Nursery D I Y - bird mobile

Ok, this isn't exactly a D I Y. This is a look-what-we-can-make-when-we-combine-things-bought-off-the-internet. But that is not really a thing, so we will just call it a D I Y even though it's cheating a little.

I have a problem with getting an idea in my head of a really specific item I want, and then spending 5 million hours searching for it on the internet, only to come to the conclusion that it doesn't exist. Is there a name for this? Well, this is what I did when I was hunting for a nursery mobile. I wanted a floaty, oversized tidbit of "forest" (the nursery theme would be enchanted forest, a combination of fairy tale and woodland theme) with pretty decorated birds attached. Almost as much a sculpture as mobile, in the ole mind's eye. I was depressed after dozens of etsy searches that turned up nothing close except for some beautiful $500 stained glass leaf mobiles that were a bit out of my price range.

Then I saw these beauties on sale at Land of Nod and knew I had to do something with them, even if I didn't know what yet:

I decided I would make some pretty leafy branches to hang them from, when my maternity leave started. A month passed and I happened upon this at BHLDN:

Eek! It was exactly what I imagined when I was picturing an overly complicated something that I would attempt to make. The branches have a wire center so you can bend any way you like. I did mine in a circular fashion over the crib, attached the birds, hung from the ceiling, and voila:

 

In person the mobile is the first thing you see when you walk in the nursery and it's quite eye catching! As an added bonus since the birds are cardboard and the leaves are paper, the mobile has a great floaty movement that will keep McClain (and adults) entranced for long stretches of time. Whenever I need to steal away and start a load of laundry or change clothes real quick, I can leave M watching this and he's entertained longer than just about anything else we have. Win!

Nursery D I Y - frame project

Our New York City apartment was a sprawling 550 square feet, and originally we had plans for Baby Williamson to sleep in a drawer. (Just kidding. Kind of.) Then when I was eight months pregnant (side note: I'm sure you're thinking what a blast! it sounds like to move in your third trimester of pregnancy but I do not recommend schlepping all your worldly belongings 700 miles when you are eight months pregnant. You should have your feet propped up with a big glass of lemonade at this juncture.) and we relocated to our cute little Lexington house, we suddenly had triple the space to fill (and only about a month until baby was due to arrive). I needed to frame lots of things on the cheap, but wanted a custom look. I had purchased these fabulous vintage fairy tale prints from Etsy and wanted oversized gold frames to show them off. I stalked several second hand and vintage home decorating stores in town that I knew had framed art until I found large ones that would fit my fairy tale prints. I wasn't too concerned that they all matched or were exactly the same size because I planned on getting mats cut for all of them in the same color, which I hoped would give them a cohesive look.

 Here are my frames before (with funny art that was in them when purchased):

With some patience I scored all these frames for 40 bucks! I then got navy mats cut at a local framer for another $40. (I would not recommend Michael's, who mysteriously seem to always be advertising a frame sale with promises of big discounts, yet wanted to charge close to $100 just to have mats cut, and said it would take two weeks! To quote Coffee Talk from 90's SNL days this is neither a sale or a big discount. Discuss.) My local framer literally had them ready in less than an hour, and as an extra bonus I felt warm and tingly about supporting a small business. Made me wonder why I had given shady Michael's (as I shall call them from this day forward) any of my framing business in the first place.

Here are the frames after (with new art and mats cut):

The top left frame originally had a funky greenish marbleized pattern going on, but I got the Krylon gold leaf pen and had way too much fun scribbling in all the space. I was really happy with the end result. All in all I spent $90 for all four frames, mats, and the pen, and I think they turned out ravishing, and looking like they cost quite a bit more. Stay tuned for more nursery D I Y's and a nursery reveal in a few weeks!

McClain is 1 Month!

Here's my sugar pie at one month :

I will be catching up over the next few weeks posting McClain's monthly stop motion videos until they're up to date. 1 month is a bit of a blur by now but at one month I remember through the haze of sleep deprivation that:

--McClain is smiling and cooing people

--He's sleeping in five hour stretches at night

--He has his first cold after a thanksgiving visit from his infected Uncle

--He will suck on a pacifier or his fingers if he's lucky enough to find them

--So far he is a night owl and sleeps his longest stretches after midnight!

--He smiles and laughs in his sleep

McClain's Birth Story

To me labor and becoming a parent for the first time is a bit like reading about driving a whole lot but never getting behind the wheel. I think of the evening of October 18th, 2013 as the beginning of our finally taking the wheel:

My mom was visiting for two weeks, and she had already burned through her first week while we waited for baby Williamson to arrive. My brother Hunter came to hang out for the weekend, and it looked like it was going to be another couple of days of thumb twiddling as I was already three days past my due date and had decided this baby was never coming out. But then, just after we finished dinner and sent mom and Hunter off to bed, my water broke. I had been having contractions for a few hours, but had had many other evenings like this, and knew I wasn't very far along. However, I was strep positive and Sam was anxious to get going as our midwife had told us "not to dilly dally." To me this meant we had time for me to take a long shower and stop by the grocery store to procure cookies for the nurses. Sam was annoyed that we couldn't go straight there, but I knew we had many hours ahead of us. While I showered, Sam "packed" (i.e. grabbed our already packed go-bags from a nearby table and proclaimed he was ready to go whilst I called out more items that we needed that he had to go look for, one at a time). Our 1:30am cookie run didn't take as long as I'd hoped, and when we arrived at the hospital we learned they had lost our pre-registration paper work, and I was forced to answer such pressing questions as "are you currently employed?" before they would check us in.

We got settled in our room and after some time two nurses arrived and were very amused that 1) I had never been in a hospital before as a patient (I guess this was evidenced by the fact that I was hanging out in my clothes and hadn't changed into a hospital gown yet) and 2) I claimed that I wouldn't be getting an epidural. Oh they thought that was hilarious. They informed us that I was about 3cm dilated, then botched getting an iv stuck properly in my arm for the strep antibiotics (and apologized profusely for it). Sam's mom arrived and we turned on our hypnobabies tracks and settled in for a long night. The contractions were uncomfortable and seemed to be getting closer together, but the hypnobabies tracks and support of Sam and his mom were helping immensely.

Around 10am my midwife Nancy arrived and informed me I was 4cm. Only 4! I was a little deflated and hoped that I would be further along after all those hours. We labored on, rolling around on the birthing ball, and hypo-breathing our way through wave after wave. There was one room reserved for women laboring without drugs that had a bathtub, and I kept asking if I could be moved there. I longed to soak in some warm water. At first I was told the woman currently occupying the room was "almost done" and her baby was "small" -- but every time I asked I was told the room was occupied, and finally I realized they had given the room to someone else instead of moving me over to it! Also complicating matters was the fact that 12+ hours into labor, I still hadn't reached "zero station" i.e. the baby hadn't dropped all the way (in fact my midwife and a couple of nurses asked me if I had every had surgery on my business because I guess it was unusual that the baby hadn't dropped this far into labor). At 5pm Nancy checked me and told us I was 5cm. Only 5!? I was approaching 24 hours in labor and fatigue was beginning to set in. I also felt I was set back by having to sit down every hour, get hooked up to the iv, and get those darned antibiotics. I wanted to be up and moving around and this lying down every hour felt like a constant step backward. Nancy was concerned I had only progressed a couple of centimeters in over 12 hours and suggested we start a "whiff of pitocin" to see if we could make more progress. I wasn't too excited about getting the pitocin but when Nancy hinted that the alternative was going to be a c-section I knew I didn't have a choice. I had trained and trained with this hypnobabies program and had envisioned things going a bit differently!

As soon as they started me on the pitocin -- the "lowest possible dose" according to Nancy -- the rocketship of pain began and things moved super quick. At this point I tried to keep doing my breathing and my hypnosis techniques but the pain intensified so quickly that all I could do was scream through each wave. I kept wondering what I must sound like to any people in the hallway who happened to be walking past my room. Around this time the nurses changed over and thank God I got this wonderful nurse, Melissa--an angel sent from above who said she had had four children all natural and had been given pitocin with her first just like me. Melissa suggested my screaming would be more effective if I redirected my energy to a low groaning, and she showed me how. What a difference. I felt immediately like Melissa and I were fast friends and I remember telling her "they made me take pitocin" and after what felt like an eternity of horrible painful contractions I asked her "Am I close to transition?" (I knew from my reading that transition meant I was getting close to pushing time) "Honey, you're in it right now," she said, and I told her "I brought cookies for everyone, and I want you to have all of them." I congratulated myself on maintaining the ability to make the occasional joke.

At this point time and space had slipped away and I was in my animal brain, but Nancy checked me again at eight something and I was around 9cm. I just remember having to clamp down on Sam's arms and relying on him so much to look at the monitors and tell me when a wave was about to start and when it was ending. "Natural labor, what was I thinking?" crossed my mind a few times, but then the room filled with nurses (it seemed like the whole floor was there--oh look there's the ladies who did my iv last night--meaning I had been at this for 24 hours now, yeeesh). The dang pitocin had done the trick, and around 9pm, it was finally time to push. I remember Nancy checking me and saying she could "feel the baby's hair." They had me flat on my back and in stirrups, which made me feel rather like a barn animal. When I began pushing, Nancy told me to push, and take a breath in between, to prevent tearing. Now it was burning like the fire of a thousand suns, something else I had read about, and I was getting a charley horse in one leg, and like 8 people were yelling at me to push while I just tried to concentrate on Nancy's direction. I wanted to scream at all of them to shut up, but being back in the South all I managed to say was "I am so sorry but I am going to poop." After 20 minutes of pushing, Nancy said "one more push and you're going to meet your baby," and oh I was determined to have this thing be over and meet whoever was waiting in there. He popped out and promptly pooped all over me (I'm told--we were both cleaned off and I couldn't see a thing from the position I was in). Nancy announced that she thought he was going to be nine pounds and I hadn't torn one bit. She handed him to me and informed me that I "have the perfect birthing pelvis" (Well at least SOMETHING about this process was perfect! I remember thinking) and then I was just shocked as I held this new, wriggling little human. Samuel McClain. He was sucking on two fingers and looking around at this big new world, all eight pounds eleven ounces of him, and he was perfect.

Riding the Subway While Pregnant in NYC

When I was just beginning to show, a friend of mine who was a few months ahead of me in her pregnancy asked if I had had anyone offer me their seat yet.

"Watch who gives up their seat for you," she said. "It's surprising."

"How so?" I asked.

She paused for a moment and added, "the people who give up
their seat are those who've been oppressed. Basically everyone except white guys. The white guy in the suit rarely offers his seat."

I was intrigued. I decided right then and there to keep track of every single person who offered their seat to me over the next few months, and make a note of their gender, race, and any other details I could remember.

For the next five months or so I did just that and these are the results of my unofficial study on riding the subway while pregnant:

At first it was just women, of all different races and mostly ranging in age from their 30's to 50's. All in all 28 women offered seats up during those months.

Men were fewer and further between in seat offering, with 12 men across those five months giving up their seat. 6 of the men were African American, 3 were Hispanic, and 2 were Asian.

I was beginning to think I would go my whole pregnancy without one
white dude offering a seat, until my birthday in July. I wish I'd interviewed the guy to find
out something about him. He was with a lady friend, and was wearing a denim shirt with rolled up sleeves, showing off lots of tattoos on his forearms. I was holding flowers and was riding home with a good male friend. Maybe it was because I was in the company of a white male, and this dude saw something of himself and his lady friend in the two of us.

But that was it. The next two months in NYC passed with no other male whities offering and it getting more and more awkward as I grew larger and larger.

Some women expressed outrage. Once I was taking a very crowded F train into the city and another woman yelled at everyone, "None of you will offer this woman a seat!? Shame on you!"

I tried to stand in the middle of a car as far away from the benches as I could when I would step on and not be able to find a seat. I saw some pregnant women blatantly stand in front of people to try to get seats, but I felt awkward doing that, not to mention the fact that it would skew my results!

The people who showed kindness often surprised me. Once I man drinking a wine cooler at 9am offered me his seat, if I would hold the doors open for him at a stop while he threw away an empty bottle.

Another time an older woman offered me her seat, while her younger son (who looked to be in his 20's, and was, yes, white) stayed in his seat. After a moment, he realized the awkwardness of his still sitting while the woman who brought him into this world stood. He then relinquished his seat for her (I don't count that one as a seat offered since he technically gave the seat up for his mom).

Never in my life have I relied so much on the kindness of strangers, and I was relieved to leave the city and not have to pretend to listen to my headphones while people stared at my belly every time I got on the train. It was a humbling season.

Quest for Banh Mi Magic

Sometime late in the fall, when a few leaves still clung to thinning city trees, I became obsessed with finding the perfect Vietnamese sandwich. The Banh Mi is a sandwich delicacy, made up of fresh baked French bread, thinly sliced vegetables, cilantro, and usually some kind of spicy/meat spread and some version of pork and/or other meats (it's a lot to take in, I know. For help, see diagram.)






Baogette, conveniently located across the street from the Curry Hill Armory and location of the Victoria's secret fashion show, was my first foray into Vietnamese sandwich world and had me at hello. Their version of the Sloppy Joe, the "Sloppy Bao," barbecue pork, and catfish options offer a twist on the classic Banh Mi and immediately had me hooked. I quickly dragged Sam to several Chinatown establishments, one of which was located in the back of a jewelry store.






Additionally, Banh Mi Saigon, as it's known, have deli cases full of mysterious Asian drinks, sides, & puddings. Sam and I tried a drink that was full of basil seeds, which was slightly sweet and perfectly tasty, if a little strange texturally.













When our classic banh mi's were finally ready, we had taken inventory on the plethora of colorful décor, from dish tanks to shrines to we're-not-sure-who:













The banh mi itself was the perfect blend of spicy, sweet, and soft bread with just-crispy-enough crust:







Most recently we discovered a Banh Mi place right down the street from our apartment, appropriately called "Banh Mi"--there emphasis was on noodles, sandwiches, and bubble tea, which I had always been intrigued by but never bothered ordering. Like the basil seed drink, it came with giant jelly-ish balls floating in it, and an oversized straw to slurp up all the strange goodness. It's like a distant cousin of tapioca pudding, in drink form:







The banh mi's weren't too shabby either, if a little on the too chewy side.

Get thee to your neighborhood Vietnamese sandwich shop yesterday, friends, and take hold of your culinary destiny.

An afternoon at the Prospect Park Carousel

Cinematic Moment of the Week: Where the Wild Things Are at Brooklyn Botanical Garden

This dude who specializes in making giant sculptures out of sticks, Patrick Dougherty, has am amazing installation at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden right now. He builds the structures on site and leaves them for people to explore and enjoy. Standing inside each of the little hut-like pieces, I felt like one of the creatures in Where the Wild Things Are, carving out a home for myself in the woods. This would be the best camp out spot evah!

Fall movie preview: Subway platform ads

Y'all there is something about the ads on subway platforms that I am kind of obsessed with. While you are waiting for your train to arrive you are sort of forced to stare at these posters over and over again, and you can see the details better than when you drive by a billboard on the interstate. There is even an art to defacing these posters, with some people having a special knack for peeling off parts of posters beneath the current one to reveal new (though unintentional) messages.

This poster for The Town is creepy yet intriguing. I think the first time I saw it I gasped a little. The cast looks very interesting as well. I will be curious how Jon Hamm does in a non Don Draper role. 

Well someone has scratched poor Jesse Eisenberg's eyes out on this one and given him red eyeliner, but like the trailer, I think this ad is just brilliant. If you haven't seen the trailer, it features a great version of Creep, sung by some kind of boys choir or something. Director David Fincher may have knocked this one out of the park. I tend to heart everything he does.

I am still shaking my fists at the heaven's that I wasn't able to work a day on this glorious production (I blame my lack of period haircut) which was shot all locally and seemingly took five years to shoot (I think it was more like a little over a year, a long time for one season of tv). I can only imagine what the budget was on this little piece of prohibition era eye candy. Let's cross our fingers for a second season and longer hair for me.

Cinematic Moment of the Week: My life is a Rap Musical

Recently I was walking to meet Sam and some out-of-towner friends at our favorite sushi joint, when I passed a group of young gentleman standing outside of our neighborhood convalescent home. They looked kind of like this, but with nursing home building features behind them:

This was strange because A) the only groups of people who usually hang out in front of the convalescent home are the convalescents who live there and B) they seemed to be checking out the ladies who were  walking past them, and in front of a convalescent home seems a strange place to do such an activity. But maybe I am not up on the trends of men attempting to pick up ladies on the street. (Sidenote: In NYC, there are certain things a lady experiences when walking alone or in the company of another lady, that most of her man friends/spouses never have the good fortune of witnessing. This includes men whistling at you, howling at you, and my personal favorite, making kissing noises at you. (when I say favorite what I really mean is I want to punch these men in the face, because the kissing noise is not cute, is not flattering, and does not make me like you. It's rude and gross.) It happens on a weekly basis and I've been here long enough that if I perceive a potential kissing noise/yelling-awkward-pick-up-lines-at-me-as-I-make-a-bee-line-for-the-corner situation, I will do my best to put my head down and get out of the line of fire as soon as possible. One out of every 50 times a dude says something to you on the street, it is actually kind of cute/funny. But those ain't good odds.)
So I've got my head down, I've sped up and am walking past them very quickly, when I realize they aren't barking pick up lines at ladies, they are making up raps about them on the fly and singing them boyz2men style on the sidewalk. Unfortunately by the time I realized this I was already rounding the corner (otherwise I would have walked slower than usual to enjoy this original rap about myself, duh), but I did make out some fresh beats that were something along the lines of "she's wearing her sunglasses and her dress by burberry" which was hilarious, because A) I was wearing this dress:

And B) I was wearing the prescription glasses I've had for the last five years, and they don't look like sunglasses at any angle. Still, the ditty had me smiling for the rest of my journey to spicy tuna roll land, and for a minute there I felt like I was in a scene from some kind of Spike Lee joint.

Summer in the City - Ways to beat the heat

Seems like summer started extra early this year (I recall feeling it was too hot to wear pants sometime in early May), so I keep telling Sam, shouldn't it be cooling off early (like now) since summer started so soon? He insists that August is always brutal, and we are in for at least another month of sweaty muggy hot, but I am still hoping for an early fall. Sometimes you have to get creative on super hot days, and New Yorkers have their own methods for staying cool:

Find a sprinkler. They have them at all the playgrounds here, but I recommend borrowing a child you may know and bringing them with you.  

Retreat to commercial A/C. Most New Yorkers aren't blessed with central air conditioning, but big commercial spaces, like the Brooklyn Museum, have loads of cool air they blast all summer long. Here I'm cooling off at their cafe, while the man next to me ingests copious amounts of sugar packets and a splash of coffee.

When you can't escape the outdoors, take in something beautiful, like here, at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. This will distract you from the fact that you have sweated through your thin t-shirt and your heavy application of deodorant isn't cutting it as the heat index tips above 90 degrees. Also, they have loads of old beautiful trees which you can escape beneath for a few glorious, if brief moments in the shade.

And when all else fails. Iced coffee. Loads and loads of iced coffee. I cannot think of a time or place when I've ever purchased iced coffee as I frequently and desperately as I have since I've lived here. Seriously. I think it's saved my life at least six times this summer alone.

Spotted on the streets! today in Brooklyn

Some days living in NYC, you just have your head down and you're mostly focused on getting to the train/bus/taxi before it passes you by. There's a lot of rushing around. Which is unfortunate because when you slow down and have time to wander up and down the streets you discover the most wondrous and strange things. Today as I was standing on the corner I saw this cadre of grown men in boy scout uniforms...I wonder where they were going?

Next I ran across an amazing fruit and vegetable stand. The squash was wrapped up in tissue paper, and arranged in neat rows, like they were little newborn babes waiting to be plucked up by loving parents. 

Instead of garage sales, stoop sales are a very popular way to get rid of all the extra junk that's laying around your apartment. I was perusing this older chap's stoop sale goods when I ran across these beauties. Anyone need some old, outdated and useless remotes? Anyone? No? Alrighty then.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

New York and my world in general has been ate up with Mad Men of late. Recently I got to fulfill my dream of being a human statue for a day outside of Radio City. A couple of days later I spent the evening posing for pictures with the majority of the tourist population at the Mad Men Season 4 premiere in Times Square. I have to say it is a bizarre feeling to either be 1) frozen, and having people take pictures of you like you are a museum exhibit 2) frozen, and having random people jump next to you, snap a picture, and run away, like you are not really real and they are posing with an actual statue but 3) I think it is even stranger still to have people show up to the Mad Men premiere dressed up in 60's attire and want to get in pictures with you, who is getting paid to be dressed up like they are. Then it's just a bunch of strangers dressed in 60's attire, and randomly in a picture together, you know?

I wish I had some examples of me in pictures with these other people who are dressed up, but alas, the only fan photo I have been able to come up with is this one:

The lovely gentleman posing for pictures with me is Josh, a fellow Southerner who just relocated to New York a couple of months ago. Josh and I decided to fulfill our duties as Mad Men human statue people we needed 1960's/alterego people. So I referred to him as Jimmy and he called me Dot all day. Apparently he is really moving up at work and I am his faithful secretary, recently having had a lobotomy and unable to charm everyone around me like I used to, but still able to type with the best of them.
Here we are being stared at by onlookers:

And HERE is a fabulous video from the premiere in Times Square that Cindi spotted with her brilliant eye in which I make a couple of cameos.

And if you haven't heard enough and I haven't completely turned you off of Mad Men for life, I have entered the Mad Men Casting Contest. There's a month of voting left and I am in the #11 spot for Women. The Top 10 move on to the final round where Matt Weiner (exec producer of the show) will pick the winner/runner-ups. So VOTE today (for me), and often!

Whew. I'm exhausted. I need to sit down.

Shopping Carts in the City--kind of like gold on wheels

After we moved to New York a couple of years ago, I was alarmed the first couple of times we ventured to the grocery store to find the storefront looking like this. I couldn't figure out for a minute why a store would purposefully make their entrance look so...unwelcoming (at least it seemed that way to my untrained southern eye). I thought it must be a mistake or a grocery store chain that had fallen off her rocker, until I visited several more grocery stores that had the same bars covering their storefront. I think Sam finally had to explain to me that the bars were not a poor design choice, but a way of keeping people from STEALING the carts. In a place where few people have cars to transport groceries home, baskets with wheels aka carts are a hot commodity, as it turns out. You see homeless folks carrying around their valuables in them. But I guess other people have been known to snatch a cart or two, if the opportunity presented itself and they had so many bags to be desperate for something to help them get their loot home.

When working in the city on a show a couple of months back, I was assisting with the stocking of dressing rooms and we had to buy copious amounts of bottled water for the likes of Ludacris and Soulja Boy. I was all, "how the crap are we going to get 500 bottles of water back to the dressing rooms?" (which were a good 4 blocks away). Well, in some stores (K Mart in this instance) they will let you borrow the cart on the condition that you leave your driver's license with them. Who knew? A final note on the magic of carts:

it's silly but most Targets in the area are two stories and come with their very own separate escalator for your cart. I love pushing it in there and watching it ratchet up to the second floor, while we ride alongside on the human escalator. It probably makes up for the barred grocery store inconvenience that I experience elsewhere, it's so magical.

And the Award for Sketchiest Pet Shop Ever goes to...

I have walked past this Brooklyn Pet Shop several times now, and this picture doesn't do justice to how scary this place looks. Every time I approach I slow my walk down to a shuffle in hopes of catching a glimpse of an actual animal inside, mayhap a few of the "exotic fish" one sign says they "now carry"--but always to no avail. I'm a pretty adventurous person when it comes to checking out random things in the neighborhood, but somewhere between the gate, the bars over all windows and doors, and the three cardboard signs insisting this place is a PET SHOP (there's even arrows to help direct you) I lose any nerve I might have to go inside and check the place out. And seeing as someone was just shot a block over from this location a few weeks ago, I may be avoiding this stretch of street for some time now. Until we meet again, Sketchy Pet Shop, I will continue forming conspiracy theories about what kind of operation is really going on in there....

The Highs of Spring

The past month has been the busiest and wackiest I've had since moving to New York. Some visuals:


Here is the finale of the Cartoon Network Upfronts I worked in April. An upfront is something all the tv people do every Spring to preview what is coming up for them in the next season. It's a good way to attract potential advertisers and also get some press attention for exciting new programming. On stage you can pick out Andrew WK and band, several mascots including a chicken (fake) and ram (real) that were shooting tshirts into the audience, a man wearing a backpack basketball hoop with several other boys trying to shoot baskets, a giant dog from a new show called Adventureland (manned by two guys playing said dog's legs), and a 12 year old boy who was either riding atop the giant dog or running around stage. Also, not pictured (sadly) there was a drummer called the Ice King dressed like a wizard in a cave above stage, surrounded by 400 pounds of dry ice. It was awesome.


The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are in bloom! Their Cherry Blossoms are legendary, but every year I miss them. This year I got to see one late bloomer, but the rest of them had already wilted. But, have no fear! Their bluebonnets are now in full blossom! Who doesn't love a field of bluebonnets, I ask you?



Our friends Jack and Cindi came to visit us for a few days, and besides lucking out with "VIP" tickets to Dave Letterman on Monday, we also got to see awesome guests Evangeline Lilly, Sam Rockwell, and The Million Dollar Quartet! Ending Monday with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk made for pretty much the best New York day any tourist or New Yorker could ask for. I could walk across that bridge a thousand times, I believe, and still discover something new every time.


The Gaga. I worked on Trudie Styler's Rainforest benefit concert last week, and everyone was gaga for Gaga. There's so many stories I could tell, but I only managed to get a couple of snaps, this one of a small snippet of fans waiting for Gaga after the show on the streets. My friend Joe and I were hanging out in the room next door to Gaga's dressing room, and as we surveyed the fans and stalkers outside, many of them started taking pictures of us! (it was dark-ish enough that they may have just hoped/assumed we were someone awesome based on the fact we were looking out the window)--we started to wave at them and they waved back, hoping Gaga would show herself.

I have no idea who this girl is but had to find a subtle way of documenting I was actually there...



Went to the Brooklyn Museum friday--they have a huge section of the museum devoted to recreating rooms from Farmhouses in Connecticut in 1789 and such things. When I rounded a corner I happened across the scariest puppets of all time, life-size with giant heads, and set up to look like they were living inside these historical rooms. I think I will have nightmares for the next week. I mean, yikes.