East coast tour!

We had a friend's wedding over Labor Day weekend, so we decided to make a mini-vacation out of it and add on a visit to Philly and Baltimore over the following week. Since we were going to a wedding, I made a sampler:

The couple met, live, and got married in NYC, hence the skyline. Their favorite place to vacation is a cabin in Maine, where they like to hang out on the dock and eat lobsters. The groom in particular is obsessed with dorky charts, especially waterfall charts, and the apples are supposed to symbolize "the big apple" and also the fact that they both work in education.

My bestie was also at the wedding, and since we're both obsessed with Hamilton we visited his house while we were in town:

Re-enacted various songs and dances from the show:

And generally freaked out anytime we saw anything vaguely Hamilton-related:

LAFAYETTE!

After NYC, Ben and I continued on to Philly, where we ate at all our favorite restaurants and hung out with all our Philly friends (including our Littles, each of whom seem to have grown a foot since we last saw them - mine is starting 8th grade now!). We also did something we'd always meant to do when we lived there but never got around to - visited the top of City Hall. The view was pretty excellent.

Also, I knew that the William Penn statue at the top was really big, but I didn't really appreciate how big (40 feet tall + 27 tons) until standing right at its base.

We spent our last two East coast days in Baltimore, hanging out with my parents and seeing more friends. By then it was incredibly hot and humid so we mostly stayed indoors, but we ate lots of great food and played lots of Bananagrams.

Now we're back in the Bay, missing our East coast friends and hangout spots, but appreciating the cool weather and lack of humidity.

Philly Wedding Weekend

I haven't posted since we got to CA, since we've mostly been trying to figure out housing (we're in temporary corporate housing for now) and settle into our new jobs (I'm still at TFA but in a new role). We just signed a lease for an apartment starting September 9, so hopefully once we get all moved in and unpacked things will start to pick up a little. In the meantime, we are in Philadelphia for a wedding this weekend! The couple loves Dominion, so their sampler is a Dominion card:

The card is called "Grand Marriage" as a play on the "Grand Market" card. The Philly skyline is behind them and they are surrounded by ice cream because we would all go to the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival together every summer. There's a baseball instead of a coin in the bottom left because they are both huge baseball fans, and in the bottom right, where there is usually the logo of the set the card came from, is a garnet "S" for Swarthmore since that's where they met (garnet is one of the school's color).

It feels really great to be back in Philly - we got dinner with a bunch of our Philly friends last night, and saw our Littles this morning. Since we're basically living in a hotel in SF, it feels like a temporary place we are staying while Philly is still our real home. We'll be back in October for another wedding, hopefully we'll feel more settled in SF by then.

Art art art

There was a big interactive art festival near us this week! Saint Gobain, which is a giant international company I've never heard of before, was apparently celebrating their 350th anniversary - they created four interactive art "pavilions" and took them on a world tour. Their North American stop was Philadelphia, since apparently it's where their headquarters on the continent are. It was pretty groovy looking:

The pavilions!

Lit up after the sun went down!

The lines were pretty long, so we only had time to go into two of the four pavilions - one had a groovy fog and laser show inside, and the other was a bunch of spinning platforms with big colorful walls:

Selfie on the spinning color thing!

Yay, art!

Staycation

As I mentioned, our staycation last week was hampered by the fact that we both got sick and ended up spending a lot more time on the couch watching TV than out exploring various Philly neighborhoods. We still did venture out a little bit, though - most notably to see Bob's Burgers Live, since we had already bought the tickets way in advance. We loaded ourselves up with DayQuil, brought a box of tissues and a bag of cough drops, and made it through the whole show even though it went until (gasp!) 10 pm.

Each of the voice actors is also a standup comedian, so the show started with each of them doing a bit of standup. The quality was pretty variable - but Dan Mintz ("It's hard to cry as a man... because things are going so well for us") and Eugene Mirman ("I saw a six year old boy in a fedora - you always think you'll know what to do when you see abuse") were both hilarious. Then they did a table read of an upcoming episode, which was the highlight of the evening - it was really fun to see how they played off each other.

It wrapped up with some audience Q&A, and someone used the opportunity to propose to his girlfriend, so that was sweet.

So, while the staycation wasn't quite as exciting as we had initially planned, we still had fun - and being sick while doing nothing for a week is definitely better than being sick for a week at work!

Rear Window

Ben and I have the week off (yay!), but our plans of an epic Philly staycation have been hampered by the fact that both of us are sick (boo!). We've spent the last four days cooped up at home, eating soup and feeling generally cruddy, but the one somewhat cool thing to come out of it is that we have front row seats to the demolition of the old building behind our building.

That building has been abandoned for as long as we have lived here, and they are knocking it down to build a 40-story luxury condo/hotel complex - we aren't thrilled about the rapid gentrification, but it has been interesting to watch the demolition process. The white thing is spraying everything with water to keep the dust down, while the yellow claw thing just smashes at the building and pulls it apart. I would have thought the process would be more sophisticated than that, and probably there's some science to the order in which they smash the various parts of the building, but from our vantage point it really does look basically like a toddler destroying a house they built out of blocks.

Sort-of Sushirrito!

One of my favorite things about living in San Francisco last summer was Sushirrito, which is the only thing there that's not at least quasi-reproducible here in Philly. UNTIL NOW.

The recently opened Hai Street Kitchen has sushirrito-like rolls, and today I got to try it out. They wrap it up for you in a cute little hexagonal box:

It's got 4 more sides you can't see.

 And it's definitely sushi in the style of a burrito:

It was good, but not as great as my favorite roll at Sushirrito back in the Bay. I may have just not found the right roll for me yet, though... further investigation is definitely needed.

Bees and Buses

Last weekend our friend was visiting and we went to the Philadelphia Honey Festival! Apparently it's put on every year by the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild (also, apparently there's a Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild!). We learned lots about bees, beekeeping, and how to get honey out of honeycomb (hint: centrifuges). We got to try some honey still in the comb, and we saw a bee bearding. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like:

Photo credit: Quinn!

The beekeeper strapped a queen bee to his chin, said "this is the cool kids' version of the ice bucket challenge," and then just dumped a ton of bees out of a box and onto himself. He also told us that 5,000 bees weigh just one pound. AND while he was sitting there a little kid asked him what you call a newborn bee, he started to explain all about grubs and larva and insect development stages, and the little kid said "no, a bayBEE" and laughed hysterically. Awesome.

This weekend Ben finally delivered on his Christmas present to me (does it still count as his Christmas present if it's nine months late?), and we did one of those double decker bus tours around Philadelphia. I LOVE both double decker buses and Philadelphia, so it was a great combination. We even got there early enough to have the front seats on the top level of the bus.

Bus selfie!

We learned lots of fun facts about Philadelphia history - including that, contrary to popular belief, Pennsylvania isn't named after William Penn. It's actually named after his father: William Penn.

Lastly, the bus tour started in the historical, super-touristy part of Philly, and we saw this sign for a food court:

Unexpected party

Since we live downtown, and specifically in the Gayborhood, we often leave our apartment to discover unexpected parties - an arts festival or gay pride parade or something else fun happening on our street. Today, though, we went outside after dinner to go to the convenience store, and encountered this:

That's several hundred people, all dressed in white, having a formal dinner along the entire street from here to City Hall. There was also live music and mummers dressed in white (although we didn't get a good picture of them).

We googled it when we got home, apparently it's called Diner en Blanc and is sort of a flashmob/public art thing. It's pretty cool looking, but - as our friend who was there too said - it also kind of looks like "a summer formal for the klan."

Dog Days of Summer

Today we went to a hot dog festival.

The banh mi dog, bottom left, was my favorite of the day.

We went with two friends, and between the four of us we ate 14 hot dog samples - each sample was half a dog, and we quartered each one, so we each ate 14/8 of a hot dog, aka 1 and 3/4 dogs. That doesn't sound particularly excessive, but the dogs were so intense - they had crazy toppings and some were made of things like bison and lamb and one was entirely deep fried - that by the end we all felt the need to lie down.

Me still optimistic after we ate the first 8 (pictured above)

Me and my friend Ashley after finishing all 14

After we regained the ability to stand upright and stagger to a new location, we walked to the harbor park and spent an hour laying in hammocks digesting and rethinking our life choices. Also, Ben got in trouble for rocking our hammock too much, because he is a rebel.

Hammock selfie!

We spent a few more hours wandering around the city and walking off our meat feast before heading home. I don't think I'm going to need to eat for at least two more days.

Fun Fourth

Since we aren't in California this summer, Ben and I were able to spend today with friends doing our annual Philly Fourth of July Tradition: the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival!

I didn't eat a cup from every single booth as in past years, which I guess means I'm getting old. I still ate a pretty ludicrous amount of ice cream, though.

After sufficient gorging we walked over to the harbor park, where we discovered something we had missed last time: giant cargo nets stretched over the water that you can hang out in!

We are rule breakers.

Adorable rule breakers.

The weather was gorgeous - warm but not hot and just a bit of breeze coming off the water - and we spent a few hours just lounging around chatting. At one point our friend got a phone call from another friend who asked what she was doing, to which she responded "not much, just drinking beer with friends in a giant water hammock after an ice cream festival." Hearing it all together like that made me realize I am quite possibly the luckiest person in existence.

Pop Up Harbor Park

We live on 13th street, and if you walk down to where 0th street would be, you'd be at the Delaware River. Usually the waterfront is pretty boring - there's a hotel and some old boats there, but that's about it. Still, when the weather is nice Ben and I like to walk over to stare at the water for a while, just for a nice walk. However, as of this week the waterfront is now home to a pop-up harbor park!

None of that is usually there - just the brick walkway and the stone wall with the posts and chains are permanent. The entire boardwalk thing, including the trees and the floating garden, are new and just for this summer. There are a bunch of repurposed shipping containers scattered around - some selling food and beer, others with small arcades inside of them.

The stretch of lawn between the road and the river, which is usually just home to some trees, is now a "hammock lounge" with tons of color-changing lights strung up.

There's also a bocce ball court, ping pong table, and a bunch of games everywhere (like an oversized chess set and giant jenga). The whole thing is extremely hip - they've even livened up the boring old flag poles by wrapping them all in knit cozies.

When we went yesterday it had just opened and so, while still fun, was also extremely packed. We're planning to go back on a random weeknight in the hope that it will be less crowded, so we can grab a hammock and hang out for a while. There's so much fun stuff that happens in Philly over the summer, I wish I still got summer vacation...

Science!

Yesterday was the annual Philadelphia Science Festival's culminating "science carnival," and Ben and I both brought our "littles" (from Big Brothers Big Sisters). We went separately and didn't even see each other there, but my little and I had a great time - she blew giant bubbles, played with cool underwater robots, and even made her own lip gloss. There was a giant inflatable brain you could walk through, a blimp, a zoo booth with a bunch of different animals, and even a Ben Franklin impersonator walking around (she couldn't quite decide if she believed he was "real" or not). Almost all of my pictures are of my little doing fun stuff so I can't post them here, but here's a picture she took of me with a model of the space shuttle:

Science party yesterday and Star Wars Day today - what a great nerdy weekend!

Harry + Cherries

Our family friend is a librarian (or, as I called her growing up, "library mom"), and she told me about a traveling library exhibit on Harry Potter's World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine currently visiting Philadelphia. Today Ben and I finally got to go up to see it, and it was great. Among other things, I learned that Nicolas Flamel was a real alchemist rumored to have discovered a way to make himself immortal, and a whole lot about mandrakes. Also, it was housed at the Temple Medical School library, which was the fanciest library I've been in - it had one of those water fountain walls, and giant glass cell sculpture things hanging from the ceiling.

Learning things!

After we left Temple we walked up to the Schuylkill river and along its bank, since it's cherry blossom weekend and everything is blooming and beautiful (including, unfortunately, these trees too).

Ben is amazed by the beauty of nature.

Yay, spring!

Morning art walk

Walking past the Kimmel Center this morning I saw there was some sort of hubbub inside, so I went in to check it out. Turns out they were having a small art exhibit in the lobby, featuring busts of famous composers that played recordings of their work when you pushed a button.

The cool part was that the busts were sculpted out of old books:

Not knowing much about classical music, I spent more time checking out the book spines than the faces and recordings. So far as I could tell, they didn't have any relation to the composer they (ahem) composed, but seemed to be chosen based on size and color.

What a nice way to start the day - surprise art!

Jubilation!!

LOOK WHAT I WALKED PAST A FEW BLOCKS FROM MY HOUSE TODAY:

SOON MY LIFE WILL BE COMPLETE AND I WILL HAVE NO REASON TO EVER LEAVE PHILADELPHIA!

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!

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.

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.