Valentine's Day love.

 

Yesterday I took a little time to make these heart garlands and hang them in the stairway. All those J.Crew catalogs finally came in handy. I'm thinking I just might leave them for all of February, since they're so cheerful, and since my heart misses the sun cheerful colors are nice. This morning, in celebration of the holiday, I made this bread. Too bad all the rising time meant that Alex was already gone for work by the time it was ready. It will have to be a pre-dinner valentine's snack for him.

A day in DC

Well, semester number 1 has come to a close. After many stressful days and late nights, plenty of back massages and other kindnesses bestowed by husband (can we say learning to cook because otherwise we might not have eaten? doing laundry for us? making me hot chocolate at the end of my long day? I love this guy.), I turned in my last assignment on December 19th.

Alex and I scurried off to Montana to spend a wonderfully relaxing time with his family (in the snow!), and then came back to Virginia to spend a few days with my parents. Now I have two weeks until classes begin for the spring, and so we decided to spend a day touring the city that has been home for 5 months.

We started off the day at Ted's Bulletin, a hip version of a diner in eastern market. The waitress handed us our menus, which were basically newspapers with the food listed on the inside. They bring an entire carafe of coffee to your table (hallelujah!), and you can sub your toast for a homemade poptart...which I did.

(They salvaged a number of pieces from the Philadelphia Civic Center for their decor).

Following breakfast, we toured around the market at eastern market (and wished we were doing another supper club so we could use some of their fancy ingredients), and then made our way to...

-the Folger Shakespeare Library to see their exhibit on the King James' Bible

-The east wing of the National Gallery of Art to see contemporary art and french impressionist paintings

-Starbucks for some tea and a break to refresh ourselves

-The Phillips Collection in Dupont, where we saw the permanent collection, including works from Rothko, Kandinsky, Monet, Sean Scully and Joseph Marioni (which were some of my favorites).

 We had worked up an appetite, so we went to Founding Farmer's for dinner - a place I have been wanting to try since we moved here. It was super tasty - we each got a cocktail, and then started with bacon wrapped dates, stuffed with blue cheese --- they were so good that once the four were gone, I almost ordered a second plate. 

(me with my cucumber-gin tonic, alex with his manhattan, our plate of partially eaten dates which we could not wait long enough to sample before we snapped this photo)

The dinner was equally tasty, and we ordered chocolate mousse for dessert -- deciding to make it a celebration of the one semester of grad school successfully completed. Great end to a fun day in dc.

A New Favorite (2).

In case some of you haven't heard of it, I thought I would pass on the name of a design and furniture store which is a new favorite of mine:  West Elm.  Here are a few things from their website that caught my eye:

(all images from westelm.com)

Of late...

Part of my blogging hiatus is due to the fact that I have been working hard on an application for an interior design master's program. This included creating a portfolio that would show my basic skills for sketching, illustrator, indesign and photography. Hence the above photos. (The tie-in theme for my portfolio was books -- all this english major knows!)

It's amazing how when you are immersed in one creative project you have very little energy for anything else creative -- especially when the project is a big stretch/entirely new to you, requiring all of your energy but producing very little work to show for it (I think 85% of the work I did was useless). Anyways, blog ideas = pretty much absent. Creative cooking? Let's stick to recipes. I didn't even have the energy to care what I wore to work, so I pretty much stuck with wearing neutrals every day.

I feel a little bit like I am coming out of a cave, shaking my head to get rid of tunnel vision, etc. etc.  :)

Needed: One cup of tea. Cooler weather. Oh, and this room.

from Anthropologie.com

summer colors

Image Credit (clockwise from top left): Flickr users Robbie Howell, Cinocino, billionstrang, papalars, Susan NYC, etringita, computerjoe, Jagger, Photocapy

Here, my friends, are some of the colors I associate with summer this year.  These colors speak freedom, coolness, relaxed fun and adventure to me (not to mention iced coffee).  Also, some of these colors are around in our new place. The walls are the grey color in the top right photo. Our candles on the dining room table are the vibrant green.  The art hanging on our dining room wall has cool blues, and some of our wood furniture has the muted oranges in it.  Just a bit of beauty on a slow (warm) Sunday morning...

Valentine's Day 2010

Yesterday, (which was a Friday, which was the end of a work week) Alex and I came home (after an especially long work day) and tried to decide what we should do for our "date night". Friday nights are our date nights, and traditionally have been even from the initial stages of our relationship in our sophomore year in college, when, with the combination of limited "open-hours" in our dorms, roommates with varying schedules, and a college-man's budget,  dates had to be very creative. Alex did an admirable job coming up with creative ways to work around these obstacles, my favorite being his "Christmas in September" date which involved decking one of the cafeteria tables with Christmas lights, music and fake snow, having me open a "stocking" full of things from the dollar store, making sugar cookies in our dorm kitchen, and finally, watching White Christmas on his laptop up on the soccer field, with blankets and  cookies to keep us warm.  However, on the days when we were too tired from unrelenting homework and the exhausting duties of college-life (like having to do (and pay for!) our laundry), the most creative idea we could muster was to grab dinner at the school cafeteria, maybe get something from starbucks and watch a movie on his laptop in one of the library's study rooms.

So last night our date night consisted of throwing together a dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, watching an episode of "Community" (on his laptop), debating for 30 minutes whether we should watch another episode or read, reading, and falling asleep on the couch by 8:45 p.m. What a wild life we live.

Actually, the real reason we had such an uninteresting "date night" is because we are celebrating Valentine's Day today.  Sorry if I misled you to think that we are boring homebodies (really we are, 90% of the time).

So with that, I'm going to go make us chocolate chip pancakes. I will attempt to make them heart-shaped, in spirit of the holiday, but since I have no heart-shaped mold they will probably look like blobs. Over and out.