And More and More and More!

Well this week was my last week volunteering at Project Basho. I met a lot of people that I will continue to see, and I discovered some awesome resources that I will probably continue to not use. Except that I did finally get my film processed from NYC/Brooklyn, and the images did come out, so I'll make a point to use Basho's Negatives Scanner in the near future. My camera being in working order also means that I can take it with me to Boston&Providence next week!! I can even fit it in my beautiful new hiking backpack (ordered off Ebay for cheap, but it totally serves my purposes!).

And when I return from far-away-lands, I will have yet another volunteer job awaiting me: yes, that's right folks, I am officially the new volunteer at the UPenn Archaeology&Anthropology Museum's Archives Department!

I will be working there Thursday mornings (meaning I'll have to get up early on my day off, BUT, I'll be home by early afternoon and hopefully will go right to the studio for some daytime painting of Leslie's kitchen (on the 4x5 canvas I stretched weeks ago. It's coming along quite nicely!) And I even have plans to audit my friend Erika's Architecture class at UPenn on Wednesday mornings. (And I won't even mention the new yoga studio by my house, because then I won't regret talking about it when I end up not going with Celia like we are promising each other we will).

So there's a lot going on! Including, of course, food: the CSA continues to be delicious (lots of squash: squash pasta, squash soup!) and even local honey this week! Last week Mom and Nanny came for dinner at Alma de Cuba (we are really making our Stephen Starr rounds) and Mom liked her birthday earrings (purchased at my favorite local jewelry store Tselaine) and Nanny had a box mailed to me because it was SO heavy, but it included lots of cookies and an asparagus cooker (in which I fully intend to cook pasta and other goodies), but because one tiny box is hardly enough to fill every nook and cranny of my apartment with food and other potentially necessary objects, she brought some boxes with her too.

And lastly, Christiane and Jessica have been graduated from Phase One of Jen Brown Fishtown Integration Orientation 101: they were introduced to, and approved of by the one and only Celia Caust-Ellenbogen. I am looking forward to a beautiful autumn of pretty ladies, knitting (finally) Amelia's poncho, squash, archives, studio, and maybe even some damned yoga. But first it must all begin with a trip to Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Julie, Lowell, Kerouac's grave, Providence, Noah, and more and more and more!

*Apologies that all of my images this post were savagely stolen from the interweb.

Escarole, Worms, and The Horse's Mouth

Wanted to get so much done today, but instead only ended up getting a little bit of work done in the studio on my hair art (soon to be finished and posted!, round one of them anyway)

But then I came home and made some escarole to go with some of Nannie's chicken I found buried in the freezer, and some leftover sweet potatoes. If I'm still hungry, I can eat some bread with the pesto I made today out of CSA spinach and some basil from the garden and other delicious pesto-making ingredients.

And the crumbs can go to the worms!
I got the worms in, and they are currently residing in my kitchen. I just get so worried about them! Soon I'll move some into the big bin outside, but to be honest, I plan on keeping enough of them in my own bin, just in case the outside bin fails again. This is my last effort on the communal worm bin, after that: they're all mine!

Now for dinner and The Horse's Mouth, a really funny movie that one of the docents at the Mutter Museum recommended to me. Every week he asks if I've seen it yet, and to be honest, I just can't take another week of saying no! (twenty minutes into it, and it's good already!)

Scarves and Apples

Well, I wore a scarf today. Just a small one. But it happened. I am so not looking forward to the winter. As a matter of fact, knowing that autumn only leads to winter, makes me dislike autumn. But that's not fair, because I really do love autumn. I just love summer the most.

A Fistful of Flowers was an awesome show by the Baltimore Annex Theatre! There weren't too many people there, but it was small and intimate and thoroughly enjoyable. Afterward we all hung out for a while, part of which took place in the playground across from the warehouse.

I took some long exposures with my digital camera.

This week has been very busy with moving Celia into her new apartment!She has some furniture from when she was a kid. We're making it work.

Did I mention she's keeping Marie-Claire? (The cat she's been cat-sitting at the house she was house-sitting)

Before&After

So, you can see even after two days how much better it looks! We still have some work to do, but all in all, its been a great Rosh Hashanah. I even ate a tiny delicious apple from the CSA on my walk home today. So much delicious food! Always!
Look at this freaking broccoli!

Hair, a Bag, and a lot of Good People

I also managed to get my hair cut for the first time in over a year! Tina at Plume managed to fill out my bangs, healthify my ends without cutting too much off. I was really satisfied with my experience, especially that the salon is organic, and only charged $35 for all that attention. And they do free bang trims too!



Hans does this all the time. He's nuts!

I've been hanging out with a lot of different groups lately! Its so strange to think that I moved here little over a year ago without knowing anyone, and now I have friends from Eastern State, Basho, Swarthmore, and now members and friends of Puppetyranny! And its the best when they overlap! Like when Kennedy from Peter Pan showed up at Erika&Jack's housewarming party with her boyfriend! Or how Eli from Basho was roommates with Mark Pruce from USY during college! Just the other day I hung out with Eli and David from the Peter Pan show! David makes these amazing gloves, and his website is great, but you can also buy directly from his Etsy store. Photos by Eli!

Tonight is a play by the Baltimore Annex Theatre called A Fistful of Flowers, hosted by Puppetyranny at Little Berlin!

Tuesday Celia can start moving in to her new apartment, just a few blocks from me!

AND I just discovered that some awesome girls I knew at MICA, Christianne and Jessica, are moving to Fishtown, also just a few blocks away. I think Celia will like them very much. <3 <3 <3

Last night I made scones from this recipe, with cranberries! Yum, breakfasts for weeks!

Also, All the Plants are Fine

Despite that Hans took a chunk out of the Avocado plant, I managed to save him and he seems to be growing back in all the right places. I mean, so its starting over a few months, its going to take 10 years to bear fruit.

This funny thing that I still have growing and growing from the Bryn Mawr Lancaster Boys last summer
Spider plant!


Ivy, oh where did that come from? Ian of course.

Jade is also doing much better than when Ian saw it last.


And if my grandmother doesn't come get her plants soon I might just throw them to the worms!
The worms actually are a sad story right now: I did several things wrong, varying from not enough bedding all the way to not keeping them moist enough. But Matt recently built us a beautiful handle-lid, so I need to get things figured out and start again! Yay wormies! (I hope I didn't kill them, but rather that they escaped out the drainage holes and into the earth and are making babies and happily swimming around down there)

Brooklyn and Back (And a lot of Manhattan too!)

Well, I made it to Brooklyn this time. Saw some amazing people, museums, and I understand NYC/Brooklyn much more than I did. All in all, mission accomplished!

I stayed with Dave on Monday and Wednesday night, and even got to spend some time with him during the day! My AAM card lets me in to any AAM Museum (and others too!) for free, sometimes with a guest too! So I ended up going to 10 museums in 4 days, and Dave got to go to some with me, including the Guggenheim!

The MET is always a good time, and I always end up seeing a new Alfred Emile Stevens painting! He's one of my favorites, and I can't find a book of his work anywhere. I can usually spot him a mile away too!
This lovely work is by Kees van Dongen. I am so in lust with these color choices! (Even more intense in person of course)

I took a walk around the Reservoir while headed to the West side, and took some shots along the way.

I had just enough time to run through the Natural History Museum before having to head back to the Gug, who were nice enough to hold my bag while I toured the city without it for a bit.

Then Kayla was so great, she came in to the city after work to pick me up and we had dinner in Chinatown which was delicious (shrimp in eggrolls! genius!)

Then I went to meet Lizzy Zevallos at a Fringe show that her friend wrote called Tiny Geniuses. Hadn't seen Lizzy since high school: she's the same, but better! Every aspect of the play was simply AMAZING: from the IKEA set, to the actors, to the spectacularly written over-the-top witty dialogue... I wish I could see it again! And best yet, Lizzy knows the girl who wrote it: Emily Feldman. Awesome.
I stayed with Lizzy and her roommate Christina, and their cat Blinkn. View from out their bathroom window:






It was raining a lot, and luckily on Wednesday morning, Dave was home so I could drop my stuff off at his place. Then I took him to the MOMA

How he loves his art!

I really loved this Matisse. I couldn't look away. I need to paint more nudes. (!!!!!!!) (And this particular painting wasn't even at the big Matisse show (on the 4th floor?), and that was really good. We were pretty tired, so I just ran through it while Dave rested outside. It was like a miniature depiction of my week, just running around looking at art smiling wildly and feeling a little bit insane and a lotta bit excited.)

Finally saw a Kara Walker in person! It was really amazing.

Dave left and I hit up the American Folk Museum, sort of just breezed through it, but it was interesting. Then I met him for his fringe show, In the Schoolyard. Not so much my cup of tea, but enjoyable nonetheless. And I got to see two fringe shows! Talk about an education!

Thursday morning I got to see Mark Pruce for breakfast! I have waited YEARS to see him again. What a great kid, and engaged too! Lucky gal. I'll meet her someday soon too!

Then I booked it to the New Museum, where I couldn't take any photos, but had a really good time there too. The space is amazing! Ran to the Whitney, and had an amazing time. I had only been there for the 60s show a few years ago, but was awesome (really, how many other words are as pure as "amazing" and "awesome"?)

Then bolted (note use of increasingly hurried adjectives, as my time in NYC runs short!) to the Frick where I finally saw Ingres' Contesse d'Haussonville... and cried. Like a sap. I didn't expect to, but I love him.

And the Neue Museum. I remembered my love for Schiele and Klimt, as well as discovered George Minne, and educated myself in Otto Dix, of whom I had remained mostly ignorant through my art education.

Thursday night was spent at Ashley Lloyd's, and we went to dinner with her friend Jeremy (how we never met during our years at MICA is beyond me!) and went to a real Brooklyn bar, and then crashed. I saw Chelsea for a minute, and Selina for a bit longer.

(Be cool, make serious faces.)

One more museum: The Brooklyn Museum. It was so much bigger than I was expecting!




And I had forgotten about their Warhol exhibit. I have also been rather ignorant of him, passing him off as "that pop artist" but now I know better!



Then some Kiki Smith, although perhaps I didn't spend enough time with her.


Larry Rivers



And even got to see Judy Chicago's The Dinner Table!!!! It was really the icing on the cake!
Vadis Turner
And even some Louise Bourgeois.


I'm exhausted all over again. Or should I say, inspired? Studio time!