Tag Archives: photos

so now we’re tattoo-married [wedding post the seventh]

30 Thursday Aug 2012

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by Mark Cook

Last week we suffered a minor crisis in wedding plans when we discovered that our tattoo artist, Ellen Murphy — who has worked at Chameleon, in Harvard Square, for the past eight years — would be relocating to New York City at the end of August to work at Red Rocket Tattoo. Suddenly, she was not going to be available on September 14th to ink our wedding tattoos!

Thankfully, my dad had just completed the calligraphy design for us a few days previously (see above), and so I phoned up Chameleon and booked us for this past Monday evening. Here are some photos we took of the process.

Ellen works on Hanna’s ink
first the stencil gets applied
and then the ink, which on one’s wrist is pretty intense!
I had mine done vertically; here it is moments after completion

Hanna told me afterwards that I turn some pretty exciting colors while I’m breathing through the pain; while I never felt nauseated or in true danger of passing out, I did feel a little lightheaded at times and Hanna reports my skin turned some exciting shades of white, yellow, and green. At moments like these, I’m grateful for all those adolescent menstrual cramps that hurt like a motherfucker and taught me how to breathe through the worst until it was all over. (Also kudos to Ellen for being in tune with how I was doing — we got the work done efficiently, without me ever having to ask her to break.)

The finished pieces, well-greased with antibiotic salve.
(Anna on the left, Hanna on the right)

We figure this puts us well on the way to a long life of marital commitment.

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!

from the neighborhood: books and cats

29 Sunday Jul 2012

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I just uploaded a batch of photos from our digital camera, so have a few pictures of domestic life around Chez Cook-Clutterbuck.

Teazle is fast out-growing this basket we bought as a kitten bed the day before we brought her home from the shelter. It lives under the chair on Hanna’s side of the bed, and Teazle dutifully climbs into it every evening  as we’re settling down to sleep. Not that she stays there, mind. But this is what the early part of the night tends to look like!

The perspective on this one is a little weird, but this is me looking down to avoid stepping on the cats as I try to feed them their supper. They love to get in the way when tuna is in the offing.

The other day, I happened to notice that the top left-hand corner of our fridge “art” is composed of pictures of Captain Jack Harkness (Torchwood), IKEA instructions, and two postcard ads for St. Germain beer I picked up at the local liquor store because they inexplicably featured vintage lesbian porn.

I feel somehow this picture captures a fair approximation of life around these parts.

Make of that what you will.

When we were moving everything around to deal with the bed bug scare, Teazle found an out-of-the-way spot on a bookcase in the bedroom to settle in for the evening.

Following the visit to Auntie Shoshana’s (while the exterminator was spraying the apartment), Teazle crashed on Hanna’s laptop — falling asleep to an episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants (she’s a fan; I think she understands Sponge Bob’s manic energy).

We took the opportunity of apartment shuffling to take care of a few outstanding home improvement tasks this weekend, including re-potting some plants which badly needed it. Above is a spider plant Hanna rescued from a windowless office at Northeastern, where it was struggling to survive. It’s since grown to about ten times its previous size and we decided to try letting it live in water (here blue-tinted by nutrient powder).

Turns out that spider plant roots are creepy as hell. If this blog goes inexplicably dark, you’ll know the thing climbed out of its pot and devoured us in the night.

We recently had to mount a rescue mission to Maine to rescue about eight cardboard boxes of books Hanna had stored in an outbuilding on her parents’ land (an outbuilding which had started to leak). The boxes have been living under our kitchen table, but today we spent a few hours unpacking them. Above is the sort of ad hoc shelving you begin constructing when you live in a household with two bibliophiles who have access to all of the $1 used book carts of Boston.

(Last I checked, our LibraryThing account had clocked in around ~1500 books, and only about … half? … of those are the books I left back at my parents’ place in Michigan.)

from the neighborhood: are you tired of teazle yet? (thought not)

12 Thursday Jul 2012

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I thought I was going to get a review of Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care out to y’all today, but that clearly didn’t happen. So instead, here are some kitten and cat pictures and videos.

Teazle likes to play under hanging cloth (sheets, couch cover, curtains, our skirts … ) and occasionally gets confuzzled as happened in this video when she tried to leap up onto the couch and found herself under the couch cover instead of on top of it.

plus, she sometimes loses track of her limbs
we’ve discovered birds in the trees outside … 
… and Geraldine has simply given up trying to manage the wee one!

And finally, the video was too large to upload in Blogger, but you can check out the epic struggle of a kitten who sought to reclaim a catnip ball from the bottom of a glass bowl by following the link. I promise it’s worth it (if watching kittens be silly is your sort of thing on a Thursday afternoon!)

Stay tuned for more fun this weekend and (hopefully!) a book review or two next week. Until then, you can check out my thoughts on Transitions of the Heart: Stories of Love, Struggle, and Acceptance by Mothers of Transgender and Gender Variant Children (Cleis Press, 2012) over at the corner of your eye.