best day ever (picture parade)

I remember a lovely spring/summer day when I was off of work for a reason I can't remember (probably because my car was broken).  In any case, almost every time I have a weekday (that isn't Friday) off from work, I arrange to have lunch and a tour of the city I love with the man I love.  No, not Mister (though I do love him dearly) - my dad.  On this particular day in my memory, Dad and I had a light lunch and then went over to the National Constitution Center for a quick stroll.  My dad, in a moment of shock and awe about my ignorance to my own neighborhood, appalled that I could live near the most historical part of the country and not play tourist more frequently said the following:
"You need to get out more."

There's nothing like your dad telling you to get out more to drive home your reclusive tendencies.

So, [a little late] I took his advice.  I took yesterday off from work so I could enjoy my city and it was delightful!  Let's start the parade!

I can't remember exactly where this is (and I'm sure the owners of this home appreciate that), but it's somewhere on an east-west street in Society Hill if you want to go on a scavenger hunt.

I was super organized about my day off (anyone surprised?) because I wanted to be sure I packed as much PIFA goodness and "me time" into the daylight hours as possible - the night belonged to another terrific outing, but of a completely different nature.

Anyway, as I was walking along, the colorful window boxes and urns full of flowers caught my eye.  Please - look at those flowers - that's an understatement.  At first I felt funny standing outside someone's home taking pictures of their flowers, but then I decided that if they didn't want other people to enjoy them, they wouldn't have put them out in their "front yard" like that.

my sister was named after these delicate white blossoms

I was passing by on my way toward Washington Square, which is becoming quite green and beautiful.  I must admit, I love the Square in the winter, when the trees are bare and establish an incredible contrast against fallen snow, but the Square really is gorgeous in every season.

On the southeast corner of the square sits Locks Gallery.  I've passed this building hundreds of times but since I work odd hours, it's always been closed.  I honestly had no idea whether it was a really fancy hair salon ("locks"?  why not?) or an actual art gallery.  Turns out it is the latter and they are hosting an exhibit of surreal art as part of PIFA: The Insolent Eye - Jarry in Art

If you maximize and/or squint at this photo, you can see that the building was erected only 7 years after we established ourselves as an independent country.  I think that's pretty darn cool.

I also think these chairs are pretty darn cool and would love to have one in my home.  I wonder what one would need to do to get one (besides steal it or become an overnight millionaire).  It looks like you're sitting on a cello.

Honestly, that was probably my favorite part of the gallery, and it was just a chair in an educational room - not part of the exhibit.  I don't actually like surrealism, aside from my love of David Lynch movies, but that's quite a different thing.  I just figured I'd stop in on my way to the exhibit I was totally psyched about, hosted by the Athenaeum, on the eastern side of the Square.

approaching the Athenaeum

I love the architectural details of this building.  Not too coincidentally, the exhibit hosted as part of PIFA deals with French influence on Philadelphia's architecture.  Bastille to Broad Street is a beautiful and very educational exhibit that I strongly encourage all residents of this fine city to attend - for heaven's sake, it's free - you have nothing to lose.

I love Philadelphia's buildings.  I love the juxtaposition of old and new mixed throughout the city, especially in my little radius of "home," which roughly includes Queen Village, Society Hill/Independence Mall, and Old City.  Being the eastern-most neighborhoods, it makes sense that they are also the oldest and most historically rich neighborhoods in the city.  I could spend hours (and I have) just wandering around my neighborhood and looking at the old buildings, or the 18th century home just next to the modern, urban, severe townhouse built at the turn of the 21st century.

For another tour of my neighborhood, click here.

After delighting myself with tales of the Eastern State Penitentiary being modeled after the Bastille and the Champs-Elysees providing inspiration for Benjamin Franklin Parkway, connecting the Art Museum to City Hall, I headed over to the Kimmel Center for a little music and a light lunch.

I haven't been to the Kimmel Center as many times since it opened in 2001 as I have been in the past month.  Nevertheless, I believe I will miss the Eiffel Tower and its little airborne city of planes and trains (representing the foremost technology and innovation in the early part of the 20th century in France).  It takes such a nice picture.

What I came for, though, was the promise of a lunchtime piano concert.  I had no idea what to expect - it could be jazz for all I knew - but I wanted to watch someone other than my students play.  Turns out I couldn't possibly have gone on a better day.  I stopped to get some coffee in the plaza and nearly spilled it in my mad dash over to the small performance area when I heard someone that wasn't me playing my favorite Chopin Nocturne (E minor).  I have never heard anyone else play that tune and I think I held my breath almost the whole time.  That hooked me, obviously, and I remained to watch Larisa Kifyak play some of my favorite melodies on a gorgeous Steinway & Sons grand piano. 

After a decent cup of coffee and 90 minutes of auditory bliss, I decided to investigate the ladies' room on the lower level of the Kimmel.  Immaculately clean, as I expected it would be, the design was also surprisingly modern.  Although the Kimmel itself certainly departs from the Academy with its geometric shapes and clean lines, the restroom still made me feel as though I'd left the concert hall in favor of a hip, urban night club/bar.  I thought the mirrors were neat (circles with a ring of light around them) and as I was checking myself out, I noticed the light was making a killer reflection in my eyes, so I decided to snap a picture.  I'm glad no one came in - they probably would have thought I'd lost my mind.

I left the Kimmel and continued west, toward Rittenhouse Square.  On my way to the Rosenbach Museum, I passed a small coffee shop with the following boastful sign:

If you don't know why it's awesome to have Stumptown coffee in Philadelphia, please pay Jess a visit at Get Sconed!

I visited the Rosenbach and was enlightened, captivated, and inspired by their exhibit on James Joyce in Paris.  Think me an ignoramus if you must, but I have not been all that familiar with him.  I hope to change that going forward, especially when I learned of the great admiration F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my favorite authors) had for him.  This is the only exhibit I had to pay for and I'll tell you - I got my $10-worth.  Go.

I stopped into Williams Sonoma for some Easter presents for my nephews, one of whom drew this beautiful picture:

I think it's called "Mommy (L) and Aunt Natalie (R) go shopping"

Anyway, after all of those adventures, I came home and made an early dinner, since Mister and I had exciting evening plans.  It was a little mind-blowing to cook and eat dinner when the sun was still up, but the flavor of Isa's 2nd Avenue Vegetable Korma from Appetite for Reduction certainly distracted us.

It didn't photograph terribly well, which is bound to be the case when part of the cooking process involves boiling the veggies for about 10 minutes.  They tasted great, though, and the jasmine rice thirstily absorbed the excess broth before Mister could get too upset about it.

After dinner, we polished ourselves off a bit and then headed up to the Trocadero to see a fabulous band from just across the [Delaware] river - Symphony X. 

Some friends of ours were in two of the three opening bands, so it was nice to see them and talk to them, but we went for Symphony X and were not disappointed.  They put on a far better show than I anticipated - the frontman is huge and has quite a presence, not to mention, he can really sing.  They played a lot of our favorite songs (which isn't hard when most songs are our favorite songs), including a 25 minute long encore that was a single "song," The Odyssey.  As you can probably imagine, it tells the tale of Homer's Odyssey and it is as epic as the piece of literature upon which it's based - after all, it's too long to post on YouTube in one piece!

It was a fabulous day, full of Me time and Me-n-Mister time...I was walking on air and slept like the dead.  Believe me, much like the day after the Gala, it was an epic struggle to go to work today.  Every time I passed a PIFA poster, I just wanted to turn around and play hooky.  Please do yourselves a favor, if you live in the Philadelphia area (and by that I mean, within a 6 hour drive), spend a day doing PIFA stuff before it ends on May 1st.  See the website for a full listing of events, but please, GO!

in the bleak midwinter

Actually, we are slightly more than two-thirds through "winter", but this has been a serious winter so far and anyone who has paid attention for the last decade or so that I've been paying attention knows it doesn't actually get [consistently] warm in Philadelphia until May.

It's snowing again. Honestly, it never gets old - I am as happy looking out my window today as I was during the first snowfall in December. I just think it's beautiful, especially in the city where you can watch the flakes dance and swirl in the halo of the street lamps before they lay a velvet carpet on untrod sidewalks.

Today was a great day to just sit inside and be cozy and lazy, so it is very fortunate that it just happened to be my day off from work. I was supposed to do productive things like get my taxes done and go grocery shopping, but why ruin a beautiful day? I'll admit, I pretty well wussed out because of the wind advisory from the National Weather Service making me afraid to drive to my taxes appointment, and when I saw metal signs wiggling around on their posts, it didn't exactly entice me to step outside my door and join the others who were fighting the wind for their scarves. Besides, I work hard enough to justify a day of watching Amy Lee be perfect while mourning that more than three years have passed without a new release from Evanescence.


So I made myself a nice snowy day lunch - leftover French Lentil Soup with a substantial and tasty salad (spring mix, sprouts, broccoli, carrots, kalamata olives).


That was actually last night's dinner - lentil soup and a mega salad with broccoli, spring mix baby greens, mixed sprouts, kalamata olives, and dried cranberries in lieu of clementine segments. I figured that the 3 I ate as a snack at work probably covered my citrus requirement for the day.


I am so impressed with how pretty salads can be if you take five minutes to construct one that doesn't require dressing. I think it's the dressing that messes up the pretty. By the way, for the more observant among you, I did not try to eat my salad with a spoon - that was for the soup. There is actually a fork beside it, it just didn't make it into the picture. And yes, I know the spoon goes on the right and the fork goes on the left, but I wasn't throwing a dinner party, I was just having dinner alone while checking out some amazing artwork in a magazine shared with me by a colleague. He and a friend thought this painting looked like me:


Anyway, with the help of Smirnoff's Grand Cosmopolitan, I constructed this week's menu after my little dinner last night. At the time, I had every intention of shopping for the necessary ingredients today, but when you see the snow blowing from left to right, rather than merely floating peacefully downward, you might not be overly enthusiastic about going to a grocery store where you get to fight the frenzied omg-it's-snowing-I'll-never-eat-again mobs. I know I wasn't.

1. Kedgeree from The Accidental Vegan because I still haven't made it. That's tonight's dinner.

2. Spanish Veggie Stew with Spanish Rice also from The Accidental Vegan because it looked interesting. I actually almost turned past it, but something made me flip the page back.

3. Seitan Cacciatore also from TAV. I made this before, full of trepidation because it borders on warping a traditional recipe, but it came out so well I was craving it again.

4. Cajun Red Beans and Rice also from TAV. I don't know why I'm so attracted to Cajun Beans and Rice recipes, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for. (hee hee - you're going to have that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day...)

5. Pomegranate Saute on Cinnamon Bulghur from my little holographic gold book of chicken scratch.

6. Spicy Stir-Fry with Clementine, Asparagus, and Tofu from Vegetarian Times: Fast & Easy. I was hellbent on including a tofu-based recipe in my menu because I accidentally bought a tub of tofu a couple of weeks ago that needs to be used up ASAP. I also happen to have half a bag of clementines left, so all I actually need to buy for this recipe is the asparagus!