"Busy but good"

"Busy but good." This is how I have been answering the question, "How are you?" from friends and patients. In the last month since rotating off of two weeks of hospital service, I have done a lot of work and had a breast cancer workup (benign), but I also made time for relaxation, connection, and creativity.

I flew to Charlotte to visit my grandmother and managed to finish editing chapter 6 of my book manuscript, which is now 80% complete. The whole thing is due to the press by the end of the calendar year.

I also found time to see a movie in an actual cinema (Coraline); go to a baseball game and a picnic with work colleagues; attend a Labor Day cook-out; volunteer at the church lawn sale; host a friend from out of town for a weekend that included glass blowing and standup comedy (separate post coming); and host a small dinner party of my own for some of the new, young female faculty.

These 4 photos are from Robin Hill: A cultural and environmental center. Dear Husband and I attended an utterly delightful Thai lunch party and ate so much delicious food that I needed a short walk before sitting in the car to drive home. I found this green oasis 5 minutes from our hostess. We had to dodge the wedding party trying to take photographs in the gazebo, I wasn't wearing the right shoes, and neither of us had a head covering or bug spray (ticks!), but we walked doooown the East Beech Trail and back uuuup the Access Road for a 20-minute jaunt in the humidity that was just enough.

Last night we participated in a "happening" at the Garfield Community Farm. Above is their labyrinth. Below, DH played keyboard for the musical part of the evening, which was dedicated to "thin places" and fairies. It doubled as a birthday party for the woman standing in the center, so there was cake, too!

I had been assigned to the kitchen detail to cut up fresh tomatoes, eggplant, and jalapenos. There were also herbs plucked from the garden (sweet basil, holy basil, rosemary). Another couple handled the dough; then I assembled the pizzas that were baked in this oven by J. Unfortunately, I suffered from the capsaicin in my left hand for several hours afterward that soap/water, alcohol wipes, Crisco, and aloe vera couldn't help, only time. 

Finally, this evening DH and I were invited to a "friend-raising" event for the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh. It was held at the home of a friend on Grandview Avenue, the street that runs along the crest of Mount Washington and overlooks Downtown and the Rivers. Here we are on the uppermost deck. We had a lovely time meeting new people and are excited about the upcoming season.

"That's so Pittsburgh": I coined this phrase as a label for blogposts when we first moved to the city 8 years ago. One of the things I have learned about the Steel City is that it is a site of so many juxtapositions: gritty industrial jobs and gleaming financial buildings, latchkey kids who ate our leftover pizza and previously unknown connections when circulating in high society. I sometimes joke that I can't wait to be retired, so I can have more time to things like attend lectures and exhibits and concerts. But I don't want to wait for that kind of delayed gratification, so I try to celebrate the fact that we are lucky enough to live in a place that has more to do than any one person can: house concerts, Broadway, museums of every size, and a rotating cast of restaurants. DH and I try to use our time and privilege to enjoy a fraction of these opportunities when we can, especially when they bring us closer to friends and to each other.

Anniversary trip to Cleveland, part 2 of 2

Click here if you missed Part 1 of our trip. 

After completing our visit to the Cleveland Botanical Garden (nee Garden Center) with lunch, Dear Husband and I walked over to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is free! (As it should be: CMA is the 4th richest art museum in the country.) It's had multiple building configurations since its founding in 1913; currently the original building has newer wings that enclose a light-filled courtyard with a lofty glass atrium. Apparently it stands in as the SHIELD headquarters in the Marvel University movies.

In the atrium are two intriguing statues, an installation called "Strata" by Native American artist Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983).

We were too late to join the 1pm docent-led tour, so I decided to focus on one corner of the second floor, beginning with the Tiffany glass and Faberge objects and ending with the armor.

To the left: marble column looking up to a beautiful glass dome. To the right: marble statue of Terpsichore, Muse of lyric poetry and dancing.

To the left: a Tiffany stained-glass window that used to be in someone's parlor. To the right and below: Faberge. Kudos to the Museum for turning otherwise wasted space on the flanks of this entrance hall into mini galleries.

They have several artifacts from Jewish history scattered around the museum, such as these beautiful silver pieces.

To the left: This wealthy woman has an extravagant outfit and what is likely her own real face; Peter Paul Rubens had the "radical" idea to represent the sitter him- or herself and not just the trappings of their station (often the conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche). To the right: a nautilus shell goblet made possible by Dutch trading and imperialism that reminded me of the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden. Below: an amount and variety of foodstuffs that only the best tables could provide.

To the left: Meissen porcelain! To the right: the most ridiculous thing we saw: a silver soup tureen with a lobster climbing over a fish for a handle. Below: a couple making beautiful music together.

We rested our sore dogs and tired lower backs on the benches in front of these enormous paintings of Apollo and the Muses by Charles Meynier (1768-1832) from 1798-1800. To the right (above) is Clio, the Muse of History. She clearly cares less about her raiment than about her writing; we tried to decipher the various relics in the shadows and debated why she has wings. ("The wings of history," as per Walter Benjamin on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus?) My favorite, composition-wise, was the one of the left, of Erato, Muse of Lyric Poetry. Apparently someone had painted a modesty veil over cupid, probably in the late 1800s. All told, it took conservators 5 years to restore the 5 paintings after they were discovered moldering in a Swiss castle.

It was...sobering to look at the evolution of metal armor and to see the hundreds or thousands of hours and finesse in the handiwork that went into protecting men and animals from each other.

Our last stop was an immersive video display about a Korean silk screen, Seven Jeweled Mountain. It was told like a fantastical travelogue, and indeed some of the mystery stems from the fact that the mountain range exists in what is now North Korea, so it is as unreachable as a peak in a fairy tale.

After a couple of hours to cool off and rest in our hotel room, we took the bus to Playhouse Square, where we ate dinner at a diner, Yours Truly. Then we joined the crowds streaming toward Progressive aka Jacobs Field for the Baltimore Orioles at Cleveland Guardians, the two best teams in the American League East. Alas, the O's were outmatched, as the hometown pitcher had a great outing, beating us 10-3. However, the rain and thunderstorms that had been forecast earlier in the week largely held off, and we only retreated up under the awning for an inning or so before regaining our seats in a delightful cross breeze behind home plate.

A talkative Lyft driver got us back to the hotel, where we promptly fell into bed to catch the end of Simone Biles's floor routine before an early morning drive back to Pittsburgh in time to make it to work by mid-morning. Happy 19th anniversary, DH!

Anniversary trip to Cleveland, part 1 of 2

I had some hotel points that are going to expire, so I asked Dear Husband whether he wanted to use them for a night out here in town, but he asked what the point of that was when we could go to Cleveland to see the Baltimore Orioles play, so with that we rearranged our work weeks to take an impromptu overnight trip to celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary.

I found us a hotel in the University Circle area so we could park our car and walk or use public transit. After debating a variety of itineraries, we decided to reprise our honeymoon in Denver (and many other anniversary trips on this blog): botanical garden, art museum, and baseball game.

DH asked if I was taking him to "the Garden Center" he used to visit when he was a student at the Cleveland Institute of Music 35 years ago, but my research had uncovered no such place. The Cleveland Botanical Garden, however, consists of a large glasshouse split into two different biomes and 9 acres of outdoor gardens.

An antechamber currently houses colorful paintings by Robert J. Putka and ceramic flowers by Kristin Kowalski. Other parts of the building had yet more botanical art of various kinds.

The first biome was the dry tropical forest of Madagascar. We learned some neat facts about baobab trees and saw this snoozing tortoise, but it was not very interesting compared to the Costa Rican cloud rainforest beyond the double doors.

The highlight of the rain forest was undoubtedly the butterflies, none of which I managed to photograph. Big blue morphos, three orange Julias chasing each other, learning to tell blue and whing longwings from postman butterflies. Of course there were orchids and waterfalls and poison dart frogs, and funny little birds.

Then it was out into the heat to explore the outdoor gardens. They don't have a map right now, because they are renovating some of them, but I think we managed to visit all the different themed sections, starting with the courtyard and herbal gardens, and then the children's section (partially under construction but decorated for the Olympics).

A "restorative garden" brought welcome shade, and then the woodlands garden has a wooden ramp and this treehouse with a look-out platform reachable by a metal ladder. Across a bridge, over a stream, and along the back path brought us to the small Japanese garden.

This is DH looking over the back wall at the Cleveland Institute of Music across the street. We figured out that the outdoor gardens were freely accessible until this wooden fence was built c. 1990, and it was called "the Garden Center" until the year after he graduated. Below you can see the colorful coverings on the now-aging divide, as well as the glasshouse from behind. We tried to visit CIM, but they've rebuilt large parts of it, and it's not open to the public during construction.

Click here for Part 2 of our anniversary trip.