Scenes from the weekend

How I'm going to be titling my to-do lists going forward:

Really brings a much-needed sense of gravitas to the goings on.

Yesterday, I wandered over to Green-Wood Cemetery, my favorite outdoor space in New York, with a friend who had never been there.

Then passed this guy on the way back to my new apartment:

I moved this weekend. I had been in a shoddy, recently constructed building in a neighborhood that I liked, but which wasn't near any green space and was kind of hard to get to from most of the five boroughs. The situation had a lot of problems I'm not going to detail here and I'm just really glad to be out of there. I've been realizing how much I didn't do in the last year because I just wasn't that comfortable in the space. I didn't make ice cream even once last year, for example, which is practically a crime against nature. I didn't bake any bread. I didn't have friends over for dinner a single time. How is that even possible? Cooking something delicious and then having people over to eat it is one of my absolute favorite things to do. It's all going to change though. The new place is gorgeous, in an old factory that's near both Prospect Park and Green-Wood. It has a lot going for it, including the perfect balance of industrial and pretty, great light, very cool roommates and fantastic views. I took both of these pictures while sitting at my desk last night.
I'm still settling in, but I'll put up more pictures as I go along... And, once my kitchen stuff is unpacked, having people over ASAP.

Reptile day

The frog proceeds apace:
(I had to raid a friend's stash for bits of guts-colored fiber. All I have on hand is grey, black and cobalt.)

I thought I had a photo of him complete with ridiculously cute, stubby little arms, but I guess this is the closest thing I have. The knitting is done, I just need to do the blocking, stuffing and assembly and make the organs. For the record, needlefelting is INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS.

I've been hanging on to photos of this handsome devil since I got back from Florida. One afternoon I had about 20 minutes free and managed to sit outside for almost all of it. The place was absolutely lousy with lizards and apparently it was mating season because this guy was positively flirtatious:
I never managed to capture his neck sac at full turgidity, but I promise: it was a sight to behold. If I were a lady lizard, I would have been all over his business.

And because I like to do things in threes, check out this great video of Debbie Harry and Kermit the Frog:

Two new projects

1. A top-down, round-yoke sweater in two strands of fingering-weight alpaca, one black, one charcoal, held together on size 9 needles. Originally, I was going to do it all in stockinette, but the thought of random purl ridges occurred to me a few inches in and I'm running with it. I'm seeing this as slouchy, but shaped. So it's not fitted, but it's not a big ol' mess either.

2. A dissected frog. Because I want this in a shadowbox on my wall, like, yesterday.

Ryantown, etc.

I went by the Ryantown installation/pop-up store this weekend, which is well worth visiting if you're in the area. There's a lot to see and the photos don't do it justice. I like Rob's work. There's an exuberance and playfulness about it that is, frankly, heartening, but there's also an acknowledgment of darkness and danger that tempers the sweetness. Plus, paper cutting at his level of intricacy is totally cool. The space itself is pretty great, with tons of light and a combination of framed work and construction paper cut outs all over the walls.

It ended up being a big art-consumption weekend for me. I also went to see these incredibly gorgeous, swoon-inducing photographs of mid-century New York by Paul Himmel. The ones of the crowds in Grand Central especially were absolute knockouts in person. And I finally managed to get to the Whitney for the Jenny Holzer show, which was powerful and disorienting and much more political than what I was expecting, based on what I knew of her earlier work. Definitely worth checking out, especially since you can go look at giant vinyl Claes Oldenburg cellos and sandwiches on the second floor afterward to balance it out. AND I went to see a play, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which was hysterically funny and incredibly well done and featured a friend of a friend as the narrator who gets killed a couple of times.

Country mouse

This weekend, I went to visit friends in the country and had an altogether fabulous time.

I got to spend time with a couple of my favorite kids.
Including a Crazy! Dance! Party!

And plenty of time sitting around, doing what my mom calls "visiting" and I call "hanging out. with snacks."

I managed to skip stones successfully for the first (and second! and third!) time ever while we were all climbing around the rocks by the river.

I love this mill.

I picked some daffodils.

For the first time ever, I picked asparagus and ate it raw on the spot, all sweet and crunchy and tasting like sunshine.

And I came home happy and relaxed and inspired to cook more healthfully, be outside more and work on all kinds of projects.