Tom & Alissa

The Philharmonic concert last night was brilliant. Perfect weather, sixty thousand people, and fireworks. The music was ideal for a summer night on the lawn. Tom made delicious tabouli and brought some thinly-cut prosciutto to eat it with, and big, juicy strawberries for dessert, accompanied by a bottle of New Zealand pinot noir (apparently a new thing for the Kiwis). It was fabulously relaxing, and I felt rather pampered as I nibbled strawberries and listened to Beethoven.

This, folks, is why we live here.

Well, I’m back at work today, after a not-nearly-long-enough vacation at home. We went to the Coney Island beach and ate mangos; finished Six Feet Under; watched A Streetcar Named Desire, Lust, Caution, Hellboy 2 (apparently I just don’t like Del Toro), and a lot of The Simpsons; ate at home a bit; did our laundry; and basically tried to stay as low-key as possible. I also had H.G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay to read for class on Monday night, which I finished just in time.

We also dropped by the Apple store yesterday to see if we could get iPhones. Let me back up here; I haven’t planned on getting an iPhone, since I have a Blackberry (for work) and a cell phone and both work perfectly well, and I’ve become increasingly averse to bandwagon-jumping in my old (snort) age. Tom, on the other hand, really has a legitimate business need for a data phone, and after copious amounts of research, he concluded that an iPhone would be the best bet. So, he has been planning to get one. After running the numbers and taking into account a few as-yet extenuating factors, we realized that it would be cheaper, in the long run, for us both to jump to AT&T and get iPhones (8GB for me, 16GB for him) now, rather than waiting and keeping a contract with both companies.

So then, yesterday - you know, four days after the device’s release - we arrived at the Apple store only to find the line wrapped around the block and stretching several more blocks north. Yeah. Right. We popped by the AT&T store, which didn’t have any phones and said to come back in the morning. It’s across from my office, so we went by early this morning and waited until they opened. They don’t have any iPhones, they don’t know if they’ll have any iPhones today or indeed any other day. By this point, I was getting frustrated, envisioning my life in the next few weeks as a futile attempt to get an iPhone. Solution: we ordered them. Should have them within a week. Shiny new gadgets, woohoo.

Far more information than you wanted to know. But I’ll bet a few bucks that the iPhone craze in New York is more ridiculous here than anywhere else. Anyone have similarly insane reports?

I have a scarily long and sordid to-do list this week, mostly due to a concentration of articles and papers in the near future. But tonight, I am taking my reading to Central Park for the Philharmonic’s other concert in that park (they were in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last night). Tom is meeting me with a blanket, a bottle of wine, and some food. Tonight they play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, and Sibelius’s Finlandia. Lang Lang is the pianist. Hopefully we can get near the front, since it’s just the two of us.

A few collected links:

- From Papercuts, the NYTimes book blog: The Perfect Novel

- New rules about shooting on New York City streets.

- The Knitting Factory, a Lower East Side institution, is heading to Brooklyn and westward.

- Why more authors should be blogging.

- The aesthetics of buzz in the dining room.

- Art in the Berkshires. First stop: The Clark Art Museum, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I grew up about forty minutes away from here, on the New York side, but didn’t spend too much time in the museum, unfortunately. Williamstown is great. If I’d been thinking harder, I probably would have tried to go to Williams College.

- Supplies of rice, corn, and wheat - crops that yield half the world’s food calories - could shrink dramatically by 2050.

- The monster collection of Moleskine tips, tricks, and hacks, especially useful for Moleskine newbies. I own too many Moleskines.

I interrupt this brief stay-cation to mention that I have an article on Slow Food and buying local at Comment today.

After class ended last night, I met up with Sarah and Matt, friends from forever ago, and a few more recent friends and went to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a lovely night, and we caught the sunset just right. We walked from the Manhattan side to Brooklyn, then had ice cream at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which sits on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights and looks directly toward downtown Manhattan. Good ice cream, lovely view.

Though walking across the Bridge leans toward the touristy side, I had a good reason for wanting to go: the aforementioned Waterfalls in the East River, which “opened” yesterday. They are lovely and fascinating to watch, and at night they’re stunning (see the pictures in that article). If this is the future of public art, I heartily approve.

Tom left early this morning to meet up with his father in New Jersey and head south to Virginia. I’ll join him on Thursday. In the meantime, I am traipsing home to Albany tonight, and will be back in town Sunday night, ready to start learning about the modern British novel. I have a seedling of an idea for my paper for that class, which is more than I can usually say. Maybe that means I am starting to catch onto this humanities stuff.

Have a good weekend, and in the meantime, if you are one of the ten people who haven’t, check out Garfield Minus Garfield.

Hey kids.

Well, what a weekend. I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday, so I took a sick day. I pounded out most of a paper as I sat on the couch and drank copious amounts of water. We don’t really have any food at home - no time to shop lately - but thankfully, our neighborhood is full of wonderfully healthy and moderately-priced eateries, so we had brunch at Olea and dinner at Lil’ Pig. We spent the evening watching Hellboy - the first one - and it was, well, awful, though made a bit better because it does not take itself seriously at all. I’m all for movies with very vague plots, but not in that genre. But I try not to demand much from movies based on comic books; that way, I’m delighted with things like Batman Begins and Iron Man. (By the way, I am totally psyched for The Dark Knight. Moving on.)

I was feeling much better on Saturday, and because I got so much done on Friday I was able to tag along to the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, along with Tom and a few friends who we met up with there. It was everyone’s first time, and it was certainly . . . interesting. On the one hand, I enjoyed the whole borough pride aspect. Brooklyn is proud to be Brooklyn, diverse, nutty, and happy. People from neighborhoods where you can have a house and garage brought out their antique cars, which were really cool. And some of the costumes were fantastic and well thought out. On the other hand, lots of people like to use marching in the parade as an excuse to get tipsy and wear very little clothing, and that’s their (legal) prerogative, but it gets old after a while and isn’t something I feel the need to experience repeatedly. So it was a one-time must-see event, but probably not one that will get any better year to year, and I don’t think we’ll do it again.

After the parade we went back to our apartment and cooked hamburgers for everyone, which was good fun, and watched trailers for scary movies. An excellent end to a Saturday.

After church on Sunday, we went back out to our ‘hood and had brunch at Red Bamboo, a vegan Thai restaurant (you won’t believe it’s not meat, etc.) with friends and ended up at Brooklyn Flea for a bit, where we did not buy anything but admired lots of things, including some imported and salvaged furniture. We wandered over to Smooch, which I immediately adopted as my coffeeshop, because it has really, really good coffee, great decor, eclectic decor, and a relaxed vibe.

We headed uptown shortly afterwards for the “Jesus Hopped the A Train” benefit reading, which was simply remarkable. Original cast plus Stephen Adly Guirgis, who is fast becoming my favorite playwright because he’s so remarkably profound. His plays are messy and profane, but somehow grace and forgiveness always explicitly slip in.

Our seats were good - on the floor, but near the back - and we were serendipitously seated directly across the aisle from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s perch at the soundboard as director. He still laughs, despite having heard this play and these actors a mind-bogglingly enormous number of times, and it was fun to be that close. I could have reached out and tapped him. He’s the most refreshing kind of famous New Yorker - still strolls around outside the theater and smokes before performances (this was the third time I’d seen him doing it), frequents the same random coffeeshops that I do. When we saw “The Little Flower of East Orange” a couple months ago, he got in an elevator with a bunch of the audience as they were going up to the theater on the third floor. They looked a little thunderstruck.

But! Our brush with celebrity was not complete. Yesterday I woke up with one of those stark-raving-mad headaches, and as this is not a week in which I can afford to be sick, I called in sick again and slept in very late. I had a dull headache all day, even after lunch at Pequena down the block, but I worked a little more on my paper and then went to class.

After class I took a few painkillers and dashed across town to met up with Tom at Madison Square Garden for the Coldplay concert. Coldplay gave away all 30,000 tickets for this performance, which was kind of awesome, because it was the first time they’d played through that set, which included a bunch of songs from Viva La Vida as well as some older stuff. They came into the arena seating - three rows behind us!! - and sang “Yellow”. And they didn’t play an encore - vaguely disappointing, but I’m kind of glad. I find encores a little pretentious. Everyone pretends they’re special, but it happens every time. Let’s save the encores for truly spectacular concerts. This one was an experimental concert, they flubbed a bit, but they were good-natured about it and very funny, and everyone enjoyed themselves. The only black mark was the drunken people to our left and in front of us who decided to get into a fight, just short of throwing punches, during “Fix You”, which is probably my favorite song. Oh well.

I’m finally back at work today and swamped, but tonight I’m planning to meet up with our dear friends Sarah and Matt and bring them up to the NY Philharmonic’s free concert in Central Park, as long as it doesn’t get rained out. This is my last week of the Moby-Dick class, and next week starts “Modern British Novel”. I admit that I’m a bit dubious about how I’ll manage to read all eleven novels and write two papers in the six weeks, but they don’t call it a “master’s degree” for nothing, I suppose.

The dark spot on my weekend is that it looks like I won’t get to see Wall-E on its opening night. Alas.

Hello bloglings.

My most notable accomplishment this weekend - besides reading a lot about Zoroastrianism for class - was learning to play Uno last night. It wasn’t that we didn’t play card games when I was a kid (we played a lot of Dutch Blitz), but when we did play games they were usually either educational or something like checkers. So this was fun. I also did well, which is a plus. I still want to take poker back up again.

We had brunch at Lil’ Pig near our apartment. I had a chilled cucumber and avocado soup and a tilapia sandwich with pickled onions on baguette; Tom had gazpacho and I think a cornmeal-encrusted catfish sandwich. Tee-riffic. Not only is the place close, but they serve about fifteen varieties of tea, there’s wine in the evenings, the menu changes daily and is all kinds of local and healthy and innovative, and it’s all pretty reasonably priced. Like Grey Dog, but a little cheaper and with a much more interesting menu.

Tonight, it looks like we’re going to the premiere of the film Tom worked on as first assistant director the summer before we got married. Cool.

We have watched two real classics in the last two evenings - Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Groundhog Day. Yes, I am catching up with all kinds of 80s-90s-era comedies. Andie MacDowell, where did you go?

I also grilled lamb skewers from Whole Foods yesterday, which ended up being slightly less awesome than they should have been (the cut of meat was a little fatty), and also some portobello mushrooms, on our cute smokeless electric grill. But alas, we had no rice, so risotto it was. This seemed far more interesting when I started writing this paragraph.

Meanwhile, my class is small (four students) and seems like it will be interesting. Any class that ends with watching a segment from Animaniacs is bound to have a sense of humor. Plus, we don’t have class on Monday (I become more and more grateful for national holidays each year) and so after tonight it’s already 1/6th over. There was a fairly copious amount of reading to do, but thankfully about twenty-five chapters of it were from Genesis and Jonah, and so it wasn’t overwhelming.

And in related news, grades were posted for last semester, and I got an A. Yay! Auspicious!

Happiness is: ducking out of work on a rainy day for sublime French-Moroccan-style chicken and sausage couscous and cherry blossom green tea at Cafe Gitane with your husband.

Lunch with Tom at Momofuku Noodle Bar: steamed pork buns, smoked chicken wings, the special of the day (homemade soba noodles with crab, ramps, and snow peas in a spicy broth), and a tiny cup of salty peanut butter ice cream.

Perfection.

I left work early on Friday to have lunch with the lovely Liz, who I’ve known through a couple different mutual friends for a while but hadn’t met. She was on her way from DC to visit her brother and had a stopover between bus and train in town, so we ate dutiful salads at a random Europa Cafe (oh, NYC lunch chains) and shared a kahlua brownie and talked for a couple hours. It was splendid.

I then went to see Made of Honor for a review which should be in WORLD (print!) soon. It was not very good, but it wasn’t painful. That’s about all I can say. Afterwards I headed downtown and jotted down the substance of my review before heading to a ukelele extravaganza at the Bowery Poetry Club, then the Half Pint with a horde. Definitely one of the better Fridays I’ve had lately.

On Saturday our dear Colleen came over; she was in town for a few days after moving home to Anchorage last year, and she’s headed Dublin-ward to Trinity this fall, and I am very excited for her. We had burgers at 67 Burger and then picked up some groceries. Alisa came by later on, and we ate copious waffles and drank rosé and discussed good books before everyone went home.

After church on Sunday, we had a lovely relaxing brunch in the garden behind Palma, and dinner at the Stone Home Wine Bar around the corner from us, all with friends. I also finished Brideshead Revisited and started Saturday, which is amazing.

Today I had one triumph - I convinced the university that I am properly immunized and managed to register for the Moby-Dick class. I’ve already bought the books, so I’m glad there were no snags. I am very excited for this class to start. I’m playing at being a grad student in the English department this summer, what with Moby-Dick and the British novel class, and I have to say, I think it’s a good way to spend the summer.

A relatively open week for me, besides work. I don’t even have class. On Friday I’m going to An Evening with Michel Gondry at the Museum of the Moving Image, and perhaps a tiny féte afterwards, and Saturday brings an Albany-bound train for Mother’s Day. I haven’t been home or seen my mom since January, and I’m very much looking forward to it. She tells me the Tulip Festival is brightening the pretty part of downtown Albany, and maybe we’ll get to see it this year.

Lastly, my review of Harmony Korine’s newest, Mister Lonely, is in this issue of Paste, but it’s also online. I tried, but I wasn’t a huge fan.

It appears that my Run, Fat Boy, Run review made it online. It wasn’t a great movie, but it’s not like you go see a Simon Pegg comedy for a cinematic revelation. It was fun.

We are seeing “The Little Flower of East Orange”, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the Public Theater tonight (which I’m realizing I must clarify is an actual theater, not a movie theater, and this is not a film, because while PSH is amazing on-screen, he’s kind of a little god in the theater world as far as I’m concerned). I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Also to dinner at Applewood, our own little heaven on earth in Park Slope, tomorrow night.

Now if Bank of America would only SERIOUSLY get their act together and mail us that account confirmation letter (I mean, come on, I know it doesn’t take two weeks for something to get from Charlotte to New York), then we could put our application in for the apartment and start the nail-biting, and everything would be perfect.

I love weekends!

Jenni, who has recently become one of my favorite internet-friends, is swapping tea with me, and hers made it here today from Adagio Tea, of which I am now wildly, rabidly a fan. Five cute little sampler-sized tins of tea are now stacked on my desk next to my monitor - almond black tea, green ginseng, blood orange herbal tea, rooibos caramel, and the “Bolero” signature blend made by one of Adagio’s customers.

This is one of the apparently multiple very cool things about Adagio - not only do they have an amazing selection of tea, and $2-4 sampler tins, not only do they have a points-earning frequent shopper program (1 point per dollar, and 100 points gets you a $10 gift certificate, which is many kinds of awesome), but they also let you make your own blend of tea (virtually, sort of) and order it, but you earn 10 points when someone else buys that blend. Seriously? This is tea for the artist.

Also, they have blooming display teas, which actually unfold into flowers when you put them in the water. That’s pretty much a grown-up edible version of those sponge things we used to have as a kid, which started out as brightly-colored pill-like things and turned into cats or elephants or other such creatures.

And to top it all off, a box of tea filters, which turn loose tea into teabags and is ABSOLUTELY BRILLANT for the office, because now I have no implements to wash but I can still brew loose tea. OH WOW. It’s a little weird how happy this makes me.

Righto. I’m going to go brew me a cup of something now.

Easter weekend has always been a busy and possibly significant one in my life for years; back in high school, our church performed a cantata on Palm Sunday weekend (probably one of the more musically good ones we’d ever worked on), and it was during one of those cantatas that I got the offer to come work at the church as the assistant to the music director, who is one of the most important influences on my life and my faith. Working there also set me inevitably on the course toward the current iteration of my existence (somewhere in the reformed-postevangelical-neocalvinist world), though they never would have suspected it.

A couple years ago, my first Easter in New York was also, if I remember correctly, the first time I went out to Tom’s childhood home (and possibly the first time I met my then-future-in-laws, though it does seem kind of late in the game for that, so maybe not). Last year I was in the buzzy-hubbub world of interviewing for new jobs and actually got my present job based loosely on a conversation I had there - long story.

This year, we saw Chop Shop on Good Friday. I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Tom likened it to the work of the Dardennes brothers - he’s completely right - but it’s by an American director of Iranian descent, Ramin Bahrani, whose previous film, Man Push Cart, played at the “New Directors/New Films” festival at Lincoln Center a couple years ago.

Chop Shop is the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his sixteen-year-old sister living in a tiny plywood room above a mechanic’s shop in the sea of car mechanics out beyond Shea Stadium in Queens; however, if it weren’t for the subway footage and the fact that the kids are speaking English, you wouldn’t realize it wasn’t in a third-world Central American village until you see the corner of the stadium peeking into frame twenty minutes into the film. It’s more real than a documentary; this will more than likely end up on my top-ten list this year.

We saw the film because our church doesn’t have a Good Friday service, since we don’t actually have a building (refresher: we rent a great space from a Seventh-Day Adventist church, but only on Sundays). Some day I’d like to go to a Good Friday service at one of the gorgeous cathedrals around here, but I am just not up to braving the tourists right now.

Saturday was a culture-y day; we saw “The 39 Steps” at the Roundabout (amazing), then tripped on up to the Upper East Side for brunch at Mon Petit Cafe (crepes for both of us, mm), and then popped by the segment of the Whitney Biennial at the Armory (very skippable, but it was free, and we only had an hour or so). Then, after coffee and chocolate souffle at Fig and Olive, we headed to the Zoae Series at the Brecht Forum.

And, I wore these shoes all day and was simultaneously flabbergasted and elated that my feet did not hurt. Shoes are the bane of my existence, and I could not believe it that these were almost more comfortable than just regular flats. So comfortable, in fact, that I’m ordering another pair, because when you live in New York and your feet take you everywhere, shoes are more important than almost any part of your wardrobe, even your bag.

Righto. Easter Sunday dawned sunny and chilly, of course, and after church we went to lunch at Smorgaschef with Tom’s parents, and then wandered about the Village a bit before they headed back to Jersey and we went on out to Brooklyn for a quiet evening. And so closed the weekend.

I am pushing to get the magazine into layout and copyedited this week - cross your fingers - and hopefully we’ll be turning in the paperwork for the apartment application by mid-week, and I have class again this week after a couple weeks off, and Tom is scouting office buildings, and we are taking full advantage of Brooklyn Restaurant Week, and we’re seeing Little Flower of East Orange at the Public on Friday, directed by none other than Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose work we tend to trust implicitly. Good ways to do good work during a good week at the start of spring.

Brooklynites, or those who wish they were so lucky, should take note of Dine-In Brooklyn, which happens next week!

Restaurants across the borough are offering three-course meals for $23 per person (not including drinks). That is a steal for places like Blue Ribbon and Applewood - our personal favorite - and it’s a great way to try out restaurants you’d otherwise never frequent.

We tend not to eat out for dinner, so we go all out during restaurant week. We have plans to visit Palo Santo (which I pass every day on my way to the subway), Alchemy (a gastropub we pass on our way to the subway on Sundays), and Applewood (one of the best restaurants we’ve been to in the city). YUM.

We were out quite late Friday night, eating chips and other snacks and watching old clips of “Square One” (the PBS kids’ show about math from the late eighties/early nineties) on YouTube and talking with various people, and generally relaxing.

On Saturday, we ate brunch at Stone Park Cafe (best brunch in the universe). Tom had some kind of poached-eggs-on-fish-cake thing, and I had shrimp-in-savory-grits, and it was great. We headed home and started cooking; three hours later, or so, we had chili cooking on the stove and extremely rich chocolate pudding in a bowl and various other goodies ready to feed the (eventually) eleven people who were there. Nearly everything was raved over and polished off, so it seems it was a rousing success.

Yesterday after church we had brunch with ten others at Philip Marie (on Hudson Street), then Tom and I went home, ran back out to see an apartment, then came back home and watched Rushmore and tried to unwind. Possibly too little quiet, relaxing time this weekend, but it was fun and full of good food, so who’s complaining?

It’s spring break at the University this week, which means I don’t have class tomorrow night but I do have about twice as much reading to do, and a lot of other things to write and revise and edit and such. It’s also a bit chilly out for “spring”. I sort of wish we were in Cancun, or somewhere.

Also, the city is INSANE here, with all the crazy people who think they’re Irish and a handful who actually are. Mom is in Albany, where it’s not much better, with the inauguration and all. I Heart New York.

I wrote a little on slow food, growing up with an organic-veggie-loving Mom, and working at the Co-op at ConversantLife.

Also, I’ve suddenly become very popular on Goodreads, getting several “adds” a day. I’m not sure why. Do I read weird books or something?

Lastly - I started a Redbubble store recently, which appears to be a much better venue than Etsy for photographers looking to offer prints/notecards/framed versions of their work. I like the set-up of the site, too. Designers, artists, photographers - check it out.

Brief things, written in a tearing hurry:

I wrote a bit about apartment hunting in New York City at ConversantLife.com, and the site appears to have finally, officially launched!

On Monday night we saw Purple State of Mind, met Craig Detweiler, and went out afterwards with a handful of random people who were at the premiere, from musicians to journalists to doctors to famous playwrights. We were up very late, but it was worth it.

Yesterday after work and class I had dinner with my friend Umbereen from college, who I don’t think I’ve seen since I graduated, and eight of her co-workers (IT consulting). We went to a French steakhouse in the financial district, and my French dip sandwich was rather tasty.

Tonight is dinner with the Strauss, of Ontario and Comment.

I mentioned several months ago that Blueprint, my favoritest woman’s magazine (and the only one I really could stomach, because it was for people just like me!), stopped publishing. Its subscriptions folded into Martha Stewart Living, which started coming last week. It’s a nice-looking magazine, but I can tell I’ll never re-subscribe. It’s clearly aimed at the suburban housewife with a lot of time on her hands and decent resources at her disposal, and though I don’t have any particular problems with suburban housewives - though I don’t think I’d make a very good one - nothing in there pertains to me. The recipes are far beyond anything I have time or patience to make, with ingredients I don’t buy, and I don’t have space for things like gardens or sewing nooks. Oh well. The pictures are lovely. :)

But, I’ve made these cookie bars several times from the Martha Stewart website, and they’re great. And very easy.

Last night I made pumpkin ravioli in melted butter (with a little fresh sage and garlic) and asparagus, blanched for a minute in boiling water, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with a few cranks of the salt and pepper grinders. The asparagus (which I made up out of my head because I didn’t have enough pots to melt any more butter) was actually kind of brilliant. I will definitely be making it that way again.

And we watched Catch Me If You Can, not because it’s particularly Valentine-y but because we just wanted to. The last time I saw it, I was in Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea (if memory serves me correctly, it had Finnish subtitles too). And Tom had seen it before. But it was great, and I now agree with him, probably one of the better endings to a Spielberg film.

Tonight is Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart! And I have Monday off. I am not sure if we’re doing anything in particular this weekend. I should think we may try to see Atonement since we still haven’t seen it. Also, I have many books to read (one for a RELEVANT piece, three for fun) and about a hundred pages of readings by such estimable folks as Jurgen Habermas and Susan Sontag about “The Critic”, which should be fascinating since I am kind of a critic myself. Our assignment, in fact, is to write a critical review of something - and a film is on the list.

Lastly, and I think this is via Annie - sage advice for writers looking to get published from an agent.

Not only was last night’s fête a rousing success (despite my less than ideal substitution of dried Great Northern white beans for dried cannellini beans in the soup recipe), but I had enough leftover eggs, prosciutto, baguettes, and mozzarella that there’s now some kind of giant baked thing cooking in the oven that should feed us for a few days. Oh, and cappuccinos made with Papua New Guinea espresso (sent from PNG a while ago) in our always-reliable, always-wonderful Mukka.

Mmm. Love Saturdays.

I chatter a little about books at Conversant Life.

It took about five hours of work, but our apartment is now clean, relatively brick-dust-free, and has half a brick wall on one end (which was intended - it’s the chimney). Our landlord stopped by and we got to talking about the building. Apparently it was built in 1890, and at one point in the past there was a family with seven children living in the building, both apartments. Even with both apartments, though, you’d have to be impressed. That totals about 800 square feet. For nine people.

The brick is very old and all different colors, probably because bits have been replaced in the last hundred-and-twenty years, but I love it. It has so much character and it looks great against the blue walls and adds a lot to the room. Maybe I can get a picture up at some point.

Tonight I have class. I’m looking forward to it. The readings this week were long and arduous but interesting, and I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a background in art history, so I think this seminar format really helps me learn and explore what I’ve read. Also, having class around a table is so much more fun than a lecture hall or one of those hideous industrial classrooms at RPI (which gratefully did NOT include the IT building, but unfortunately did include pretty much everywhere else I had class).

As part of next week’s work for class, I have to make it either to MoMA or the Met. I really need to go early in the week so I have time to write about it, but unfortunately they both close at 5:30 pm until Friday, after which they are opened in the evenings and more crowded to boot. I’ll probably end up at the Met on Friday night or Saturday morning. It’s just bigger, and therefore less annoying when it’s crowded.

I’m reading Slow Food: The Case for Taste (by Carlo Petrini) in my spare moments, and I’m really enjoying it. , I think you’d really like this book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s a history of the slow food movement and a case for thoughtful, flavorful, healthful meals and eating as a communal activity, which is a rather Biblical idea, when you get right down to it.

Which, of course, I say as I’m about to finish up at work and wolf down a Clif bar on the way to class. But though I long for a really yummy meal, prepared with love and served around a table with friends, I’m okay with the Clif bar for now. It’s just a phase of life.

I like to go backwards and read about what I did over the holidays each year, and that’s the primary reason for this roundup. I won’t be offended if you don’t read it (but feel free).

Because I started working at NYU this year, it was the first year since college where I had the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s off without having to take any vacation days. I highly recommend working at a university. Or at least this one.

Holiday, Part 1 - Albany
My break really began on the Thursday night before Christmas. We wrapped up early at the office and headed to a dinner with our printing house at Aroma, where we ate very good food, including dessert. I ducked out early to see Margot at the Wedding at the Angelika with Tom - we greatly enjoyed it - and then we headed uptown to see Sweeney Todd at the midnight screening in Times Square. Let me warn you now: if you see a musical film at midnight in New York, you will be surrounded by mildly obnoxious musical theater students. Thankfully, nobody sang along with the film.

We got home somewhere around 3am; I’d arranged to work from home on Friday. I woke up feeling lousy and gradually felt lousier throughout the day, until I felt so sick that I took a long, painful nap and ended up skipping Adam and Renee’s Christmas party that night (which was something I was looking forward to). Tom was good to me and stayed quiet and made me soup.

On Saturday morning I wasn’t feeling any better - it felt distinctly like when I had mono two years ago at Christmas - but I dragged myself out of bed and we dragged our suitcase, camera bag, hanging bag, my purse, and three bags full of wrapped Christmas presents to Penn Station, where we got on a train and mercifully sat and read and napped until we arrived in Albany just before 3pm. We hadn’t been home since June.

There was snow everywhere - the first white Christmas in a long time. Mom and Sean picked us up at the train station and brought us home, where we finished decorating the Christmas tree. Sean and Tom and Sean’s friends headed off to see I Am Legend that night at the local theater, but I watched a bit of the Andy Griffith Show and went to bed.

I was still feeling pretty sick on Sunday, but we got up and went to church. My grandmother drove in from Boston and came with us. The kids’ Christmas musical had been postponed due to snow the previous Sunday night, so instead, they performed it during the morning service. It was cute, though we were a little disappointed at not getting to sing Christmas carols. :) We went to brunch with family friends afterwards, then headed home for a little while before going to a friend’s birthday party. Tom and I came home early again. I think we watched a movie? But I can’t remember what it was.

Monday was Christmas Eve day. I was feeling so sick at that point that I ended up in urgent care with some strange and disconcerting symptoms, and they ran tests (the results just came back and they were negative) and gave me antibiotics. Perplexing and annoying.

In the evening we went to have dinner with Mom’s family (my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) at Outback. We’ve had Christmas Eve dinner with them every year since I can remember, and it’s one of my favorite traditions, even if I wasn’t feeling well enough to eat anything. Dinner ran so long that we missed church, but we came home and watched the Behold the Lamb of God DVD I gave Tom for Christmas (that’s the Andrew Peterson concert we went to see a few weeks ago in Connecticut), which was probably equally as good, even if it didn’t involve candles. Everyone loved the concert. I can’t emphasize enough how excellent that CD really is.

We woke up on Christmas and ate breakfast (Tom made some very fancy and yummy scrambled eggs, which I was actually able to eat), and then the whole family piled in to open presents. It was a lot of fun. We have small cousins in our family, and children are fabulous at Christmas. My small cousin Johnny was delighted with the broom he received. We’re a strange bunch.

When they left, we cleaned up a bit, then opened our presents to each other (lots of books, great CDs, and I got this dress, which I love completely). We headed to our long-time friends’ house for dinner and ended up singing the Messiah loudly and enthusiastically as I frenetically tried to keep up with the piano part. Ever tried to pound through fugue-like accompaniment at a breakneck pace? Good thing we all know the entire Messiah by heart from years of spending every Friday night at practice.

We spent Wednesday in Albany; I had breakfast with my good friend Sarah, and we had lunch with Bill, my former boss when I worked at the church and one of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet. We wound up the evening that night watching A Christmas Story (you’ll shoot your eye out). And on Thursday, we got up rather early to head home.

Holiday, Part 2 - New York City
We spent the greater part of Thursday and Friday at home. Tom ducked out and bought Guitar Hero III for the Mac with his Christmas money at some point and rocked out for most of the weekend as I sat and finished a book and watched old episodes of The Office on Hulu and What Not to Wear on the TLC website.

And on Friday night, we saw There Will Be Blood in a sold-out theater (we’re so blessed to live in New York, with one of only two theaters playing the film nationwide right now), which duly bowled us over. A true epic, and Daniel Day-Lewis fully deserves the Best Actor Oscar that I certainly hope he’ll receive this year.

On Saturday we met up with Angela and saw Persepolis, not bad, but disappointing overall. After the film we went to Think Coffee and played Scrabble - I won, but only by about five points - then headed home and watched Rescue Dawn, which was, well, interesting, and good. That Christian Bale. What a guy.

By Sunday I was feeling fully recovered, and after church we headed to brunch at Cafe Asean with a herd of people that included a baby, a toddler, and a four-year-old. Hijinks ensued. When the dust cleared, Todd, Angela, Tom and I headed out to Brooklyn and sat around eating bits and pieces, drinking a Pinot Noir, and watching The Hoax, that Richard Gere film about the guy who wrote a fake biography of Howard Hughes. It was not very good, but it was pretty entertaining.

Monday was, of course, another holiday, and we went to our friends Holly and Christy’s apartment to ring in the New Year with “southern libations” and a handful of people who we didn’t know but do now. We headed to their roof to watch the fireworks and shout “Happy New Year” to everyone on the other rooftops all over Brooklyn. Marvelously festive, and we walked home through the lit-up brownstones around 3:00 am, when it appeared everyone else had just gotten tired and was walking home as well.

On Tuesday we rose late and went to Angela’s, where we ate deliciously well with a small gathering and finished welcoming the New Year with The Lives of Others, which we’d seen almost precisely a year ago but Angela and Katie had not seen. Thankfully, they thought it was wonderful. Which it is.

So that is how we brought in 2008, and yesterday was my first day back at work. Tom knocked out a shift at the co-op early yesterday morning and then hung out with Amy (hi Amy!), who is in town for a few weeks, resting from LA. By the time I got home last night, they’d concocted some delicious salad with roasted salmon and homemade tomato-mango salsa of which I couldn’t get enough. Amy left around 8pm and we watched The Page Turner, which turned out to be a fabulously creepy-ish film that plays very much like a French version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and if you see it, you’ll know what I mean.

We have lovely plans for gatherings on Friday and Saturday night, and the Museum of the Moving Image is having a Paul Thomas Anderson festival this weekend, so we’re hoping to make it up to Astoria to see Punch-Drunk Love on the big screen on Sunday. Marvelous.

I made a scrumptious curry turkey sandwich on a baguette for lunch this morning before I left for work. Very easy and very delicious. The recipe is from the Chocolate & Zucchini recipe book (see the equally scrumptious blog here) that my in-laws sent me for my birthday. It still sounds weird to say that I have in-laws, even after more than a year.

Anyhow. Highly recommended, especially if you’re kind of like me and obsessed with simple French food.

We had a perfect weekend.

On Friday night, Catherine and I went to see Rosie Thomas and Over the Rhine at the Highline Ballroom. I’d never been to this venue - it’s WAY out in the meatpacking district. Rosie was adorable, as always, and Over the Rhine was amazing. They played all of the songs from The Trumpet Child, plus North Pole Man, Born, Ohio, and Orphan Girl.

I had an amusing moment; we handed our tickets to the doorman/bouncer. He asked if we wanted a table, and we declined. Then he said, “We ask that there be no moshing at this concert.”

Now, if you’re familiar with either of these artists, you know that moshing is probably not something you could actually do at this concert. So I smiled.

“I’m very serious, ma’am,” he said, as he ushered us in the door. I felt vaguely reprimanded, but it was so ludicrous that I just starting laughing when I was safely away from the bouncer. I didn’t want to get kicked out.

The drummer on this tour was on the Snow Angels tour last Christmas; we liked him so much that Tom went backstage and got his contact info in case we ever ran across a sudden need for an awesome drummer. I was so excited when he came onstage that I texted Tom. And he did not disappoint. After his drum solo, the twentysomething guys next to me were clapping and shouting “Mickey! Mickey!”

I met up with Tom for dinner at Lobo in Park Slope (nachos loaded with pork, yum). He walked in grinning like a Cheshire cat. After we ate, he handed me the sweetest birthday card (yes, my birthday isn’t until this coming Sunday . . . but stay with me here), grinning again. We went home and when I walked in, I saw one of these.

Yeah. Major freak-out. Once upon a time, piano was my life, but I haven’t really played much since I started college six years ago and not at all since I moved to New York. It’s amazing. I’ve never played a keyboard that so closely resembled an actual piano. I can’t stop grinning.

On Saturday we got up late, watched a few episodes of Battlestar Galactica (we’ve almost finished Season 1), and headed off to Angela’s for her birthday celebration including much food, good company, and a very late night. Felt a lot like old times. I stuffed a lot of prunes with cheese and wrapped them in bacon, and I managed to clean out the roast pot, so she was very happy.

We were misinformed by several people on Saturday night and therefore set the clocks back when we got home around 3am; unfortunately, when we finally got up Sunday morning, we discovered that we were wrong because of the legislation that moved the end of Daylight Savings Time forward one week. Whoops. So we were rather late for church.

After church we had a raucous lunch at Miracle with plenty of lovely people (including these two. Tom and I dashed off to the Angelika to see Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (the jury’s still out, but I can’t say I recommend it), then dashed out of there to see a staged reading of a play, of which two of the actors were from Tom’s class at Esper. Very New York day.

And the World Series was just the icing on the cake.

I am really glad it is Friday.

Yesterday, we got cable internet. It wasn’t very expensive when compared with our old DSL service, and what’s more, this one actually works. And it’s much faster. I’m still wrestling to get the printer and external drives set up with our multiple-Mac laptop setup, because I am not so good with networking, but Apple makes it much easier. Hurrah!

And as a result, I was able to keep tabs on the World Series while we watched the Season 4 premiere of The Office on the NBC website. Yes, we’re behind, but we were very happy. Happier still that the Sox hung on.

Someone blogged about having a grilled pepperjack cheese sandwich and now I am CRAVING grilled cheese; I looked it up, though, and the grilled cheese restaurant is someone on the lower east side, and I’m not warm enough to wander around town today. I will make do.

Tonight, I am seeing Over the Rhine and Rosie Thomas, which should be an excellent concert. Tom couldn’t go, so I replaced him with Catherine, who was happy to oblige. This is the Trumpet Child tour, and I think Rosie’s just along for the ride.

Tomorrow involves some celebratory cooking, drinking, and eating around Angela’s birthday. She has a menu planned with food that sounds very good, and I shall make a roast (beast?) and other lovely edibles. Mmmm.

I finished Housekeeping yesterday and started Atonement today, and I’m already obsessed. Love reading good books. Tom hauled our copy of Anna Karenina off the shelf last night (something like 900 pages) and brought it to work with him. And I have What is the What on deck.

I’m a bit boring today. But I’m hungry.

Tom got a call yesterday to work on a big film until mid-December. It has some good named talent attached to it, and is shooting all over town, so we’re both pretty pleased. Work is good.

That also means I probably have a drastically more open schedule until then, so I’m seriously considering a shot at NaNoWriMo. For real this time. Anyone out there doing it (besides Josh)?

Our weekend really was quite good. Besides the scheduled events, we also took in Michael Clayton and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both of which hit my top-movies-of-the-year list. I blogged briefly about them at Radiant today.

We listened to Lorrie Moore and Jeffrey Eugenides on Friday night; having read almost all of both their catalogs, we found it to be an insightful and wonderful experience. I feel like I’d love to just sit down over dinner with both of them and pick their brains. Lorrie Moore is very funny, unassuming but witty, a lot like her characters; Jeffrey Eugenides looks exactly like you’d expect him to look and seems excessively normal, for the kinds of stories he dreams up.

Though the costume design panel was good, the highlight of Saturday was definitely the Kronos Quartet, with a program called More Than Four. They started with a sampled piece that included bits of recordings of the work they’ve performed at BAM over the last twenty years. Then they moved onto a piece that included a giant puppet with a marionette stage in its chest; the music was composed by the puppeteer, and it was beautiful. The second half of the program included a piece that was incredibly intense - the Quartet, along with an accordion player/singer/live looper and a guy playing an electronic pad and surrounded by his MacBooks, sampling and doing crazy things. It all came together well, at times imitating the ocean, or a war zone, or just waves of sound. It makes me so happy to see a string quartet that’s been playing innovative music together for over 30 years and staying relevant while still maintaining the structure and beauty of their original form.

On Sunday, we ducked out of church a bit early to go to the Parkour demonstration. Jason Kottke was apparently there, too, so you can read his very accurate roundup.

We left and went to the East Village to a restaurants whose name I cannot recall (help, Angela?) and drank coffee and ate eggs and a pear cake, then met up with Angela and Steve for Jesse James, followed by a random pasta dinner at Pane e Cioccolato.

On Thursday, I’m seeing a screening of Slipstream, written and directed by Anthony Hopkins. I have high hopes.

It was good! I think I might try WAY less salt and slightly less pepper next time, though. Still, tasty. Crusty bread is a must-have accompaniment. Tom picked up a stellar chianti as well. I think I might also try throwing some potatoes in for the last hour. Mmmm.

We watched The Lookout (Joseph Gordon-Levitt!) while we were eating, and enjoyed that, too. Finished it and we were talking about something, and for some reason, we decided to watch The Matrix, which we ended up pausing for future watching about halfway through because it was late. We love our little parties.

Perfect fall weather today; crisp but not cold, and sunny. I am wearing corduroys, a T-shirt, and a scarf and drinking a nice hot cup of coffee and feel just about right.

Tom picked up extra shifts at the co-op last night, and I busily brought our humble abode into some semblance of order and made a chicken in white wine vinegar sauce from the Silver Spoon, which made the place smell very vinegar-y (not pleasant). I brought some for lunch today, and I’m hoping it tastes ok.

Also, we received a set of lovely knives from Tom’s parents for our anniversary! We’ve been using a hand-me-down set of knives from my former roommate that were rather dull. I cracked open the box last night and started using them. It’s a complete revelation to cut bread and not have it crumble everywhere, and to chop onions and have them stay on the cutting board instead of flying about and falling into cracks between counters and appliances where they will stay and go bad. Oh, the joy. I feel like a real grown-up now.

Speaking of food: this week’s New York has an article by a guy who lives in the outer reaches of Brooklyn and turned his tiny backyard (”Green 1/55th of an Acre”, the cover proclaims) into a self-sufficient garden. It’s harrowing but fun to read, having grown up in a world where we actually did grow a lot of our food ourselves and had rabbits and chickens. It makes me wonder what my own children will be like, since they’ll probably grow up in Manhattan or Brooklyn. I really hope I can garden on a rooftop or in a community garden so they don’t join the growing ranks of those who don’t know the joy of eating peas in their pods or who aren’t aware that carrots grow underground.

Speaking of food; I shopped for ingredients at the co-op last night and left full of joy that I can now do things like buy gloriously fresh apples for eighteen cents, or four free-range chicken breasts for four dollars. We’ve always seemed to spend most of our money on food, because frankly, we love to cook and entertain and we love good food. It’s such a blessing to be able to buy it at a reasonable price and to feel good about what we’re eating, ethically and nutritionally.

All this food talk is probably springing from Heat, which I’m using to cut my Cormac McCarthy consumption and enjoying greatly. If you like food, you’ll love this book (and it’s not fiction!). Highly recommended.

I’m not sure how I feel about James Frey getting a book deal. On the one hand, the guy is high on my “creep” list for fabricating parts of his own memoir, and I feel like he shouldn’t get rich because of it. On the other hand . . . the next book is fiction, and apparently, he’s good at fiction. I haven’t read his memoir and I have no idea if he’s actually a good writer or not. I suppose it comes down to the fact that the book industry, as with most industries, rewards talent, not character.

Very rainy here today, but somehow still warm. Strange. Also, other New Yorkers, has the trash on the sidewalks smelled especially awful to you this week? It’s made me gag far too many times the last few days.

Last night we went to the Co-op to finally join, which we did, enticed by the proximity to our own home and the impressively inexpensive food; the produce is not too much cheaper but much fresher than surrounding grocery stores, but it is local and organic, and everything else there (meat, cheese, snacks, drinks, bulk grains, the list goes on) is so much more cost-effective than anywhere else in the vicinity. I can finally get Clif Bars (an integral part of my daily diet) for $1 apiece.

The co-op here works differently than the one to which my family belonged in Albany, which allowed non-members to shop at higher prices. At the Park Slope co-op, only members can shop, and each adult member of the household has to work one 2 3/4 hour shift every four weeks, which comes out to 13 shifts per year. So, between the two of us, we need to work 26 shifts per year. And my husband, who is amazing, is working something like six shifts this week and next to get us ahead. He worked one today already and is going back to work another this afternoon.

In other news, our New Yorker hard drive came at some point this week and the guy who runs the photo studio below us had received the package, so he caught us on our way out the door last night and handed it over. It’s great. I’m so excited that all the original cartoons and ads are preserved. If you like the New Yorker, or just like good writing, I think it’s well worth the cost.

Fall sparks creativity, I think. Tom and I have suddenly both started new writing projects. Here’s to hoping it lasts.

I’ve been a little obsessed with the story in this week’s double issue of the New Yorker about high-flying wine counterfeiters since I read it last weekend. I think it’s a great story. (A great movie?)

Anyhow, if you’re not a subscriber, you can now read it here.

Starting in 1980, Rodenstock began holding lavish annual wine tastings, weekend-long affairs attended by wine critics, retailers, and various German dignitaries and celebrities. He opened scores of old and rare wines, all provided at his own expense, and served in custom-made “Rodenstock” glasses that were supplied by his friend the glassmaker Georg Riedel. Impeccably dressed, wearing stylish Rodenstock eyeglasses and shirts with stiff white collars, he bantered with guests, exclaiming, over an especially fine bottle, “Ja, unglaublich! One hundred points!” He was punctilious about being on time, barring latecomers, and when serving older wines he banned spitting, which prompted some guests, alarmed at the number of bottles they would be sampling, to hide spittoons in their laps. “You don’t spit away history,” Rodenstock admonished them. “You drink it.”

Rodenstock made no secret of having discovered the Jefferson bottles; on the contrary, the record sale to Forbes had made him a celebrity in the wine world. In the spring of 1985, he would later explain, he received a phone call about an interesting discovery in Paris, where someone had stumbled upon some dusty old bottles, each inscribed with the letters “Th.J.” Rodenstock refused to reveal who had sold him the bottles, but apparently the seller did not realize the significance of the initials. “It was like the lottery,” Rodenstock said of the experience. “It was simply good luck.” He would not say how many bottles there were—in some accounts, it was “a dozen or so,” in others, as many as thirty. Nor would he disclose the address in Paris where they were discovered.

Last night I made a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, kalamata olives, and mozzarella cheese dressed in a chive and red wine vinaigrette, loosely based on a recipe from an outstanding salad recipe book we picked when we were in Martha’s Vineyard earlier this summer. Added a three-cheese Amy’s Pizza and some crostini from Whole Foods and we had quite a meal, over which we watched Castle in the Sky. Yes, folks, I watched anime. I’m not a fan, but the movie was certainly entertaining and downright funny in some places. We watched it dubbed in English, which I think was a great improvement over Japanese with English subtitles. I’ve never been a fan of cartoons (I didn’t really watch them growing up), so I think that element is really difficult to hurdle. Still, it could have been infinitely worse. We’ve borrowed a number of Miyazaki films from our friend Kevin, on his recommendation, so we’re working our way through them.

Our weekend is fairly open. I think we’re hoping to see 3:10 to Yuma and possibly Shoot ‘Em Up (who can resist Paul Giametti as a crazy bad guy?), and on Sunday after church and a meeting, we’re planning to marathon a handful of The Office Season 3 episodes so we’re caught up. Not that we’ll be watching Season 4 in “real time”, since we lack network TV, but at least we’ll know where it left off.

The weather is gorgeous. I love fall.