other people's kitchens

we spent this past weekend in the twin cities with will and sandy and also got to hang out with our friends jeff and amy. both couples have recently redone their kitchens. jeff and amy's (top) is part of a larger project--they recently bought their first house, a sweet craftsman cottage in st. paul, and are adding personal touches to their new home (we gave them the mr. roboto/tin man clock over the sink as a wedding present). they took us out for pizza at psycho suzi's motor lounge, an awesome tiki bar and restaurant in a converted A&W drive-in.
our main reason for heading up to minneapolis was the twin cities food and wine experience, which will and sandy had told us about over the holidays. the four of us spent saturday afternoon eating and drinking our way through the huge exhibition hall--lots of fun. their kitchen remodel (bottom) is almost complete. will tiled the countertops and he and sandy spent countless hours stripping all the woodwork that now looks absolutely gorgeous. the old school linoleum floor is new, too.
these beautiful rooms made rob and i pine a little bit for our next house. it's still a few years off, but the thought of amenities like a dining room and a front porch make us a little giddy.
over the weekend lucy was nice enough to share one of her toys, a stuffed skunk, with oscar, whose face is actually somewhere under all that fur.

on bath night

last night rob and i went to prairie lights for a poetry reading by marvin bell. he was iowa's first poet laureate and, now retired from teaching, he's often at the first ave. java house on weekday mornings when i'm there working. he wears corduroys and has an apple laptop and seems to be the sort of amiable older gentleman you'd want to be your neighbor. PL's second floor was standing room only. my favorite poem of the night was "to dorothy," written for his wife, which he knows by heart.
after the reading we did some browsing and were excited to find that kate di camillo has a new book called the miraculous journey of edward tulane and picked up a copy. we highly recommend her tale of despereaux--it's a wonderful story about a valiant mouse who wants to be a knight. a good read for both grown-ups and kids with great illustrations. i'm especially intrigued by the edward tulane cover art--it reminds me of a magritte painting.


i had some shopping to do at target yesterday, and as i was strolling through the snacks/food section i discovered that my favorite superstore now sells wine and hard liquor. it's perfect for when you're stocking up on shampoo and cleaning supplies and you realize that what you really need is a drink. anyway, the impulse buy of the day was this fabulous purse (ebay-esque pic at right) from the new luella collection. i love that cool designers (thomas o'brien, cynthia rowley, luella bartley, etc.) are working with target so that folks with middle-incomes in middle america can
enjoy beautiful things.


oscar had a bath tonight, or as he would call it, water torture. here he is looking skinny and sad.











when it's cold he gets the full salon blow-out treatment. now, fluffier and happier!

CHALL-ONGE! (it's from the Cosby Show...)

Ok - let's do this. Imagine yourself 10 years from now (20 years from your last entry) and envision what is is you'd like to be doing in the future.



What is it that you hope to be doing? What would you like your work to be? What about your immediate family? Your extended family? What about the state of the World? Do you have any long-term goals you want to accomplish?

This time we can speculate instead of recalling. It will be a different mental exercise but an interesting one i'm sure...

10 YEARS AGO!!!?

Wow. I'm sitting here enjoying a Red Hook ESB, approaching my 33rd birthday and I realized that I have to get my entry done for this contest. The problem is that when I start thinking about it - it's sort of depressing. I'm sure many of you will agree with me that the speed at which life passes is truly staggering. Cliche be damned - where in the hell did the time go? Anyway... here's my entry... maybe you'll enjoy it:

Ten years ago at this time I was entering my last semester at the University of Iowa. I had graduated with a degree in Geology & Anthropology nearly a year earlier but i'd spent a year driving Cambus and Iowa City Schoolbus while taking one class each semester and working. I was also slowly looking for a job. I was taking C++ programming at Iowa and it was moderately interesting. In March, John Downing, Jodi Koviach and I traveled to Salt Lake City for Spring Break. I talked to a company out there called AGRA Environmental and in May, decided to move out there and work for them - for $8.50/hour. My first job was inspecting pile driving for the E-Center which would be the hockey venue at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Unbelieveable. It was my entry into the construction inspection field in which I still work today. I lived with Tom and Kim in their house in the "Avenues" area of Salt Lake City for a few weeks until getting my own apartment which was also in the Avenues. I had a couple of them (the second of which is pictured here.) I also included a house typical of the area. The Avenues is a very nice older area of town with older houses, most of them stone and brick with large front porches and lots of older shade trees and beautiful views of the valley.

Hmmm, I wonder who lives here now?













Check out this crib!









I met a number of good people in SLC many of whom i've lost contact with over the years - except for one, my buddy from Champaign, IL... Gerard Kies... he's the crazy old dude on the left in this picture:

The best part about living in Salt Lake City,
however, was all of the time that I got to
spend with my uncle and great friend, Tom
Pilger. I became very close with him and it
saddens me greatly to this day that I don't get
to see him as much as I used to. We had so
many great talks over beers at the Dead Goat, over cigars on his front porch staring at the mountains or stars, and sometimes even at the base of a mountain like at the old timey ski lodge at Alta. I think about those times very often to this very day and it seems like only yesterday that it all happened. I don't often miss Salt Lake, but I always miss Tom. As you can see in this picture - Alex (his youngest daughter ) had just recently been born - and as I discovered at my wedding, didn't even know that i'd lived in Salt Lake!


















Many a Cutthroat Ale was drunk at the Dead Goat!

I had a few great vacations while I was there as well. Two of these were trips to the Escalante National wilderness in Southern Utah which is a wonderful, mainly untouched piece of desert. It's a quiet and easy-going place... just like I like. I have included a picture of Will and I on one of these trips.

Besides the things that would jump into one's mind when thinking of a place like Salt Lake, I also discovered so much good music while living there. Much of this was because the area is condusive to "folky" type music but some of it was because I was living by myself as well. I really grew into my music tastes while I lived there. That type of music has stayed with me and always will. In fact, as I type this i'm listening to Sarah Harmer who is an artist very much in this vein who I would highly recomment to anyone - especially Tom, Betsy, and Sandy. She's a canadian folk singer. She has tons of great songs.
I'm typing all of this on my new computer by the way. I have to include this picture that Carrie took yesterday while I was transferring everything over from my old computer. Please notice the evil genius look, i'm quite proud of it.


This is a very interesting assignment. It actually makes me excited that maybe we can have further blog challenges. I hope that everyone might participate and/or chime in. I can tell everyone that something this has made me think about is the passage of time in our lives - how quickly it goes, how it makes me feel like a failure in communication, how is changes us without even realizing it... sometimes until slowing down to do something like this. Maybe, then, that is the greatest benefit of doing something like this. It's hard for me not to communicate with people as much as I should or as much as i'd like to. It's hard for me to get older. It's sometimes hard for me to even look at these pictures. Ok, I guess that's my 2 cents for now. Until the next post...

impishness

robbie, 1974












henry,
2006

"i went back to chicago..."

"...and my city was gone." if you're familiar with the pretenders song i'm lifting this slightly altered lyric from, you'll know where i'm going with this. chrissie hynde sings about returning to her hometown, akron, OH, and finding that the things she had loved about the place were changed, replaced with features that made it more or less just like everywhere else.

last night, my parents went to dinner at the berghoff restaurant for the last time. this chicago landmark and legendary dining establishment will close its doors at the end of the month. fans of the devil in the white city might be interested to know that it was at the 1893 columbian exposition that herman berghoff first sold his dortmunder-style beer to chicagoans (and the rest of the world), and the restaurant soon followed. early patrons paid for the beer and got their sandwiches for free. as a girl i remember my dad telling me about the berghoff's famous standing-only bar (photo at left, taken in the 50's) where downtown businessmen would crowd at lunchtime. those murals above the bar, which also crown the dining rooms, are still there, as are the checkerboard floors.

dinner at the berghoff is a christmastime tradition in my family. there is something especially comforting about their rich german-american food on a windy, cold winter evening. light rye with caraway and a dense, dark bread with butter tides you over till your food arrives--sauerbraten, schnitzel, geshnetzeltes (my favorite--the only place in the world i eat veal), creamed spinach, red cabbage, spaetzle. nothing envelope-pushing or cutting edge, just delicious and satisfying.

as a kid, our trip downtown at christmas centered around looking at the department store holiday windows and going to see santa at the cozy cloud cottage on marshall field's eighth floor. i remember when field's basement was the discount floor (before their re-vamp) and had a friendly grubbiness that complemented the polished fanciness above ground. my mom and her mom and i would have a snack at the basement buffeteria (was that its name, or did we just call it that?). mom and i still go to browse and lunch and gawk at the great tree in the walnut room every christmas.

at some time this year it is likely that marshall field's will officially become macy's, thanks to a buy-out by federated department stores inc. there's a grassroots movement to save the field's name, and everyone seems to agree that while macy's is new york, field's is chicago. i've always happily given macy's my thanksgiving morning, but i'm sad that they're taking away a sentimentally important part of my christmas.

though i haven't lived in chicago for more than a few months at a stretch since i went away to college, it will always be what i think a city should be. it will always be my hometown. it will always be a unique place with more history and local gems than i'll ever know. still, i feel like having to say goodbye to some old favorites means that a part of my city is gone.

10 years!?

My response is coming soon. I have been in Boone all week (boooooooooooooooorrrrring.) I'm getting things rounded up for my stellar response.

to central iowa and back again

rob has been in boone, IA all week for a suffocatingly boring IDOT workshop (don't call it "the concrete college of knowledge." he is so over that joke.), so oscar had to be my proxy valentine. we took advantage of the unseasonably fabulous 60-degrees-and-sunshine weather iowa city had on tuesday and took a second walk in hickory hill park (the site of our wedding brunch, right). the creek is still opaque and murky with ice and everything that will green up remains straw-colored--i know that the thawing and new growth will take a few months, but spring really felt right around the corner that afternoon. oscar always looks happiest to me when he's panting and "smiling" after a good, long ramble. that was his valentine's gift.

i met up with rob yesterday in ames, where i stayed the night at our friend jackie's house. she's recently undertaken an new project called smiling stone soup, an upstart publishing imprint for books, photos and CDs. i now have a copy of her lovely first volume, path of joy and i'm looking forward to reading it. the three of us had dinner at stomping grounds, a coffee shop/restaurant with a liquor license; it's what iowa city's java house(s) would be if they hired a chef and let you have a beer while you studied. over coffee this morning, i enjoyed the view of jackie's numerous bird feeders through her kitchen's french doors--she even has a little heated bird bath. oscar, the ever-vigilant terrier, tends to keep feathered friends out of our backyard. maybe it's time to re-hang the feeder that used to be on our tree in front...

on my way home, i stopped in west des moines to see brandy, a grad school friend who's also getting her PhD in anthropology. she and her husband mike have two rambunctious australian cattle dog mix pups (tugging at left), one of which knocked brandy over at the dog park a few weeks ago and broke her wrist (they also have two cats who tolerate the dogs). she has assured me that this is not a ploy to get a few months off from dissertation writing, and that it's really no fun at all to have to rely on your husband to put your hair in a ponytail.

it'll be great to have my little happy family all back under one roof tomorrow!

the ten years ago challenge

betsy's most recent blog entry gives her own answer to the question recently posed on her friend amber's blog--what were you doing ten years ago? along with her response, betsy threw down the gauntlet and asked who would follow her in taking up the challenge. so here i go...
in late winter 1996, i was in the middle of my sophomore year at knox college (old main, at right). as of yet undeclared, i hovered around philosophy, psychology and anthropology and realized that whatever certainty i had about a future career (some kind of writer...?) when i wrote my college application essays had completely disappeared. this didn't really make me nervous. actually, it was pretty exciting. i guess the teenage feeling (or reality?) of limitless possibility can hold on through nineteen. still, according to my journal, i was mentally drained by the end of winter term and happy to have a low-key spring break at home in chicago.
i lived in post hall, knox's women-only dorm, with my roommate hannah (sadly, ten years on, i have no idea what she's up to). we had lived together during our first year, too. she was from southern missouri, stood barely five feet tall, drove a VW fox, and loved music like i do (we had a radio show on WVKC). that year, i went to see fugazi at a fairgrounds in peoria, the big monet show at the art institute, dave matthews and tim reynolds at the adler in davenport, and ani difranco. like betsy, i also saw phish for the first time in october 1995 (were we at the same show? in madison? have we already discussed this at some point? hmmm...).
the residence halls at knox are set up as suites--bedrooms around a common living area--and our suite had an itinerant cat named skibbies (i found that in a journal--there's no way i would have remembered that name in a million years) who would come around and hang out sometimes. maybe college is the last time you can have a pet (of sorts) without any responsibility for it whatsoever?
almost exactly ten years ago, i started dating adam, the boyfriend i moved to iowa city with after graduation in 1998. he was living in his frat house and had just come back to galesburg from a term at the newberry library in chicago. we had become good friends during the spring of my first year, then on new year's eve 1996, he broke up with the woman he'd been dating since we met, and things kind of went from there.

looking back at things i did, thought and felt a decade ago has been a strange experience. i don't really have any photos of myself from ten years back, hence no old pics with this post. i had a 35mm camera that i later lost on a park bench in dublin, but i didn't take it out much. flipping through letters, ticket stubs, notes, and postcards brought back a lot of vivid, funny and touching memories. going through my journal, though, was more like reading someone else's words than my own--unsettling, but also reassuring. i'm not the girl i was then, and thank goodness. she was great at 19, but at 29, i think she'd be a bit of a mess.
here's to ten years of beginnings and endings, learning and change...

now, who else will take up the challenge?

of dogs and squid

today oscar got to play with with gunnar, a 6-month-old great dane puppy (already 80 pounds!) who lives around the corner with kelly and david, our new neighbors (they moved into their house in july--i met kelly at the bus stop this week). it's kind of funny how much a first dog play date can feel like a real, people date--will our dog behave? will their dog be aggressive? will they be compatible? will there be a second date?
i think it went pretty well. right now gunnar outweighs oscar by 60 pounds and he has lots of puppy exuberance--they had fun chasing and wrestling a bit in the backyard. oscar likes to try to prove that he can hang with the big dogs. in the house, he was more protective of his turf and bared his teeth a few times. gunnar is really tall, making everything at coffee-table height fair game for his powerful, wagging tail. it was a bit like having a toddler around and realizing how un-kid-proofed the house is. kelly and david are really nice--it's good to get to know more people in our neighborhood, which often doesn't feel like a super friendly place.

sometimes grocery shopping can be a funny experience. i spent what seemed like a really long time in the asian foods section this week mulling over the fish sauce (ah, the power of anchovies!). the accessible thai kitchen brand, custom-made for the american consumer, was selling their tiny bottle of fish sauce for $3.15, whereas the jumbo economy-sized, made in thailand, squid brand was only $1.39. i'll admit that i was a little unsettled by the brand's namesake sea creature looking so life-like on the label, as well as the message that any salt crystal formation in the sauce is "harmless" (this put the idea of harm into my head, which i didn't really like). but then i thought, "what kind of sucker would i be if i bought the carefully marketed product that's specifically designed to make me feel comfortable in unknown culinary territory at three times the price?" maybe next time i'll just go to chong's uni-oriental market (formerly just chong's) where i won't be as tempted to wuss out.
yay squid!


my favorite part of the olympics opening ceremonies last night was the tree and snow-covered mountain skirts worn by the women who carried the country signs in front of the athletes as they entered the stadium (couldn't find a photo--googling "olympics tree skirt" was, not surprisingly, fruitless). rob tells me the mascots (at left) are snow/ice creatures. i think the blue guy looks like a marshmallow. i like that they each appear to have only one tooth.

cotton candy machine! cotton candy machine!

today i enjoyed my 3.5 seconds of televised fame as an audience member on the episode of the price is right that aired this morning. our friend sarah* arranged my whirlwind CBS experience when i was in L.A. last month. you can see me when they call a guy named archie to come on down to contestants' row. huzzah! you definitely get sucked into the collective mania of the studio audience. when they carted out the big wheel that the contestants spin to find out who goes to the showcase showdown, i started shrieking and doing "oh boy! oh boy! oh boy"-type clapping. sad, but true. during "commercial breaks" they do audience q&a with bob barker and it was embarassing how many women didn't actually have questions but just wanted bob to give them a kiss. he didn't kiss them.


last night, rob and i went to see richard buckner (affable, at right) at the mill. the opener was this singer-songwriter named andy who seemed to have some inner demons. he rhymed "methadone" with "ice cream cone." it was a good show--buckner mostly played newer stuff that i wasn't familiar with. we recently bought dents and shells, but haven't had time to listen to it yet. one of my favorite albums ever is his debut release bloomed, which critics like to call his "most accessible." that description makes me feel like a simpleton who doesn't really know how to listen to music, so i mentally replace it with "least pretentious" (no offense to r.b.) or maybe even "a little less brooding."

*in other L.A. news, sarah and her mom saw jorge garcia (hurley on "lost") at lunch the other day, which reminds me that there's a new episode tonight. joy!

dude!

magic fridge

anyone who knows me could probably guess that the only reason i watch the Super Bowl is for the commercials. i think my favorite (of the ones i saw) was the bud light magic fridge, whereas Rob preferred the hidden bud light spot which i felt was more than a bit reminiscent (verging on rip-off territory) of the best S.B. commercial ever--Terry Tate, office linebacker. okay, except for the part where the guy punches holes in the wall to find the beer. that was hilarious.

in non-couch potato news, Rob is putting my daily 40 minute dog walk to shame by riding his bike to work in 15 degree temperatures and dusting off the weight bench downstairs. it just may be enough to get me across the street (yes, it's that close) to the mercer aquatic center for some laps. maybe by posting this i'm actually trying to convince myself that i'm going to do this. hmmm...

if you haven't tried a cara cara navel orange yet, you really should.

SATURDAY!

Oh boy, it's Saturday and that's the best day of the week! It's like 16 here today - the first time in weeks that it's been under freezing. Throughout January, the highs in Iowa were in the 30s-50s... it was the warmest January on record. I guess I sprayed enough CFC into the atmosphere in the 80s. My big news this week was that I got a new bike (see right.) It's really sweet. I rode it to work for the first time on Friday and I love it - super smooth. Now I need to figure out what to do with my old bike - I may try to post it on ebaY and sell it for local pickup.

We also got news that our good friends Jeff and Jess in Napa, CA had their second child this week (Mister X) and are currently thinking of a name for him. I suspect maybe he has one by this time however. His older brother Sam wanted to name him Patch because he was only opening one eye when he was born - I personally think that this is a great idea, there aren't enough people with pirate names around these days to satisfy my tastes.

Carrie and I watched Grizzly Man - the documentary about Timothy Treadwell (the guy who lived with Grizzly Bears for 13 years in Alaska before one ate him and his girlfriend.) Man that is nuts, but very well done. I would recommend seeing it.

I think Carrie and I are going to run some errands today and then watch the Hawks play against Michigan in basketball for first place in the Big Ten. For the first time in ages, the Iowa Basketball team is playing worth a crap and it's fun to see. Maybe they can win a game in the NCAA tourney this year! Nothing else super exciting so i'll sign out. Peace.

culinary MacGyver-ism

i'm starting to think that a lot of my entries will wind up being about food. i love to eat. i love to cook. a few months back i bought a discounted copy of ruth reichl's (former NY Times food editor who used elaborate costuming to try to ensure fair, everyday treatment in restaurants) first autobiography from a remainders table. i haven't read it yet, but it's called Comfort Me With Apples. my own account would be more like Comfort Me with Heavy Cream and Unsalted Butter, but the basic idea is the same.
so, yesterday i decided to make this stew for dinner that calls for Old Bay seasoning, which is apparently designed to make your cooking taste eastern seaboard-y, like a clam bake. we didn't have any, so i decided to make my own--hence, the culinary MacGyver-ism. i found a recipe online--what ever did we do before Google? oddly, Old Bay contains celery salt, cardamom, cloves, mustard, paprika, and bay leaves--all together. i was wary. at least i was finally able to use the mortar and pestle i got for Christmas, which made me feel like an old timey apothecary. the results went into the Tilghman Island stew (from Moosewood New Classics) pictured here which contained no seafood, but somehow seemed like it might have. food alchemy, i tell you!

in my last entry, i bemoaned the fact that i didn't have any photos of oscar to post, so i had to remedy that. here he is at his new food bowls with built-in kibble storage below, skillfully crafted by Bill (my father-in-law). we were seriously considering getting a cairn terrier puppy brother for oscar last weekend, but the breeder was weird on the phone (why do i need to know that he owns vending machines in sigourney and had to buy a cell phone for his 11 year-old?) and he balked when we asked to come see the pups and their mama (bad sign), so no dice.

Howdy Doo

Howdy Doo! This here's a message from Robbie D. Yes, it's true - we have to give Betsy some mad props. She started her own blog and we read it a lot. It seems like a great way to keep up to date with people in this age of modernity. I imagine Carrie will probably dink around with this more than me but we'll see. Please come here a lot and see what we're up to. Hopefully we'll be up to the task of keeping up with it. We'll try to take more pictures of stuff and things of that nature to let people know what the heck is going on. Ok, i'm going to go for now. More later...

blogalicious

so, i guess this is it.
rob and i have a blog.
it's blogtastic.

here's a photo of us at lake tahoe on our honeymoon. you might have to settle for some pics from the archives on our posts until we get used to breaking out the digital camera to document the odd, delightful, mundane and totally outrageous details of our daily lives.

i should probably explain "howdy doo," though it might not seem to need much explaining. last night rob was listening to the kids' song of the same name written by woody guthrie--one of his childhood favorites. i would recommend downloading it if you are so inclined. it is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, especially the line "how'zer doober doober doojie, how'dja doo." it struck us as somehow appropos.

what else to say off the bat? we don't have an adorable baby to write about (ala betsy's awesome--dare i say coleslawsome-- blog, "and don't you forget it, either"), so you might get a lot of oscar updates. but right now i'm proving what a deficient dog-mom i am by not having any photos of him on my laptop to upload here. hrm...

okay, more later.
blog on.

carrie

p.s. no more punning with "blog" in future posts. i promise.