Tag Archives: holidays

thirty two [happy birthday to me + some photos]

30 Saturday Mar 2013

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Today’s my thirty-second birthday, in the event you didn’t already know that via all the over-helpful social media reminders!

Hanna bought me this lovely ceramic indoor water fountain as a present.

Ever since I was a small girlchild I have loved the sound of running water and used to fantasize about living in a house with a river running through its center. Short of that, I wanted to live in a cottage by the sea, on a river, or by the lake, where the sound of waves and rapids could be heard through the open windows.

Neither of these things is practical right now, but the fountain is a lovely “plan B.”

(photos by Hanna)

Making room for the fountain, despite its modest size, precipitated a major reorganization of the living room – a way of making the apartment few new and springy even though we’ve lived here nearly five years (and Hanna even longer).

We moved the couch from the inside wall out to a spot beneath our bay windows (the element that really “makes” our living room as a space). This shift necessitated consolidation of some bookshelves into a book wall … bonus points if you spot the TARDIS shrine!

We’re enjoying natural light that now falls on the couch, making for good reading into the evening without having to turn lights on.

The cats continue to be unimpressed by us, though we have clearly been setting a poor example in the lewd cuddling department…

Or a good example, depending on which way you think the bread is best buttered.

Enjoy your Easter weekend, folks — spring is slowly arriving!

home for the holidays III [photo post]

31 Monday Dec 2012

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One of Hanna’s presents this year — a gift from friend Diana — was a Death Star tea ball (complete with attached tie fighter at the end of the chain!) … 

… which goes delightfully in this Doctor Who tea mug — though Hanna was concerned that the mixing of two such potent fandoms might cause the universe to end!

We’ve had a lot of breakfasts that look like this in the past week; there was something pleasing about the way everything was laid out in sets on this particular board, so I snapped a photo.

The cats have definitely been pleased to have us around as Big Soft Warm Things upon which to sleep; sometimes it can be difficult to get a book in edgewise so that we may make headway on the year’s reading!

Or blogging …

And of course, no matter how much reading and writing and tidying we do, there are always piles of books and periodicals left to consult when time and inclination allows.

It’s a good thing we have lots of tea, coffee, and sweets to consume while we’re being all intellectually (or at least texually!) inclined.

Welcome to the final day of 2012. It was rather a momentous year for us; I know for some of you as well, in varying mixes of positive-to-stressful (and at times positively stressful!). Let us hope for a creative and renewing 2013!

mutual christmas gift: a trip to the montague book mill [photos]

29 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in a sense of place

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This year, Hanna and I decided that our joint gift for one another was going to be a trip to the Montague Book Mill in Montague, Massachusetts (“books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”).

We set out this morning along MA-2, under snow-grey skies, and about two hours of NPR later arrived at the Mill. It was so lovely to have snow! As Hanna says: “A proper winter!”

We decided right away that this was definitely a bookstore we could fall in love with! All they needed was a woodstove and a bookstore cat or two (too bad they don’t allow people to take up permanent residence…)

(I’m a sucker for exposed beams and wood flooring, what can I say?)

From the second floor, you could hear and see the rushing waters of Millers River outside.

The re-purposed riverside mill building is actually a complex of businesses, including not only the bookshop, but also a cafe, the Lady Killgrew, used record and CD store, and artists’ showroom.

After browsing and selecting our book purchases* we got a delicious lunch at the Killgrew, consisting of peanut-ginger udon salad, a brie and marinated apple panini, maple milk (an “intrinsically delicious” food) and ginger cupcake.

(I seem to like taking photographs over Hanna’s shoulder)

While we were eating, the snow began to fall in beautiful fluffy flakes over the river.

… and on our way back out to the parking area, we stopped at the artists’ shop and bought these beautiful recycled wood inlaid star ornaments for our future Christmas tree. They’re supposed to be “friendship” stars, but we figure they can be for a pair of wives just as well.

*Thanks to my grandparents Ross for the gift money that funded our book buying spree! For those interested, we bought:

Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd (Harcourt, 1929).

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation by Nancy F. Cott (Harvard U.P., 2000)

The Tassajara Recipe Book: Favorites of the Guest Season by Edward Espe Brown (Shambhala Press, 1985)

Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England by Douglas Hay et. al. (Pantheon, 1975)

The Unknown Mayhew by Eileen Yeo and E.P. Thompson (Schocken, 1971)

A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane by Roy Porter (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987)

Perfecting the World: The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, 1798-1866 by Amalie M. Kass and Edward H. Kass (Harcourt, 1988).

christmas in allston [thank you all!]

26 Wednesday Dec 2012

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We started Christmas Day morning with the two packages we suspected from their shape were coffee mugs — and we were right! Thank you, Brian and Renee. We were playing Scrabble just last night; now we have appropriately nerdy mugs for hot cocoa when we hold a rematch 🙂
The cats were initially disinterested in present-unwrapping (Teazle is even cleaning her toes!). But soon, both were in on the action. Gerry was particularly interested in helping Hanna upwrap presents from Janet and Mark:
And Teazle’s new favorite toy (of this half hour) was a bow from Diana and Collin:

We put out the runner from Grandma Cook, made by master weavers in Sweden who serve the Swedish royal family!

I particularly enjoy the leaping pig!

We had to keep these little guys up high away from Teazle’s explorations…

And I’ll leave it there as we head out on this cloudy Boxing Day to the thinking cup for a few hours of reading and lattes. I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas Day and is looking forward to a relaxing as we head into the final days of 2012 and the dawn of 2013.

eating our way through the holidays [recipes]

24 Monday Dec 2012

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One of the really nice things about an extended at-home vacation is that Hanna and I can eat on our own schedule, which for both of us is more along the brunch-at-ten-late-lunch-at-four-cocoa-before-bed than breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, and dinner at six.

Hanna’s parents gave us Rose Elliot’s New Complete Vegetarian for Christmas and we’ve made some lovely and simple recipes from it, like the oatcakes and most recently vegetarian toad-in-a-hole. Toad-in-a-Hole is basically a baked pancake with sausage in, and very simple to make! Elliot’s version is as follows:

1. Heat oven to 450 Fahrenheit.

2. Brown vegetarian sausages (we used the Field Roast apple & sage, but any kind would work!) in 1/4 cup of oil (we used olive, but any nut or vegetable oil would work) in a cast iron skillet, remove from the pan and set aside. Leave the remaining oil in the pan for later use.

3. In a mixing bowl or blender, combine:

1 cup white flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
150ml milk
150ml water

Beat until smooth and put in a pitcher (I used a Pyrex measure) or leave in blender for easy pouring.

4. Put skillet with oil into heated oven and let warm until the oil is very hot and just starting to smoke.

5. Pull out the oven rack and pour the batter directly into the pre-heated skillet. Drop the sausages into the pan, distributed as evenly as possible, and close the oven door as quick as you can.

6. Bake for approximately 25 minutes (don’t open the door to peek!). Check after 25 minutes and once the top of the pancake is golden brown remove from the oven and serve immediately.

It was just the sort of meal we needed prior to going out on a brisk walk yesterday afternoon to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and back.

This morning, Christmas Eve, we’re having coffee and cinnamon buns while listening to the MPBN broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge. The buns are inspired by our favorite recipe of Joy the Baker’s, her sugar and spice yeast rolls. But this time I did make a few changes that Hanna and I agreed were

  • I substituted half whole wheat flour for the 2 1/2 cups white flour in the recipe
  • I swapped the amounts of cinnamon and cardamom in the dough, since Hanna and I love cardamom
  • Instead of the citrus zest I put in a tablespoon of cocoa powder
  • I also added two teaspoons of cocoa powder to the filling
  • And instead of butter I used coconut oil in both the dough and filling
In other news, we’re forecast to have a couple of inches of snow overnight and into the morning hours of Christmas Day, so hopefully Hanna will have the white Christmas she’s yearning for!
Merry Christmas, one and all!

Cross-posted at Lyn’s Friends Feast.

home for the holidays II [photo post]

23 Sunday Dec 2012

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My family often complains I don’t share enough pictures on this blog, the better for them to get a sense of how we live here in Boston. So I thought over the holidays I’d try to make up for lost time (with a little help from the cats).

This week, Christmas parcels arrived from Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, Oregon, and California with presents for the humans; Teazle and Gerry enjoyed the boxes.

We had to clear a top shelf of the bookcase off for presents, out of reach of curious kittens. We had so many gifts that some have spilled onto the lower shelves (and a few more have arrived since!).

On Friday, I left work early to pick up our December CSA farm share in the pouring rain. When I got home, we had to lay all the veggies out to dry before storage.

Teazle was, as usual, super helpful in the task of vegetable organization. She kept insisting turnips should be kept on the floor.

I seem to have taken a lot of pictures of Teazle in the last couple of days. Possibly because she is ever-present investigating our activities. Here she is watching Hanna prepare lunch from the vantage point of an empty box in our kitchen.

I thought the light coming in the kitchen window made this a rather lovely still life. We just re-potted the plant after Teazle had dug it up multiple times on the windowsill in the living room. It’s been relocated to the kitcen for safe-keeping.

While we were crocheting this afternoon, we decided to let Teazle play with our stuffed mouse from IKEA, which she is convinced is a real threat to life and limb. She kills the zombie mouse repeatedly, and carries it around in her mouth growling, particularly when you try to pry it from her jaws.

Above, she’s guarding it between her front paws …

… here she is wrestling with it across the living room floor … 

… carrying it off by it’s (broken) neck …

… killing it again …

… and finally getting bored by the whole endeavor (although only momentarily; the mouse came back to life and had to be killed again moments after I snapped this one).

All this ruckus sometimes exhausts Gerry, even if all she’s doing is watch!

giving thanks today for …

22 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in think pieces

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  • My wife, Hanna.
  • Our cats, Geraldine and Teazle.
  • Our families and friends.
  • The internet that lets us all stay connected.
  • Work I enjoy and
  • Colleagues I am proud to work with.
  • Robust health insurance and
  • Obamacare (babysteps everyone, babysteps!).
  • Writing and reading fan fiction,
  • My fellow writers at #firstthedraft,
  • And the people who encourage me to continue my history work outside of academe.
  • Starting to feel that Boston is home.
  • Bootstrap compost,
  • Maple syrup pie, 
  • Kona coffee from the Drowsy Parrot, 
  • And Stillman’s Farm summer and winter CSA.

things for my thirties [happy birthday to me!]

30 Friday Mar 2012

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So today is my 31st birthday. And to be honest, I’m quite psyched. Because I’m pretty much the age now that I’ve felt, on the inside, most of my life. And I wake up most days feeling like “fuck yeah my life!”

Which is a good, good place to be and something I will try never, ever to take for granted.

A couple of observations for today.

baby Anna and mother Janet, early April 1981

1. Five days after my mother turned thirty-one, she gave birth to me. So I feel like, on some level, this is the point at which my own life narrative and my mother’s life narrative diverge. Which is super-overly-simplistic, really, given that before she was thirty-one my mother did lots of other things I also haven’t done (e.g. date people, get married, get divorced, go to college for architecture, work as a waitress, and go snorkeling in the Cayman Islands). But — all judgyness about parenting/not parenting aside ’cause we don’t really do that in my family — there’s no way to get around the fact that spending your thirties as the full-time parent of three children under the age of ten is going to make for a significantly different kind of decade than the one I have stretching out before me.

Which feels a little weird. Like an opportunity, but weird. One of those moments, as a kid, when you realize your parents — however great they’ve been as models — can only model so far, and so much, before you’re on your own, inventing a life.

2. Not-library things I want to do in my thirties. So I’ve got the next decade before me, an open book. And Hanna and I are settling into life together. Which is really something rich and strange and rather unexpected (I had this notion in my head, for a long time, that I’d probably end up a spinster — in the nicest possible way! I was kinda looking forward to it. But, you know, then Hanna came along and how could I not?). So I have the luxury of thinking about what I’d like to do with myself, other than my professional and partnership activities. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

  • Travel to England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. I mean, duh. Travel is definitely near the top of my list of things to do with discretionary income (after “buy books” and “eat good food”). 
  • Write and publish erotica. Turns out, at least in the estimation of a few friends (of a range of sexual persuasions) that I have a talent for the stuff. Who knew! But I enjoy writing it and they enjoy reading it, so it seems like it might be fun to try my hand quasi-professionally there. 
  • Find ways to be with young people and age-diverse families. So I’m not going to have children of my own, it looks like. And I’m 95% cool with that. But I’d like to use part of my time this next decade thinking about how my household of two-adults-plus-cat can be hooked into wider networks of caring that encompass families with more age diversity. None of our intimate friends or family have chosen to incorporate children into their lives yet; I’m kinda hoping a few of them do so that we have the opportunity to be kick-ass aunties.
  • Choose and/or create a home. Okay, well, yes. We obviously already have a home together, Hanna and Geraldine and I. But it’s an apartment that started out as a student space, a temporary space, and something not actually selected by both of us, as a couple. It would be nice if, in the next decade, we actually found a home-space through more deliberate selection according to our needs and desires as a family.
  • Research and writing. I have yet to publish that first scholarly monograph. Now with a thesis under my belt, I feel I can move on to other projects — so hello life-long learning! I’m really looking forward to nosing around and finding my niche as a thinker and writer. Not having this be my day job is, in some ways, even more of a blessing since it means I have free reign to explore ideas as I see fit. That was one of my goals of library school: to situate myself as an intellectual in spaces that honored intellectual endeavors, without being required to “publish or perish.” And since I’ve arrived, I’d like to make the most of it.
Happy birthday to me, and welcome to this most fine of decades. Go forth and be joyful.

looking back/looking forward (from where we are now)

31 Saturday Dec 2011

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it’s been a busy and oft-times exhausting year!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling more aware and more thankful than usual of all the ways our life feels more settled than last year and — while still containing its stresses — just generally better on the well-being front. So here are a few notes on what happened in the Cook-Clutterbuck household this year.

The Good:

  • Last December I completed my library science degree which, hooray!
  • On the first Monday after New Years, I began my full-time position at the MHS.
  • Hanna took the leap of leaving a workplace that had been steadily eroding her health — a particularly brave move given the current economic climate — and has been rewarded by steady gainful employment at the Center for the History of Medicine and the related Medical Heritage Library with a fine group of fellow archivists. As I type this, she’s looking forward to two more years of grant-funded archival processing and digital projects.
  • I’ve been blogging at The Pursuit of Harpyess since January 2011, an opportunity that has led to slightly more active participation in the feminist blogosphere than I had the energy for during graduate school — and certainly kept me more engaged during my first year of post-grad employment than I might otherwise have put in the effort to sustain.
  • I finished my thesis in May 2011 and brought my graduate school career to a thankful close. 
  • Also in May, I finally had a chance to take Hanna to visit my hometown in Michigan.
  • With neither of us in school, we’ve had more time to settle into life here in Boston, which appears to involve a lot of coffee shops, used bookshops, libraries, and hosting dinners for a few close friends.
  • 2012 will mark the fifth year of living in this apartment and neighborhood, both of which we’re pretty happy with. We keep talking about moving at some point (a bigger kitchen would be nice; and space for more bookshelves), but thankfully moving isn’t an urgent need.

The Not-So-Good:

  • In the event anyone wants to know, depression still sucks. I’m so, so thankful for Fenway Health and the wonderful medical and mental health care providers we work with there. And I am continually amazed at Hanna’s strength and patience, with her willingness to put one foot in front of the other (particularly on the hard days), and her determination to hold onto hope we’ll build a life worth sharing.
  • While Hanna and I are more securely situated than many vis a vis our employment and financial stability, carrying a joint burden of some $160,000.00 in student loans — even if they’re our only form of accumulated debt — is a vulnerability we’re just learning to live with. Even as we scrabble around to start long-range savings and consider the possibility of paying for things like travel abroad or a mortgage. I’m thankful the issue of educational debt continues to be a topic of conversation and concern on a national (and international) level, since it’s not going to get better without significant structural change.
  • Given our limited ability to travel, living far away from family and close friends continues to suck. We’ve got loved ones in Texas, California, Oregon, Michigan, and Maine. All of whom are missed dearly. Social media helps, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the distance between us.
The Possible Future:
  • Thanks to Hanna’s continued employment in the Harvard University library system, she’ll be eligible to take a history seminar in the spring, virtually free of charge (hooray!). While they don’t offer courses specifically in her area of interest, Irish history, she plans to enroll in a course on intellectual history that she hopes will give her a chance to continue her research on the history of Irish nationalism.
  • I’m working on a paper for the New England Historical Association and the MHS on a 1914 case of alleged sexual assault here in Boston documented by the New England Watch & Ward society as part of their ongoing efforts to eradicate vice. 
  • In March, I’ll be traveling back to Michigan (hopefully with Hanna for company!) to take part in the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the Hope College Women’s Studies program, of which I am a proud graduate.
  • Hanna and I are knocking around the idea of starting a joint review blog, tentatively titled stuff + things, which will roll out in January. Watch for further details coming soon.
  • As if that weren’t enough, I’m still working on oral history transcription and hope to start posting final versions of interviews on the project blog later in the new year.
I’ll obviously be writing about all of this as time and energy allow, so stay tuned … I look forward to sharing all that’s to come in 2012 and beyond.