A Few of My Favorite Things...

When you move, somehow, everyone seems to automatically find out about it - except for the post office, of course; all your catalogs are instantly re-routed and you get promotional offers from just about every home-related industry. Anyway, a couple of these coupons were too good to waste, and spurred me on to the hardware store to put them to good use. I picked up a few nuts and bolts first (to reconstruct some pieces of furniture for which we'd lost parts in the move), but also found my new favorite kitchen toy - a plastic strainer that hooks onto the lip between two sinks! I have only had this about a month and I cannot tell you how useful it has been! One of my pet peeves when cooking is having to hold a strainer over the sink so it doesn't touch the bottom of the sink and get contaminated with raw chicken juice or whatever while avoiding dripping vegetables all over the floor as I transfer them over to a pot or bowl. Well, problem solved! I can leave vegetables straining here until they're dry and better yet, I can even point the faucet at them and have them rinse while I'm doing something else! Ah, modern conveniences, how I love you!

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My mom has been working on knitting this blanket for 15 years - probably since there were actually babies in the house to make one for! She finally picked it up again recently, after finding it balled up in storage... and, get this, actually finished it! After watching her tie up the loose ends over the holidays, I joked with her that this might be the first blanket that began as a baby blanket and ended as an old biddy blanket!

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I've been sleeping like a rock for the past few weeks, and I only partially attribute it to catching up on post-election missed sleep. The other key contributing factor has been this amazing pillow. I first learned about Pacific Coast when staying at a Marriott hotel years ago, having the most contented sleep, and eagerly digging through a series of pillow cases to identify the tag and pillow brand so I could get one myself. When visiting the website, I was initially deterred by how expensive they were. They range from 40 to hundreds of dollars depending on how many "chambers" you need in your pillow. But they have a package deal for the Down Surround pillows and my parents bought us these for my birthday this year. I am trying to get better about assessing purchase value based on how often I will use something, and this may be the best investment since I bought my SLR. It's like my own personal little cloud.

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It was Halloween this weekend, and neighborhoods around Boston celebrated not only the spooky holiday, but also their enthusiasm surrounding the upcoming election. In fact, we have been so inundated with information, sound bytes, advertising, and the Situation Room that it's pretty hard not to connect the election with just about everything else in our lives right now. Who knew there would come a day when I could watch three hours of CNN in a sitting? For the past week, I've woken up from dreams about the candidates and voting day scenarios. We are at the height of a precarious decision that could trigger impressive change. And I for one will likely be sleeping lightly 'till Tuesday night!

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Another great thing we did when we had our parents up was antiquing. Actually, I think that's maybe too glamorous a term for it - we were essentially wandering around sheds brushing the dust off old things in Essex, but it's always fun to pick up a "find" on the cheap, and Jason's mom got a great pair of old figure skates for her holiday display, so it was a success! In the yard area of one of the shops, I spotted this enormous old shipping rope - hard to imagine trying to tie something like this - and it reminded me of a gigantic python, all coiled around itself and about 4 or 5 inches in diameter. I am sharing this because I love the texure of this shot - who would have guessed there were so many greens to find in a piece of old, weathered rope?

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Maybe it's optimistic, but despite the still-cold weather and rumors of snowstorms prevailing in the Midwest, I stand convinced that we've finally hit spring here in New England. Technically, the spring equinox hit late last week and the quality of light has completely changed. If it's 6:30 at night and the sky is still blue, I consider us on the road to recovery, or... summer. Here's a fun still life of plant pots outside a brick chimney - patiently waiting to be filled for spring.

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The ground is always powder beneath you and oftentimes you can ski in the sunshine while still coasting on inches of snow. This is ski heaven... or so they say. I haven't attempted a slope since I steamrolled three perpendicular sets of skis on an accidental icy black diamond in Okemo, Vermont years back. Fast but deadly, I prefer to stay in more controlled environments, like the lodge. And that was my vantage point for this shot of the ski equipment parked outside a chair lift on Snow Basin mountain just north of Salt Lake City. Thank goodness for the telephoto lens.

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Ten toes in the air! One of the highlights of being here in Utah is getting the opportunity to meet my namesake for the first time. Little Pippa, or, "the pill," as she is affectionately called is the smiliest person I think I've ever met. The latest daughter of my college friend Jessica, she's ten times less cranky than me in the morning, but sports the same 'fro I had as a kid. The name's a bit of a liability - so susceptible to any nickname that begins with an "f" or a "phuh" as Jessica puts it - but I have a feeling she'll pull through just fine.

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For the past year, I've been collecting food photographs (many on this site) and gradually pulling together the recipes for family favorites that my parents have been cooking for decades now. There are many memories attached to the standard dishes my parents have always prepared, and I wanted to document them all in a customized cookbook. A while back, my friend Aimee referred me to a site called Blurb.com where you can create books within templates using your own photographs and text. I had these collected for a Christmas gift to them this year, and was generally very impressed with the quality of the photographs that printed and the overall quality of the book Blurb produces. I opted for hardcover, and even then, the book was very budget-friendly. Despite the rush to cook some of the straggling recipes (for photos) at the last minute, it was completely worth it! I'd heartily recommend this site.

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So we finally got festive. Against our combined will. Yes, it's the 22nd of December, but better late than never, right? And Martha Stewart I am not. I don't just mean that we don't deck the halls and leave spiced cider simmering on the stove. I mean I see carolers on the street and keep walking. We didn't get a tree this year, not even a 15-inch tall shrub of a tree like we usually do, in the hallowed spirit of conformity. It's hard to believe Christmas is already upon us. But... I was cleaning the apartment yesterday and found a set of tree lights, which I quickly strung up over the arch in the kitchen to get them out of the way. When I saw them lit, I got a rush of sentimentality... And when Jason brought these bubble lights in from Home Depot last weekend to create a lighting effect over the bookshelf, I had to laugh. He looked more holiday than I'd ever seen him, with a string of lights wrapped around his torso as he clowned around, dancing. I've found my Christmas tree. And the rhythm of the season is, indeed, gonna get you.

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And while we're on the subject of creative lasses, check out this great idea for carrying around your travel tissue packs that my friend Marissa implemented most beautifully here. But you don't need my domain pimping to realize what a quality investment her crafts are. These puppies sell themselves. She was raking in customers when we went to check her out at a local craft fair earlier this month. I was sold on this tissue carrier - I like my Kleenex clean, thanks very much - and some great handmade gift tags for the gift-giving season. She also makes gloroiusly colorful pillows that would be fantastic on any unpatterned sofa.

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My friend Steph sent me a beautiful poem wrapped up in this hilarious box. The box also contained a delicious-looking bottle of Champagne, but I've never received a gift before plastered (no pun intended) with a warning note like this one for the shipper not to "deliver to an intoxicated person." I wonder if it's shipping company policy to ask the recipient to walk a straight line and touch his finger to his nose. Luckily, I received the package while on the job. ;)

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Speaking of Halloween, this year I went as "Get in Shape Girl!" from the 80s. "Get in Shape Girl" was not a person, or any representation of a person, cartoon or otherwise, for that matter. Rather, it was a marketing gimmick designed to turn impressionable elementary-aged schoolgirls into aerobics teacher wannabes. Sadly, I couldn't dig up my old logo-ed leg warmers, sweat bands, and weightless dumbbells from decades ago, and only had a pair of faded legwarmers from college dance classes to work from. But I re-worked a pair of pink fluffy bootie socks from Walgreens into this accessory set and stapled on my memory of the logo! A guy at the bar asked me if I was wearing a costume.

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Here's another show-and-tell from my latest art class. I was excited because this week we actually got to paint! I know that sounds odd, since it is, after all, a painting class, but our teacher is much more into understanding what we've been thinking about, what we're interested in, and how we're approaching the architecture, and sometimes we barely get time to pull out our supplies. Call me impatient, but with only eight hours total in the course, I was eager to stop talking and pick up a paintbrush!

The class and the process of putting aside a few hours every week to concentrate on process has already paying off though. This week, I focused on the concept of redrawing an object over and over and over again until it becomes so familiar that it gets more proportionate each time - without having to do so much tweaking. This is particularly important for architecture. I was doing that with the two Taj Mahals above (the right one was the later version) as well as experimenting with color.

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Yesterday, Jason became my very own Xzibit. Or automedic, or whetever you call someone who brings the life back to your eighteen-year-old, four-wheeled, hunk of sentimentality. After hearing me mention several times now my many tactics for getting my car to start on the first try, he thought it might be a good idea to change out the air fiter. When he saw the black lung that had been choking my car for, well, potentially the last sixteen years, he ran back up to the kitchen to show me. I felt like a smoker in health class. I guess I've committed one of the cardinal sins of car maintenance, but I'll admit to having a very small idea of how these things work... why oh why are we not forced to learn these things in high school?

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Well, I've finally learned how to keep plants alive (regular watering - who knew?), which relates to how I caused this rather unseemly watermark on our brand-new butcher block counter top. However, I did look up a trick for lifting it, and it worked! This was news to me, but apparently, placing a white cloth over a watermark on wood and holding a hot iron on the cloth for several seconds, for several rounds, slowly picks up the mark by gradually drying it out. We rubbed in a coat of oil and you couldn't even tell the difference! Now I just need to learn how to get out red wine.

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Well, how could we not pick this up off the shelf for only 69 cents? Jason, sparked by untempered curiosity and a life-long penchant for toilet humor, had to try it out. We had a few laughs, but I can't say that I recommend this gem from the Super 88. Call me high standards, but I just can't drink cold coffee from a can.

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One of my favorite parts of the summer is when you actually get to enjoy being lazy. Saturday nights spent staying up late with friends after a long day of doing nothing at the beach. And board games. The more weird hand gestures and absurd word combinations the better. I think I get this from my mother, who can sit puzzling at computers and buried in crossword encyclopedias for hours. I can't say I apply nearly as much brain power though... after all, it's Saturday.

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Well, someone had to do it. Motivated by a good friend of mine who adores these things, I purchased a couple of fancy Red Sox koozies for my personal collection. I did a little research and learned that these can also be called "stubby holders" or "cozies." These ones only work with bottles, but they're hilarious both dressing the bottles and hanging out on the shelf! This shot reminds me of summertime and root beer. 'Cuz that's what that is, you know.

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Driving in Gloucester, MA is at your own risk! And risky it is, partly due to some of the erratic driving behaviors that you see, particularly around the town's main rotary and in the parking lot of the local Shaw's market! But this wonky One Way sign isn't helping much, making it difficult to distinguish which way is the one way.

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On the trip back, it got extremely windy on deck and we realized that the storm we'd seen far out on the water was actually getting closer. The crew told us to expect some rain and we started speeding back toward the shore - witnessing some impressive natural special effects along the way. This little girl's hair and the way she was so excited about the wind at the front of the boat cracked me up.

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Okay, maybe I have Bob Barker on the mind, ever since I saw him bust up a late-night show desk on YouTube... But whether the spices are right or not, they certainly look better in these see-through, magnetic containers than they did stashed away in our kitchen cabinets! Since we've been doing so much home repair shopping, we picked up this little something fun for the kitchen. Now the real question is: will this motivate me to cook again?

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It's true! But this is one of the most exciting home renovation projects yet... and there have been a few. Pretty soon we're going to have a brand-new bar separating the living room and kitchen. Most impressively, Jason's doing it all himself in the heat of his least favorite season! I found myself getting all gooey when I discovered him sitting on the tile floor on Saturday morning taking apart the toilet and putting it back together again. I sense that this home repair stuff can get addictive. Thankfully, he wasn't just doing it for the practice, or I'd really be worried. 

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While down on the Cape for a wedding, we took a guided tour of the Provincetown dunes, only accessible by permitted four-wheel drive vehicles with the tires partially deflated in order to avoid a puncture on the bumpy sand banks. Our driver was extremely friendly and talkative, and gave us a good overview of the lives of the dune dwellers out here - people who spend their summers in one of the seventeen remaining sand shacks that were built in the 1940s. Several are now boarded up and it's a very different life to live out here, without access to running water or other traditional conveniences. Propane is used for cooking and refrigeration from tanks leashed to the houses.

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Bangkok here is breaking all the rules. What a rebel.

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My incessant snapping paid off as we were driving along "the 101" on Sunday. This motorcyclist caught me taking pictures of the overpasses and waved to get my attention. He and his friend then showed off a few flashy stunts for the camera, including this wheelie right alongside our car. The picture came out a bit blurry, but I thought the story was worth the blogging!

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Personal space - that's what's being sold here. This weekend, we hung out in L.A. and enjoyed the humorous touches of our brightly-clad hotel room - bright green walls, enormous, modern canvas-painting headboards, a squeaky toy frog on the edge of the bathtub, and miniature personal oxygen "tanks" for sale in the bathroom. It would have cost us a pretty penny to crack the seal on this aerosol can of wonder, and curious as we were, we left feeling content to leave its promise of boosted vitality a mystery.

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Here's a boat decorating the shores of the Pondicherry coast in southeast India. The fishing boats here are all painted brilliant colors - bright, but at the same time in harmony with the landscape. We saw them at sunset, which only made it seem more romantic, but see the fish kissing at the base of the vessel. Okay, so I don't really know my boat jargon... what's that called? In the top right corner, you'll see another type of boat, a seemingly makeshift canoe composed of planks lashed together at the furthest points. These must be like little rafts on the water. There were tons of little crabs scuttling in and out of holes in the sand and on the way home, we were hop-scotching around them just to get back to our hotel. They're probably nothing to be scared of, but so quick and spindly that I kept having this feeling they were somehow clambering up my calves as we trundled along.

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Part of a funky, entirely brass door at the Amber Palace. The money the maharajas put into their homes is inconceivable to me! Then again, while in India I found myself lamenting the fashion of buying the kind of new-age, cheaply manufactured furniture you find in places like Crate and Barrel, IKEA, and Pier 1. Who will be looking at that stuff a hundred years from now and finding a treasured place for it as a beautiful artifact of a past era in their homes? Royalty has at least left us with the legacy of beautifully constructed things, made with the most expensive and unnecessary materials available.

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Looking through the geometric grate of a Jaipurian palace window, you can see the manicured green of the courtyard below. I love how everything is so structured at these palaces. You can imagine the most chaotic, wild, and unexpected lifestyles going on inside these painfully symmetrical walls.

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A reconsituted orange. My friend Jocelyn noticed that everyone in my family peels oranges (or at least the easily peelable Clemantines) like this - in a spiral. Funny the habits you pick up from watching family without even knowing it. I thought this looked pretty cool, hugging itself back together like this.

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Here's a strategy garnered from the movie "The Good Shepherd" for carefully and thoroughly eliminating all recognizable content in a document. This method not only works perfectly in real life, but is also a very beautiful process to watch. Much better than a shredder if you have the time and fire insurance.

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In my family, if there isn't water being boiled, spoons stirring, or tea being drunk, that means it's time to put on the kettle. Here's a shot slowing the process down a bit.

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Went into the town of Concord today to visit the graves of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts. A very pretty cemetery, well protected from the traffic of the town by steep hills and valleys, that actually made a nice walk on this weirdly warm winter day. We must have been at 70 degrees in the sunshine out there, all dressed inappropriately for the warmth!

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Here's a fruity basket that is essentially a coil on stainless steel feet. My brother got this as a Christmas gift, but it has become a home for community fruit - at least for the next few days until he leaves and takes it with him!

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Here's an up-close shot of the copper rivet on the pocket corner of a pair of jeans. Apparently, somewhere around the 1850s these were introduced to reinforce points of strain on jeans, so they wouldn't continually need to be patched. I never knew!

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Furniture compromises are hard!! After much haggling over favorite lighting fixtures, Jason and I finally made a great compromise. I guess you could call it a "lantern-scape" in our living room. It produced surprisingly more light than we expected, so he successfully added a dimmer for a fantastic effect.

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A nice looking Lincoln parked almost on the curb at Trader Joe's today. People were staring like I was some kind of nutcase photographing cars in the parking lot.

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Dashboard of the car as we drove back on the Mass Pike tonight. These long exposure shots can be a lot of fun. I tried a few others of the road as well, but this was the coolest.

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An beat-up old old tire, deflated beside an old farmhouse, out near Harvard, MA. But you should see the other guy.

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Okay, so maybe these subjects aren't some of my favorite things, but I liked the aesthetic of them all stacked up like this. Today, I spent lunch taking some pictures of books for a product catalog at work.

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Shoe sale at Harvard Square Oktoberfest. We got lucky with a beautifully hot day for this festival -people were shucking layers left and right. And lots of people there were. It made me wish I had participated and sold some of my artwork in the sunshine!

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Go on... take my hand. This door belonged to apartment number 2 1/2. They have no room for integers in the big apple, but they certainly have style.

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One of those binocular thingies atop the Rockerfeller Center tower (TopOfTheROCK) in New York City. From this particular vista you can see all of Central Park from above. The binoculars also vaguely reminded me of Number 5 ("Alive") from Guttenberg's Short Circuit movies...

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Even though we're going to sell it, I like the detailing on this small bookshelf of Jason's. We're giving it up now that Jason has built in shelves for the living room. What a difference!

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This reminded me of a colorful martini, but is, rather, a ball spinning around the neck of a blue vase. The flash allowed me to catch a still, but the blurred pictures are cool too. 

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Here are some cute candle holders that caught the light really nicely (even when they weren't lit!) and added some color to the table.

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Another shot of this amazing sunlight. It looks as warm as it feels.

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Here's a sliver of the afternoon/evening sunlight right at the end of April. I wait all year for sunlight like this. 

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A well-decorated bicycle.

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Not a gut-wrenching thriller on network TV...or my age, unfortunately. This is actually the number plate from the building where I work. 

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Every picture tells a story.  This is the story of an empty cubicle.

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I thought this shot was interesting because it shows steam coming out of an espresso cup...or is it an illusion? 

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Here's a big silver bean-shaped structure we encountered in Millenium Park, Chicago.  You can see the city skyline in its reflection...I bumped my head on it trying to get a few shots!

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