This weekend, Paul and I drove to Indiana to pick up our new beagle Diego! He's already been making us (asmile and bringing us lots of joy. Check back for more photos tomorrow.
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Josh Ritter came to Milwaukee this week and played at the beautiful Pabst Theater. Paul and I went to the concert with some friends to celebrate his birthday, and we had a blast. I love going to see shows at the Pabst; the musicians usually make comments about how much they enjoy playing there, and I like to think that improves the quality of their performance. I think Josh Ritter smiled through his whole performance. He was so happy! The show had a great energy, their set was really long, and it was super fun to hear our favorite songs live.
This is his song "Kathleen": if you haven't heard it, I recommend taking a few minutes to listen. It's good stuff! Unless you live in Hawaii or some other goregous part of the country, you've noticed we've been having a crappy, cold spring. Despite our extended winter weather, our community garden's second season is now underway. We had our first work day this past Sunday; it was so nice working outside and getting my hands dirty again. Though we couldn't start preparing our garden beds yet (the rainy weather prevented delivery of the soil we needed), we built an herb circle and worked on our mulched paths. I was so pleased with the result, and I will be very excited to see the circle when it's full of herbs. Taller herbs will go in the very center, perrenials in the second ring, and annuals in the bottom ring. Soon this space will be bustling with life! The little bit of green popping up everywhere is a nice preview of things to come. We began working with Reflo, a local non-profit, last season to install a rain catch system. They got our system all hooked up again this system, and we discussed some exciting plans for the future. I feel proud of how professional our rain catch system looks, and I'm happy that we'll be conserving resources by using rain water for our garden beds. Even with the cold weather, a few plants are popping up around the garden. Some of the plants in our edible fruit forest are beginning to bud, one plot has some greens that over-wintered, and I even found some volunteer tulips on the hill overlooking our garden. I must have spent too much time outside Sunday, because I think I caught garden fever (har har). Can't wait to get our beds prepped and ready for the season and to get some seeds in the ground!
Are you growing anything this garden season? This video has been circling around the interwebs lately, but I thought some of you may haven't seen it yet. It's worth a view - for the reminder to be kind to yourself and to remember that you are a bright shiny beautiful person.
No big post today. I'm enjoying time with our visitors!!! Here's a picture of us from our trip to the Oregon coast last year. Life is good.
This weekend, my friend Mary and I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum for their Art in Bloom event. The curators of the Art in Bloom exhibit pick forty-eight pieces from around the musem for local florists to use as inspiration for floral scultpures. The results were breath taking - not least of all because they combined art and flowers, two of my favorite things! Here are some pictures of my favorite designs. I apologize for the quality of the photos; the lighting in the galleries was not ideal for my camera. I think you can still get the feel for how impressive these floral interpreations were. Most of these pieces received people's choice awards and some were official winners as well. What do you think of the floral interpretations? Think they nailed it or missed the mark?
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. I am proud to say that I am part of a fantastic book club. My former coworkers and I used to meet from time to time to discuss books during lunch breaks, and after some of us moved on to other organizations, we decided to revamp the old book club so we could hang out more. We chose The Night Circus for our first read and met last week for a black and white themed book club party. The feast - just as important as the book discussion. As another friend's book club likes to say: "half read, well fed." We even dressed in black and white (with splatches of red!) drawing our inspiration from le reveurs in the story. The general concessus from our discussion was that The Night Circus was like a really pretty movie. The story was really enjoyable, the descriptions of the circus were so fun, and the turn of the century setting left me feeling very nostalgic. But when it was all over, I thought "wait, what did I just read? I don't think that made a lot of sense." If you like the books you read to make sense and have some meaning, my recommendation is to do exactly what I do with pretty movies: enjoy it for what it is and don't ask a lot of questions. For this reason, I think The Night Circus would make for great summer reading. And speaking of movies, I think this story would translate better as a movie than as a book; you could get carried away with the magic and imagery of the circus without worrying so much about character development and plot consistency. My contribution to the black and white feast were these chocolate covered strawberries. I had never made them before, and I was surprised by how little effort they required. I rinsed and dried the strawberries, melted a few squares of baking chocolate (found in the baking aisle at the grocery store), and dipped the strawberries in the chocolate. I let them dry on parchment paper and stuck the white chocolate strawberries in the fridge for a bit because they weren't setting quite right. Et voila! A delicious, simple treat for all of us reveurs. Do you have any ideas for fun themed parties?
Two things have me smiling today. One: VISITORS!!! We will have five (count them five!) visitors staying with us throughout this week, and I am sooooo excited! My sister and sister-in-law are included among the five, and I cannot wait to get some good quality girl time with them. Looking forward to showing them around our fair city and making new memories. Two: FLOWERS! You may have noticed that I've been including more flower pictures here than usual. I confess, it's a crappy weather survival technique. Spring is refusing to come to Milwaukee - snow actually stuck to the ground yesterday (see below) - so I've been cultivating spring in our house and on the blog. I also recently discovered that Whole Foods has great prices on cut flowers (to make up for their not-so-great prices on other things), so I've been buying myself weekly bouquets. I am quite the fan of this week's - picked it up for less than $10! What has you smiling today?
On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?
WOW. Gone Girl is exactly what it promises to be - a mystery thriller about a missing wife and her suspicious husband - but doesn't follow the normal trajectory. I love being surprised when reading, and this book has two big plot twists that left me reeling. And if for no other reason, I would recommend this book because the story is so engaging that you simply can't put it down. I was turning pages and staying up late the same way I did with most of the Harry Potter books. With that said, the book left me with a strange "huh" feeling after reading, and I didn't end up liking any of the characters. I found the plot to be too far fetched - and that's coming from a person whose favorite series include Lord of the Rings and the Walking Dead. I can believe that goblins and monsters and flying witches exist, as long as they make sense within the world the author has created. But Gillian Flynn has done masterful work in this book because she knows exactly what she's doing. She has a reader on a string, getting you to think and feel exactly what she wants you to. So maybe her plot was believable within the world she created; maybe The Gone Girl world was just meant to be really twisted. You've been warned. I woke up deliriously this morning at 6:00 am to the fourth straight day of rain and clouds. I blame my tiredness for my brain wondering back in time to old boyfriends and old crushes. I was thinking of some boys I had liked who didn't respond to my awkward flirting and mixed cds and other boys who liked me back but just felt off. There were so many years of feeling slighted or unwanted or like I wasn't quite enough. I'm sure many of you have experienced a variation of those feelings at some point and know how yucky it feels. Now, believe me, I still was having plenty of fun in my pre-Paul days and still had a healthy self esteem, but the search to finding a good partner was frustrating.
I still remember how amazing the first few weeks of dating felt because it was the first time someone had really felt right - and thought that I felt right too. I'm still slightly amazed by how well Paul and I fit together and how happy I am with him. It was silly, but I had really questioned whether I would ever find a partner I meshed with. It was really just a matter of being patient. I'm writing this down so I have hard evidence of how happy I am with Paul for the next time he drives me absolutely crazy. Just because he's a good fit doesn't mean he doesn't annoy me, it just means I still want to spend my life with him even if he acts like a weirdo sometimes. That's love for you. |