John Baldessari

I love Baldessari and I love Tom Waits's voice. . . it's like a little gem of a documentary made just for me.

TMB

So, I've decided to fall deeply in love with The Morning Benders.

Here's just one reason:


But isn't the one reason plenty when it's this lovely?

Embroidery Warm Up

I have a plan inside of me for a larger embroidery project that I would like to work on. I don't totally know what that means yet, but something illustrative on a larger scale than usual. Still cute, but maybe a little dark, too.

But I haven't been embroidering much of late, so I've been knocking out a bunch of small pieces to get my hands back in shape--available on etsy soon.

OK Go

So, I love OK Go.  I don't have any of their albums. . . though I think I'm looking to rectify that.  But in a day and age when it feels like there's a lot of bad news pouring in, these guys are the joy bringers.

Plus, everyone loves a marching band.

Three Straight Days of Gardening

Columbia shut down for a 4-day NATO holiday--worried, I think, that the commute for all of us would be terrible and that violent protests might break out putting all of us in harm's way.  So, it's almost like we got a big blizzard that shut down school for fours days. . . 

Except it's May, and the weather has been gorgeous all weekend long.  Sunny.  80's.  Windy.

So, I've spent the whole weekend gardening.  Literally every day.

Neighbor's Yard

(okay.  I had to get this out of the way first.  I had no part in this, but they have the prettiest roses in bloom right now.)

 Friday--Front Yard

I didn't do loads of work in the front yard.  Planted a big load of perennials and annuals that I bought on Friday and then watered and watered and watered--this early hot weather is pretty brutal on new plants that haven't had a proper spring to root themselves in.  

But there's some pretty stuff in there--new bleeding hearts, irises that I stole from the foreclosure across the street.  

And the northern part of the front yard--thanks to lots of patience and dividing of hostas in the last two years--is starting to actually fill in really nicely.

 

 Saturday & Sunday--Back Yard

 The big work this weekend was in the back yard.  Dan helped out a lot on this project--turning over the soil and then using a hoe to break up big chunks into smaller, planting friendly dirt.

Since the back surgery, I am less good at the heavy lifting part of gardening 

(though, I'm hoping in another year, that might turn around.  Hope springs eternal).

Backyard veggie plot before work:

Total mess.  Weedy.  Hard packed.  Ugly.

 

Backyard veggie plot after work:

Gorgeous! 

Okay, so I know it doesn't look like much yet.  But it's so cleared out and dark brown.  Plus, the secret ingredient. . . there's horse manure from the Ohio family farm in there. 

I planted loads and loads:

7 Tomato plants

3 Hot pepper plants

2 mounds--one squash, one zucchini

Kentucky Blue runner beans

Brussel Sprouts (from seed. . . again hope springs. . . )

Basil

and. . . 

 Green bush beans and Yellow Wax Beans

 

Plus, some veggies in containers with more to come.

The peonies are in bloom.

And L.P. helped out the whole time.

Man, I love spring and summer.

And four-day weekends.

Austin Exit Art

How great is this little guy?  A little spaceman?  A giraffe jockey?  I'm not sure, but I love his pout, his slouch, and his blue comma nose.  

Located on the back of a sign facing the Austin off ramp from I-290

NATO Visit

I love the Columbia College Bookstore. I've bought books and sweatshirts and snacks and gifts from the Columbia Bookstore. . . but this sign strikes me as a little weird.

I don't know that the NATO delegates visiting this weekend are in the market for books.  But I guess if they are, they'll know where to go.

Or this might be just the kind of sign that could set protestors off. . .

Oh, Miss Apple

I may need to get Fiona Apple's upcoming album, if I can judge by this: "Every Single Night"


She's haunting. I think she shouldn't be American. She seems more closely related to Edith Piaf than anyone here in the States.

Before House

If the weather holds, I will garden today.  But the front of our house has looked terrible pretty much since we moved in over 5 years ago.  We've been working on it very very slowly--mostly because when we started working on it, I started having back trouble.  But this summer will be the start of the house having some bona fide curb appeal.  It will take a while for everything to grow in, of course, and I will tinker for years trying to get it right.

So, here is the house at the start of spring:

Sad. . . just wait until the picture at the end of the summer. . .

Ready for Summer

Chicagoans earn their summers. . . I guess we didn't really do that this year with the mild winter, but the instinct to enjoy every bit of the summer months is still deeply ingrained.  And I'm ready.  It's still cold now, but I've started to think about concerts at the Pritzker Pavilion and dinner picnicking in Millennium park after work.  Or walking back from the park to the car or the train and sliding into Dance Chicago--the orange light, the live bands, the romance of the tango just after nightfall, outdoors, in the garden and dark, the music echoing off the faces of sky scrapers, rolling down Michigan Avenue.

Chicago can feel like Europe in the summer.  That beautiful and cultured and alive.

Appealing

What?  What was that?

 

I got a sink full o' curb appeal.  

Astilbe, hollyhocks, 2 variety of peony, butterflybush, and echinacea.

Thanks, Burpees!

Getting Ready for Spring

Hung out with my honey today--gardening and cleaning up around the outside of the house.  We raked leaves and hacked our apple trees and wisteria back to their very nubs.  We weeded and got rid of unwanted plants.  We divided hostas and sage and replanted to fill in in empty spots.

It was cold outside, but we treated the day like spring.  So, to celebrate, I'm making a strawberry/rhubarb crisp for dessert. . . after a springy dinner of quiche and salad.  Even the outdoors knows it's a party tonight.

618 S. Michigan Ave

The Fashion Studies Department of Columbia College Chicago has moved fully into 618 S. Michigan Ave.  And not surprisingly that means that the storefront windows of that building are consistently filled with a revolving collection of awfully brilliant student fashion work.  Sometimes the work there is so far along the fine art spectrum that I just want to stare it as art, but often the work makes me covetous.  I want to buy it and wear it and make it my own.

But the windows are spectacular. Walking to meetings or to go get coffee in the morning, it's fun to watch passersby drawn in to get a closer look.  It's a wide sidewalk there and it's not hard to notice the beelining to the collections on display.

Most recently, there was a collection of historical designs made entirely out of paper.

Hot Cross Buns

I don't do much to celebrate Easter. Usually, if weather permits, I like to go outside and garden. While I'm out there digging in the dirt, I get to see all of the church folks walking home after church in their Sunday best. Two different churches in my neighborhood this year sounded like they brought in high school marching bands to play at the end of the service. It's a fun day to listen to, if the sun is out, and I can be outside.

But the one thing I try to always do is make hot cross buns. My grandma always did, and I follow that tradition.

I used Ree Drummond's recipe this year.


It was tasty, but all of the bottoms burned. . . so either my oven is too hot, or you should cook these puppies on a silpat.

Toynbee or copycat?

Last month, I watched the Toynbee Tile documentary--Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. It sounded interesting, and unbeknownst to me, the little robot guys I photographed both on Michigan Ave. in Chicago and in a rest area on the Turnpike in Ohio are part of the Toynbee Tile mystery.

I'm not going to go into what the Toynbee tiles are. . . there's a feature length documentary after all:



But today, taking a break from work and headed to 33 E. Congress to see a few student gallery shows, I walked across either a Toynbee tile or the tile of a copycat that's paying pretty great homage. . .


For you Toynbee fans--Wabash Ave. in the lefthand turn lane just north of Harrison.

Go, Devil Brushhogs, indeed!

My Anthem

This song--"Carry On" by Fun.--has been my anthem for the last month. I found Fun. in the midst of less appealing times and made a point of listening to this song at least once (okay, often 3 or 4 times) during my morning commute. And it totally buoyed me up.



Anyone else think the lead singer looks like Guy Pearce? Anyone? Anyone?

Tree full of cute

A bunch of new toys for the fivetrees shop. A mouse, a bunny, an elephant, and an alien.

Oh my!

Martha Marcey May Marlene

I cannot stop thinking about this movie. D and I watched it just this past Tuesday. It has legs. I don't want to say much about the plot. The plot isn't the point and I don't want to ruin a bit of it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. It got a lot of attention when it first came out--a movie about a young woman who joins a cult and then is rescued by her estranged sister.

What's so disconcerting about this film for me is that the setting of the whole film reminds me of huge happy swathes of my life--my family's farm in Cleves, OH, the seven years I spent in Athens, OH, vacations in Maine. And so much of the film could be happy and has all of the markers of usual summer splendor--sun glinting off a lake, having a beer on the back of small speed boat, reading in adirondack chairs at the edge of a pier, the slant of sunlight through dust kicked up while working in a barn, young folks long-limbed and attentive listening to their friends playing acoustic music, skinny dipping in a wooded creek, everything green on green as far as the eye can see rustling in a warm wind. It's the summer I've been dreaming of ever since I first started having to work all year round.

And despite all of that, it's a horror movie. And that was a sense I didn't have until it was over, as if while watching it, my mind kept trying to resolve the story, kept trying to fix the narrative to go with the sensation that the visuals of the movie were giving me. But it's a horror movie, and the first one that I have ever seen that is 99% psychologically horrifying. There's almost no blood whatsoever and there is certainly no gore.

Four days later, I haven't been able to shake it. I keep thinking about who I am and if there's any way that I could have been the lead character, Martha. I don't think so, but it's hard to know. . . and frankly, in the end, I don't want to. I'd just prefer to stop thinking about it.

Rent this movie immediately, just please don't watch it with anyone under the age of 13. This would be a rough one to explain to young people. . . though probably a good one to explain to young women sometime in their teens as a cautionary tale. *shudder.



Written and Directed by Sean Durkin and starring Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes and Sarah Paulson.

Dear Field Museum,

I love your dinosaur mold-a-ramas


and your giant underground adventure bugs


and your baboon conapic jars


and your quirky sense of humor


and Sue


but what in the world do you have against giraffes?

Dreams of the Future

Casey and I were going to go to France. . .