as cute as he is here, he was more or less cute on his back with his feet in the air this morning. we tried: we made a little nest and tried to feed him some of flannery's high-calorie "crack" food suppliment. no dice.

he just seemed sleepy last night, but liked being petted by ben, and would lift his head up and open his eyes at times.

been kinda slow updating here lately. in little news, there was another butterfly in the yard.




in much, much bigger news, ripley got a small piece of my gelato cone.





in medium-sized news, we only leave the house if we have to, and we really only have to to shop for food and to exercise the dogs. (you can see by ben's expression here, what summertime is like for us.)





but the biggest news of all of course is the carnival that was directly (you can see, very directly) outside our front door for ten days. we took quite a few pictures of it. and we miss it now that it's gone! but it's kinda nice to have the field back. we are just waiting for the return of the saxaphone guy.

1. the park. from the front windows, where i stand when i am using the press, i have seen: buddhist monks in saffron robes, three red-tailed hawks, people doing tai chi, and as of this writing, people fencing. on summer weekends and evenings, the field is full of soccer teams, softball teams, and happy cheering. it never goes on too late and it never gets rowdy - it's just a happy place. yeah, it needs to be sodded something fierce, but it's lovely to live across from it nonetheless.

2. the ice cream man plays christmas carols all summer long. have you ever heard an ice cream truck play "o come all ye faithful"? (WHILE a buddhist monk in a saffron robe walks by?) come around here any day between may and september.

3. the nearest ATM is only a block and a half away. and only has a fifty cent fee. and is located inside a police station.

4. the thirteenth street saxophone guy. he walks up thirteenth playing, then goes and sits on the bleachers and plays some more. flannery in particular loves to listen to him.

5. the 9th street market festival.

6. 1601 - my favorite bar of all time.

7. the pavarotti pizza at franco and luigi's.

8. next door neighbors who will scrub your steps for no reason, or will hand you a perfectly prepared filet mignon or homemade bottle of wine over the back fence.

9. zoe strauss. because she has learned to stop worrying and be the bomb. and mikey wild. because he is a mother fucking maverick.

10. café viet huong - or as we call it, "the diner". there is no better comfort food than pork and paté on baguette, spring rolls, and charbroiled pork on broken rice. and chrysanthemum tea! my favorite server there looks like a vietnamese pee wee herman.

friday afternoon i was cutting up a lettuce for salad. this romaine had been in the fridge for a week and a half, in one of those fresh-veggie bags.

i washed it, put it in the drainer for a half hour or so, then started slicing. i had cut halfway through the length of it when the ladybug crawled out of the uncut end.

i screamed, "oh, SWEETIE!" and every animal in the whole house came running.

the dogs and i took the ladybug outside and put her on the sumac. she seemed fine after ten days in the fridge!

we set a very casual table this year. so much stuff going on around the house on the weekends, we really didn't have time to sit still for holidays that neither of us really celebrate. (i like bunny plates though. and the nod to passover is over to the right with the haroset and horseradish, and the sephardic eggs, which i have been making at eastertime for longer than i have been wed to a jew.)

these are the first flowers we picked from the garden this year.

there was a time in my life when i was very adamant about not wanting to grow tulips, even though they are widely known as my favorite flower. but something about them growing up out of the ground just looks icky to me. this is an experiment, growing them, and i don't know how i feel yet. i think this cultivar is called "queen of the night" but i wish it were blacker.

as many of you have already heard, this easter was a lesson in one thing: anise extract and anise oil are NOT the same thing by a long shot. anise oil is MUCH stronger, and anise oil is what i used in the cookies, and yes, it was something of a problem. now i know. why didn't i know before? other people did.

our ben turned 30 years old yesterday. i remember when i turned thirty, it was shortly after ben and i had become friends. i asked him how old he was, and he said "23". i had no real reason to want to beat my head into the ground at hearing this, but i remember that i did. it should have been a portent. a lot of things should have been.

but now it's ben who is thirty!!!

last saturday night he had a little surprise dinner party which pleased him greatly and made him very verklempt indeed. for his actual workaday birthday, he was surprised in the morning with huevos rancheros!

he has been talking about huevos rancheros a lot. i had never had them, nor did i think i wanted to, but they were very good.

ben requested that his birthday supper be franks and beans. there was no way i was eating that, so i made it for him, and he stopped at the wawa on his way home from work and got me a hoagie.

but the thing i was MOST excited about was... the bibimbirthday cake!!!

for the uninitiated, bibimbap is a korean meal that looks just like this. and you eat it in this kind of bowl. a stone bowl, which we have, since i got them for ben at christmastime. in fact, the cake looked so authentic, that ben says his first thought was, "she made bibimbap for dessert. oh boy. i guess i better look like i'm happy about it."

i didn't bake anything here, but focused all my creative energies on the look. the only aesthetic drawback was the green saran. i didn't want the cake or icing touching the stone bowl, but our only saran wrap was green. the cake is just marble pound cake, sliced up to line the bowl; then cream cheese frosting; coconut for the rice; dehydrated green apple slices for the vegetables; shaved chocolate for the meat; and mango sorbet for the raw egg that gets put on top. the date is the soy paste denjang and the little red juju date is the chili paste gochu jang.

damned clever. i know it.

and ben was really happy.

this picture was taken about a week and a half ago. when ben went to move last year's pumpkin out of the way, to plant a pussy willow, he expected of course that it would have just turned to jelly. instead, it was kinda hard -- it was as though it had in fact turned into a ZOMBIE pumpkin!


we think it looks rather like an andrew wyeth painting.


speaking of which -- the talented beth robinson, of whom we have become very good customers, loves andrew wyeth. ben and i need to get to the big exhibit at the PMA to get beth some good schwag (classy, not overdone and sad, like a lot of the gift shop shit at the PMA is). i am not sure any of you have yet met gunter ekdahl. he is obviously little amber's brother. (beth no longer has any of these limited-edition crows on her site at all.)


gunter ekdahl was a christmas gift and i am a little embarassed to say -- but ONLY a little -- that i have acquired a third doll since then. this is doctor scops. right now you hardly see him around - he's in the chopsticks cabinet (hanging out with a dessicated grasshopper.) isn't he awesome?


in addition to these three, ben and i gave my sister a very hush-hush, as per beth's instructions, "gift certificate" for a custom doll last xmas. (beth does not do this for everybody.) the result was robert smith.

with all that, the real reason i am giving beth a special thank-you of some wyeth schwag is that a friend of beth's has just bestowed upon her a bunch of stuff from her own grandparents' estate, including a lot of silk cloth that the friend's grandfather brought back from korea after the war. of course, my head almost exploded. beth has offered to save some of the silk for our next doll (which will be for the han's room, probably) and so, i owe her a thank you, although obviously we are very good customers.

yeah, i needed to password protect the WHOLE blog just to announce this: we've already eaten one all-black bag of jellybeans this passeaster season.

i do not know what we are doing for easter. often i only invite people here based on the fact that target has some cute paper plates. numerous occasions to have people over have stemmed from paper plate-buying at target. and i DID go buy bunny plates. target has such cute easter stuff this year and all the kids we know and like are nonchristians and frankly, even stuff like peeps just screams easter. even when it has nothing to do with a crucifixion. target even has these little polly pocket dolls in lamb outfits. it's kinda porno.

the big thing this year too i noticed is making easter "baskets" that are very boy-driven: like soft-sculpture tonka trucks and stuff like that. apparently easter is too girly.

we don't have actual passover plans either. taking the seder plate off the wall. putting something on it. i know i want some macaroons. it doesn't seem to extend beyond that, this planning. we had hoped to have the shutters up in the front of the house by easter, but now we are sure we won't; even less incentive to do anything and have anyone over.

we are getting a tree on april 29th. the parks commission already put the hole in the sidewalk and filled it with mulch!

i can't wait any longer. do you have any idea how ugly our old staircases were?

ben has done beautiful work. it's so much like we imagined it would be!

okay, i did it. he finally got to me -- what with his caring and his honesty and his reliability and the backrubs, the way he does the dishes... i offed him. you see the evidence; the lifeless bod, the handy "box of rags" for cleanup, the little plastic cup dripping with blood.

actually, this is just ben finishing up the staining of the bottom staircase -- and, like all good philadelphians, i "called empire!" and we should have someone coming out next weekend to show us some berbers for the runner. then we will post some photos of our finished project!

a pal of ben's from work went to singapore, and as everybody knows, the whole point of travel is going to the grocery stores and buying funky packaged food with long or indeterminate shelf-lives to bring home to your friends.

case in point: the lemon cheesecake kit-kat. what the photo doesn't capture accurately is the bile-colored lemon packaging that puts one in mind of nothing at all like food -- except maybe food taken out of someone's stomach during autopsy. mind you, ben already partook of the wine-flavored kit-kat (you heard right) yesterday. apparently i'm dealing with someone far more fearless than i expected. (ben's wild side appears at unlikely junctures.) he said it tasted like "wafers dipped in manischewitz". that's classy.

after a rather incapacitating dinner of potroast, oven fries, salad and homemade gravlax -- in front of a fire -- ben got out his torch and put the finishing touches on our valentine's day dessert.




turbinado sugar is the key to a good sugar crust. this was my first solo attempt at creme brulée and was in fact the most successful this household has yet had, although my ex-husband's is still better. with a probe thermometer, i can beat everyone out next time, i know it.

okay, we've kinda been celebrating all week, 'cause this particular lemon meringue pie was made on sunday night (and gone by monday). and today, for my actual birthday, we had a lot of errands to run -- out to the bindery for a quick consultation, and to the h-mart for our asian grocery needs.




we haven't actually gotten to the 'big' birthday things today -- dinner, and going over to ikea for me to pick out a chair. but we're on our way.





this, however, has been the highlight of my day so far. had it not been my birthday i am not sure that ben would have been as willing to buy two bags of ULTRAMAN SEASONING PACKETS. yes, nothing says ULTRAMAN like the taste of dried bonito and salmon flakes, and whey powder! mmmmm! ultra!!!

well how are you gonna know if you like or don't like plarnbum, if you don't try a little plarnbum?

i know. what the hell. i can only assume that "plarnbum" is some cronenbergesque deformity -- or, maybe, a very poor chinese translation of the words "plain bun". as in, plain steamed bun, which is what these are, and not bad, either.

we admit, we got the new staircase mostly for the dogs. the problem is, they both hate it. flannery will go up, but doesn't like getting past the newel at the top to come down. and ripley -- ripley prefers a carpeted step. these will get carpet runners after they are stained and sealed, but for now, we thought we'd get her practicing a bit.

one thing rai and i have in common -- aside from twenty-plus years of friendship, fondness for rats and '80's pop, and numerous other things -- is that we were both fans of the moomin books by tove jansson as kids.

recently rai came across this item in a store in new york, and sent it to me. there were a few moomin-related items there, but this one -- featuring the character "little my" -- made her think of me.

while rai knows i liked the moomins, little did rai know that in fifth grade, for "come to school dressed as your favorite character from literature" day, i did indeed come dressed as "little my". nobody had the vaguest idea who she was and a lot of my life still feels like dressing up as a finnish cartoon that nobody's ever heard of. (and for that matter it appears she has been influencing my hairstyle for the past couple of years as well.) rai knew i liked moomins in general but not "little my" in particular -- still, "little my" is what she chose for me, and this wooden kitchen timer has shot like a bullet to the top of my list of Prized Possessions of my Lifetime.

when i took it out of the box and showed it to ben, he said "oh my god -- it looks just like you."

indeed.

since my birthday is three weeks from today -- and since rai and i generally ignore each other's birthdays and holidays for the most part -- i am calling this my birthday present. close enough. also, i like getting orange things for my birthday, ever since last year when my sister got me an orange cabinet sanchez t-shirt.

obviously there is more to come. the second-to-third story staircase has also been replaced; the rest of the week will be putting in balusters, newels, and railings. all mission-style, very plain oak, very lovely.

ben will be doing all the finishing work himself. staining and sealing. he will also be doing all the finishing work for the indoor shutters that are due to arrive next month -- also hardwood, philadelphia federal style, they are being made now. ben is going to be doing a LOT of staining and sealing over the coming weeks; at the end of it all he will have the brain cells of an eighteenth-generation appalachian. and then we'll see who is really running things around here.

that ben is SO clever and so great. he orchestrated hanukkah in such a way that i got a gift on the last night (we switch off) and, that night being new year's, he made sure i got the TALES FROM THE CRYPT wall calendar i had wanted! he had a hard time this week, i see in retrospect, since i tried to go buy this calendar at least three times. he headed me off every time; and now i have it! it's so wicked.

we walked up to the mummers' parade today. some years i really hate the mummers. some years it seems fun. this was a fun year. we rode home on the subway sitting next to a man in a satin striped prison uniform, with gold-painted shoes and a sparkly hacksaw. next to him was an old drunk black lady dressed like a flapper, and next to her was a woman in full clown costume, wig and makeup -- even with the giant shoes on -- who sat down and said, "i don't feel so good." she didn't puke, but the whole subway reeked of beer. i can't believe that parade goes on all day, and there's even an eagles game tonight! it's a great people-watching holiday, and particularly in south philly.

they set off more fireworks in our neighborhood -- frankly, in our yard -- last night than i have ever heard. we put ripley in bed with us to keep her calm, and she was fine. you would think 2006 was the biggest year that ever was!

you see here the disarray that is our front first floor (and you see the roomba is trying to make things better, but it's a mere drop in the bucket.) the lumber was delivered yesterday for our new staircases; ben proudly showed off the box newels to our friend kathy when she stopped by. we are very excited, but we also know that the next three weeks are going to be rather disorderly and crowded around here.

the gift i was most excited about giving ben for christmas was a pair of large stone bowls for bibimbap, and the wooden "coasters" that keep them from burning through your table when you eat. bibimbap is a recent discovery of ours -- a korean dish -- and we have the zeal of the recently converted, demanding that tim go to koreatown on his recent visit to new york and have some there. he now is one of our flock.

bibimbap is amazing. so simple and yet so delicious. rice is cooked as usual, but is then placed into the stone bowls, brushed with sesame oil, which are heated directly at the flame; the bowls are brought (with safe, cool wooden coasters or frames around them) to the table, and sizzle throughout the meal. meat is added, and vegetables, laver, and gochu jang or denjang -- hot chili or miso-like soy paste. many people also put in a fried -- or raw! -- egg. (the egg cooks quickly.) sometimes ribbons of egg omelette are used. ben made a little omelette using his cholesterol-free egg stuff, and he had that.

as you eat, the components of your meal actually become hotter. and the rice along the sides of the bowl gets brown, roasty, and crunchy -- it's quite a treat. (best enjoyed while wearing a "mr. sparkle" t-shirt you got for hanukkah!)

my christmas gift from my friend lisa is always unusual and never disappointing. this year is clearly no exception!





two bright green, poseable mantids -- one clutching a festive bunch of castor bean pods, the other a mysterious thing lisa's card says is an "air potato" -- arrived today.





they are on the mantle and they are fantastic. fantastic! we have yet to name them. ben likes to name things, so i will wait until he gets home for dinner.

i have to haunt the house this week, with little reprieve, because workmen are here installing rather fancy slick ductless air conditioning. today i was lucky because a famous cabaret singer came to hang out and have lunch with me and we did each other's cards. then we were kind of almost unlucky in that i was not being very attentive to the beef stock i was making (it is necessary for good french onion soup, which we want for thanksgiving) and we had a little fire. now i know my lightning fast reaction to kitchen fires is to: turn off the burner, and call for someone else, and stand and stare. i might need to amend this reaction at some point -- or, buy a big box of baking soda.

anyway -- no damage done. poor little ripley had an accident, but honestly, she was overdue for one, what with the workmen, and the new sentient robotic vaccuum cleaner ben brought home yesterday. however, she got to eat some delicious beef marrow this evening as a reward for her 99% good behavior.

this oak sideboard has been promised to me for some years, but now, i live in a place where i can have it -- and not think about moving it again! so it's down in the basement/grotto, which is becoming more of a liveable space every day. it's going to be a cozy little nook before long.




out in the backyard, the scented sumac we bought at bartram's gardens is now, also as promised, turning beautiful colors. isn't it amazing when things come true?

... for a korea family event today.

finally, finally, finally. the air conditioners: off. the oven: working. the mosquitos: dying. my favorite ninety days of the calendar year are upon us. ben is in a constant swoon of happiness.





out in the backyard, the figs on jimmy and joe's tree are, literally, bursting. birds fly by and rip at them with their beaks; ripe, half-eaten figs litter our yard. we don't complain. the birds are cute and the figs smell great.




in the evenings, we have begun reading dickens' great expectations aloud. and tonight, for dinner, a meatloaf baked inside of a small pie pumpkin. in my first year with ben i was given every indication that there were many foods he didn't "like" -- i have since discovered that it was only a matter of me making them, and then he liked them. meatloaf, kasha and bowties... consider him schooled.

now i have learned to at least leave the camera lying around somewhere when people are here, to guarantee a photo of actual living, breathing, eating humans will be taken. i myself have a history of photographing floral arrangements and yet-to-be-used table settings and forgetting to take pictures of the fast-moving, distractingly talkative, fast-chewing people.



i wish i had gotten robby and scott in a picture too but since all i took pictures of was napkins, i didn't. i hereby promise to do much better at the wedding in a few weeks. i will have pictures of everyone. and pictures of cakes and flowers, too.



we were so impressed with sal's first kugel. this rosh hashanah was so much better than last year's that we forgot to open tim's mead. maybe next year! (or, maybe tonight.)

ADDENDUM : it is important to note that we cooked this dinner -- including a brisket and a baked apple dessert -- in an oven that had no thermostat control. very rustic, and very challenging. if it had not gone as well as it had, we would have resorted to serving this.

but we instead came out looking more like this -- amy's rather stylized illustration of us which served as last year's rosh hashanah greeting from the artist.

those are the color names of the paints we have chosen for the redo of the downstairs powder room... for which we have always had plans, and while those plans hold steady, we are going to be doing some extra stuff as well... including... wait for it... a tin ceiling! i'm SO excited.


been making bulb wishlists, too, for fall. these are two rather goth items that i have my eye on...





as is this... daylily "bela lugosi". you KNOW it.

oh yeah. we ate him.






and here's a korean radish, the size of a jack russell terrier. that's for kimchee.






and here's the beginnings of some gazpacho. we spent a lot of yesterday cooking.

august is our LEAST favorite month of the year. it ought not even exist. however, to get through it, we have packed it well with lots of stuff to keep us busy. dinner guests and cabaret performances, pelvic exams and vet visits, picnics and parties. we may be moving through the month like ghosts of our former selves, but at least there will be plenty to see and talk about, and then... autumn! please god.

yes, hillel is truly an amazing cat.

ha ha ha. you KNEW i meant ben. and so did ben.

here is ben up on the roof of the powder room -- an addition to the original house that isn't even as big as a double bed, but has its own roof nonetheless -- putting some sealant on it. the air conditioner drips onto this little roof (which we were told in inspection wasn't long for this world) and we are getting some drips in the powder room. eventually, it will be replaced, but for now, sealant is fine.

poor ben, out there on the roof with a nasty summer cold. the best cure: a nap with a puppy.

he knew i was going to post that, too.

after much ado and planning, the planter is finished. it goes in an "L" shape and is impossible to get one full photo of.






here are some close-ups of some of the individual set-in tiles:

"a dalmatian! i haven't seen a dalmatian for years, not since i left massachusetts, my goodness!"

from whose mouth would you expect to hear that?

A. a person on a country time (TM) lemonade commercial

B. a character on a sitcom about a girl from mass. who moves to new york to be a broadway star but ends up working for a dog walking service run by a bunch of zany metrosexuals

C. a preteen black girl with a muslim headcover, on a bicycle

the answer is of course, C. that happened a few days ago while walking flan and ripley. today, however, we saw something even more interesting than just a dalmatian -- we saw a dalmatian/basset mix. ripley was astounded.

there is something about this place. i have lived in the city a long time but our block is the only block where i have ever experienced multiple sightings of red-tailed hawks, a steady stream of saffron-robed buddhist monks walking past the house, and an ice-cream truck that plays only christmas carols.

our whole neighborhood is this sort of wonderland mesh of almost charicature-like "old guard" residents, and then younger, more eclectic types. i have noticed that this is where old punk rockers come to buy their houses and raise their little ones. this morning at our civic association's green sale, a middle-aged woman with red hair was bringing her baked goods to the bake sale table at the same time i was. she looked familiar and i realized that for many years she had worked at zipperhead, and i had only ever seen her before in full punk regalia.

yesterday, while two blocks away at our local acme market, a middle-aged mom shopped with her daughter, a mentally retarded young woman who was obviously going to her prom that night. i knew this because everybody -- people in line, the cashiers -- all knew it, and were talking to the young woman about it, telling her to take lots of pictures, admonishing her to "don't do anything that i do," and telling her how pretty her hair looked -- she had clearly just been at the beauty shop and was all curled and laquered.

from the back of the store came one of this young woman's schoolmates, who apparently works at the acme. he too was going to be at the prom. when he saw his schoolmate's hairdo, he pointed, and guffawed with glee. so did she. then he approached her and she kissed him on the forehead. all the same folks, cashiers and customers, told this boy to remember to shave and fix his hair when he got home from work.

in front of me in line was an elderly lady -- definitely italian, with skin like kleenex and dyed red hair with bluish scalp showing through. she chatted with the cashier, a blonde woman in her thirties, who commented that her girlfriend had never been a very good cook, although it was she (the girlfriend) who had done most of the cooking in the house over the years.

that's an interesting pattern i've seen in the south philly old guard -- particularly in relating to issues of racism and homophobia. in the general -- they are racist and homophobic, the "old timers", as a community. take the same people and give them specific individuals to relate to, and somehow, they are able to make exceptions. seemingly without even forcing themselves or "trying".

late last night, while we baked cookies for today's bake sale, from about a block away there was a sound of young screeching people -- not unusual in the city. as it got closer to our house, we both went closer to the front door to listen. it must have been at least ten young women singing "the greatest love of all" at the top of their lungs.

it's quite a neighborhood.

to prepare for the final embellishment of the planter, we have to decide where to put the tiles. ben had an idea that the best way to do this was to tape up paper representations of each tile, so we could move them around and make up our minds. ben is so smart and cute! he's a way better husband than the one britney spears got. (i'm just saying.)



i will tolerate NO LAUGHTER at my drawings of our "canterbury tales" tiles. these are PERFECTLY SERVICEABLE for our needs.

saturday it all goes down!

honestly, the way i feel when tulips are around could require psychoanalysis -- i have such a strong response to them. i know i have mentioned before that i do not like to see them coming up out of the dirt, and would never grow them in a garden. that still holds true -- i prefer them as a cut flower. french ones, dutch ones, fancy ones, plain ones, i don't care -- they are all stupendous.

it is a good reason.

i was being good about this -- i was not letting it break my stride -- and then it fell on my desk.

if you google "house centipede", you will read much and see many photos of this lovely animal. but nothing can really compare to the beautiful fluttery SMACK sound it makes when it falls from the ceiling onto your papers. really.

you see, this is what we get for buying an almost 100 year old house. we had these when i was growing up, too -- we called them "suckers". as in "look at the size of that sucker". they do not do anything bad. but they are fast, feathery, and sort of juicy when killed. oh god. it's too much to think about now.

i have chills. i am peering into my coffee cup with great care. every sound, every shadow -- it's him. this seems like JUST the kind of thing ripley would want to kill -- why doesn't she get busy?

after originally posting this, i received advice from my dad. it's eerily poetic.

You have to learn to hate them and attack and kill quickly. A cannister vacuum with a long wand would work if you happened to be already using one, but they will usually hold still long enough to allow you to get a paper towel. Then be brutal. On the floor stomp them. The more you kill the fewer you will see.

i like "On the floor stomp them."

i had considered calling my dad to have him come kill the sucker. i had even considered how long it might take my sister to get paratransit and come kill the sucker -- and i would have had to build a ramp to make that happen.

my friend lyn also informed me:

These are known in Lyn's personal dictionary as "pekumachers." [PEE-coo-mock-erz] (Don't ask.) They are evil and creepy. The first time I saw one about 15-ish years ago I thought I fell into another dimension. When I saw one in my current house for the first time, I freaked. I made an MPG movie of it to show Eric so I could prove it existed. I still had no idea what the damn thing was until he told me. He used to feed them to our fish.
Pekumachers bad.

pekumachers bad indeed.

i cannot go into our powder room. in fact, earlier today when i kept snacking on some pistachios and wanted to put them somewhere where i would be less tempted to get them, i actually thought about tossing them very quickly into the powder room and shutting the door fast. that would teach me.

i didn't do that though.

neighbor ed comes by this weekend to build our brick and mercer tile planter in the yard. here are the brick samples along with a few tiles.





here is a close-up of one of the five canterbury tales tiles.

clearly i'm still kind of in love with having a mantle on which to put things. see the many many tulips. ben knows what he is doing. (and this morning i was gifted with a new richard cheese cd as well.)

notice that burled wood vase there in the middle, with the single tulip in it. a birthday gift from a very special knitting blog friend! i sincerely love it and look forward to keeping it nice.

the gift i gave ben this morning (we have a gift for each other in the morning and then another in the evening) was not very photogenic. i made a "bouquet" of seed packets on sticks. the seeds are all edible and ornamental gourds and pumpkins from rare nonhybrid stock. i also got him a set of vintage brass skeleton keys -- these, too, we have use for in the garden. we will be overhauling all of our garden spaces in the front and back this spring, and will be adding a new category here to document that work. gourds, pumpkins and keys are all a part of it!

tonight's menu is paella, and pot au creme au chocolat, which i will be making today before ben gets home.

my mom's housewarming gift to us paid for the installation of not only a new light fixture in the backyard, but an outdoor electrical outlet, for plugging in strings of lights. our big, muppetlike juniper bush is festooned with multicolored, satin-finish globe lights.



here is a long view from the den, all the way out to the printing room, where there are also colored lights.





with the night vision feature on the camera, you get this.

this is my first morning home just writing (which is supposed to be what wednesdays are about. that and pilates.)

we are getting a bit spoiled, since we settled in here just as the seasons changed, and we are having a particularly beautiful fall -- i keep reminding myself that the park won't look just like this all year round. leaves are falling constantly and the colors are wonderful. it's great to grab flanny's leash and have her chasing balls in the field in less than two minutes.

here you see, out the front window, what we see. (including "wendy o.", who is one of the people from the drug house a few blocks north -- she looks like wendy o. williams from the plasmatics, and also from one of ben and my favorite movies, Reform School Girls.)

leaves leaves leaves. it's crunchy out there, and colorful, and smells so good. i love autumn!

... strawberry leaves, turning red with fall.





... juniper plant, full of berries, smelling like christmas is coming.

oh. you want that i should be serious about photographs of the new house.

well it's difficult. i wanted to do a whole tour around, in every room that we live in currently, but it's harder than i thought to get representative pictures of rooms just for the sake of being rooms. so i gave up. here's the fireplace in the printing room.

we'll have people over in december, we think. meantime, it has been fun to print here for the first time, and to get exclamations of surprise from the UPS guy and mailman when they find me answering the door here rather than around the corner!

one thing though; i am SO glad for this blog, for all the extra pictures it gives me of ben's and my first apartment together. i miss that yellow place so much! it's hard even to ride by on the bus.

mmmm. homemade pumpkinseed brittle and soy milk in a gourd-ornamented glass. on a new mexican oilcloth!

thank god, oh thank god we have cable here now. because for me a place just can't be home without the comforting voices of david venable and nancy grace. when at home during weekdays alone, doing my thing, they are my best friends in the world. the few days of living here without them before the comcast guy came were very, very scary!

but anyway. i know you are all dying for photos of the new house. so --- here it is!!!

i will have some real pictures up later this week.

eh, somehow, even with all the fuss around here, it felt like a special time all the same. the beginning of fall is the right time for a new year's celebration; i can get behind that entirely.

and although our meals were a little prefab, ben unearthed a bottle of my ex-husband's homebrewed mead, which obviously works for rosh hashanah. (it made doing any letterpress corrections later that evening something of an impossibility for ben, but otherwise, it really was the highlight of the holiday!)

notice the book in this photo: THE JEWISH-SICILIAN COOKBOOK. didn't know there was such a thing, did you? well, we've had it on pre-order since march. and we didn't even write it! it's not a very "serious" cookbook, but it was necessary to get it nonetheless.

usually for rosh hashanah, we make a nice dinner -- usually a stuffed chicken, sometimes it's been lamb. twice a pheasant and chartreuse and lentil stew that it's just a little too warm for, weatherwise, yet.

this year -- with purchasing and renovating the house, and various other creative and business projects going -- we forgot about rosh hashanah. or, we got the date wrong. i'm the atheist, so i leave it up to ben to remember. monday night he said, "why does everyone at work keep asking me if i'm going to be in on thursday?" and then we realized why.

we were unprepared, so, last night, we ate out at one of our favorite places -- the astral plane. for the second night, we still wanted to do something homey -- i think of rosh hashanah as a kind of mini-thanksgiving -- but, short on time and energies, we decided it was going to be a Very Trader Joe's Rosh Hashanah.

which was challenging. it was so funny to see that there was no chicken, and no apples, to be had anywhere in the store. (but piles of pork remained unsold.) we tinkertoyed together a pre-fab but yummy looking meal, brought everything home, and went to bed.

around 1:45 am, i woke up to a big, big noise. (ben later remarked that he heard this noise too, and it made him dream that the chimney to the woodstove at the new house had been dropped off of the roof). i looked outside to see our neighbor brian trudging out in his skivvies, and saw a police cruiser slam to a stop in the middle of the block, and put its flashers on.

running to another window while dressing, i saw a very bashed-up car in the middle of the intersection. cars all along the block, actually, were in various states of bashing. ours looked mostly okay, although a totaled SUV was shoved up against our back bumper.

i woke ben up, and we stumbled outside, where all of our lovely buildingmates were already goggle-eyed. apparently, some idiot was being pursued by the police in his car, and he lost control on our block -- ricocheting off of no fewer than SIX cars. keep in mind that we all heard ONE continuous sound -- so that indicates just how fast this hellbound moron was going. six cars, back and forth, in one big smash. six. three totalled, two pretty poorly off.

three plus two doesn't equal six, though, does it? that sixth car was ours. the bumper was dented. when the tow-truck guy moved it, the dent popped back out into place. nothing. not a thing wrong with it.

not only this, but if any of the cars that WERE damaged or destroyed, the culprit's car would, in fact, have ended up directly in our apartment. this is the one thing that has always made me afraid to live on the first floor, and right before we move out, it almost happened. incredible!

the driver of the out-of-control car apparently abandoned his blood-filled vehicle and fled on foot. police searched while we watched. then we started to smell the gas. the gas tanks from two of the wrecked cars were leaking.

a hazmat team came out, poured some powder around, and decided it wasn't enough. they opened two fire hydrants, flooding the street for an hour or so. debris -- fiberglass, safety glass, an axel -- was everywhere, like there had been a tornado.

it took two and a half hours for everyone to report their information to the police and get everything under control. i was out sweeping glass at four in the morning just so flanny could pee; ben and our neighbor mike were out again doing the same thing when we woke up today.

ben is working from home today. we're just a little tired.

still gotta go get a challah though. yeah, and my paxil, by no small coincidence.

after a long friday night of letterpress printing, i looked up to see this on our front window: and, of course, ran outside to photograph her.




this is our "big girl", the mantis we've been seeing the most of these days. we haven't seen a male in weeks, come to think of it. ben has been seeing what he assumed was another female in the backyard -- now he thinks it was this one, since she's such a mover.



she would look down at me with the camera, with her big dark nighttime eyes, and then look back up to watch a car go down the street. very regal, very composed, very beautiful.

ben is happily ripping up carpet with a crowbar and canoodling with roofers. i know my strengths. it's time to get some pictures up!

here you see a bit of our backyard, including a massive juniper (and, as of this morning, a massive spiderweb. can you see it?)



i found bacchus in the back alley. (hey, that's pretty good.) we think it might have used to cover the coal chute -- this house is nearly a hundred years old.



the ceiling fan should give it away -- you are not looking at a beautiful hardwood floor. this is our kitchen ceiling. (there is one like this in the bathroom, too.)



...although, under the wall-to-wall carpet in what is to be the printing studio, ben found this inlaid woodwork.



look -- a built-in cutting board! i think that is so cool.



and, no problems keeping warm when you have a fireplace...






and a woodburning stove, too.

we are more and more excited. roofwork begins in two days. electric and painting and some minor repairs next week. then we will have more pictures again, as things progress.

we are sorta tired and confused, but happy.

yes, yes, i'm a girl mantis (i guess) and i'm brown. we're brown, us girls. we think.




excuse me. why are you getting closer? i said i was brown. and a girl. that's all you need to know right now!

i don't know why but i had this silly train of thought where this actually WAS some sort of fad; maybe in vermeer's time, or something, and the way to seem stylish was to put peppers on your printing press and have someone come and paint them, and your social worth would then be judged on both your peppers and your press. then, somehow this train of thought got mushed up in my mind with having watched a lot of coverage of the laci peterson murder trial, and that situation, social climbing, vermeer and peppers and printing presses all came together in a way i should be embarassed to go too much into.

i had really, really intended that my next post to this blog would not have a praying mantis in it. i wanted it to seem like other things are happening around here. they are; we are making settlement on our big beautiful new house in just a few weeks, and we are excited, picking out paint colors, a new bed, and generally brimming with enthusiasm. but you can't really photograph that. (well, you could. but we haven't.)

so, while we wait...

we came back from dinner at the black sheep -- one of our favorite dinner spots -- to find this little guy. he has BLACK EYES. go look at the pictures of all the other mantids we have EVER taken. they have green eyes! this one has black eyes! he's very, very different!

he was a little freaked out by our interest. and the light wasn't great -- it was dusk, and just about to rain. but still. black eyes! how gothic!

UPDATE: apparently, mantids' eyes get darker at night! that explains it.

research one topic and find out about another: would you like to read up on the deadly art of tai mantis kung fu? of course you would.

last night, we had a relatively friendly, passive mantis (male) crawling around on my arm without any fuss. but this is not that mantis. indeed.




here we go with the "i am a scary vampire or maybe a boring stick again" trick...






... and apparently, since i kept prodding him, we have a new trick: "i am a question mark, or a cheeto, but whatever it is, I'M SCARY. BACK OFF."




i don't know if you can see it (frankly, i hesitated to get any closer), but these brown fangy things popped out from the sides of his mouth, when he got all freaked out.

the way this blog has looked lately, you'd think we do nothing but irritate mantids all day and night. really, we are doing other things, too.

ben was browsing in the garden, since neither of us had seen Last Week's Mantis in quite a few days.





and in looking, ben found something very interesting. not Last Week's Mantis, but a reasonably sound explanation for why he may have gone missing. for this is surely not him, careful inspection of photographs will show.



whoever this is lets you pick her up, without playing "i'm a boring stick". she lets you pick her up, but she reaches around with her arms for a way to climb onto something else while she is on your hand -- like a cocktail party guest trapped listening to someone's excruciating anecdote. she behaves differently. she looks different. look at that tummy.

we think something's up.

which probably means our friend from last week is lying in the garden somewhere, dead and headless and his passion spent, to say the least.

once upon a time, there was a young adult mantis -- almost two months old -- who didn't want to be picked up and held.




when his captors/benefactors continued to insist on talking to him and trying to touch him, he headed off for some privacy.


but he fell over the edge of the planter, and directly into a spider's web!

fortunately, his captors/benefactors saved him, by lifting him to safety with a stake of bamboo.


even while upside down and in the process of having his life redeemed, the mantis played the game of "i am a boring stick and not worth touching." it is something all mantids do. look how far he can stretch out his "prayers" in an attempt to look like a dull, lifeless, uninteresting twig.

after this, his captors/benefactors left him alone for the morning.

and we wonder why we don't see them as often as we used to.

ooooooo. ben really does not like spiders and ben REALLY does not like THIS spider. hopefully, she will find a better place to do this kind of thing.

"skittles".

this is skittles. he's the only mantis we really recognize again and again, and that's because -- as you can see here -- he's three-legged. he HAS a back right leg, actually, but there's not much to it. it's small and not real useful.

ben discovered skittles, and we wonder, did he lose the leg in the molting process? that is what my dad thought.

he seems fine otherwise.

ben got a little deep-fryer, which so far this season has resulted in cold battered eggplant slices on memorial day, and beer-battered vidalia onion rings this past weekend (the beer in use was iron chef morimoto's soba ale.) gorgeous!

here is a slightly shaky photo of a mantis who could not be slowed down. i sent ben for the camera when i saw this guy out on his own, along the border of the planter, navigating iron nails with great curiosity. when i bent down to take this photo, he leapt into the air, out of sight.

we looked around frantically for a moment before realizing that he was sitting in the only place i could NOT take a picture of him -- on the lens of the camera itself.

a holly plant, going to flower.






a young mantis, hanging upside down.








ben's first strawberry, with a little spiderweb on it.

okay. you'll never believe this, but at the time that this photo was taken, this bubble had been sitting on the leaf of this plant for 20 hours. yes. twenty.

it didn't quite make it to twenty-four. but still.

we want to give this little guy (and they are getting so much bigger, and more grown-up looking) a soft-serve cone slathered in mosquitos!

one of the praying mantis egg sacs hatched this morning.






... oh yeah, and one of the praying mantis egg sacs hatched this morning.






so. did i mention the freaking mantis bomb that went off in our kitchen this morning?...






gibson is not dealing with it.

you've got to get close to this one to see what's up. apparently, a few errant soap bubbles from the top of the palmolive bottle wafted across the counter, and behind the knife block, where there was a little spider's web. ben found the bubbles caught there, just hanging in space.

in other news, i got flowers delivered to me at work from friday. tulips, of course, and of course they were from ben. but i had left work about twenty minutes before they got there. we had to go back on saturday and pick them up, but here they are, at an unusual angle, with my favorite salad bowl full of fresh apricots.

ladybugs eat aphids. we had aphids. so we bought some ladybugs. fifteen hundred.

what's this, lying next to the philly weekly and ben's cholesterol medication?

it's one of ben's easter treats -- a simpsons ice cube tray!


you only get one marge, because she's so big -- but you get two of everybody else.




they look so dead.

it also doesn't seem to matter how many times we wash the tray -- the simpsons taste awful. i have thrown away perfectly good diet coke and iced coffee due to them.

...expanding, and growing. all the seed saving i did last year and i haven't even planted any. we went in for shrubbery -- and there are many bare-root plants that are still dormant, but look who is coming up behind in the photo!

ben is planting strawberries this afternoon.

it is nice, sometimes, to have a kid around. luta has been the kid-in-our-lives for the past two or three years. she was sick recently, so we took her a "lord of the rings" 3D puzzle.





a few days ago, cleaning the spare room, i found a box of good stuff for dress-up, and sent that over to her. wow. it was only a couple of years ago that we were impressed when she just spelled L-U-T-A.

we also got a nice note from steve pratt, who built our handpress. it contains an interesting fact or two. we are the only owners of a pratt-albion (and there are currently only nine in existence) who had their names engraved on the press itself. well! i should say we did! all these other couples out there with their measly, finger-sized gold bands. with divorce rates what they are -- not to mention untold infidelity and spousal abuse -- who wants a stupid ring?

if you are the joint owner of a pratt-albion printing press and get your and your loved one's name engraved on it, do you know that you have a 100% rate of success in your spousal-equivalent relationship?

facts are facts.

ben built two new, smaller planters outside, and currently each one contains a small forsythia bush. they have just come into bloom this week. we are awaiting the delivery of some trumpet vine and wisteria vines, which should have shipped last week, and amy is rooting some black pussy willow that she got at the philadelphia flower show for me!

o yes.

peeps lights.

o yes.

at target. $6.99.

not one moment of hesitation or deliberation involved in this purchase.

now why can't i find a bag of all-black jellybeans?

... that was ben's comment on the printing press -- ludovine -- after she was all set up this evening, and he got to play with her a bit.

there should have been a much more exciting entry for this event, considering all the photo opportunities that presented themselves today -- including a bizarre mid-march blizzard, schoolchildren outside attempting to ransack the seven hundred pound crate once it was delivered, and the sight of ben, scott, john and tim carrying this thing into the house -- but frankly, we were preoccupied.

she is gorgeous. ben, near exhaustion (he went to pilates class with me yesterday, then lugged ludo around today), could not keep from trying her out.

he built one little form, with just an antique postcard back...

he inked it up with just a rubber stamp ink pad to try it out...

we pulled the handle together...

ta-da!!!

the pictures are a little dark and fuzzy, but that's more or less how we feel. but i didn't want to miss that "very first" feeling, grainy pictures be damned. she is here! paysans sans peur press, est. march 16, 2004.

(more pictures of our first full day of printing are available here).

ben's very good at valentine's day. we stayed in this year, and made a dinner that almost felt like thanksgiving (at least when it came to trying to put away leftovers.) we were throwing veal, saffron, st. andré cheese, dark chocolate and fresh berries around the kitchen like nobody's business.



thank god ben is not one of those people who expects (much less wants) novelty boxer shorts for valentine's day. we don't deal in those types of goods here. and thank god he knows better than to bring home red roses.

apparently MY dad spent MY birthday taking drugs with dennis hopper.

need to know more about how i spent my birthday?

go to the knitting page.

also known as the rosemary's baby coffee pot (watch the movie and see!) ben's parents have one of these, and i have loved it, loved it, loved it, ever since i set eyes on it.

friday night ben was doing the dishes and i heard him say, "oh no!" and i thought, please, please have just broken the french press, so we can go buy a chemex this weekend.

and he had! so we did! isn't it stylish? it is, you know, the only coffee brewing system that is part of the permanent collection of the museum of modern art. it's true!

one chilly november evening, a handsome jewish man -- in an attractive handknit hat -- was seen outside decorating his large, handmade, dirt-filled "coffin" with white lights. and it wasn't even thanksgiving yet!



heeeeere he is again. we bought these lights last year at an after-christmas sale at target. we weren't even thinking about how they would be used.

i feel certain we are targeting ourselves for tragedy once again. many in this neighborhood are rather against people feeling they can, oh, be happy, make things look beautiful... that type of thing. it can be very threatening, you know. here i was thinking well, we made it through the growing season with a more-or-less minimum of vandalism and damage, but here we are, sticking our necks out again.

and once more, with the night vision filter on!

they may be only here for tonight... but they are lovely.

the actual press itself is still weeks away. but the "imposing table" that we won on ebay was put together today (it sat in my dad's van for a few weeks, when we realized it didn't fit in our VW.) it's top surface is a hundred and fifty pounds of iron. here you see ben sitting and re-organizing a set of 12-point copperplate bold that he knocked over a few weeks ago. isn't this fun?

looks like we're going to need a good work light over here.

what the hell.

i don't know that there's much else to say. we bought it, but we've got the sense to never, ever open it. rest assured of that.

ben was quick to note that almost every ingredient in the can is of a dead-animal nature, which, one has to assume, is what sent buddha over the wall.

i'm sure the vietnamese walk around american supermarkets looking for gross, kitschy things, too. we probably have them beat when it comes right down to it.

i am stuck home for days, on crutches. i fell down on monday and hurt my ankle. it looked like it had a scone glued to it -- a blueberry scone. ow.

ben has been an angel. he stayed home with me yesterday and rented me a whole bunch of horror movies.

the garden box is a constant work in progress. the indigo is going to flower and seed, and the lantana has taken on new fall-like hues. and of course, there are mums now.



... but morning glories still make appearances over the wall.

this past weekend, ben made bread with a secret recipe from a reliable source....






and then he reverted to his adolescent passion for setting things on fire. this is our supper. (actually, it is bluefish and herbs, flamed with gin, and was very well received.)

i am a soap snob. and i have made ben into one.

i don't have any "sensitivity" skinwise, but i just hate the smell and feel of commercial soaps. and i hate hate hate flowery smelling soaps. but to buy soaps all the time from places like lush, or other specialty sellers, can get very expensive -- often over a dollar an ounce for soap! i can usually make the lush that ben gets me for christmas last through the beginning of spring, but not much longer than that.

when we were at the maryland sheep and wool festival last may, we bought some soaps from simpler thyme. we fell in love with them, but, again, rather expensive for every day.

until now!!

simpler thyme offers a one-pound sampler bag of unlabelled, mixed soaps in odd pieces. each piece is more than a couple of showers' worth for two people, and to buy an odds-and-ends bag is much cheaper. PLUS, if you buy five pounds, you get one free!

this brings the cost of this wonderful stuff down to less than eight dollars a pound, plus you get to try a new (and mysterious) type every few days!!

nothing too flowery, all completely yummy. and i can still look forward to lush for my holidays.

ben's boyhood dog, kasha, died this weekend. he and ben were definitely special friends.

my time with kasha was memorable as well. i had heard of dogs who "humped your leg", but really didn't know what it looked like. i thought it was some kind of cute trick, and called, "hey ben! come see what the dog is doing!" ben has informed me that kasha hadn't done that to anyone in so long, it was clearly a compliment.

ben and kasha share many similarities, actually.

when i first met ben, he told me stories about kasha eating things like: a can of crisco, some corn cobs, a two liter plastic bottle, and a bag of raw barley. my own family dog had only ever eaten a case of contraceptive sponges, and this really paled in comparison to the kasha stories. one had to assume that kasha had been living on borrowed time for most of his life, with his digestive derring-do.

kasha was the first pet whose death ben experienced. he never had many pets, and the story of his first dog, buffy's, departure from the family is vague to say the least. it was hard for ben to hear that kasha was gone. we were sad all day.

when i thought about kasha, i envisioned him standing up on his back legs, with his back to me, but turned with his head facing me. his ears were blowing. he had a big smile on his face, and a bright and excited look in his eyes, as though every question he had ever asked himself in his thirteen years on earth and suddenly been answered. he seemed relieved, exuberant, and satisfied with what he was leaving behind. it was a nice way to see him. it made ben and i both feel better.

ben has always watched the beagles around town. we have driven around a single block numerous times for glimpses of extraordinarily good-looking beagles, and sometimes ben will even approach a stranger in the park if they have a beagle puppy. i'm sure we'll continue to enjoy our beagle cruising, and kasha will always be part of it.

shortly after our last post about zelda eugenie, we lost track of her again. she abandoned her most recent web and couldn't be found anywhere else in the garden. i was sad and concerned; i had hoped for an egg sac. (don't even say the words "spider egg sac" around ben.) i thought maybe she had gone the way of all things, as she undoubtedly must, and soon.

so this morning, upon opening our front door, i was surprised and relieved to see this.

i ran back to the bedroom, all excited at having found her, and relayed the whole story to ben, finishing up with, "and now we have to go move her!"

it took me about ten minutes to realize that ben was not coming.

good thing, too, because the flailing of spider legs was not lovely to watch and might have put ben in an early grave. i knocked the web apart with a stick, and zelda went scurrying -- across rebekah and ghalia's steps, where she looked terribly exposed to the elements, and up the other side of the building -- where the garden isn't.

armed with a supermarket coupon flyer and ten dollars, which i planned to give to any passerby who could help me get the spider alive from here to there, i eventually -- singlehandedly -- got zelda back over to the indigo plants, where she would be safe. we had a talk. hopefully, she has learned something.

in time, i was able to get ben out of the bed. now he's all, "can i make you breakfast?" hah.

known to us as "zelda eugenie". i reported on her when we first found her, a few months back. then we were impressed by her "unique" ability to spin what looked like a serged buttonhole. but this, in fact, is a mark of the species, argiope aurantia , or common garden spider.

i don't find her common at all. she has built at least four webs in our garden box and has stayed all summer. we were worried yesterday that we had lost her -- ben found the abandoned web, but no zelda. she had merely taken up residence behind the sunflowers. ben got squeamish upon seeing her chewing something. he has a hard time warming up to her. she has gotten bigger and bigger as the weeks have progressed.

okay, i'm ready to talk about this now. we weren't saying anything until we knew for sure... which we now do.

a beautiful iron hand-printing press -- an exact, historical, museum-quality replica of this lovely albion foolscap folio handpress pictured here -- is, right at this moment more or less, being poured at a foundry in utah -- for us.

our very own.

what are we going to do with it?

as if we would have a problem coming up with something to do with it. as if you didn't know already!

oh please, don't come bringing us your book manuscripts and art, to be printed. (unless it's nebish's haiku. or lisa's drawings.) let us call you.

but as far as job-work goes: cards, announcements, et cetera -- we may be choosy, but we're open to ideas!

and we're very excited about it. planning, scheming, looking at the letterpress type and block auctions on ebay are all conspiring to bring an end to our late-summer slump.

paysans sans peur press, owned and operated by benjamin jay levin and amber dorko stopper, is just about in business.

(well, the press won't actually get here until around christmastime. nebish, can you come over and help carry it in from the curb? we'll give you beer. and oh yeah, the immortality of publication.)

here is the lantana plant given to us by our neighbor dwayne. butterflies like it. in this weather, the only thing to enjoy about being out of the apartment is our little garden. we are taking it slow and quiet, cooking and enjoying each other's company.

we also had trout and corn on the cob...

whoa -- i know i made a few of you promise to kill me if that happened, but hold tight -- i think i found a fairly benign way to express it.

aggregate lotion bottling!

you see it here, in an otherwise normal bathroom. (note the many french puzzle and story and comic books on the toilet tank.) do you see the mating pair of johnson's baby lotion bottles?

i learned this from my dad.

the word "dad" calls to mind, in addition to a few other more meaningful things, the image of two bottles of Curel lotion stacked the way the ones in my bathroom are right now. he was always doing this. i never eschewed it in any way; in fact, my complaint is that it isn't as effective as it should be. i'm not getting all the lotion we paid for, no matter how long that bottle stays upside down!

i have an urge to go to my ex-husband's apartment and borrow the Cutco scissors and just cut the bottle open.

we did some revamping of the garden box this weekend. got rid of the scraggly annuals in some parts, and replaced them with more foliage-driven, perrenial types. we also pretty much took the indigo plants down to bare stalks! read the knitting page to find out more about it.

... that spiders can spin perfect buttonholes?

did you know that ben has an absolutely pathological and irrational fear of spiders?

i know both of these things, and i intend to put that knowledge to work.

when he first saw them in the yard, out of the corner of his eye, the bright blue made ben think that someone had perpetrated some injustice upon our recycling bin. but no. it was the very first morning glories, which ben planted around our trees, and up a bamboo pole in the back yard. lovely!

last night we were outside and a man approached us and asked, "is this your garden?" he turned out to be a neighbor/botanist who ran home to give us a lantana plant, and to assure us how much the community appreciated our efforts at making things look nicer. it really is all worth it!

the spoils of a very full saturday.

i woke up this morning and fed the dog and cat, and stumbled to the door to check the weather outside. how surprised i was to find someone on my doorstep.



he was very active and alert, and, as you see, picked his "head" up to say hello.

so i put him out in the planter.

there is some flax, some miniature roses, and a second generation indigo in the clay pot; a dracaena and some sedum in the blue; and a lot of evergreen and boxwood and two newish japanese indigos in the steel washtub.

it sounds like the title of some old jackie gleason orchestra song, doesn't it?
we made it this morning with bamboo tim had given us. we bought the honeysuckle yesterday. i don't know how well honeysuckle climbs on its own. we also have a moonflower in there that could go up the right side if it was so inclined.

well, i don't know that it's the only one. but there aren't a lot of others.

strangely, this weekend, it was commented on twice. ben was walking flan and i was out messing with plants and an older woman waiting for a bus came over to me and pointed to it. "i see you have a mezuzah," she said. "yup," i said. "i hope you don't mind -- i use it when i walk by here," she said. i said we didn't mind, she was welcome to use it.

"so how," she said to me conspiratorily, "did you come to live down here, with all the it-al-ee -ans?"

i figured it was not going to get anybody anywhere to tell her i was one of the it-al-ee -ans and was merely shacked up with the jewish guy, but that i had helped choose the mezuzah. i don't really know that i gave a useful answer at all, but i don't think she noticed. she was busy telling me what she did for a living, where she was going, where her husband was, et cetera.

it was the first time anyone had noticed the mezuzah. then, believe it or not, this morning we were out with the plants again and a man in a car pulled up and got out, came toward us hesitantly, and said, "i see you have something on your door."

he was from israel, and was looking to buy a home, and although we talked to him for some time we could not seem to impress upon him that there was no jewish "area" in philadelphia. he seemed disappointed. it's tough luck to drive all the way here from israel on a sunday and not be able to find a decent house to purchase and neighbhorhood to live in by lunchtime. at least that seemed to be how this guy felt.

he had jersey plates, though.

update to entry, may 28, 2003: i figured it out! the guy had heard that there was a "very old, longstanding jewish community at twelfth and federal", maybe. and there IS! it's a cemetery, though. i'm glad we didn't direct him there, although my writerly sense tells me he had a pretty sly sense of humor.

we certainly wish him the best on his search.

in the background, you see the working paper clock that ben constructed, hanging on the wall.

the incredible hulk has always been my favorite superhero or comic book character. when i was little, i used to get ear infections, and if i was good at the doctor's office we always stopped for a grape slurpee and a hulk comic book on the way home.

of course, because of my advanced age, i am particularly sentimental about the 1970's-era marvel comics version of hulk. hulk isn't what he used to be. he has undergone some changes. and, thanks to a live-action movie this summer, which will probably ruin everything, there is a lot of hulk merchandising going on now.

we bought the cereal. we've bought spider-man and star wars cereals in the past, no reason not to buy the hulk cereal. last night, ben had a bowl, but not without carefully reading the box.

he reported immediately that the base element in the cereal was a corn pops-type entity, with colored marshmallows representing various important themes in hulkdom. the first of these was a green humanoid figure: ostensibly, hulk.

then, it got kind of esoteric. one of the other marshmallows was shaped like a laboratory beaker. (because that's how the hulk became the hulk, right, in a lab accident?) we felt that was kind of abstract. the third marshmallow shape was a BRICK. just a pink rectangle. a brick. HULK SMASH. a brick.

the fourth one pissed ben off. "it's supposed to be an "explosion" , he announced to me rather unhappily. "otherwise known as a star ... of... david". that's what this "explosion" looked like. "explosion". indeed.

now ben was going into "user experience architect" mode (which i find very appealing...) and was getting miffed about the trivia quiz on the back of the box. " 'how tall is the hulk when he is at his angriest?' " he quoted. "but don't those things have to be measured by different standards?"

he was seething. "how sad is the hulk when he is at his fastest?" i heard him mutter. who knows who he took this all out upon when he got to the office this morning.

we participated in artist julie dermansky 's easter drawing marathon, and purchased an easter drawing with a sexual theme, and a passover drawing with an animal theme. our drawings arrived in the mail today. uncanny! more gefilte fish! it's a synchronicity that enboldens me to believe that the universe itself loves my gefilte fish, and this makes my ego even more gefilte.

send that man off to work happy. make him a silk bucket hat and some gefilte fish to share with his officemates.

may i just add here that the officemate with whom ben shared this "treat" apparently thinks my gefilte fish is just as good, if not better, than ben does. i am some sort of gefilte savant.

easter/passover weekend was upon us. i had a cold, and ben was coming down with one.

on good friday, we bought flowers, which make any holiday lovely. ben chose irises.

of course, i got tulips, but i also got a big white hydrangea blossom. this is as close as i come to a "mixed" bouquet (another of my hyperfloral prejudices: mixed bouquets just scream "Hi Honey, I Bought You Flowers Out Of A Mop Bucket Outside A Convenience Store").






we decided to have our holiday supper on good friday. while we did not intend a "seder" in the traditional sense, we do like to recline while eating. but first, much cooking was to be done. a six pound leg of lamb was among the items featured, and it created a bone for our seder plate.

i don't suppose many jewish guys get passover seder plates on christmas morning, but ben did, from me. it's handpainted with cute things like goats and matzoh.

i was initiated last year into the joys of haroset and horseradish sauce on matzoh. but believe it or not, these very traditional sephardic eggs are something that i have been making and eating on easter long before ben was around! they were a tradition that tim and i had. sephardic eggs are made by baking eggs in a slow, low oven overnight. they are wrapped in onionskins and covered with water and coffee grounds. "compost eggs", we sometimes called them. they are, for sephardic jews, a traditional shabbat and passover food and for ben they are the only hard-cooked egg he will eat the yolk out of. they are not your garish "paas" easter eggs, but they do get a mottled, sepia look that is varied and pretty.

a few untraditional additions to our supper were a big pan of sautéed rainbow chard, and homemade mango chutney (which i thought up originally to make an easter present for tim, but there was plenty for us to sample as well):

it was a lovely dinner and we finished a bottle of wine ourselves, making for a rather early evening. and after that, my cold seemed much better, and the beginning of what had been ben's seemed to have been headed off at the pass. a miracle!

i did not get one of my south philly favorites this lent, a lenten hoagie filled with fried oysters. but, fueled by all the interesting jewish cooking going on, i did make my own gefilte fish. no jar involved here. just hideous decapitations.

i would have to call my experience with gefilte fish a "failure". now i'm no longer part of the solution. i'm part of the problem. i have helped to proliferate and encourage the eating of this dish. i eat lots of disgusting things, but nothing like this. never.

sunday night, i was reading the paper and looked up to see ben with the biggest smile on his face. "what's your deal?" i asked sweetly. "this is the best gefilte fish i've ever had," he said.

best gefilte fish, best hamantashen, best meatloaf... he makes me blush.

we didn't do as much for easter, really. everyone should just read the david sedaris story "jesus shaves" and leave it at that.

this is a list of successful keyword phrases (some of which i dispute heartily) from notsoswift.com's stats page. i think i have generated a poem that pretty much sums up our life here.

tova borgnine
amber dorko
knitted devil hat
slippersocks
amber dorko stopper
birthday goat
tova borgnine photos
what s for dinner tonight
mutton dressed as lamb
video she is tied to the bed posts
state of literary publishing
photos of tova borgnine in 2003
how to germinate spruce tree seeds
david sedaris brother hardwood floor
succulent wall
kosher killing
short stories vendetta
silver little thing
intrepid literary journal
tova borgnine beauty products
drawings of balzac
devo girl u want text
most respected literary journal magazine in the world
wawa celebration ice-cream
samurai delicatessen
balzac passion desert study
spinning wrist
steel chopsticks
cotton kerchief for your head
french oldies
black hollyhocks
je suis mal
tova borgnine birthday
poor visual accuity
how old is tova borgnine
frankenstein en francais
muffinki
tiny living
hanukkah stocking

ben's birthday weekend kicked off last night with a dinner of three bean salad (which he loves) and a REUBEN STROMBOLI from ralph and ricky's. this morning, he was awakened by a gift from flannery (she had been dying to give it to him right away). you see it here: SCOOPIES!, a very fancy dog walking acoutrement indeed. the package is even written in french, and has pictures of very cute dancing poop on it!

(of course, now, when we go and check the stats on this page, we will see how many people have come to it searching for the keyword phrase "dancing poop". i'm not really sure we want to know.)

ben's request was that his birthday breakfast be homemade banana nut bread and a big fruit salad. we took these things up to the park and enjoyed other people's dogs and other people's babies, then went off to tower records where we bought some nice new spring music; spanish guitar for ben, of course. (i got dinah washington and miles davis.)

ben's other gifts can be found, at least by day's end, on two of the other pages on this site. can you guess where?

it's been said before: i love tulips. and ben bought me some yesterday.

tulips are my favorite flower. but i don't like the way they look growing out of the ground. i would never grow tulips. it will always be my luxury to have cut tulips bought for me, or to buy them myself, but i will never grow any on my own. i would be unhappy to see them in my garden. you'd assume someone who barely brushes their hair everyday wouldn't have such picky little aesthetic issues, huh? but cut tulips by the dozen, all over the house; better than anything.

if you're ever coming to visit unexpectedly, bring ben some scotch and me some tulips, and you might actually get in the door.

it is a national pastime, finding misuses of the language in print. but this is incredible. i can only assume that this ad was actually looking for a "mechanically inclined" individual... then again, the "maniacally incline" have special skills all their own.

Ben has been eagle-eyed and hopeful, wanting to find a glass cloche or bell jar for our Venus Fly Trap. This inverted vase -- good as anything -- he found at Target this morning!

we did. i made apple, apricot and sour cherry hamantashen and ben proclaimed them the best he'd ever had. he's much better at eating hamantashen than he is at making much noise.

pretty good, huh? we met a lot of our neighbors today while ben worked on this. the old vietnamese lady who announced, "now we all can be beautiful!" the guy who referred to our planter as the "in-law suite". and yes, numerous coffin jokes. but it looks lovely, doesn't it? we got these white pansies just to stick in for now, so people recognize, hey, it's a planter. all the things we grew from seed that we want to put out here are too young right now, and it's still too cold.

this was our big project of the spring! we still have to go to the bait store to get some worms to live in it and warm it up. there is some compost in there for them.

well what do you know! i always call this good luck. i don't think i've ever BOILED one and found out it was double -- and i hardly EVER cut them up when i boil them. so this was a rare occasion indeed.

tim got roses aplenty for directing greene st. friends' production of "little shop of horrors". (or at least i think he directed it. i'm sure he directed the music). so he shared some of his bounty. although i do not have a photo (yet), i have solved the mystery of the "metal avocados" that i found on tim's kitchen table last week. they are EMU EGGS. hopefully more to come.

how happy a girl is amber?
take a freakin' guess.

one burst of inspiration, one late night trip to home depot. one afternoon spent on the sidewalk in the whirling vortex of trash that is our corner, with an electric screwdriver. ben is making a big, outdoor planter (for the flowers and plants we've started from seed that are toppling out of all of our windowsills.) it's about six feet long and we believe we are staining the wood a ginger color. pretty darned good job! councilman frank stopped over and complimented it.

for those of you who are on the edge of your seat, i have checked fed ex tracking. my book was delivered to mr. auchincloss on tuesday, and the package was sent back out from his address yesterday -- i think they estimate it will get here on the 11th. quite the adventure this has been! this volume, signed -- it will be among my greatest treasures, right up there with the two signed volumes of truman capote that ben got me for christmas (the hush that brought over my father's living room when i told them that's what i had gotten was astounding. my dad's comment: "and did ben get a really big kiss for that?")

i would like to give louis auchincloss a big kiss, too.

remember the xmas gifts you sent me this past year? not just the mistletoe that had turned into cheese by the time my post office got it to me, but the books -- the diaries of dawn powell, and three lovely old volumes by louis auchincloss, whom you know i love. i just finished the rector of justin and adored it.

you may remember that one of the books you sent was a short story collection by auchincloss, and the copy you sent was a pre-release press copy -- from 1964! it even had a photo of the author taped inside the front cover. it's particularly cool. but you know me. i thought i might be able to get it EVER so cooler.

it wasn't hard to find auchincloss' home address. i wrote him and said, with his written go-ahead, i would mail the book to him for inscription, with return postage paid. i was really just hoping the man was alive.

today, this postcard came. it took a little time to decipher, but here is what i read: "Yes - Of course I'll sign the Book, but if it weights more than 18oz, it has to go to the PO and I won't wait a 1/2 hour in line -- Auchincloss"

(he's eighty five, you know).

soooooo, we're off to fed ex the book, and send a note along ahead so he can simply have the package picked up at his address. pretty cool, isn't it? hell -- having read two of the three books you got me, the man is rapidly approaching my proust/capote standard of reverence. thanks! (the dawn powell is good too.)

the blizzard allowed me one of my great guilty pleasures -- watching a little of "beauty by tova" on QVC.

since the days of bob ross' "magic of oil paining" are sadly behind us, i count on the demerol-like qualities of television shopping -- particularly mother angelica and QVC -- to relax me. "beauty by tova" is one of my favorite programs. look! tova has named a whole line of cosmetics after me. thank you, tova.

here's the thing about tova. she's tova borgnine. as in -- ernest borgnine's wife. i have no problem with it. he's adorable. and she, frankly, is lovely. it's just that many of tova's products -- perfumes and bath specialty products -- are designed to put you in that special mood. she talks about it a lot when she's on the air; she's put a lot of her own personal experience to work in this line, apparently. and ben and i can't help thinking: the woman is on television shilling a line of products that are specifically designed to be sexually enticing to ernest borgnine. and people are buying them.

if i have any real criticism for tova, it's that i think "body soufflé" is a terrible name for a product, regardless of what it does or what its consistency is.

where is he?

white tulips, my very favorite. and a homemade card. featuring the iron chefs. and a bar of lush's "honey waffle" soap. we are going to brunch at the four seasons sunday morning.

unless some other woman out there received a life-sized caviar sculpture of david sedaris, this DOES officially make ben the best guy in the world on valentine's day.

why am i the last to know that there is a stamp with EDNA FERBER on it? for the unlikely denomination of 83 cents?
(photographed on top of the last clementine in the case.)

i wonder how this will be! we bought it at bitar's and it's on the menu tonight, along with grouper in ben's famous sauce.

our pretty pretty home.

here you see a picture of the card tim gave me for my birthday today -- a popup card featuring a deluxe sushi meal in a tatami room. there's even chopsticks! it's adorable, and perfect for me. so what is extra funny about this?

that TIM'S birthday is in ten days -- and i already have this EXACT card sitting signed and sealed in an envelope here, waiting to give to HIM!

it's also interesting to note, that years ago, on the first birthday i had when my parents separated -- the first year they gave me separate cards instead of one "mom and dad" card -- they both bought me identical cards.

ben woke up this morning to find our new year's amaryllis had toppled and injured herself. he staked her, but she fell again before we finished breakfast. so here is my solution for now; propped up by a pot-au-creme pot and a butternut squash, and tied with twine, she stands.

i love old tins, and i LOVE anything with a label from an old department store on it! really! so when i found this -- caked inside with frost and tubes of oil paint -- i was very excited. washing it up didn't do right by it, though. it's really peeling. i'm not sure how to maintain it, so it's just up on top of our kitchen cabinets.

... is this one little sprig. but no matter. a few days ago it felt kind of empty and stark, now it just seems like a nice new beginning. two words: seed catalogues. a few more words: we're going to put glass shelves in the front kitchen window, and ben is right now making an alton brown recipe called "ramen radiator". mmmmm.

although i of course HAVE posted a photo of this hat on the knitting page, here is a different one for this page. i started it saturday, finished it this afternoon. ben loves it. i love it. it's really, if i may say so, perfect on him, and he agrees -- he saw himself in the mirror and exclaimed "i look so good in this!"

i recall myself saying earlier in the weekend, "we don't need to get any new plants." i said it twice. it was an eerie foreshadowing. we went to home depot and there were big, happy, lush norfolk pines for six dollars and forty nine cents each. so they kind of smelled like cat pee -- it's a small price to pay for this kind of beauty!

ben's mom makes these functional mosaic pieces; we got this one for hanukkah and we really love it.

"i want to make caramels," said ben. "i'm not helping you," i replied. i watched "that touch of mink" and slunk into the kitchen to take this, the beauty shot, when he had finished toiling.

here he is, outside in the snow, his very first. we had planned to winterize the pots before the weather got tough... keep your fingers crossed for him!

a favorite in late fall, early winter. for once it seems i'm actually going to have them blooming for thanksgiving, like i always try to. ben practically worships these little girls.

meet "baby tree", seen in this photo at the apartment at 16th and walnut, last year. we bought baby tree on a weekend trip to manhattan. he was carried from the east village to midtown, where he was checked in the coat room at the russian tea room while we lunched. then he was brought home on amtrak, and he was our first christmas tree. check back in the next few weeks to see what has become of him now!

hot and sour soup!

the new couch arrived this morning. a big red sectional. gibson is trying it out. we expect it will look lovely at holiday time!

I had NO idea how wonderful Target was. Particularly for holiday stuff! I could have spent hundreds on Halloween junk alone. But, ascetic that I am: here is what I got: a Frankenstein head with a pushy spout.

From the inside.

Look at these wonderful veggies. Sooooo pretty. And now we'll eat them.

Ben made this for the eve of Yom Kippur. It was perfect.

a new silk floorlamp and a new little ficus tree with white lights. so pretty! soooooooo pretty.

This blue pot contains several different succulents, none of which are dead yet.

They were the most delicious tomatoes we'd ever eaten. And, they were gorgeous.

Piled high on blankets, he stares blankly. Surveying. Bored. The living room looks pretty. He's tired.

Catching the early morning sun, a window filled with folliage and, of course, Tex Cobb on the fridge. Feel free to spell out a message when you get a chance.