Christmas Cross Stitch

We've been having a very low key winter break - we're currently in Chicago with Ben's family, and tomorrow we'll head to Maryland for Christmas #2 with my family. No exciting updates to report, but I did make a Ben a sampler for his present, out of a toothpaste for dinner comic that he likes:

That's Ben, wearing his Knights of the Lambda Calculus tshirt.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Tis the Season

Yesterday we went to Longwood Gardens Christmas - Longwood is a giant complex of gardens and greenhouses right outside of Philly, and every December they go nuts with Christmas lights and decorations. We got there right as the sun was setting, which made for some nice views:

I liked the reflections the "floating trees" made on the water.

After it got dark, parts of it felt like walking around in some sort of Dr. Seuss forest.

The centerpiece of the show is the giant conservatory, which is filled with many different Christmas trees. The coolest part was the central hallway:

That chandelier is made of flowers, and if you look closely you can see the pattern on the ground is made out of apples. APPLES. They also had lots of smaller flower chandeliers throughout:

Love those orchids.

It was cold, but quite tolerable with long johns and hot chocolate. We picked the perfect day to go, though, because this morning we woke up to this outside our window:

As of now there's about two inches of snow accumulated on our deck railing, and it's still coming down - we'll be staying indoors for the remainder of the weekend!

Back from break

Ben and I went to our respective homes for Thanksgiving. I uncovered the following awesome picture of my 8-year-old self, fresh from Girl Scout camp 1995:

Check out that sweet swap hat.

Ben had fun with his niece:

Now we are back in Philly, and tonight we climbed into the bed to watch a movie together. I looked over at Ben and noticed that his nightstand was even more funny than usual, which led to the following exchange:

Me: If I did twitter, I would tweet "Things on Ben's nightstand: a glass of wine, an empty beer bottle, a piece of bread, and three mechanical pencils."
Ben: That's not true! It's two mechanical pencils and one pen. Also you left out that there's a receipt.

It's nice to be home.

Small rebellion

This appeared at the park near our house over the weekend:

Take that, The Man.

As seen in Philly

A giant green guy in a third story window:

That is all.

Autumn Express

Ben and I love trains, so when we heard about Amtrak's special Autumn Express train we bought tickets with only a mild amount of embarrassment. It was great to spend a day doing nothing but staring at pretty scenery, reading, and chatting. While we enjoyed the being-on-a-train aspect as well, we definitely weren't as enthusiastic as many of the other passengers - when the conductor announced that the train was being powered by some sort of historical engine or other, our car literally burst into applause.

Excited to be on a train, but not enough to applaud about it.

Look at that fall foliage!

Ben modeling the commemorative lunch bag. Yes, there were commemorative lunch bags.

They handed out brochures about the National Association of Railroad Passengers, figuring - pretty accurately, I'm sure - that people who pay money to ride around on a train going nowhere would also likely be interested in joining their train club. I was somewhat interested at first, until Ben pointed out that NARP is only one letter away from AARP (which also described the demographic of the vast majority of the other passengers). Perhaps in a few decades...

Goodbye, dress!

I always said I would donate my wedding dress after I was done using it, since I'll never wear it again so it might as well make someone else happy. After a year of it sitting in the back of our closet, I finally got around to actually donating it!

Me with my dress for the last time, right before dropping it off.

There are actually a number of places that accept wedding dress donations; I ended up going with Brides Against Breast Cancer - mostly because they were having an event in Baltimore this weekend, and I was going to Baltimore anyway to hang out with my sister. I have to admit to feeling a twinge when I handed the dress over, but now that it's gone I can't say I miss it, or even notice its absence. Here's hoping someone else loves wearing it as much as I did!

Gentrification

Ben and I have been on a bit of a John Landis kick lately, so we just watched Trading Places. We didn't realize it was set in Philadelphia, so we had fun identifying all the Philly landmarks in the background of various scenes. We had to laugh, though, when Dan Aykroyd goes home with the prostitute to her rough neighborhood...

...and she lives at 12th and South. That's about four blocks from where we currently live, and that corner is currently home to a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. A lot has changed in the three decades since 1983...

Barnes

Ben and I decided to get some Culture-with-a-capital-C today and visit the Barnes Foundation. If you haven't heard of it, Barnes was a self-made gajillionaire who invented an anti-gonorrhea drug, and spent his money on buying lots of Art, which he filled his house up with. When he died he wanted his collection to be available to the public, but on the condition that it remained exactly in place, in his house out in the suburbs. In the early 2000s the foundation successfully petitioned to move the collection to downtown Philadelphia so more people could access it (and they could bring in more money), and it was a whole big controversy that all the Art people were very upset about. They even made a movie about it. Anyway, the shiny new Barnes building opened up shortly after Ben and I moved to Philly, and today we finally got around to going.

I can't say that I really got or was excited about any of the art, since it all looks the same to my unsophisticated eye (although some of the antique locksmith materials were cool). But the building itself was really fun to be in - all high ceilings and unusually-shaped rooms; there's a multi-story indoor garden, and even the bathrooms were architecturally interesting. You couldn't take pictures inside, but here's a picture of the exterior (including the moat that surrounds it), which gives an idea of the type of place it is:

I wouldn't pay money to go back, but I think we will add it to the list of interesting places we take walks to. You know, so we can class ourselves up a bit.

Boston!

Wednesday was my birthday and this weekend we went to Boston - we actually went to go to a Final Fantasy concert with friends, but I'm pretending it was for my birthday since I never played Final Fantasy. We had a sleepover and went to dim sum and bonded, and the highlight was a midnight picnic with this box of happiness from Finale:

As much as we love Philly (which is a lot!), every time we go to Boston we end up yearning to move back. We actually like the city of Philly better, but Boston has all our friends... we just have to figure out how to lure them here!

Skyline

We had a rare commitment-free weekend, so we spent several hours just wandering around the city today. We crossed a bridge in Fairmount Park and came across a really excellent view of the city:

It is so good to be back home!

Nerd love through the ages

I officiated my friends' amazingly nerdy wedding this weekend! I'm still too flabbergasted to write about it coherently, so let me just share that the ringbearer was a falcon and leave it at that.

In this photo I've just retrieved the rings from the falcon.
I'm also tremendously relieved that nobody got pooped on.

For their wedding gift, I made them a sampler themed "nerd love through the ages." It's one of the more complicated samplers I have made, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Here are close-ups of the individual couples, since it's kind of hard to see them in that picture.

Han Solo & Princess Leia (Star Wars)	Aragorn & Arwen (Lord of the Rings)	Apollo & Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica)
Westley & Buttercup (The Princess Bride)	Chris & Alana (The actual couple!)	Ron & Hermione (Harry Potter)
Rory & Amy (Doctor Who)	Wash & Zoe (Firefly)	Fry & Leela (Futurama)

I had a lot of fun making it, but it also made me realize (for the umpteenth time) how white and heteronormative most nerd culture is.

We've already got five weddings on the docket for next year - I better get cracking!

Cronuts!

Everyone has been talking about cronuts lately. We found out about a Philly bakery that makes them (well, technically they make a knockoff cronut, since only the original NYC bakery makes official ones), but the first time we attempted to get them was a failure - we went on a Sunday morning, and they don't make them on weekends. You know, because why would you make a popular breakfast item on the two days of the week when people have time for a nice bakery breakfast? Anyway, we vowed to be back, and yesterday we finally lived up to that vow:

CRONUTS

Unsurprisingly, they were really, really good. They were also heavier than I had expected - they are filled with a dense, delicious creamy goo of some sort. I also didn't anticipate that they would be rolled in cinnamon sugar, which was the icing on the cake... or the cinnamon sugar on the cronut.

Mariel before eating hers

Her first bite

I'm pretty sure that I just consumed my caloric allotment for the entire weekend, possibly the week. It was worth it.

Tulsa

I just got back from four days in Tulsa, for a conference. The conference was fantastic, but I didn't really leave the hotel for most of the time I was there (partly because of all the conference events, and partly out of a fear of cricket swarms). I did manage to get one picture of my time in the Sooner State, though:

This was in the women's room at the airport.

Farewell, Paris of Oklahoma!

Dialect

Ben and a bunch of his work friends took the dialect quiz that has been going around lately, and it did a pretty good job of pinpointing where Ben is from:

Definitely from Northeastern Illinois!

It was similarly accurate for most of his friends, so I decided to take it too. I was... surprised by the results:

Apparently I am definitely from Texas.

It even tells you the five cities your dialect is the most similar too - mine were all in Texas. Four of my five least similar cities were in Michigan, and the fifth was in Wisconsin. So, I'm really not from the Northeastern part of the Midwest - which was a bit surprising since my mom grew up in Illinois and I thought I have a lot of her speech patterns.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was a sample size error, since I took the shorter, 25 question version of the quiz. So I spent an hour doing the longer, 140 question version, and once again was flummoxed by the results:

I guess that week in San Diego really rubbed off on me?

This time my five most similar cities were all in SoCal (including San Diego and Fresno), four of my five least similar were in Louisiana, and the fifth was in Mississippi. So, I'm definitely not from the Deep South, except for the fact that I'm from Texas...  At least my actual home state of Maryland is red on this one!

Ben thinks the fact that my results are so inconsistent and all over the place means that it has no idea where I'm from. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in between DC and Appalachia, have one parent who isn't a native English speaker, one from the Midwest but who was raised by an Irish immigrant, and you have lived in Philadelphia, NYC, Boston, and (briefly) San Francisco in the past several years.

Russian Wedding

Yesterday we went to my cousin's wedding right outside of Philly. He's a cousin on my dad's side, meaning he is Russian (as is his new bride), meaning it was a traditional eat-and-drink-until-you-explode Russian wedding. Here is our table when we first entered the reception:

Things to note about this photo:

1. This is the cold appetizers, and the cold appetizers only. Those two stands are there so they can bring out more plates and have multiple levels of cold and hot appetizers going on.
2. In addition to the three bottles of wine on the table, there is also a large bottle of cognac and a big bottle of vodka (in the back, by my dad). There was this much alcohol at every table (as in, one large bottle of vodka for every eight people, in addition to all the wine and cognac).

I didn't really take pictures of the various courses as they came out because I was too busy eating, but the entrees were lamb, beef, salmon, and ravioli. Notice that I said and - those weren't the options you could choose from, there was a giant platter of each of those things at each table. By the time all those courses were done it was about 11:00 pm and they started clearing all our plates - we thought it was time for dessert, but it was time for shish kebabs! All meat, too - chicken and more lamb. It wasn't time for dessert until closer to midnight, but it's a good thing we had some time to digest because this was the dessert table:

This is just one half, there is an equal amount on the other side of the cake.

We got home around 1 am, but the party was still going strong when we left - it probably went until 3 or 4, and they probably made it through all of the alcohol.

Also, before all the festivities started, Ben and I attempted to take a nice picture since we don't usually dress up. Here's how that turned out:
I guess it's not surprising that we don't have more nice pictures together...

March on Washington

This upcoming Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and this weekend Ben and I headed down to DC to participate in the anniversary march. I'm still reflecting on the day and what it meant to be there, but I feel incredibly privileged that we were able to attend.

The sun rising behind the Washington Monument bright and early, when we first arrived.

It was simultaneously exhilarating to think about how much has changed in 50 years, and infuriating to think about how much further is left to go. It was heartening that there were many women speakers this time (unlike at the original), and that issues of immigration reform and LGBTQ equality were also included in most of the speeches (at the original march one of the main organizers, Bayard Rustin, was not given public recognition for his role because he was gay). It was also humbling to hear so many leaders of the movement speak, from the more contemporary (Eric Holder, Cory Booker, Sybrina Fulton, and Al Sharpton) to those with direct ties to the original march (Martin Luther King III, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and John Lewis). You can watch almost all of the speeches online (I found a bunch here), so if you weren't able to watch yesterday I highly recommend making time to watch now.

We somehow ended up this close to Representative Lewis after the march, which was mind-blowingly amazing.

At the same time, the Voting Rights Act was just gutted, the Zimmerman verdict made it clear that our justice system still values Black lives less than others, mass incarceration oppresses and disenfranchises people of color at astronomical and ever-increasing rates, educational equity sometimes feel so far out of reach I'm not sure my job is worth more than a drop in the ocean, and the list goes on... and it's all made worse by the fact that so many (mostly white) people believe that racism is "over" and we don't have to worry about any of these issues any more. Frankly, I was disappointed at how few white people were at the march, although I can't say I was surprised. I just don't see how we're ever going to achieve true, systemic change unless everyone - including and especially people with privileges that allow them to not have to engage with these issues unless they choose to - realizes social justice isn't an important issue, it is THE issue. It makes me think about the Jonathan Kozol quote:

So long as these kinds of inequalities persist, all of us who are given expensive educations have to live with the knowledge that our victories are contaminated because the game has been rigged to our advantage.

(Fun fact for those reading this who I know from college (which I believe is most of you): Kozol gained his experience in this area teaching in Boston Public Schools and working with students from low-income families in Roxbury, a mere 20 minute drive away from where we all spent four years tremendously benefiting from all the privileges it takes to be admitted to a place like MIT, and being set up for the lifetime of privilege having a degree from there confers.)

For me, the highlight of the day was the actual march after all the speeches. As we were walking in this enormous crowd, everyone around us began singing - at first "This Little Light of Mine," and then "Amen." I don't really know how to describe the feeling, other than... warm, I think. Warm and whole and hopeful.

Panoramic shot from where we were standing, with the Lincoln Memorial on the left and the Washington Monument on the right (click to enlarge).