In the age old debate

Parisa's on my side. Here's her peanut butter:

Mugs mugs mugs

More mugs

Can't think of what to draw?

Draw what you draw with.

More stuff around my house

As the days get shorter...

Nights in my living room get longer. Roommates, tv on dvd, sitting on the heater, and soup!

Crunchy or Creamy?

Yuraygir National Park, New South Wales

Sunday Seconds

On this side of October

Hello readers, I'm back! Back from a whirlwind trip in the Northeast. 5 cities, 1 friend, 8 museums, and a boggling amount of art. From ancient Egypt to Andy Warhol, Flemmish scenes of the annunciation to Impressionist lilies, I saw such incredible things that to try to describe it sounds futile. But I'll try to, city by city.

City one: New York

I love New York. But I don't think I'd ever want to live there. I'd buy the t-shirt, but not the lifestyle. A four day visit though? YES! There's too much to see in a lifetime in the city, but we tried our darndest to see what we could in four days. The museums: The Museum of Modern Art (Moma), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), and the Museum of Natural History (the one in that Ben Stiller movie). We stayed with Rose's best friend from high school, Daniel, a photography student living in the lower east side. He was a wonderful host and guide, and even better new friend! I'm now part of the unofficial Daniel fan club here in Bellingham how.

Five favorites from NYC

1. The Moma.

2. Good eats with Daniel.

3. The Museum of Natural History's painted environments for the animals. Beautiful, but a little creepy.

4. Central Park

5. Hopping around town on the Metro!

City two: Boston

We didn't spend as much time as we wanted here, just one night and most of the next day. But from what I saw, Bah-stonites are very friendly, and Boston University is a very long university. Also: the Farrington Inn is a very nice hostel.

Five Favorites from Boston:

1. Meeting Ann at the Museum of Fine Arts!

2. Meeting two Argentinian girls and an Irish bloke at the Farrington

3. Exhibition on Richard Avedon, a fashion photographer with over 5 decades of stunning pictures.

4. 1,300 year old Chinese silk paintings. This was a little bit of a dream to see after 8 credits of Chinese Art History last spring.

5. Did I mention seeing Ann?

(the art school where Ann and I studied in Hobart, a renovated jam factory)

City three: Wooster

Don't be confused, it's actually Worcester. But if you say "Worcester," even while trying to buy a train ticket there, you will get weird looks. So we followed Ann home to Wooster, the town she studies in, close to her native Connecticut. Ann is one of my best friends from Tasmania, so we caught up on life post-Australia, reminisced about tim-tams and the jam factory, and even talked to our old friend Hannah on Skype for a long time!

Five Favorites from Wooster:

1. Seeing Ann, wonderful and booming in her senior year, graduating this spring!

2. Ann, getting up early to go to her crew races!

3. Meeting Ann's roommates.

4. The scenic train ride in.

5. The friendly taxi driver in the morning. (Okay, we didn't see much of Wooster either).

City four: Washington D.C.

My unofficial favorite part of this city is seeing the above view every time you turned a corner. The capital looms over everything, shining in it's important beauty. And when you think you've shaken it, you see the Washington Monument, the White House, or something else distinctive or important. We stayed 5 nights with Rose's uncle, Scott, who is possibly the friendliest person in D.C. He showed us his favorite spots in town to grab some grub, and his house was very, very close to the metro line! We could be in downtown D.C. in 3 minutes.

Five favorites from D.C.

1. The Smithsonian Museum of American History, specifically seeing the original star-spangled banner and the collection of the first ladies' dresses.

2. Smithsonian's national portrait gallery. Every important person you can imagine from the war of 1812, and also LL cool J. Who had the biggest painting in the place, by the way.

3. Norman Rockwell at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

4. Watching Boardwalk Empire with Scott

5. A day in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, with Rose's family!

City five: Philadelphia.

Rose and I prepped for this city by watching 'It's always Sunny in Philadelphia.' We have now seen the majority of places featured on the opening credits! We stayed 2 nights with our friend Rodney, who lives in a house with 6 other people, all of them incredibly nice an accommodating! They showed us around the town, and on our last night we went to the Museum of Art to catch a great view of the distinctive Philadelphia skyline. It's very colorful, with a parking garage's lights schematically planned in red and white to resemble the Phillie's baseball logo, and one huge skyscraper with a continual, rotating news feed. Other buildings were also lit up with colors other than white.

Five favorites of Philadelphia:

1. The Magic Gardens. See it to believe it: http://www.phillymagicgardens.org/

2. The Museum of Art, most specifically Thomas Eakin's "The Gross Clinic." It's a portrait of Dr. Gross performing a procedure on a pale and palid patient in a lecture hall. The year was 1875, and no gloves were to be seen.

3. The museum's collection of European art from the middle ages and renaissance times.

4. The Museum of Art, running the infamous "Rocky" steps, and seeing a statue of Rocky Balboa.

5. Cheese steaks on South Street!

oh, and 6. Redding Terminal Market

So that's the trip in a nutshell! Thanks for reading!

Full-on fun fall

Okay, back to this blogging thing. Today I went to see the movie The Social Network, a film about the founders of Facebook. It forced me to think about how my age makes me very much apart of the information age. I got my first myspace page in high school, facebook in college, and blog when I studied abroad. In the past month I've been a bit hesitant about this idea to start a blog about... me, because it seems a bit like, "well, who is going to care?"

And then I got over it. I have an amazing family who deserves to see my artistic shenanigans, especially during my quarter off (when fun comes in abundance!) I have friends who inspire me every day, and a boyfriend with an abundance of encouragement and grammar skills. My co-workers are educators in every sense in the word, and I aspire to be as helpful as they are to me. I'm also starting this for me, to hold myself accountable.

So for today, my post has no visuals, but from now on... who knows! The next week will be quite a flurry of work and preparing for an East Coast trip (did I tell you? I'm going to New York and Washington D.C!) but I'll also carve out some time to post some pictures.

Thanks for reading, my few but friendly readers. I'll see you soon!

First

So I guess we'll see which kind I am...