do check out ALL of our pictures from our trip to longwood gardens to see the christmas display. we had a wonderful time! we look forward to seeing the other seasons in bloom.
because we're celebrating an accomplishment and a tribute!
our flash was behaving a little wonky but it just made things more atmospheric.
what an amazingly beautiful place! we went with hopes of coming home with a witch hazel but they were all sold already. we got a christmas fern, a scented sumac, some honeysuckle vine and some other stuff i can't remember the names of.
it's amazing to think that this place is ten minutes from our home, and we had never been. so many lovely specimens. we walked around for awhile, after securing our purchases. everyone who works there is so nice. even the bathrooms are nice -- they reminded me of the bathrooms at fallingwater.
and you can see the philadelphia skyline!
they do a christmas cutting sale too at bartram's -- we will definitely be there for that. all the plants we bought today at this once-a-year event were included in john bartram's original eighteenth century census of the garden.
a new favorite place, for sure!
the whole gang in handknit sweaters! (and ben in a handknit hat as well.)
early march comes in like a jack russell/dachshund mix... and goes out like... what?
my birthday was so sucky -- due to unbirthday-related administrative difficulties (who says working at home is easy? even lucky?) that we are basically just re-doing the whole birthday again tomorrow for a better go at it.
some good things happened. i love my cabinet sanchez shirt from my sister. and ben and i went to a very nice byob on our very own corner. and i got extra nice treats from tim and numerous birthday wishes. and it still sucked ass. it was nobody important's fault. just business.
boy george is on kumars at no. 42 tonight. that's something.
our pals lou and kathy are engaged in a photographic project that involves taking portraits of people outside of their homes. this is my favorite of us, taken on new year's eve day, 2004. (it's pretty big and may take a moment to load.)
oh come on. anyone who knows the first thing about me knows these came from QVC. less than thirty bucks, even with shipping!
anyway, as holly golightly said, it's tacky for a woman under forty to wear diamonds. that's really why i'm not. that, and that i'd always rather have books and yarn.
still, after about seven years of wearing tiny silver wire hoops that were so tarnished they were black, this is a nice, easy change for the better.
we went to the henri david ball this year, costumed as the mexican day of the dead and the chinese new year.
i knitted a good portion of both costumes, and an entire rundown of the components and history is available on the knitting blog. while ben's costume was an exercise in personal obfuscation and easy recognizability, mine was subtler, more of an incorporation of personality and concept. in fact, i've worn stranger outfits for everyday, and can re-use much of this costume for just that. I KNITTED MY OWN FUCKING FISHNET STOCKINGS, PEOPLE. let's give the lady a hand.
at these fancy events, it always happens: some egyptian hieroglyph comes running up to you flashing her new engagement ring. this year, it was our amy. here she is with her betrothed, her brother, and her brother's girlfriend.
we also saw my dad's friends jerry and ken. we hear this morning that they, of course, won a prize. they always do. wish we had a better photo here, but they usually get a nice one in the philadelphia papers or on the news, so we're sure to see more.
we didn't actually get to see robby and sal as st. sebastian and the roman soldier, but robby sent a photo. it's not that robby's costumes seem to endavor to incorporate the least amount of fabric and the greatest amount of porcelain white skin; it's not. at least, i've never noticed a trend. i'd like to go on record as saying that.
taken while shopping for coffee and a pheasant, and while being pursued by a wandering accordionist, sunday morning.
i guess it takes me the exact same amount of time year after year to extract my camera from my bag when we get to maple acres to buy pumpkins, and to yell "ben! turn around!" because i have taken this picture at least three years in a row now.
maple acres is the place to go for pumpkins -- they have so many different kinds.
pump(kin) it up!!!
i saw this link to this portrait icon maker, so i went to it, and tried to make a me.
but i made a megan by accident.
my mom doesn't think so, and neither does megan. but ben and i both think i made a megan.
these are me and megan.
and i made this:
weird!
off to make a ben.
and when you have had the same pair of sunglasses for six or seven years, the pictures look even more the same.
on the pier in newcastle delaware on a saturday afternoon, after a long saturday at a familiar maryland fairground.
guess who rode in the car all the way up to rittenhouse square, and sat outside for an hour, being petted by babies and admired by all, while her mother and stepfather drank coffee and basked in the glory of having the most beautiful dog in the whole park?
it would be flannery, of course, who was waaaaaaay better than we thought she'd be. she even stopped by the knitting store and got a biscuit from schmucki!
taken with the "night vision" feature on the camera (no, ben does not wear glowing green pants.) our animals are affection fiends. and ben is a snuggling bandit in the night.
yes we did. and why not? it was lovely. after lunch at saks fifth avenue (there's nothing i love more than eating in a department store) we took a carriage ride through the park, with mustafa, who said, if we couldn't pronounce mustafa, we could also call him maximilian. it was like having andy kaufman for a carriage driver. and mustafa really liked my hat. actually, that hat got a lot of attention, considering we were in midtown manhattan, where the whole idea is that everybody has seen-it-all to the extent that nothing is noticable.
i even patted the nose of the horse. and i am afraid of horses mostly.
the man on the street below was, in fact, screaming and gesticulating in response to seeing me with a camera. i should have hit "video".
this is the 200th post to the album blog!
the effect here is quite unexpected. one is sitting, trying to write, futzing with the camera in one's "in" basket, and suddenly one has taken a photo of oneself with a baby mysteriously appearing on one's shoulder.
one says "feh" to the idea of biological clocks that manifest so tackily. one says, nobody should be getting their hopes up.
my father's aunt alice, who is not so well, sent a piece of jewelry home for me when my dad went to "ladonnapalooza" out in punxy (at my aunt ladonna's sheep farm).
aunt alice told my father that she kept picturing my sister in one particular piece of jewelry, and me in another. so she sent both along for us with my aunt poppy.
the piece aunt alice chose for me is really something i'd have chosen for myself! a big orb with that sinister "rosemary's baby" look. it's not unlike something i already own; a big costume-jewelry ring that my dad's friend once gave me for a halloween costume add-on when i was a kid. i wear that ring on a long chain around my neck. it has much the same affect as this new necklace of mine.
the very first time i wore it out of the house, it attracted attention. someone told me the silver flowers around the orb are edelweiss.
...some don't.
i have hulk boxers.
for when you really, really, really mean, "not tonight, honey."
"...her lips said 'no,' but her ass said, 'RRRRRRRAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHRR' (or something to that effect)"
it's harder to get a picture of your own butt than you might think.
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.
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?
we were at my mom's yesterday, and she was commenting on the picture i posted of myself on my birthday. we both thought it looked remarkably similar to a baby picture of me -- but we each had a different opinion as to which picture. what do you think?
at silver maple farm, sargeantsville, new jersey, february 2, 2003.
and she came to visit today and took this picture, which we think is nice. we had lunch at nam phuong.
ben has wanted a picture for some time now that would adequately illustrate our matching beauty marks.