Hoppy Easter 2024!

My Awesome Parents (MAP) came to visit us for Easter this year. Saturday morning we went to the Strip District for breakfast and to walk around the shops. It was not as crowded as I had expected it to be, probably due to the cool weather that threatened rain. While Dear Husband was at church rehearsing, we spent the middle part of the day making things: hot-cross buns for Eastern morning, curtains for the guest bedroom, hard-boiled eggs, and plastic eggs to hang on the tree out front, which I've wanted to do for years. I also repaired several items of clothing by hand.

Saturday evening we went to a Liberty Magic show by Billy the Kidd and then out for dinner at Social House 7, before returning home to watch The Miracle Club (2023) with Maggie Smith. All 3 experiences I would grade as B+. The magician had some good tricks and others that were just meh. The restaurant kitchen took a long time to send out the third and largest dish, so we were hungry almost until we were ready to leave. The script had some good ideas, but the pacing was awkward.

Sunday morning we all had an early first Easter breakfast together (at 6am!) before DH left to play the first of three services. The rest of us spent the morning reading, emailing, and having second breakfast before heading up to Sewickley Presbyterian Church for the 11 o'clock worship service, complete with voice choir, brass choir, and beautiful flowers. Also a small snack before and a larger snack afterwards. Then home to change clothes and head to a friend's house for good food, better pisco sours, and an outdoor hunt for confetti-filled eggs that the kids broke on each other's heads. Although rain had been predicted, it was sunny and almost warm. There was time for a nap and a Zoom with family before settling in for smorgasbord for dinner while watching the first two episodes of the British original Ghosts, which is miles better than the American knock-off that DH once watched while we were flying cross-country.

Because we didn't sing my favorite verses from "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" by Charles Wesley (the Presbyterian hymnal has different words), I'll include them here in closing:

Lives again our glorious King! / Where, O death, is now thy sting? / Once he died our souls to save. / Where thy victory, O grave?

Soar we now, where Christ has led, / Following our exalted head; / Made like him, like him we rise,./ Ours the cross—the grave—the skies!

Admittedly, some of my experience of this hymn is undoubtedly tied up with having heard DH play these verses on the organ--triumphantly, as only he can--almost every year since 1997. Happy Easter to all of you, from both of us.

DIY: Rusted Tin Box Edition

When we purchased our house, which is larger than our apartment was, I spent a lot of time on Facebook Marketplace furnishing it, which is how I found this delightful enameled tin box, which I thought would be perfect for storing my cross-stitch supplies. However, it came with a lot of rust, so I looked up home rust-removal procedures, such as a soaped-up cut potato (?). I decided to try a coating of baking soda and water paste that I applied with an old sock and left to sit for an hour while crafting with a girlfriend by Zoom. Then I scrubbed everything with a toothbrush. It seemed to required more elbow grease to remove the gritty powder than the rust! I finished it off with a coat of linseed oil that a neighbor on our local Buy-Nothing Group dropped off. After sitting for several days, the box was shiny but slightly tacky, and I worried about storing thread unprotected. So while watching a presentation about caring for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, I applied some marble-patterned contact paper left over from a previous DIY project to freshen up an old Ikea shelf for the exercise room / conservatory. It's so much prettier on my shelf than the cardboard mailing box I had been hiding in a drawer!

2023 Rememberlutions

This time last year, I created a Pittsburgh Bucket List which, upon reflection, was a complete and utter failure. The only item we completed was a tour of Bayernhof for my 1-day staycation--and we were 15 minutes late on account of getting lost. However, we will be taking My Awesome Parents to a Liberty Magic show this spring as a Christmas gift, and we have promises for rollerskating at the Neville Roller Dome and dinner at The Woods House from friends. 

Which isn't to say that we had no fun in 2023! I did keep a few mementos in my Rememberlutions jar. First up is...a ticket to a performance we didn't end up seeing: Billy Strayhorn: Something to Live For. I tried to squeeze this in between travel, but the performance kept being cancelled for cast illness, and finally I took a refund. In no particular order, this is what else I found in the jar:

We watched the Pittsburgh Pirates defeat the St. Louis Cardinals when one brother was pitching against his brother on the other team. That was with colleagues from my work.

I saw a really great one-woman show about Frida Kahlo in June.

We finally visited the Pittsburgh Zoo, where we enjoyed the Chinese lanterns.

In February, Dear Husband and I had a "grand pause" at Dogwood Cabin to celebrate his new job, and in March, we had a great second trip to Phoenix, AZ, for Spring Training baseball, hiking, biking, museums, etc.

A patient wrote this to me in a message: "Just wanted you to know that you were the very best doctor I ever knew and I consider you as my friend."

Over Memorial Day Weekend, I went home to Baltimore to celebrate my father, and over Labor Dar Weekend, I flew to Charlotte to visit my grandmother, aunt, and her family.

A lovely outdoor lunch at Kaya followed by an afternoon exploring the Heinz History Center for DH's 1-day vacay.

We took a tour of Laurel Caverns with MAP in August and lunch afterwards.

Sitting at my desk with a breeze blowing sweetly through the window. This is what my office looked like recently, shortly after signing my book contract (!).

We drove to DH's family picnic at the little church by the graveyard, and on our way home, we spent the night in a tiny cabin.

When DH leaned over while driving to kiss me not once but twice after I read the poem I picked out for my youngest brother's wedding. If you search "San Diego," you can find the other posts from our vacation that week.

Finishing not one but two Princess Bride cross-stitch samplers; I gifted the one I did not keep.

When I found out parents of adult children with disabilities refer other parents to me via Facebook discussion threads. Honestly, anytime a patient compliments me on my care is really meaningful. I even had one tell me he had referred some people to me--"but not too many, because I want to make sure I can still get an appointment!"

I not only got a co-edited special issue of a journal published, but I had a magical afternoon in Montreal with my co-editor in 80-degree weather.

Every time Rosie purred through a morning brushing session, and the way she flops herself against me in ecstasy.

In March, I was invited to Chicago as an expert on teaching nutrition.

Watching "Animal Kingdom" in our backyard during dinner on the patio in the warmer months.

The time one of the nurses put someone on the phone on hold so she could join the other one in giving me a hug when I was feeling down about the way clinic was going.

We visited the Phipps Botanical Garden twice this year, once for Billy Porter and once for the holiday light show.

Our musical adventures included a trip to State College in July, which I declared "a perfect summer day." That was made better by the presence of friends, which I also enjoyed multiple times the week between Christmas and New Year's.

So that's the year that was. It was not as terrible for me as it was for some people I know. I hope we all have a better 2024.

Christmas 2023

Editor's Note: If you're following along in real time, this post is dropping one month after the big event due to general busyness of mixing family/friend time with a half-week of work over the holidays, followed by jumping into the new semester with both feet. Also, I was waiting for my new storage items to arrive in the mail, and I wanted to show them to you, because this post is dedicated to the suburban wife I have become. Cheers!

Dear Husband and I had a lovely Christmas 2023, in part because for the first(!?) time in two decades, we did not travel. Instead, his immediate family came to us. Unsurprisingly, I made very ambitious plans for cooking and activities, beginning with a great new taco place. Christmas Eve breakfast was waffles with a warm, homemade cinnamon pear compote topped with walnuts and powdered sugar that looked like something from a Williams Sonoma catalogue, but I was too busy serving and eating to photograph it.

(Moravian star visible in front window.)

(Yes, that is a flock of flamingoes; alas, their days may be numbered--

they really should have flown south for the winter, as snow and ice do not agree with them.)

Since buying our house almost 2 years ago, we have been purchasing more Christmas decorations. Last year was a reusable wreath with matching garland for the light pole in the front, and a sparkly light-up deer for the back. This year I discovered "urn fillers" for the concrete containers on either side of the driveway and scoured the internet to find a set that DH liked with battery-operated timers that didn't require a second mortgage. (Our first picks cost $170! EACH!) I also leaned into some kind of country kitsch with two oversized black metal lanterns with battery-operated candles to hang in the back yard--for ambience? DH seems to like them.

For Christmas Eve lunch (DH would already be at church by dinnertime), I decided to re-create that phyllo pie recipe. This time I made chickpea-with-spinach and chicken-(leftover from chicken soup)-with-peas, served with homemade cranberry sauce and my in-laws' German cucumber salad. Demerits for forgetting to defrost the frozen dough sheets overnight, although it turns out you can nuke them in their plastic wrappers in the microwave for 60 seconds (thanks, Alan Brown!).

Christmas Day breakfast was cinnamon rolls with grapefruit. More demerits to me for hustling us out of the house at 9am to be early for the 10am service at St. Paul's Cathedral, when actually we wanted to attend the noon service with the special music that started at 11:30am (whoops). So we gave up our spot in the parking lot and drove across town to Homewood Cemetery, where we hunted for the grave of a distant relative, then dawdled over hot drinks from the Starbucks that was open in the Jewish neighborhood. It felt so nice to give ourselves the gift of "no stress." (Kudos AND TIPS to the baristas who were working hard!) We were in good time for the brass, choir, and organ music and came home to a late lunch of phyllo pie with my MIL's raspberry pie for dessert.

There was jigsaw-puzzling, various rounds of card games, and we visited the large train set that is up in the living room of the older couple next door. The husband grew up in our house, and that train set used to be in what is now our living room.

Christmas Day dinner was London broil with this excellent marinade (not shown), mashed potatoes with my in-law's mushroom gravy, and Brussels sprouts that I thought would continue to cook while they rested on the stovetop but didn't (whoops).

On Boxing Day I took two meals off and only cooked for dinner, since DH's brother had come to town. I made this Martha Stewart "Cajun shrimp" recipe (above), except I swapped out the Andouille sausage for water chestnuts to lower the salt and fat content for my FIL, and I skipped the celery altogether, since only my MIL and I like it. I also tossed in the green pepper chunks last so they would stay crunchy. Served with roasted carrots and cumin. This filled our stomachs before we headed out to the Holiday Lights at the Phipps Botanical Garden.

Finally, this year I tired of storing our ornaments in torn, decades-old tissue paper and a mish-mash of cardboard boxes, so I invested in a set of plastic tubs and red-and-green canvas storage containers with cardboard inserts. Here you can see Rosamunda "helping" me sort everything into their new containers. There's a little space to grow, but we have more than enough ornaments to fit on a standard-issue live fir tree, so it's mostly about being able to see what you're looking for when you're decorating and feeling neat and tidy when everything is put away. 

Well-Dressed at The Frick Pittsburgh

A girlfriend and I made a date for the Saturday after Thanksgiving to try a new restaurant for lunch (Hemlock House: great mocktails, food almost too salty to eat) and then take ourselves to the Frick Museum. We were pleasantly surprised to discover that while their special exhibition on The Great Migration in the automobile section, and of course tours of the house itself, require tickets, the art pavilion is now free!

In front of the museum is Of Thee We Sing (2023), a new installation from vanessa german (1976- ) of Marian Anderson, in a blue-bottle gown, surrounded by flowers and hands reaching up from the mass of Black Americans who relocated from South to North to realize their dreams in the early 20th century.

My friend wanted to see The Red Dress, which is the product of 380 embroiders from 51 countries over 14 years. The brainchild of English artist Kirstie Macleod, who started it in 2009 by wearing the dress and sewing on it as performance art, it became a way to connect women as artists, immigrants, entrepreneurs, refugees, and survivors of many kinds of violence to showcase their hopes, dreams, and selves. Each was paid for her time and continues to receive a fraction of the exhibition fees.

There are all different styles of stitching in a rainbow of colors, women, animals, birds, flags, flowers and vines, stars, and creative abstract designs in thread.

As part of the exhibition, the Frick commissioned a local piece, The Calico Dress, which includes pieces from people of all ages and abilities who live here. Among the designs on it are one of the yellow Three Sisters bridges, the Frick building, a Steelers logo, flowers, a seahorse, a peacock, fancy fish, a rainbow, hearts, a cat, smiley faces, and big black buttons for contrast.

We also got to (re)visit Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave's exquisite paper sculpture based on Peter Paul Ruben's Portrait of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princess of Conde, which hangs in the same gallery.

While there, we enjoyed some Chinese vases and a nice little exhibit on Shakespeare's Folios on the 400th anniversary of the printing of the first one, from the Carnegie Mellon University Library. I thought my maternal grandfather and -mother would have particularly liked this one, although probably they already knew that John Milton's first publication was the dedication in verse to Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1630).

I made that!

I've been a busy bee and want to share some of my "honey." 

First up is a special issue of a German-studies journal that I co-edited with a colleague at another institution. Neither of us had edited anything before, so we figured out together how to write a call for papers, publicize it, sift through the abstracts, and select a group of papers to shepherd through the writing, editing, and publication process. The two of us wrote the introduction and selected artistic images for the cover and between the essays, which is why I was disappointed not to receive the finished product initially. Finally, after the annual meeting, I reached out to the press, and they mailed us our paper-back copies. It's so pretty! And now that it's done, I can devote my precious writing time to turning my dissertation into a book.

Second is a trio of balsa-wood nightlights that were an impulse buy at the craft store. I picked out the moth, the brain, and the ribcage with flowers. They are colored with paint pens, and I haven't decided yet whether to keep, gift, or donate them.

Third, I finally finished the second copy of the Princess Bride cross-stitch sampler I was working on. I received the first copy for Christmas last year, but it was missing some of the thread, so the Etsy seller sent me a whole new kit, which had enough supplies to finish both. This one is on the side table in the entranceway but will probably eventually be hung in my office. A woman at church made the knitted cactus, which I just love.