Tag Archives: from the neighborhood

from the neighborhood: "sunshine and delightful"!

16 Thursday May 2013

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A couple of weeks ago, I bought a rose for Hanna from a woman who sells flowers along the street between work and the T station.

I stopped at the soon-to-be-closing City Housewares store to pick up a jar to keep it in. The clerk I always chat with, when I shop there, suggested that I’d better be ready to tell my wife what I wanted for supper when I brought it home.

Hanna’s actual first response was, “Are you breaking up with me?!”

I think we had pasta salad for supper. ‘Twas very tasty.

The cats were unimpressed (although Teazle later discovered a taste for rose leaves and we had to move the flower to higher ground).
They have been busy enjoying the spring weather, which Accuweather recently informed us was “Sunshine and delightful.”
The cats are making the most out of the “kitty shelf” we constructed from pillows and blankets along the back of the couch.

Although sometimes Teazle loses track of her back end…

We have a friend in town this weekend, so expect light posting for the next ten days or so — I promise I’ll be back on board with The Future of Marriage in due course, and likely more cat photos.

Because I’ve become the crazy lesbian cat lady who will haunt your Internet for evermore …

springtime in Boston, 2013 [photo post]

04 Saturday May 2013

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Last Sunday I took the camera with me when I set out to meet friends for lunch. Here is the T arriving at our local (above ground) subway station.

I met friends for lunch at a new food truck on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the North End, the park system that replaces what used to be an elevated freeway slicing through central Boston (what the infamous “Big Dig” project took underground).

Clover Food Lab is one of our favorite restaurants in the Boston area, and they operate almost entirely out of a network of food trucks spread out across Boston and Cambridge. Their menu has a few staples (chickpea fritter sandwich ahoy!) but changes daily and seasonally as ingredient availability demands. On Sunday I had rosemary french fries and lavender lemonade.

On the way home from my lunch date, I walked up through the Boston Common and the Boston Public Gardens. People were out everywhere sunbathing and enjoying one another’s company. I’m not sure where the artist working on this painting had gone off to, but I got a nice shot of their work looking toward the pond!

Those of you familiar with Make Way For Ducklings will recognize the swan boats in the background — to the right under the willow tree branches you can see the island where the ducklings in question were born!

I never thought I’d be That Tourist Taking Pictures Of Tulips, but this bed of blooms made me (almost) miss Tulip Time in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, which begins today!

Our neighbors up the way have a lovely garden we walk by every morning on the way to work.

And the blooms in our neighborhood park are particularly stunning this year.

I hope you all have a restful weekend with wonderful weather, wherever you are.

from the neighborhood: sunning cats & SCOTUS nailpolish

24 Sunday Mar 2013

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While Hanna was dozing in the bedroom this afternoon, and I was listening to Jeff Chu’s interview on the Diane Rehm Show through their online streaming (have I mentioned how much public radio totally rocks and that we’re proud supporters?), I decided to paint my fingernails in rainbow in anticipation of this coming week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the legality of bans on same-sex marriage.

Like it’s any secret, but I think my nails probably give my position on the matter away.

What with the wedding ring and all.

The cats were unimpressed with my politics and beauty regime, particularly since there was nothing edible in it for them.

They preferred to spend the afternoon sunbathing in our living room.

(Sometimes I suspect Teazle is a slinkie in disguise.)

(And also that one day she will figure out how to reach the hanging plants…)

Hope you all are having a restful weekend — more coming later in the week on queer porn, queer families, sex and relationships, SCOTUS, DOMA, and all the rest!

home for the holidays [photo post]

16 Sunday Dec 2012

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Hanna and I are staying here in Boston for the second year in a row this holiday season. It’s really nice not to have the stress of travel or the press of social obligations pile up on the end of the year. Instead, both our places of work close up shop for the week between Christmas and New Years and we have eleven days (December 22-January 1) to putter around the house.

This weekend, we’re doing our wrapping and card-writing for all the presents that need to be posted on Monday. The cats have been very helpful.

(We’ve had to put our Christmas lights and decorations up high this year because of Teazle the Ever Inquisitive Kitten.)

Today, we dug out our store of candles while we were doing a little tidying, and they looked so pleasing lined up on the bookshelf that I pulled out the camera and took a few photographs.

Thanks to my in-laws, we have some lovely new apple crates for additional book storage. They helped us get the candles high enough that Teazle wouldn’t burn her whiskers trying to figure out what flame is all about.

We found this little guy at our local Ten Thousand Villages store when we were out shopping for Christmas presents in November. He doesn’t have a name yet, but we like his air of insouciance.

 Geraldine watched the proceedings with a skeptical eye…

… while Teazle was eager to assist with wrapping and packing of presents.

Perhaps she is interested in traveling the world?

Thanks to Mom for the tapers, which she sent last year and we’ve finally getting around to burning. They cast a lovely light!

The best thing about this time of year is the candlelight that long evenings allow to come to the fore.

And the fairy lights a night never get old. 
Although I, for one, am a glutton for daylight and will be thankful for the earth to turn and tilt and begin it’s journey back to summer as we cross deep of winter and the days start to stretch before us.

from the neighborhood: a day of un-labor

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

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I hope even those of you who didn’t get Labor Day off found ways to relax. Here at Chez Cook-Clutterbuck, we relaxed by watching a lot of Eureka and The Beiderbecke Affair and reading (Hanna a brick of an atlas on the Irish famine — keep an eye out for her review in Library Journal — and me two books on American evangelicalism).

And then there were the cats, who loafed like champions.

for some reason, Teazle was captivated by The Beiderbecke Affair
Human blogging = kitten snoozing!
(thanks to Hanna for the hilarious pics!)

Here’s to the start of what will hopefully be a gorgeous and productive autumn!

from the neighborhood: anna & hanna go shopping at ikea…

19 Sunday Aug 2012

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… and accidentally come home with a GIANT BED.

Also a stuffed fox.

We … didn’t mean to purchase a bed that was going to need library stools to ascend into at bedtime. But upon assembling the pieces, we discovered that’s what we’d done!

We started out this morning by picking up a Zip truck and dropping our old full/double bed frame (also from IKEA)  and second-hand foam mattress at Goodwill. Then we drove south of Boston to the local IKEA store. Which, we can report, is always an experience and a half. The relationship drama being played out between parents and children, husbands and wives, wives and wives, husbands and husbands, roommates, etc., is just something else. But! They did have our beloved bed frame in the next size up as well as a variety of mattresses to choose from.

We just somehow failed to realize that between box spring and mattress we were purchasing Mount Moriah.

The cats are slightly confused.

But we have a new bed. That will hopefully help us sleep a bit better and serve us for years to come. By some miracle of physics, Hanna figured out how to get the damn thing — box and mattress — up the narrow stairs to our second floor apartment. It was touch-and-go there for a few minutes at the u-turn of our landing. After we got it up, we agreed fully that next year when we move such heavy lifting will be left to the brawny lads and lasses of the moving company while we sit back and drink tea. If they have difficulty we’ll point out that we did it once, so we know it’s possible to do again!

To celebrate I went down to our neighborhood liquor store and purchased a lovely bottle of ten-year Glengoyne whiskey:

I picked Glengoyne because my father and I have actually been to the distillary, on our walking tour of Scotland in May 2004. Here’s my Dad standing out in front of the main building in his hiking gear:

Anyway … I’m signing off to knock back a glass and watch some Eddie Izzard while we wait for our Indian food to be delivered. Wish us luck as we climb to lofty heights for forty winks tonight!