets morphed into the "put everything where I can see it and position it so that I can't put anything on top of it" system. If it's in the back I should consider it lost so nothing goes in the back unless I can see it peeking out the top.

So what's one to really do with a tall, deep closet for a pantry? Well, I hid a lot of stuff that I don't mind losing until I need it again. The blender, toaster, wine chiller, and growler bottles. Those are seasonal so they'll come out from hiding. The big green closet didn't really need that much rearranging. What it actually needed was a serious scrub.

The previous owner left all sorts of stuff there including sample granite tiles, a very large cutting board, and tons of other little crap. Word to the wise, no one ever wants your crap so do them a favor and get rid of it. When I lifted up the crap I realized he had used it to cover this disgusting sticky mess. I tried everything to clean it and ended up just putting the tiles back over the slick and stacking things on them. A good scrub and vacuum (all the dust from the electrical work) and it felt a lot better and now has enough room to house the liquor which had been living in the husband's office.

I also used this time to decide what I needed to repurpose or buy. A few more bins (I've seen these great lucite ones) and a spice rack solution is really all I need.

So my few simple rules:
1. Organize by amount of use
2. Don't hide anything
3. Don't stack anything unless you only use it when people are around to supervise its removal
4. Things do get dusty when they're not in cabinets
5. Organize by weight, put heavy things down low, lighter things up high
6. Don't booby trap the house
7. Don't over organize
8. Don't buy organizational things until you know you need them. The corrollary to this is don't buy things at Ikea just because they are cute. You will end up buying organizational things just to organize your cute, miniature, useless things and repeat the cycle.

We have a lot of stuff. I can imagine that my "after" pictures look a lot like people's before pictures. But I've spent a lot of time trying to reduce the amount of stuff I have while pretending that I'm not a pack rat and more organized than I really am. So I've embraced my pack rack (and my pack rat spouse) in an attempt to only be able to mess up the things that I use on a daily basis and reduce the clutter that drives everyone crazy.

Warmies

2009-10-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

I've been laid up inside with a case of the "blahs" all weekend long. We've both lounged around, sipping tea, eating left over chinese food, and watching bad cable movies since Friday after work. The weather is horrible, low 40s with rain and clouds like the inside of a dirty dishwasher, and it took the promise of a soy decaf cappuccino hand delivered by my husband to get me to go outside.

So to warm myself up, I've been staring at some pictures I took last weekend of the sunlight bearing down on our displaced kitchen goodies. The yellow slippers were a wonderful christmas gift from my sister last year. When I first opened the box I was not inspired by them but as soon as I put them on they became one of my favorite items in the world. Who wouldn't want incredibly warm, silly yet stylish yellow slippers with pompoms? They make me giggle and remind me that my sister has incredibly good taste. I should have her pick out all my stuff, she picked out my prom dress and my most wonderful cocktail ring, so why not?

The final picture is of some tortilla chips held closed by an unused mouse trap. My husband was looking for a way to close the bag and picked this instead of the various clips and rubber bands scattered around the place. It is stuff like this that makes me love him, he has a practical whimsey that is just so darn endearing.

The repurposed mouse trap + the slippers + last weekend's sunshine gives me the warmies.

Bye Bye Wall

2009-10-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

Last week Frank, Bernie's friend, came to take down the wall between the living room and kitchen. It was a relatively quiet and orderly demo, not at all like you see on the DIY channels. There were no sledge hammers only careful deconstruction of some original baseboard, giant actual 2X4's, and quirky drywall.

We're still working on the design for the peninsula and are trying to maximize seating area and storage while retaining the flow of the entry way and room. The top will be butcher block and we'll have some open shelving for pots and pans underneath. I think its going to be pretty great and I can't wait to have the whole project done. I have some other small projects on the brain but I'm pretty sure the Husband needs a break.

Much Doing at Our House

2009-10-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

I think the husband has reached his breaking point. First the bookshelves, then the paint, and now the wall removal and minor kitchen renovation. When ever I suggest a new project he just looks at me, signaling me "not to push it". We embarked on this kitchen project when we first met Gabe, the incredible carpenter who did our bookshelves.

There is this random wall in our kitchen. Okay, I should back up. We thought it was random because it wasn't load bearing, blocked a nice flow into the living room, and made it very awkward to have people over when you're cooking. So we decided to bring it down and put in a counter top and some shelves. Gabe draws some stuff that we like and I start lining contractors up.

Bernie, my new favorite electrician, came this morning and just left. He had to do a bunch of stuff that involved poking very large holes in the wall. We felt a little weird watching but the Husband asked permission and Bernie very patiently walked us through what he was doing. Electricity scares the heck out of me (a totally rational and important fear to have) and watching him figure it all out was like taking the reasoning part of the GREs all over again. Anyway, we had a lovely day with Bernie and all of our lights and outlets are moved and back to their normal functional state.

One Wednesday, Frank, Bernie's friend, is coming to take down the wall and fix the sheetrock. Then, we have to make some decisions about what goes in its place.

Before

During

After

The after pictures don't really show you anything but the holes in the wall. According to Bernie we couldn't have picked a "more happening" wall in terms of electricity. The electricity comes from the box, across the ceiling in the kitchen, then down the wall and spreads out to the rest of the entire house. Cutting the power to the wall knocked out most of the living room, dining room, and hallway. All of that, and the creepy giant transformer for the undermounted lighting, needed to be rerouted and repositioned.

My guess is that you never really know what you're going to get in an old house. Bernie seemed fond of new construction where everything was obvious but then seemed to relish the challenge of the maze of wiring in older houses. Regardless, we were very lucky that there were only minor surprises and that the previous renovation had been done correctly. I kept expecting disaster but felt like we were in good hands if it occured.

Sunset sans Antenna

2009-10-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

Last night's sunset was a beauty but in the process of taking its picture I noticed that my most favorite antenna had been snapped off in the recent wind storm. I had luckily, just a few days earlier, exchanged emails with the owner of the building next store so I quickly sent him an email about the dangling antenna. This afternoon, as I was staring out the window I noticed a man on the roof fixing the antenna and threw open the window and introduced myself.

"Hi! You must be Andy?"
"Um, Hi. Who are you?"
" I'm Meg."
"Oh, hi!"
"This is a weird way to meet."
"Yup."
"I take pictures of your antenna all the time, I was very sad to see it and the owl go."
"What owl?"
"The owl, tied to a string, on your roof. It must have blown away."
"Nice to meet you."
"Okay bye!"

My Childhood

2009-10-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

I was recently given a bag of childhood stuff from my dad's office. I've been going through boxes of the stuff at my mom's house for years but this was a very concentrated set of report cards and notes and represented a snapshot of my childhood. I was a bit nervous about going through it since it was literally every single letter I had ever written and notes from every single parent teacher conference he had attended, but once I began exploring, I saw what a gift this, and those boxes from my mom, were.

My absolute favorite thing was a note that my dad took out of the mail. It was from a boy named Mike written to my in 6th or 7th grade, thanking me for attending his birthday party. It had never been opened but upon inspection it must have appear to my dad as some sort of awkward early teen advance. Why he thought a boy would write and mail me a love note and not just put it in my locker is totally beyond me. But the idea is adorable. I'm not sure he knew how unbelievable awkward I was around boys in middle (and high) school but he would perhaps have rested easily if he knew the first boy that asked me to slow dance was met with a shriek and a very awkward run out of the mess hall at camp. My weirdness was boy kryptonite and an overprotective dad was enough to scare any potential suitors. Maybe the US Postal system wasn't such a bad idea.

My second favorite find was a large percentage of baby teeth. If anyone needed proof that the tooth fairy doesn't exist they just need to look in this bag. There must be 15 teeth in there, all carefully taped to the notes that came with them. One note asked for the tooth back (to show my mom) while others asked from ridiculous amounts of money (see above). There is a whole mess of them from camp where I carefully wrapped them in color-coded stationary with a short explanation of how and where they came out, and a very loving "Mr Postman please hand cancel" written on the outside. The idea of these things sitting in a drawer a foot or two away from my dad for 20 years just makes me smile.

Finally, the report cards. I was a totally average kid with a few very obvious problems and strengths. I was very helpful in the class, worked well in groups, and was always happy to read when given any down time. The negative comments should just have been cut and pasted from year to year: bad handwriting, can't spell, and makes careless mistakes. My most treasured comment was "Meghan would do much better in math if she slowed down and didn't try to be the first in the class to finish". I also scored off the charts for all of my physical education markers and apparently loved to climb the ropes in the gym. Great so I was a hyper competitive gym rat in elementary school with the patience of a meth head.

I had been making good steps to do away with my pack rattery but I suspect finding this cache of my childhood will send me strait back to where I came from, two pack rats who loved their kids enough to save every little piece of childhood.

My "Day Off"

2009-09-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

I took today off in an attempt to get some stuff done around the house. But I have a major meeting that I'm organizing tomorrow which meant that I spent most of the day tethered to my computer frantically trying to coordinate things even though the entire office was out.

I went to Ikea to measure their bathroom vanities. Oddly enough they have 15 huge ones and 2 tiny ones. You'd think that a place dedicated to apartment living would have a few more. I was really good though and didn't buy anything. Including their lovely wooden blinds because I can't find the size that I need. This would be a perfect item to be able to order off their website but nope, they don't have that available on line.

I stopped at Fairway to get some grocery shopping done but got seduced by the lobster rolls and beautiful weather out back. I enjoyed my lobster roll but totally forgot to get groceries.

One my way home I decided to stop by the Chelsea Garden Center to see what fall plants they had out. I usually shop at the lesbian overpriced organic small selection shop in Gowanus but thought I'd check it out. I had always avoided it because 1) It looked expensive 2) It was named after a place in Manhattan which guaranteed it to be expensive. Not surprising, it was in no way or shape expensive and the owner was very helpful with my microclimate window boxes and neighborhood vandals.

I should admit something. Everything is dead. All my window boxes, all my pots, everything died over the vacation. I had a few boxes down stairs that survived the heat and vandals (damn you kids!) and it was a bit embarrassing and I needed a refresh right quick. So the downstairs stoop got almost all new plants and two of my window boxes got a thorough reboot. I'm moving the downstairs boxes that are hanging on the railing up to our floor (someone just keeps walking by, pulling out plants and putting them back down).

One of these is obviously a "before" picture. Can you guess which one?

Colorado Pictures

2009-09-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Just in case you think I left my brain in Colorado, here are a few beautiful pictures to reassure that my brain might be there but at least its happy looking at the pretty pretty sky.

Marni took me to Colorado National Monument early in the morning (before it got too hot). She used to work there and kept teasing me with little nooks and crannies making me wish (more than I already was) that I could stay there for a month, snuggle with her dog, and be her nanny for the upcoming Meyorac bundle of joy.

Here's Marni all adorably knocked up!

And in case you're not jealous of Marni's town of residence, here is her kick ass dog (who doesn't attack people like her last one) who's only flaw is her attempt to smoother you with love and the great cowgirl sheets you get to sleep on in her guest room!

I then drove to Basalt to have lunch with Casady, another good friend from undergrad. All I can say is that it amazes me how close I can still be to people even if I haven't seen them in 10 years. The drive, as always, was spectacular and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a place to spend a few days in a car.

After lunch, I stopped in at Glenwood Springs to soak in the giant hotsprings. The summer rush was over and I just laid around, napping, soaking, napping, getting a pedicure, and soaking some more. I always get out of that place like a wet noodle. If you've never been imagine 3 olympic sized pools put together and filled with 100 degree mineral water. Its heaven.

Next stop, Ben's place in Vail.

Colorado Vacation

2009-09-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

I've been hesitant to write about my Colorado adventures. When people asked me about my vacation I tell them that it was "rejuvinating" and that is very true. It was incredibly invigorating but it was also emotional. I went to undergrad in Colorado (Go Tigers!) and hopping in my car and driving the long stretches of mountainous highways was my escape from the laughably ridiculously easy life of an undergraduate student. Those years were some of the hardest of my life and criss crossing the state, driving 70 miles an hour while singing at the top of my lungs has always been cathatric and inspirational. Its hard to make your emotions the center of the universe when staring at 14K mountains, faults, and breathtaking ravines. I always feel a bit like I'm tumbling to the center of the earth and feeling small and tiny in the universe is almost always a cure for what ales me.

I needed this. I needed time alone, in a car, Bon Jovi and Kenny Rogers in the CD player, singing, wind in my hair, feeling like I was being sucked down into geological time to begin to confront all that has happened in the past two years. The death, the life, the changes, all of it and after a relaxing week of vacation in Seattle, it weighed down on me like never before. And I cried, howled, yelled, and belted my heart out from Grand Junction to Denver and arrived, at the end of my week raw and exposed but feeling more like myself than I had in fifteen months. And that is exactly why I went there. I also can't really tell how but I know that I've been profoundly changed by all of this but in a way, feel that those changes have made me more mellow, less judgmental, and completely unable to process negative things that happen around me.

After my Colorado vacation, I arrived home very excited about my life. Completely and totally in love with my husband, very thankful for my family, and very appreciative of my friends. I've been excited to exercise again (after about a year of being a lazy bum) and impatient with myself for not replacing our stove earlier so that I can get back to cooking. All of this new found energy makes me excited to be alive, grateful for those around me, and so goddamn pissed off that I can't share it with two people who meant so much to me. Yup, the highs are high, the lows are low, but the middle has smoothed out considerably.

Colorado

2009-09-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

Haven't written up the colorado portion of my trip but there are lots of pics up on my flickr account, just in case you're wondering.

Screw the Tesla

2009-09-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

I'm buying myself one of these for my birthday. When I was in Denver last January, I decided to rent a GPS system for the car and now on this trip I've gotten one for our Seattle and Colorado rental cars. They are awesome and take the guess work out of navigating a new place. May I also recommend the british lady as your guide, the American voices are both very judgemental and the australian is totally garbled and not at all kicky and spunky like I was hoping for. The British lady, she sure knows how to give directions and she says "Recalculating" in the sweetest voice that assures you "I will get you where you need to know despite the fact that you do not know your left from your right."

Happy 3rd Anniversary!

2009-09-09T09:59:00.001-07:00

Seattle Continued

2009-09-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

That night we head over to Tom and Marisa's house for a dinner party. It was one of those dinner parties you fantasized about when you thought of your early 30's: fascinating people, great food, plenty of wine, and that warm, glowing feeling of just enjoying your new friends. It turns out that Marisa grew up around the block from us and frequently visits her mom so there is hope we may get to see this lovely couple again!

For our last day in Seattle, I met my sorority sister for breakfast and once again thanked a higher power for such incredible people in my life. Ashley was close friends with Adam, my friend who died in January, and once discussed him, we slipped back into old times. She too is a science teacher and a professional singer on the side.

I should write a whole post about how incredible it is to reconnect with old friends. It makes me tear up just thinking about how much it means to me to know that my relationships with these people are just as they once were. They are uniformly exactly the same as before but have aged and matured into even more interesting, caring people.

So after breakfast, we head back over to the farmers market to grab provisions for the evening and then hustle to a 1:30 showing of District 9. See it, its awesome!

The four of us make a feast and enjoy the lobster mushroom crostinis again. I bake some peaches and introduce them to the wonders of baked stone fruit with vanilla ice cream and a balsamic reduction. And we just sit back and wait for the evening.

After dinner, we run across the street to Bliss Soaps, a kooky, crazy store that specialized is bath products. I'm not one for perfumed soaps but it was worth it to meet the shop keeper, a kooky, crazy guy who seems to be a bit of a Seattle icon. We bought a few things for ourselves and stashed the rest of the goods throughout Jon and Malory's apartment with little thank you notes.

I had a 7am flight so went to bed, sad to see my time in Seattle over. Next stop, Colorado.

Seattle

2009-09-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've been stalking the city of Seattle for a few years now. When I was still considering academia I thought of doing a postdoc with a favorite researcher out there and have always been fascinated with the city. I also read their alternative weekly paper The Stranger in the form of the Slog for the best arts coverage I've found anywhere. I know all about Seattle's mayoral primaries, book stores, snow storms, traffic woes and neighborhoods (creepy, I know) but had never been. So here's a quick summary of our trip:

Our good friends run the Puget Sound Aikaiki and the husband was excited about taking an aikido class the first morning we were there. The dojo is right across the canal from Freemont so I wandered around the bike path down there, watched the bridge go up and down, and wandered the streets of Freemont.

After the classes we joined the group for a nice dinner at a Belgian Beer Hall across the bridge. Apparently our friends were a bit worried that we wouldn't fit in with their closeknit group (mostly coders for microsoft) but I embarrassed myself immediately by referencing a Stargate episode and out dorked the dorks. I sometimes forget that my type of dork (science) isn't the only type of dork out there so I spent the rest of the evening saying vapid things about Lady Gaga and Ted Kennedy.

The next morning I met a friend from grad school for an early breakfast at Volunteer Park Cafe at 17th and Galer. Totally unbeknownst to me I had to walk right by Dan Savage's house (the writer who lives in Seattle) in order to get to where I was going.

This required me to walk through the Capitol Hill neighborhood, one of the most architechtually interesting places I've ever been.

After breakfast, we loaded up a picnic and headed to the beach. Now its not a swimming beach but people just kind of hang around on the rocky sand and do stuff. At this point I've just accepted that every time I open my eyes I will see a stunning incredible view of Seattle but here are some pictures to show you:

We also saw the most rediculous hipster that has ever burned my eyeballs. He was fishing in a 1920s style onesie bathing suit. The suit was bright red stripe with a green butt flap and fanny pack. It was an incredible specimen and blew the Brooklyn hipsters out of the water. Pick it up Brooklyn!

I'm not sure what we did for the remainder of the afternoon but I can assure you it probably consisted of hanging out, having interesting conversations and just generally basking in the warmth of our friendships.

I believe it was that evening when we went to Poppy, a relatively new restaurant on Broadway and Roy. Here's their website They set up a series of tastes, think little ramikens on a round tray, and you order one of 4 or 5 of the selections. Mine had little pickles, string beans and shallots, a lobster mushroom lasagna, a beet salad, some icky tomatoes, and the best gosh darn thing I've ever tasted (sorry roasted cauliflower soup from Blue Hill) a sweet corn soup with lemon and thyme. It was a perfect blend of sweet and savory with a really smooth consistency. I really wanted to order more of it for dessert. We rolled out of there so happy and stuffed with a couple of new tastes for us to think about.

Out of respect for my marriage I will not post pictures of what we did the next day but it was silly and rediculous. Malory suggested that we head out to a 13th Century village living museum complete with costumes from her friend Staci. So we pile in the car (with Jonathan dressed half in his version of 13th C clothing and half as a samurai) and don Staci's renaissance/elizabethan/ye olde oldey timey costumes. Malory and I are both in complete head to toe and Peter has thrown on a pirate tunic and large floppy hat complete with giant feather. Staci, the master of this plan, decides she's not going to dress up but throws on a very silly red wig and informs us that this really isn't a festival like we originally thought but just a place where they show you with it is like at that time period. No one but the people who work there will be in costume, including her.

So we get in the car, drive there and wander around in the rain. We have a quick and surprisingly good meal, a few glasses of mead and spiced wine and talk to the "villagers" about their crafts. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without the mead or costumes though I have to say I was really happy to get that corset and 20 yards of wet velvet off my body.

To Good Friends We've Lost Along the Way

2009-09-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

Not Too Shabby

2009-09-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

An outside shot of the cottage and the view from the front yard

Spidey Sense

2009-09-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Our little cottage

2009-09-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

We Finally Do Something, but Not Really

2009-09-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we drove through Moran State Park and up to the top of Mount Constitution. It was rainy with the road haunted by clouds that made me sure that no view waited for us at the top. When we reached the top, we were greeted by a warm and cozy gift shop, a 1933 WPA look out tower and a beautiful misty view of Mt. Baker, the Twin Sisters, and promises that Canada lay to the west even if it was obscured by thick clouds. It was one of the more beautiful vistas I’ve seen (aren’t they all though?). There is a certain generic quality to everything here: pine trees piercing the misty, haunting clouds, jet black water swirling among the intricately shaped islands, dots of white sails making they way through the archeapelago. It reminds me of the Met’s impression gallery where I spent many hours wandering around, shrugging my shoulders and just accepting that through the painters eyes, everything is routinely and uniformly beautiful.

We did just enough hiking for me (and my flipflops) and drove back down though the clouds and intermittent rain. We once again, stopped in Eastsound and drove back home to our books, and dinner of steak, potatoes, and roasted beets and a bottle of Chimay we picked up in town. It continued to rain through the evening though we were treated to a beautiful sunset. Its quite chilly and we bundled up against the cold and as usual, headed to bed around 9.

Wearing a hole in my sweatpants

2009-09-03T20:11:00.002-07:00

I’m always a bit embarrassed when I return from this type of vacation and admit to my friends that I did absolutely nothing. In case you are caught in judgment consider that it has been quite chilly (low 60s) and rainy the past two days and even in the best of weather there isn’t a lot to do around here. We could kayak, rent a sail boat, or go whale watching but all of those things sound either cold or guaranteed to make me puke (don’t think I don’t remember those Montauk whale watching ‘be sure to puke through the scupper’ trips as a child”). We could also hike but don’t have the right gear.

To be honest, this part of vacation was designed to do nothing, to sit on the porch or lounge around in bed reading, sitting tea, and refilling the bathtub with more hot water when it cooled too much. It’s been a long time since our last vacation and we need 4 days of sweatpants, noses in books, and lazy all day meals. If I feel adventurous I can just sit up and look at the silly honking burrows, toss the ball to Quincy (who is a terrible partner at fetch since he doesn’t understand “drop it”) or occasionally meander outside to take obsessive photos of the lichens or flowers that grace our front porch.

Each day, around 1, we’ve gotten up and drove to Eastsound, a town of about 20 shops on the other side of the island to grab lunch, pick up some provisions, and download the NY Times to my phone and let Peter check his work email. We are blissfully without cell or internet service.

Lobster Mushroom Crostini

2009-09-03T20:11:00.001-07:00

We had grand plans for dinner, a mushroom crostini, large salad, pickled cucumbers, and a nice grass-fed steak that we picked up at the Farmers market in Seattle but it was derailed by these absolutely perfect mushrooms.

I know very little about mushrooms and asked the farmer at the market to recommend his favorite. He had obviously been asked that question before and replied, “What do you like to cook?” I had improvised a mushroom puff pastry before and explained what I was thinking about and he steered me towards these grotesque, bright red lobster mushrooms. They look like giant tumors, only more so and he explained that they weren’t mushrooms but fungi that grew on mushrooms. He also explained that they had a fishy (ugh!) odor and when we sniffed them I recoiled in agreement. He also pulled out a recipe sheet and explained that if we were to buy them we had to buy a small piece of cheese from the guy at the next booth. This type of salesmanship is right up Peter’s ally and I think he shouted ‘Sold” and looked at me expectantly. In a show of good faith, and to make up for my years of proclaiming that I didn’t like avacados, salsa, shrimp, fish, and “sauses”, I bought them and the cheese and hurried my way.

Now that we were locked in a small cabin 20 minutes from the nearest food store I was faced with the fishy parasitic mushrooms. I prepped them, Peter sautéed them, and we devoured every last bite (including the bits I dropped on the grass) while watching the sunset over the mountain, warming ourselves on the rocks and their last bit of daytime heat, and laughing at ourselves.

After the sun finally set, the temperature dropped about 30 degrees and we hustled inside to make out steak. We were so full we skipped the steak and ate just a small salad with bacon, eggs, and the bits of fried garlic generated from the garlic oil that graced the lobster mushrooms.

Lobster Mushroom Crostini

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees

½ lb Lobster mushrooms, cleaned and diced
½ a baguette, sliced horizontally, with some of the bread hollowed out
4 tbs olive oil
4 cloves garlic, pressed through a garlic press
Enough seastack cheese sliced thin to cover about ½ of the break

Add the pressed garlic and olive oil to a cold pan. Turn the heat on to medium, occasionally stirring to break up the garlic until it turns a dark golden color. Strain the garlic and catch the oil.

Brush the baguette slices with 2 tbs of the garlic oil and toast in the oven until they are golden brown. Wipe out the sauté pan and add the remaining tbs to the pan and heat over medium. Add the diced mushrooms and sauté until soft. Remove from the heat and season with salt and pepper. Slice the cheese and lay on the bread, allowing it to melt a bit. Spoon on the mushroom mix.

If I were to make this again I would most likely dice the cheese and mix it thoroughly with the mushrooms to ensure an even mix in each bite. Peter thought there was too much cheese and I thought there was too little.

I’m not sure what Seastack cheese it other than a soft ripened pasteurized cow’s milk. It has an ash layer under its rind. I suspect this would work just as well with a mild goat cheese.

That is All

2009-09-03T20:10:00.001-07:00

Peter thinks they sound like donkeys, I think they sound like alien war birds.

Murders of Crows

2009-09-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

The rest of the day wasn’t half bad either. We laid around reading until about 10am when we got up and I made some steak and egg sandwiches with the most wonderful toasted brioche rolls I bought at the famers market in Seattle. I contemplated going down to the harbor to rent some kayaks but got seduced by the relaxation.

We did venture into Eastsound where sat on the water and ate a lunch of questionable provenance. I guess this part of the island is known for its crows and we were constantly circled by the ominiously named “murder” of crows through lunch. After lunch we picked up more provisions (there is nothing on our harbor) and took the long route home over Crow Valley Road. The island has obvious agrigrarian roots and much of the interior valley land is still employed. There are sheep, goats, and horses all over the place and it feels primordial like Muir Woods.

We got back, took a nap, and have been sitting out on our little front deck drinking wine and reading for a few hours. I tried to sneak up on the donkeys to scare them into braying but had no luck. I’m not sure whether the owner wants us over there but I’m certain he doesn’t want anyone harassing the donkeys, especially the one that’s wound too tight.

Day Two- F$%king Donkeys

2009-09-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

Day two started off with a starling reminder as to why chickens and sleeping late don’t go together. The rooster started at 5:30. Luckily I went to bed around 9pm and was ready to get back to reading in a vain attempt to go back to sleep. While the chickens roused me from my sleep, it was the booming otherworldly bray of the resident burrows that scared the shit out of me and shocked my system full of adrelenin. I’ve heard donkeys bray, it’s a funny, odd sound. But this was the noise that sound editors choose when they want to convey a creature so terrifying that it would make you pop your cyanided pill. (Not sure if you saw “Contact” but there is a scene where they give Jodie Foster’s character a cyanide capsule for those terrifying alien torture methods us earthlings can’t imagine”. And by the way, those terrifying aliens would sound like these burrows. One makes a sort of sad squeaky bed spring noise but the other is a deafening resonating honk with slo-mo, high pitched squeeking and squeeling.

I should also note that the one that makes the horrible noise is kind of a jerk, kicks the other one and is a hunchback. Their life is pretty boring, they stand around and eat grass with the occasional human, dog, fox or snake to bray at. My guess, the quiet one has normal donkey intelligence and the jerky has superdonkey intelligence, and his cry is a reaction to his sad life as a hunchback donkey.

Once we acclimated to the noise, I got out of bed, made some coffee and sat outside to watch the sun rise. The owner was out working (feeding the fucking donkeys) and let Quincy out. Quincy and I bonded yesterday and he immediately curled up around my bare feet, let out the most content doggy sigh, and watched the sky color with the morning.

Day One - not edited for grammar

2009-09-03T20:07:00.000-07:00

Day 1 did not start out well. We managed to get ourselves to the airport by 5:30am only to find that Peter had an assigned seat but that I did not. As a seasoned (but usually lucky) traveler, I knew that this was trouble and in my early morning stupor I predicted that this would ruin our vacation. We had some really bad luck on our last vacation and once we hit this little hiccup, I was sure our bad luck would be revisited.

But the good luck held and I was assigned a seat about 2 minutes before boarding was to start. The flight was unexciting, though I did enjoy a rewatch of Star Trek, and we disembarked in Seattle. Once we got our sattelite navigation system (which took a few laps around the airport to kick in), we were on our way to a quick luck with Jon and Mallory.

I choose Seattle because I had never been here but actually more because I wanted to spend time with Jon and Mallory. They are actually Peter’s friends but I just adore them. We stayed with them in Paris a few years ago and adding them to our vacation was just about as much of a guarantee that one could ask for.

I wasn’t until we arrived at their house and were seated at their table that I finally believed that this vacation was going to happen. See my last vacation, 4 days in Spain with Abby, was cancelled by work and I guess I’ve gotten a bit gun shy about taking time off.

Anywho, lunch was great, a quick homemade pasta sauce with Italian sausage faux tofu and beers for the non-drivers. Jon suggested we pick up some supplies at the farmers market and I knew that I was in heaven. We picked up the usual suspects of veggies, greens, and berries with a flank steak, some heavely bread, cheese, and a lobster mushroom. Jon and I discussed the Seattle style of farmers market chic (a large handled basket) vs Brooklyn style graphic bags as I emptied my wallet and filled my bags.

We said goodbye (for now) to Seattle and made our way up Route 5 to Anacortes ferry terminal. Our ferry was 2 hours late so we had some time to kill. At first blush the ferry terminal is quaint but after about 10 minutes the shine is off the apple and it is quite obviously the Port Authority Bus Terminal of ferry terminals. It functional, outdated, and would be described as “quaint and charming” by a real estate listing. But the locals obviously knew how to enjoy themselves and pulled out folding chairs, blankets, beers and sandwiches and picnicked on the strips of grass and asphalt overlooking the Sound.

To amuse ourselves (since we didn’t have anything but raw meat and produce and a Volvo) we wandered into the little café and some bad sandwiches and enjoyed, in my opinion, two of the best mini cookies I have ever eaten.

The ferry ride was smooth and as Peter enjoyed his hard earned beer, I wandered the decks trying to stay out of the biting wind and get some pictures. This is exactly what I imagined it to look like, craggy islands spiked with pine trees, sail boats cutting across the water, and a few dramatic, snow capped peaks reminding me that it had been a wise choice not to bring anything sturdier than a running shoe. I’ll just say this and be clear, I really don’t like hiking uphill or actually doing anything uphill so just having running shoes means that I can’t get talked into hiking and that, to me, is a wise strategic choice.

The ferry takes about an hour and dropped us off in Orcas, which is a ferry terminal, small shop, and that’s about it. The drive to our cottage took us along the water, winding through small farmsteads, and through a few tiny marinas. This place isn’t remote or rural, its just very sparsly populated. We had lost cell service about 30 minutes into the ferry ride but Peter kept announcing the magical appearance and reappearance of the 3G network, which wouldn’t connect him with his email but would let him make a few phone calls.

After driving by our cottage a few times (hey look at those tourists in that giant white Volvo) we pulled in to discover a sincerely charming cottage on about 5 acres with a few other buildings, a view of the water, and a house dog (available for petting and catch whenever I have the time) name Quincy. I’m sure there will be many many pictures of Quincy.

I also noted that there were chickens. I actually squealed “Chickens” and Peter, being the one with a keener sense of how these things play out, sneared “chickens” and I think “you just wait”. That’s for day 2 though.

We got back in the car and headed to Eastsound, a town of about 10 shops all of which were charming, quaint, and overpriced and managed to grab a few essentials like olive oil, beer, and wine. My friend, who stayed her a few weeks ago told me that there were provisions on the island but I’m here to tell you, they are meager though their wine selection was plentiful and beer selection generously tilted towards local beers.

We finished the evening with a giant salad on our little deck, a glass of wine, and an early bedtime after a long day of traveling.

Just in case you think this is all a fairy tale, let me remind you of the chickens and, as an added bonus, randy burrows who seem to honk and bray in an attempt to tell the rooster “hey, its 5:30am give us a break”.

Things I want for my birthday...

2009-08-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

My birthday is just around the corner and I thought I would list a few, simply gifts in case you're sick of buying me books and wine. In no particular order:

A Tesla- We saw a review of this well priced car on "Top Gear" last week and it sold me on electric cars. Not only could we scoot around Park Slope, we could do it with all the smugness and piety of a prius owner while being able to drag race down Hamilton Ave. I prefer grey or black. I would also like to share my birthday with the guys from Top Gear if at all possible.

Tesla Motors

I need a new chair for our reading nook. Something mid-century danish would be nice.

Here is a reasonably priced alternative to an original

I have decided that I really like chunky cocktail rings, Abby has a few and they are pretty great. I have a tendency to wait about 3 years after something has become fashionable so I'd like to be proactive this year and have someone buy me one of these. Blue is my favorite color...

This is only a suggestion, my only requirements are platnium and blue stone

Now that I've put my dad's lenses through their paces I'd like another one of my very own. We've been wishing for a wide angle lens for the cameras and this would be a nice companion. I of course want the most expensive one, but let's be honest, they are all pretty damn expensive.

Just consider it a downpayment on your christmas photos, which I will take for you for life

OMG

2009-08-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

Excuse my txt speak but these bookshelves are freaking huge. That's me, sitting in the bookshelf. They are finishing up today after having to perform all sorts of surgery to get the shelves level on our floor.

So Sleepy

2009-08-10T19:07:00.001-07:00

So I've actually made good progress on my nesting list, especially today. I painted the bathroom a nice blue/grey and then began installing the bookshelves. The funny part of the project, at least to me, is how different it is in my head than it is in my living or bath room. The bathroom is still a bit dark and sad compared to the cheery yellow and the base of the bookshelves look enormous, like they could swallow our house.

I would much rather make a mistake on the paint color than the bookshelves!

On a totally random note, I got the first tomatoes from the garden and booked our Seattle vacation!

wash basins

2009-07-31T16:41:00.000-07:00

Nesting

2009-07-31T16:17:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to post this until I told me husband but I've been nesting. Hard. Like I can't work because I'm thinking about paint colors nesting. We've lived here for over a year and aside from paint and the floors we really haven't done anything. This week, we agreed upon a design for our built-in bookshelves and that triggered 31 (almost 32!!!) years of pent up interior design from someplace deep within my soul.

But listen. I don't have very good taste. And, and this is important to know about me, I can basically be talked into liking anything if you try for 1-2 minutes and ask nicely. I'm fickle, have poor taste, and insist on doing everything on the cheap. Luckily for my husband, I am also plagued by an utter lack of confidence and am easily distracted by shiny things, white wine, and my own feet. I am also lucky in that my husband has wonderful taste. I think he would roll his eyes at my declaration but we still love and use everything he had when I met him and my stuff never made it out of my last apartment. His style seems to be mellow colors, lots of wood, and clean lines. My "style" is a bit, well, its better not to think about other than imagining a dyslexic fairy princess threw up after a particularily large meal at Ikea and Kmart. Think granny shabby with impulsive color choices.

Anyway, nesting. I made a list. And some stuff I can do by myself (keeping in mind that the husband should and does have executive veto power). I wanted to start in the bathroom. It has navy tile, white fixtures, high ceilings, and a huge window. It is currently a bright yellow. It is important to note that we are not super neat people so while I love an all white bathroom, it isn't the best idea.

I was envisioning light grey walls, paint the currently pine cabinets glossy white, and then change out the plywood/formica vanity for something with clean lines that's made out of wood. Maybe some sage green highlights (like I'll keep the succulents in there).

So for this room I want:
- new window coverings
- vanity
- light
- coat of paint

A quick garden update

2009-07-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

While I haven't been cooking I have been gardening. I've been struggling with a plague of green aphids all spring and summer and have had to find plants that they don't want to eat. They pop up very quickly and will destroy a window box of plants if I'm not careful. And they're really pretty gross!

I put in a bunch of planters on street level and those seem to be doing alright. They're quite pretty and they haven't been knocked over yet.

Here's what doing well:

Basil (only one pot this year)
Patio Tomatoes are just about to turn red
Herbs
Flowers
My little box of succulents

My cucumbers are quite dead. I was hoping that they would grow onto the existing ivy vines and take up residence but that never really worked.

The broccoli and cauliflower did really well until a few weeks ago but then bolted in the heat. I'll try again in the fall.

Egads!

2009-07-30T04:58:00.000-07:00

I've had this fantasy my whole life: I want a wall of bookshelves so tall and massive that it towers over me and makes me feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of pages. If there is one thing that defines me it is my great love of reading and the idea of having a place for all of my books makes me incredibly happy. So when we bought our apartment we wanted to put in some bookshelves.

And after a few months of dithering, we finally picked out some wood, settled on a design, and ordered them for a carpenter down in Red Hook. I've been nesting pretty strongly since we bought this place and this is just one of many relatively small projects that we want to do to make this place seem more like home.

The next project, potentially taking down a wall or knocking through the roof, will be a bit bigger. But maybe, if my stepsister is free, she can help me change out a few light fixtures, which would be, well, less messy.

LBI

2009-07-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

Every year my family rents a house in LBI and both my husband and I made it down for about 48 hours. I spend almost the entire time sitting inside reading and avoiding the sun while he organizes an army of small children to build a fortress against the incoming tide.

A Little Test

2009-07-06T18:05:00.001-07:00

I told one of my coworkers that she had to read "Cryptonomicon" and she asked me back "What else do you like? I have to know whether to trust your recommendation, so what other type of fiction do you like?" I've been stuck on non-fiction for a while now but I'm sure I've read some good, non-embarrassing to admit fiction but I had to check.

Here are some of my favorites. Some are achingly good, other whitty, amusing, and fun. Some, like, #12, symbolize a particular time in my life but I still think are excellent books. As I look over the list, I realize that I love historical fiction with a saucy main character and very descriptive writing. I also realize that my list is biased because it is stuff that has managed to stay on my shelf. I'm a giver of books and that means I often foist my favorites on unsuspecting dinner guests.

1. John Irving, "A Prayer for Owen Meany"
2. Michael Chabon, "The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay"
3. Edward P. Jones, "The Known World" (breathtaking)
4. Tim O'brien- The Things They Carried
5. George RR Martin - the first three of that series
6. Chris Moore- Bloodsucking Fiends is my favorite but he's best known for Lamb
7. Kate Atkinson - Scenes from a Museum and any of the Jackson Brody Series
8. Caleb Carr- The Alienist
9. Richard Russo- Straight Man
10. Tania French - The Likeness
11. Nicholas Krauss- A History of Love
12. Nicholas Christopher- A Trip to the Stars

For a little perspective, I'm currently reading an autobiography of Madeline Albright, Salt, and a book called "Hilter's Scientists". I'm in a bit of a non-fiction jag it seems but I could use a heartbreakingly beautiful fiction book. I haven't read one since A History of Love or The Known World.

4th of July

2009-07-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

We had grand plans for this weekend, BBQs, fireworks, friends, and sun but this damn flu got in the way. We're still sick, and not just a little sick, still really sick and it meant that we didn't do anything but be sick all weekend.

Luckily, we have a great view of the fireworks from our roof. Not only could we see the fireworks on the Hudson, we could see them all around the Harbor. I'm not really fond of fireworks but it was great to see all the small town fireworks across NJ and imagine all of the family and friends huddled together, "ohhinh" and "ahhing" together as we watched from our roof.

We were also treated to a beautiful sunset!

Home Sick X2

2009-07-01T18:54:00.001-07:00

My husband was on a business trip last week and came home with a wicked flu, which he kindly shared with me. We've been home sick together for the past day and a half. I have to admit its a bit weird. When I'm home sick I want to be alone, lounging on the couch, being my grossest and not worrying about anything. When you home sick with someone you care about your torn between using your hair as a tissue and running around trying to make soup. Luckily, our flues seem to balance out and when my fever is up, his is down. We also have two bedrooms so his death rattle/ garbage disposal cough doesn't interfere with my honking canadian goose cough.

I've been steadily getting better since my fever broke late this morning while his flu has bought real estate in his lungs. I can hopefully get back to work tomorrow and he can go back to being sick without his wife fluttering around him, honking in his ear and offering to get soup and he doesn't have to feel like he needs to take care of me.

Cracks in the Sidewalk

2009-06-28T17:56:00.001-07:00

One of the things that I love about urban living is how, despite our best efforts, life always invades our cement paradise. In the spring, all of the dreary industrial wastelands bloom and are overcome with exuberant plant life forcing itself upon the landscape. I feel a kinship with those plants in the cracks of the sidewalk and try to find a new place to stick a plant whenever I can.

I'd been looking for some planters that I could hang over the railing in front of the building and finally found them out in NJ. I also picked up some new and different plants to go in them. This was my first attempts to purchase plants that would look nice together. Unfortunately the planters and their plants do little to mask the ugly garbage cans and barren street corner where we live. I may consider buying some more but they are expensive and there is little to prevent the local teenagers from stealing or destroying them.

I've been thinking a lot about a deck and wondering what I could do up there in its current state. The roof is totally blank with and I wouldn't feel comfortable putting anything up there for fear it would damage the roof. Its also windy as hell and I would be worried that things would fly off. Regardless, I get credit for trying...

More Pretty Pink

2009-06-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

Ab brought these beauties to our dinner party and I snapped some shots of them last week. I'm tempted to blow them up, perhaps 8 X 10 and frame them. Their color is so rich but they are so princessy I'm not sure I can justify it. Maybe they could go in my office at work...

Succulents

2009-06-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

My succulents made it through the winter and are flowering.

First Summer Feast

2009-06-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Happy First Feast of the summer! We had many feasts last summer and this kicks off the first of 2009! I feel like I need to make up for my lame start to OLS and throw an almost entirely local feast. To make it more difficult, my oven is broken (though the broiler works). To increase the degree of difficulty even further, I have invited my friend who is allergic to wheat, soy, most dairy, eggs, and red meat. Couple that with making it an OLS meal and you have your challenge.

Luckily, I am a member of the food co-op in my neighborhood and they go out of their way to stock local, organic food. When I went shopping this morning I stopped at the co-op first with the intention of picking everything else up at the farmers market. Luckily, I found everything I needed (and then some) at the co-op. Park Slope, our utopian yuppie sanctuary is one of those places that follows Michael Pollen's every dictate so even our delis and overpriced markets carry more local than most places. That made my local task easier but didn't help me with my oven or my friend's food allergy.

Starters:
Cheeses
Ewe's Blue - Old Chatham (NY)
Tilsit - Brovetto Dairy (NY)
Hawthorne Valley Alpine Reserve (NY)

Mozzarella (Russo's on 7th Ave), Basil (our fire escape), tomatoes (hothouse tomatoes labeled "from New England")

Salsa (made at Union Market on 7th) and Chips (not local)

Main Course:

Roasted Chicken (PA) with homemade pesto under the skin, stuffed with local shallots and garlic and herbs from our window boxes (lemons not local)

Beets (New Jersey) with Goat Cheese (Do, Ri Me Farm, Poughkeepsie NY)

Baby greens (our planter box), beet greens (our windowsill), and local lettuces with kirby cucumbers (NJ) and cherry tomatoes (PA)

Roasted Asparagus (NJ)

Dessert:

Flourless Chocolate Cake
- Chocolate from Mast Bros. - made in Brooklyn
- Flour from King Arthur Flour - VT
- Butter from VT
- Sugar that's not local

Basil, Strawberry Honey Frozen Yogurt

- Basil from our fire escape
- Plain yogurt from Old Chatham Farms
- Honey from my mom in NJ

Chocolate Covered Strawberries
- Strawberries from NY
- Mast Brother's chocolate (Brooklyn)

Have you met TED?

2009-06-19T04:53:00.001-07:00

One of my coworkers turned my on to the TED talks last year. They are short videos of really smart people talking about interesting things, well, sometimes the people are pretty boring. One TED talk that gotten a lot of attention lately is Clay Shirky's talk about how twitter, facebook, and text messaging has changed journalism. It is well timed to offer some prescient insights into the uprising in Iran but interesting even out of that context. The link is below, if you've got 15 minutes to kill, I recommend it as an introduction to these mediums.

Clay Shirky's TED talk

My IKEA Hack

2009-06-17T05:28:00.000-07:00

I spend much of my free time drooling over apartment therapy and wishing I had any design sense or taste. Luckily my husband has excellent taste and design sense but he is not often with me when I get a bee in my bonnet to "decorate". In fact, some of the most frightening words that my husband ever had to hear is "I'm going to IKEA". Usually I come home with $150 of stuff with unprounancable names and limited utility and while this last trip on Monday was no exception, I did come home with a few things to spruce up the fire escape.

We were told by our insurance company that we couldn't have flower pots (or tree beds) on the fire escape. I took down the tree bed (well my husband did most of the work) but have repopulated the tiny space with flower pots filled with basil, tomatoes, mint, our lemon tree named Plant, and some flowers. My thinking is that they are removable so don't count? You can see that in addition to lacking taste and a design sense, my logic can often be suspect as well.

Regardless, I saw a quick piece on apartment therapy about using some small IKEA utensil holders as planters on the iron bars of an apartment. I picked up some metal ones but knew I would need to modify them in some way to make it work. Luckily they already had holes drilled in the bottom (vital for planters).

I removed the pot from its metal bracket and stuck the bracket through the vertical metal bars just above the cross bar. I then passed a bamboo skewer through the hook and used tension to hold the bracket in place. I then potted the plants in the pots and hung them on the metal brackets.

And there you have it, a very simple, not bad looking way to increase your plant real estate. My one suggestion would be to use something darker than bamboo since it sticks out a bit.