mojosmom

I didn't do much for New Year's Eve. I never do, as I'm too old to enjoy going out and getting drunk just because it's 12/31. And I'd like to avoid people (particular drivers) who think that's a good idea. So I stayed home, made a nice mushroom risotto, and watched a couple of Thin Man films on TCM. And here's an odd coincidence! The answers to the NYT crossword this morning included "risotto" and "Nora" (as in Nora Charles). How weird was that?

The Saturday before Christmas, I did something incredibly stupid. I needed to put something on a high shelf in my bedroom, and instead of getting the step-stool I stood on a chair - a chair that swivels. Dumb! Because it moved, and I fell and hurt my back. Fortunately, I didn't break anything, but I had some very colorful bruises and had to go very, very easy in my workouts, and finding a comfortable sleeping position was not easy. I'm very grateful for the existence of ibuprofen. Much better now, but I can't believe I did something so idiotic.

Both my sisters were in town for a week over Christmas, and while I like having them here, it was also nice to get my house all to myself again. We did the usual rounds of the local bookstores, had dinner with friends a couple of evenings, and went to the Art Institute, and the Cultural Center to see the Architecture Biennial. I took them over to Robie House on one of the days it's closed for public tours so I could show them around without worrying about running into, or being run into by, a tour. They both left last Sunday, which turned out to be an excellent plan, as Monday was godawful weather. Sleet and winds gusting to 60 mph. Cathy, who flew, probably wouldn't have gotten out at all. Stacey takes the bus, and I'd have been worried about the roads.

Things have been pretty quiet since then. I went to see two films at the Siskel Film Center, Gaudi and Sagrada, with the woman whom I'm going to room with on my trip to Barcelona in late October. I see I haven't said anything about that plan! Last February, I went to Pasadena with the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust's TravelWright program. It was incredibly well-organized, and when I learned they were doing a trip to Barcelona and Bilbao, I knew I wanted to go. It's pricey, though, so I really wanted to find a roommate so I could avoid the single supplement. I mentioned it to a woman who was on the trip I did to Italy in 2014, and she was interested, so we're going together. I decided the expense was fully justified by things like "private after-hours tour of Sagrada Familia"! Barcelona has long been at the top of my list of "must go" places, so I'm excited!

While I was at the Siskel, I bought tickets for some other films. I always find their offerings to be either feast or famine, and January is definitely a feast. I'm seeing A Ballerina's Tale tomorrow, then Rosenwald and Suffragette on Sunday and Monday. My friend Jeanne gets back from a trip next week, and we've got a couple of other films on our agenda.

Had a lazy day today. Everything is closed, so I just did some stuff around the house and heated up some leftover meatball stroganoff for dinner.

The holiday season is now in full swing, with lots of shopping opportunities. The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust has a shop in The Rookery, a Burnham and Root designed office building with later renovations by Wright. They had an event a few days ago with choir, champagne and sweets, and tours, so how could I pass that up? I used it more as a photo op than a shopping op, though:

(More pretty pics here.)

Yesterday, my friends Barb and Patrice, a bookbinder and potter respectively, had their annual open house cum sale. I enjoyed their gingerbread cake and hot cider, and bought a nice garden journal for my sister and a small, lidded casserole dish for me.

Saturday was the Hyde Park Art Center's auction, "Party with an Artist". It was fun, and my neighbor Marva, also a potter, had a piece up for auction. (I'll be going to her open house/sale next weekend!) There were several pieces that intrigued me, but starting bids on most were a bit rich for my blood. However, I did successfully bid on one, an abstract (not my usual!) piece called "Among the Rafters":


As I was leaving the house to go there, I saw three boxes of books sitting by the dumpster. My initial excitement faded, however, when I realized that they were almost all out-of-date economics textbooks. However, I did retrieve two Harvard Classics volumes: Charles Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and Twenty-Four Years After, and a volume with bits of Plato, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

One of the things that I decided to do once I retired was to join The Saints, an organization of volunteers for the arts, to do some ushering. I did my first event on Saturday, at a performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors by the Chicago Chamber Opera, at the main library. That opera is one of my earliest television memories, being the very first show I saw on the first television my family owned. It was stage-directed by Menotti's son, Francis, and choreographed by Dame Libby Komaiko. I sniffled, as always.

In other things operatic, we went to Ariadne auf Naxos at Lyric on Friday, and enjoyed it tremendously.

Today, I dug up my rosemary from the planter on the back porch, put it in a pretty pot, and brought it indoors to sit on my kitchen window sill:


Apropos of nothing, just because she's cute:

Rockefeller Chapel at yesterday's Christmas Eve service:

Christmas morning, and the usual exchange of presents. Only one book for me! But it's a beauty: Bookmarks, an exhibition catalogue. Cathy also gave me a subscription to Kateigaho International Edition, a magazine of Japanese arts and culture, and some lovely paper she bought when she was in Japan. Stacey gave me a pair of black velvet gloves and a black velvet scarf with embroidered roses. And, of course, we had the usual joke presents.

The weather was very nice - about 40ºF, no wind and the sun was out. So Cathy and I decided to go over to the Wooded Island for a walk. When it is cold and the leaves are gone, it is an entirely different experience. You can see the bones of the trees and bushes, and the dead limbs are no longer buried in creeping greenery. If you pay attention, you find all sorts of curious shapes. I was completely intrigued by the ice - the different colors and textures, and the way it formed on the lagoons and the ponds:


Then we came home, and just hung out until it was time for dinner. The leg of lamb was excellent, as was everything else.

Boxing Day:

We decided to go to the Garfield Park Conservatory, where they are having their annual holiday show. The title this year is "Let it snow, let it grow", with white and silver plants and ornaments in the Show room. I'm not a big fan of poinsettias, but this variety, called "Winter Rose White", is utterly gorgeous!


Then we walked down to the Garfield Park Fieldhouse, a rather exuberant Spanish Baroque Revival building:

(There's some work going on; hence the scaffolding in front of the entrance.)

Lunch at a favorite noodle place in the neighborhood and a visit to Powell's Books, then back home. I made a classic chocolate pudding to take to Victor & Paul's for dinner. Paul had the day off (he works retail at a gourmet wine-and-food shop, so they are always crazy busy at the holidays)! We had Victor's mac-and-cheese (they save up the scrag ends of gourmet cheeses - this is not Kraft!), so it was an old-style comfort food meal all the way around. Victor will be on sabbatical the next academic year (2008-09) and is planning to spend it in Macedonia doing research. So we talked about my sisters and me going over there, perhaps in the spring of '09, and, with V. as a guide and translator, visiting the village where my father was born.

Yesterday:

Cathy headed back to San Francisco yesterday. There was enough lamb left over so she could fix herself a nice sandwich and make everyone else on the plane jealous. ;-)) Before she left, she gave us each a 2008 calendar. It's an advertising calendar for Pearl® Soymilk, with a different drink recipe for each month, all of which Cathy developed.

Then Stacey and I went to visit some friends. We checked out their new digs (they've moved from a big loft downtown to a smaller apartment in Pilsen (ex-Czech, ex-Polish, currently mostly Mexican neighborhood), and we all went out to Greektown to eat. (Stacey doesn't like Mexican food, or we'd have gone somewhere in the neighborhood.)

This morning, Stacey went to the dentist, and I'm home catching up, watching the fluffy snowflakes, and waiting for the 4"-6" to hit. (I had to warn Stacey to move her car, as she had parked right in front of my house - a great spot, except it's a snow route, which means no parking if there's over 2" of the stuff.) I think I'll go run a couple of errands before much more comes down.

I read this poem yesterday in Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within (great book, by the way), and knew I had to share:



More about Benjamin Zephaniah

Dinner at Julie's last night was excellent, as always. Turkey moist and delicious, Fran's yummy sweet potatoes, also mashed potatoes, a variety of veggies, etc. No cranberry sauce, though; Julie, being Swedish, requires lingonberry! My pumpkin pudding turned out very well. Gifts were exchanged; as usual, Caroline had been madly baking and supplied us all with cookies to last, well, at least until her open house!

Today I did a bit of holiday decorating. I'm not doing a tree this year; my arm hurts too much to haul a tree up and down three flights of stairs and through the apartment, not to mention manœvering it into the stand and then decorating it. I've put a wreath over the fireplace, and I think I may get some garland, if there's any left at the place I usually get my tree. C. had packed her cookies in a box which she put in a dark pine green metal sleigh, so I filled that with tinsel (red, and white/gold), put a variety of red and white ornaments in it, and put it on the table on the landing outside my door. (With cats, tinsel is verboten where they can get at it.) There are a few more things I want to do, putting candles in the front windows and the like. Or maybe I'll just let Stacey do it when she comes in!

Thanksgiving Day was lovely, thanks to the lovely tzurriz, who, when she heard that my sib wasn't going to make it in, invited me to join her family, including her mother (the lovely dreamsweaver), who is an absolutely delightful hostess. Now, I'm going to make their ears burn and say that tzurriz' family is one of the warmest and most welcoming it has ever been my pleasure to meet. They've also got a few good cooks, too. So I stuffed myself on turkey and the usual accoutrements, enjoyed the conversation, and generally had a good time. And when I moaned about having to go shopping for weights the next day (for the exercise referred to in my previous post), dreamsweaver dug out a couple and saved me from the horrors that are stores on the day after Thanksgiving!

I did brave downtown Chicago the next day, but only to take some pictures of the wreathed lions at the Art Institute, and the protest demo at Macy's (f/k/a Marshall Field's), at which a number of ladies dressed in 1890's garb.

That evening, I went to Gounod's Romeo and Juliette at Lyric Opera. The Romeo was lush (Matthew Polenzani), with the equally good Dina Kunetsova as Juliette. I'm not sure why it was updated to the 1850's, but it didn't detract from anything (though I thought having the Mercutio/Tybalt/Romeo knife fight end in Romeo suddenly pulling out a gun and shooting Tybalt was a bit out of character).

Saturday was spent straightening up the house, doing some (grocery) shopping, and otherwise getting ready for my annual Sunday-after-Thanksgiving open house. Despite the lack of my usual chocolate-chip-cookie-baker (i.e. my sister), we did have the cookies, though I cheated and bought the refrigerated dough. Couldn't have been too bad, because there aren't any left! A couple of people who hadn't been able to make it the past few years did make it this year, my friend, Victor, was back in the country and came despite his jet lag, the lovely tzurriz and the lovely jfroebe trekked in from the south suburbs, and (I think) a good time was had by all. The cats were fairly well-behaved, though one of them (I'm betting it was Marissa, as she seems to think that paper exists for her to attack) destroyed the paper napkins I had put out. Late in the afternoon, when most of the food was picked over and the few remaining guests and I had adjourned to the living room, I heard my friend Cheryl and her daughter in peals of laughter. It seems that Lilith had ensconced herself on the dining room table, not going after the leftovers, but carefully draping herself around the serving platters! Cheryl's husband Leonard whipped out his camera and I have been promised a picture. And I would like to thank the makers of paper plates, napkins and cups for making clean-up a breeze. ;-))

Hope you all had wonderful Thanksgiving weekends, too.

Gorgeous weather today! I got up and went around the apartment throwing open all the windows. A nice change from yesterday's hot, humid and stormy. I was also rather productive today. Aside from the laundry, I got a fair bit accomplished on the book I'm working on for submission to the One Book, Many Interpretations show. I also painted the rusty planter that I have on the back porch. I've been intending to do it for a while, but with the weather as nice as it was, and the forecast for the next couple of days also good (i.e. no rain), it was the perfect day for it.

Around 11 a.m., I went downstairs to watch the neighborhood Fourth of July parade go down the street. The usual politicians dressed as Betsy Ross, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, and the usual bagpipers, horses, school bands, kids on bikes, anti-Bush posters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I took a bunch of pictures and, having now finished the roll, will post them on Flickr as soon as I get the CD/prints back.

Late this afternoon, I traipsed out to the south suburbs because the husband of a friend was having a birthday. His brother came in from Indiana bringing his grill with him. And, oh, what a grill! It's nicknamed "The Enterprise", has a grilling surface approximately 4' x 5', a chimney to adjust the smoke, and all sorts of other stuff. He made it himself. He'll make you one for a mere $325. Judging from the barbecue we had, it's an excellent grill! Even aside from the food, the party was fun. Nice mix of folks, good conversation.

This was, as usual, the second Fourth of July, the first being on the Second of July, as that's the day Waukegan had their parade. I went up there to join my friends at the parade and then for dinner at Julie's (the traditional hamburgers, brats, potato salad, corn on the cob and watermelon). Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so no pics.

Changed the kitty litter. Emptied the dishwasher. Went by the bank and made a deposit (always a good thing). Returned a couple of books to the library (yes, you're right, I checked a couple out as well). Picked up the dry cleaning I should have picked up a week ago. Got stamps at the post office. Bought my tree (5' spruce). Brought the stand and decorations up from the basement. And it's not even 11 A.M.!!

Now I have to decide where to put the tree. I usually have it in the living room, but for some reason this year I am feeling the urge to put it in the sunroom. We'll see.

Party tonight at Jim & Kevin's. Being me, I stopped on the way home from work yesterday to see if I could find something new to wear. I was planning to go to T.J. Maxx, but remembered that someone told me Casual Corner was going out of business. I stopped there first, and found a really lovely white silk overblouse: long floaty sheer sleeves, crossover V-neck, seam under the boobs. There were several hanging on the rack, the smallest was a 10 and I very nearly didn't try it on. But I did and though it was a bit big, I figured I could live with it. And then the saleswoman found me an 8. Yay! I'll wear it with my black silk slacks (one of my best purchases ever - I don't remember what I paid for them, but I've had them for years, have had the elastic in the waist replaced once or twice, and I wear them everywhere). I did stop at T.J. Maxx and tried on an incredible bargain of a dress, a $350 Gianfranco Ferré dress reduced to $25, a long, brick-red spaghetti-strap slinky of a dress. Unfortunately, it slunk in the wrong places. Clung where I didn't want it to, and was loose where I'd have liked it to cling. Ah, well.