Cincinnati Museum Center

Dear Husband and I recently enjoyed a visit to the Cincinnati Museum Center with his parents. The former Union Terminal--a large art-deco building--is now home to a variety of exhibit spaces, including the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History & Science, the Children's Museum, an Omnimax, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center. You could spend all day there, but we just did a morning, hoping to beat the crowds. No such luck, as it was a rainy day the week between Christmas and New Year's, so we enjoyed the exhibits--masked--with many families and children. It was almost like the before times.

We explored the Duke Energy Trains at Holiday Junction, which includes train sets for kids as well as a larger set with smaller figures. Both were very inventive. In another space, there were also Lego dioramas. Next we wandered through the Cincy history sections, then the science parts, from hands-on physics demonstrations past dinosaur skeletons to preserved flora and fauna. We ran out of time to look at the displays about outer space or see a documentary. Next time?

View from above the O-gauge train set, at 1/48th actual size, dusted with powdered snow.

Two trains pass each other; the one on the upper track is carrying presents and Christmas decorations. During the holiday season, the trains travel more than 100,000 "miles"! Below, the conductor has popped out of his track-side shack as a train passes by. I caught him before he retreated and the door shut again.

There were "Easter eggs" hidden among the kids' train sets, including butterflies, dinosaurs, and astronauts for a science-themed "I spy" game. 

There was the requisite Thomas the Tank Engine set, where parents and children named the trains to each other. It included a rotating water wheel, a windmill, and a bumpy incline circulating back and forth between two cliffs.

The next picture shows Cincinnati's town hall made entirely out of Legos. Reportedly it is a very beautiful building to tour in person.

So much to look at! Legos celebrating Chinese New Year, Santa Claus and his reindeer, and DH much captivated by everything going on. Below, the Ghostbusters are saving a church.

In the history section, I was of course drawn to the olde-timey pharmacy with its patent medicine bottles.

They have a (replica of a?) paddleboat of the kind that made Cincinnati "Queen of the West" and a gateway for internal migration as well as for products such as pork and Proctor & Gamble's Ivory Soap.

I also noted the food references, such as the boarding house sign advertising "meat served 4 times per week" and this collage of a sausage factory.

The natural history section was interesting, even if the spelunking experience was closed (presumably considered too claustrophobic for COVID). A large selection of nature photography in the four seasons gave way to a display about fireflies (do you call them lightning bugs?). There were cases of butterflies and of a variety of stuffed animals, including bats, a fox, owls, and this red-shouldered hawk. The last photo is of preserved mushrooms.

For lunch we met DH's brother at The Incline Public House for a lunch of burgers, cheesesteaks, and fries out on the heated/covered back deck. Too bad the rain dampened the famous vista of the city of seven hills. Next time!

Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor: Christmas Edition

Him: "You? Freelanced? In the kitchen?"

Me: "I plead the fifth."

You see, Dear Reader, I wanted to make Creamy potato broccoli soup for our Christmas Eve dinner. Because Dear Husband is a church musician, he works on Christmas Eve, so we can't leave town to celebrate with family until at least Christmas Day (sometimes later depending on our respective work schedules). When we lived in Champaign, DH would be gone for most of Christmas Eve either rehearsing or playing for one of several church services, so I asked him to come home in between, usually for a steak dinner by the light of the unity candle we had lit at our wedding.

This year he suggested thawing the Montgomery Inn ribs his parents had sent for his birthday. Usually I would make his favorite side dish--mashed potatoes--but I came upon this plant-based recipe and decided to give it a go. Let's just say, I should have re-read the directions before starting. Here's how to prepare it, Frau Doktor Doctor style:

1. Once you've located the recipe on your phone after much fruitless searching on your laptop, put on a nice holiday movie like Love Actually, Die Hard, or ... The Beguiled (the recent Sophia Coppola version). In my defense, I thought it was a ghost story based on the trailer a couple years ago. (Ghost stories are too appropriate for the holidays; Exhibit A: A Christmas Carol.) Spoiler alert: The Beguiled is not a ghost story. It is a whole movie with a singular plot line that, when it is over, makes you wonder, Was that all? (Reader: it was.)

2. Assemble ingredients: 2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes (or whatever fingerlings are leftover in the fridge, since we were imminently leaving town), 3 garlic cloves (for the first time in my life, I actually used fewer than the recipe suggested, because the head I currently have offers enormous cloves), 1 large yellow onion (eh, I had a half leftover from something or other), 3 tbsp extra virgin oil (now this I had), 1 quart vegetable broth (oops, the carton in the pantry was chicken broth), 1/2 raw unsalted cashews (all we had were honey roasted), 1 pound frozen broccoli florets or 4 cups steamed fresh (I opted for the latter), 1 large carrot (check), 1 tsp dried thyme (ground or flaked?), 3/4 tsp dried dill (yes), 2 tsp white wine vinegar (located at the back of the cupboard), 1 tsp Dijon mustard (oui).

3. Figure that the potatoes will take the longest to cook, so chop them into a pot of boiling water.

4. Since the broccoli was supposed to be well cooked, chop that next and start to steam it.

5. Dice the onion, mince the garlic, and skip the step about stripping the potatoes of their most nutritious part (aka the peel). Sauté in olive oil.

6. Add cashews and a pinch salt. Note that you were supposed to cook the potatoes in the broth in this pot. Too late now.

7. All of the potatoes are supposed to fit into a blender?? You're making a generous batch, so figure it will have to be done in parts. Blend several spoonfuls of potatoes with a generous splash of broth and a spoonful of broccoli. 

8. Pour this into the pan with the onion and garlic. Re-read the directions again and finally comprehend that only the potatoes were supposed to be blended, not the broccoli. Whoops.

9. Jiggle the blender, plug and unplug it, and hope that the smell of burning motor doesn't mean it's dead.

10. Blend the rest of the potatoes. With the rest of the broth (works better that way).

11. Heat everything in the pot with the rest of the seasonings and "julienned" carrot strips. Decide you had selected an extra large carrot and eventually eat what's left as a cook's tax because you have plenty of carrot ribbons, and you know DH doesn't particularly them.

12. Serve hot with some crusty bread! This was the first course for our Christmas Eve dinner of ribs, homemade orange-cranberry sauce with walnuts on a bed of spinach, and rosemary roasted carrots. It was okay, definitely not as life changing as the online recipe promised. It probably could have used a little more salt and to have cooked down some. Looks like it will freeze well to have in January on a night when we don't feel like cooking.

To drink: leftover Orange Crush soda from the hospital. To watch: Downton Abbey.

We actually had a second dinner with friends after the Christmas Eve service: butternut squash soup, homemade wheat loaf, lasagna, and the green salad pictured above with red pepper, spicy pepitas, bakery-bought baguette. I had contemplated making some whipped rosemary butter but gave up for lack of time. However, I did improvise a salad dressing from this recipe, swapping a rest of a packet of sriracha sauce for the freshly grated ginger. It had just enough kick to be interesting! The special treat of course were the pomegranate seeds, which I will only spend the half hour of picky labor on for this particular hostess.

For Christmas morning brunch, I baked cinnamon waffles and made this pear compote topping. I used half as much brown sugar, included the special rum vanilla from cousin EH, and punched up the plating with cinnamon, walnut halves, and pomegranate seeds. Not only was it delicious, but it sustained us through noontime mass at the Catholic cathedral.

Here you can see what we did for Advent already. We still have to travel to Ohio to celebrate with that part of the family. New Year's will be a balancing act between work, travel, and small celebrations. With 55 degrees and rain, it could hardly be more different than Christmas 2020. This is last year's post, although what we remember most is a snowy walk late on Christmas Eve to look at lights on the houses, and a snowy walk on Christmas Day through Frick Park. I'm finishing this blog after a nice long, rather damp walk around the neighborhood to look at lights. It's time to go to bed with my new book (Atul Gawande's Being Mortal from DH), with the lights on the tree shining through the doorway. Merry Christmas!

Home Sweet Office, aka office makeover part II

When I finally got my own desk at work, I was so excited to personalize the space (part I). There were just a few finishing touches I wanted. Workmen kindly retrieved the junk that had fallen between the desk and the wall, pushed the desk back 4-6 inches (it really does make the space look bigger), took down the bulky wooden file holder, repainted the wall, and hung my graduation art ("Oh, the places I've been").

I found some like-new battery-operated fairy lights on Facebook Marketplace to hang in the fake tree.

And for Christmas this year, My Awesome Parents purchased me a blue gamer chair to go in the corner. Basically a rocking cushion, it's been a hit with my colleagues as well as students and residents. I use it on long days when I'm tired of sitting in my office chair and can accomplish tasks on my laptop.

On the left is as close as I've got to a "before" picture, as I neglected to take one before the workers came to remove the file holder. And on the right is the "after"!

Here are close-ups of the gold-flecked green glass finial my SIL got me for Christmas; I hung it in the branches like a rare piece of fruit. It's a beautiful piece of art from the Pittsburgh Glass Center, and I love it!

Looking pretty festive!

Advent 2021

In our household, "Christmas" (Advent) cannot begin before Thanksgiving. (I hear about it every time the grocery starts holiday muzak early.) Due to work and Dear Husband's desire that the tree last through Epiphany, we typically start our preparations the first week of December. This year we went to pick out a tree from our favorite vendor, Trees for Veterans, only to discover an empty lot. We are afraid the pandemic claimed the tree supply, the business, and/or the friendly man who ran it. So we purchased a likely specimen from a hardware store and decorated it after its poor branches had a chance to fluff out while we attended a service of lessons and carols at one of the big episcopal churches nearby, complete with a choir that processed in robes, a string quartet, and--of course--the organ.

My Christmas present to DH this year was brunch at the Inn on Negley on St. Nicholas Day (December 6). We can't usually brunch, since local restaurants typically seat on Sundays, so it felt luxuriant to dress up and go out on a Monday morning. We arrived with big appetites at 9am, just as breakfast was wrapping up for the B&B's overnight guests. This meant that we essentially had the room to ourselves. Everything was beautifully decorated, with an entire Dickens Village under the sideboard.

We started with fruit cups, mini pastries, cranberry juice, and individually steeped teas. DH chose the sweet entrée, which was chunky French toast, while I opted for the savory, some of the best-seasoned eggs and potatoes I have ever tasted. So full that I couldn't even touch the toast that came with them, we asked them to box up our eggnog cheese cake desserts to go. It was really lovely to have this time together to catch up with each other.

Giving Thanks, 2021

This year I am thankful for the people who worked on Thanksgiving Day. 

I had been scheduled for hospital service over the holiday for the second year in a row, but my parents-in-law had reserved rooms for us the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville in February or March (a rescheduled Christmas present from 2020, and back when we thought vaccination would end the pandemic). Thankfully I was able to make a trade with a colleague to cover the last two days of my shift, so I could fly down on Thursday. A kind church friend drove me to the Pittsburgh airport, and I picked up some hot chicken and an old fashioned at a Nashville airport eatery (Party Fowl) to eat at my final destination.

I spent the night in an Air BnB, a garage converted into a backyard efficiency apartment (the building in the background of the photo below). It was cute, and quiet. I was able to walk to pick up breakfast and spent my downtime watching re-runs of Xena: Warrior Princess or working on my laptop (when the wifi worked). I have two presentations in December, one on accessibility in online teaching and one on the history of polio vaccination.

The Five Points neighborhood of East Nashville is a cute residential area of nicely painted single-family homes. I felt very comfortable walking around by myself on a cooooold but clear morning. To the left is a fire station designed to look like a house.

After a quick meal of a gourmet donut from Five Daughters Bakery, a pear from home, and my airline snack mix (none of the restaurants in the area were open for lunch on Friday), I met up with Dear Husband and his parents, and we moved into the hotel, which was a revelation for me. It's really a series of hotels built around big indoor garden atria that are now decorated for Christmas with trees and lights. Some of the shops were Christmas themed, and some of the activities for kids. There was a mix of country and Christmas music. Their catch phrase "So. Much. Christmas." epitomizes truth in advertising.

We spent our first day checking in, wandering around the complex, eating dinner at an Italian restaurant, and listening to a guitar player at a bar next to the waterfalls in the picture on the left. The second day we wanted to go ice skating outside, maybe swim in the indoor pool, take the indoor boat ride, and have a formal family dinner together. Unfortunately, I woke up with a headache, subjective fever, mild sore throat, and chest tightness, so I spent the morning getting a COVID test and the afternoon holed up in our room working or watching comfort TV. Dear Husband spent part of the evening with his family (masked because he had been around me) and brought take-out from the restaurant, which we ate in our room while watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

This was our view of the ice rink (white trees) and snow tubing (pink lights). All day and into the night we could hear the music. Sunday we packed up and drove home with the in-laws. I stayed double-masked and ate separately until my test came back negative Monday morning. Then it was time for the two of us to drive home and resume regular life with clinic and rehearsals.

I am thankful for friends and family, for my health and insurance (which are both good most of the time), for a job with flexibility, and a car. If you're reading this, I'm glad you're in my life. How did you celebrate, and for what are you thankful this year?

Kentuck Knob

The second half of our daytrip was a visit to Kentuck Knob, the last of the three Frank Lloyd Wright properties in southwestern Pennsylvania. We had already toured Polymath Park one Fourth of July with my parents, and the two of us stopped by Fallingwater on a frigid early spring day. While waiting for our guided tour to begin, we tried to count up all the other FLW visits we have made together: Taliesin, Oak Park, Hollyhock House, and Southern Florida University (which I still need to write). Maybe post-pandemic we'll make it out to Taliesin West.

Kentuck Knob was a late-career design from Wright for Isaac Newton (I.N.) and Bernadine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmanns at Fallingwater. He was in the dairy and ice cream business. She named it for a pioneer who liked the land so much that he didn't bother moving on west to Kentucky, and for the fact that the top of the hill was bare of trees when they purchased the land in 1953. Apparently Wright divided his clients into "perchers or nesters"--people who would rather be up above everything or down in a valley, and the Hagans were "perchers." The house is built according to Usonian properties and sits 2,050 feet above sea level. They moved in in 1956.

The ranch-style house is built into the hillside and shaped like four sides of a hexagon. In the first photo above I snapped the art studio and the carport, and in this second image you can see the bedroom wing to the left and the living room to the right. The original copper roof reportedly inspired rumors of a UFO landing (it was the 1950s, after all), so it was treated to speed up the weathering process. I found the decorative gourds to be picturesque and asked our guide to photograph us, but because of the slant of the afternoon sun she had to change the angle.

Of all the custom designs FLW did, the abstract cut-outs for these under-eave windows may be my least favorite. They don't let in very much light, so Mrs. Hagan had to make her art in the gravel courtyard instead. When Mr. Hagan got too old to live out in the middle of nowhere, the couple sold the property in 1986 to Lord Peter Palumbo, an English developer and collector of both art and architecture. He stayed in the property while in the States for 10 years (1986-1996). Unfortunately, a landscaper parked a recently used lawnmower in the attached shed space, where there was a gas heater. Things combusted, and they had to make major repairs before the house could be opened for public tours. Until the pandemic, Palumbo and his wife Hayat (herself an artist) used to come back with new items to display and rearrange--like a collection of wooden duck decoys in the kitchen--but now they stay in a farmhouse just down the way.

We weren't allowed to take any photographs inside, so I can't show you the large living room with the 28-foot orange-cushioned built-in bench sofa; the cabinet for hiding the television (an abominable and faddish technology, according to Wright); the inside/outside window box; the collection of low-slung FLW chairs; the enormous stone fertility god statue Mrs. Hagan left behind because she didn't want to pay to move it; the awkwardly placed and unusable fireplace; the bedroom art displays reached down narrow passages; or the basement (!). I was particularly enamored of the "murphy-bed" range from General Electric, whose burners folded up against the wall to provide more counter space when not being used. The guide also mentioned the difficulty in the 1950s of finding a refrigerator with sharp angles like in the rest of the house, because the trend at the time was for rounded edges, remember?

Outside we could glimpse the thin autumn sunshine through a skylight in the balcony roof and enjoy the sound of the water feature on the back patio. Our guide was proud of the local craftsmen who had cut the stone for the walls, and the carpenters who spent 2 years cutting the thousands of feet of dental molding. You can see some around the hexagonal opening to the left. It was too expensive to haul the ingredients needed to pour Wright's trademarked "Cherokee red" cement floors, so they also used local slate for that.

It ended up being just the two of us on this particular tour, which lasted just over an hour. Having come up by shuttle bus, we decided to return on foot and picked up a map of the sculptures on the property. Next stop: the overlook. The very first photo in this post is my favorite image from the whole trip, a selfie of my delight and his bemusement, sitting on a stone bench looking at Sugarloaf Mountain and a country road on which there were sometimes no cars. It was so quiet and peaceful. When our butts were cold, we finally followed the walking path around the property and back to the visitors center, where we promptly ordered scoops of Hagan ice cream, which we ate outside on the back deck in the sun and fresh air.

No trip is without its adventures with us; during this one, Dear Husband realized several miles too late that we were in danger of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere aka Ohiopyle, PA. So we spent the time while eating lunch in the one open restaurant strategizing about how to get to the nearest gas station. On the way, we listened to more of The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast, something I found a year or two ago that consists of a pair of American brothers who LOVE the old Granada television series. While some of the podcasts are interviews with actors, most consist of a blow-by-blow retelling of an episode (with sound from the original), followed by Gus and Luke dissecting what they did and didn't like about the acting, directing, and cinematography. Mostly they like everything. Each episode is rated out of 10 Persian slippers (you know, to go with Sherlock's silk dressing gown). Then they share fan mail. DH is also a fan of this retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, most of which we own on DVD, and it's become a tradition to listen to one or two of these while making long car trips.

My favorite part of the trip was getting away from work after 26 straight days of patient care, including three weekends in a row. DH's favorite part was the lack of crowds. I had planned this in late summer to be COVID safe, since at the time no one was sure how bad Delta would be. It was wonderful to get to spend a whole day together, roadtripping in the car and tramping through the woods.

Editor's note: You can go back and read part one of this trip to the Ohiopyle Falls here.