For every New Year’s Eve for the last 8 years, Tim and I have done the same thing: stayed home and cooked pepper-crusted filet mignon and indulged in a nice bottle of wine and a chocolate pear tart. This year we invited our friends Dan, Nancy and Oskar over and it was more than double the fun (after filet mignon, two toddlers and a marathon dance party, we’re all full and happy).
Happy New Year!! May your 2012 be full of prosperity and love.
PS We spent the day at the Bronx Zoo — I’d never been and had such a good day looking at so many majestic animals.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all my wonderful and patient readers. We made our own cards this year; some with prints of Alex’s hand and foot and some just doddled with Martha Stewart Glitter Pens by me. I love that everyone is getting a different card.
These images of “shelfscapes” were taken by Ray Eames. I found these images on the Library of Congress website — as part of a great microsite (is that what they are still called?) on the Work of Charles and Ray Eames. Lots of great images, but, I found the most interesting bit was this:
Multi-screen slide shows were perhaps the Eameses most effective method for presenting everyday things in new ways and relationships. Encompassing an enormous breadth of subject matter, the slide shows were assembled for school courses and lectures as well as for corporate events. For these elaborate presentations, the Eameses drew upon their meticulously catalogued collection of approximately 350,000 slides: their very own “cabinet of curiosity.”
I translate this to mean Charles and Ray would have been great bloggers.
Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-E21-P564-B]
I’m not one for food hype — in fact, nothing depresses me more than overhyped food (Eatly as a notable recent example). However, I am confident that I’m not overhypeing the chocolate layer cake at The Chocolate Room in Cobble Hill when I say it is the best in NYC. It is everything a chocolate cake should be, which is moist with a good ratio of not too sweet frosting to cake. Tim’s birthday was on Sunday, and we made a special trip to Brooklyn just for this cake (much to the amazement of the nice man who took my order).
PS It is also an amazing date place for Brooklynites — a movie at the Cobble Hill Cinema followed by chocolate cake at The Chocolate Room.
Thanks to amazing M for introducing me to these and many other NYC delights — you light up my life!
(For the next six weeks I’ll be posting gift ideas whenever I come across them. )
These ghost chocolates from Burdicks get me every year ($18 for 5). This is the kind of thing I don’t think people ever buy themselves. Or, at least, I wouldn’t.
A magazine just for kids ($24)! Alex (2.5 years) is just at an age where he’d love to get something in the mail (we check it together every day — he gets to put the key in the mailbox and pull out the mail). Also, he’s starting to develop an attention span for reading longer stories.
Personalized aerial map jigsaw puzzle ($50) It sounds like this is a really hard puzzle, but, I love the personalized aspect!
This morning we ran out of coffee chez Nova necessitating a very early morning walk to resupply the house. Alex brought along his tool box and I brought my iphone — we both did some work! I sighed a little at this townhouse with seasonally appropriate window boxes. PS It was a dramatic night on the UWS with a shooting at 91st and Riverside — we heard the helicoptors for hours last night. PPS: @NYScanner is my favorite breaking news Twitter feed.
Take a gander at this amazing 2012 calendar ($35) designed by Abbey over at Aesthetic Outburst and printed by Pistachio Press. I don’t usually get into the whole calendar mania on the blogosphere, but, this one made me feel a sliver of excitement instead of my usual panic about the upcoming year. (Speaking of which, where did 2011 go? Yikes!).
Thomas Ruff, “Constellation”, 1990.
19 x 12 inches
$2,500 – $3,000
Freeman’s is having a photography auction! Let’s go on a fantasy shopping spree, shall we? First up, a little something for me and Tim. How about Thomas Ruff’s “Constellation” ? I’d love to go to sleep with that winking at me every night. Then, a little something for Alex. He’s into trains right now, so this photograph by Joel Stenfeld would be perfect.
Joel Stenfeld “Coeburn, Virginia, April” 1983/1989
14 x 17 inches
$2,000 – $4,000 estimate.
Douglas Mellor
Still Life with Onion, 2004
13.5 by 17.25 inches
1,000 to 3,000 estimate
Back to me for a minute, how much do you love this still life by Douglas Mellon? And “Floral Arrangement # 7″ by Pamela Ellis Hawkes also screams to me. What photos would you pick?
Pamela Ellis Hawkes
22.5 by 30 inches
$1,000 – $2,000 estimate.
I read someplace that it was lucky to give new homeowners a loaf of bread and a can of salt. I love the packaging of this salt ($12) from St. Helena’s Olive Oil company.
Saturday night I went to a dinner party at my sister and her girlfriend’s amazing Brooklyn loft. You can see the lights of Manhattan literally twinkle from their enormous windows. Courtney (who is basically a trained chef) made some killer homemade cheese straws from this recipe, not to mention down home shrimp and grits and a kale salad. The conversation was still raging at midnight when I finally pulled myself away and headed back to the city.
Adweek.com: The Next Great American Consumer
Upsetting and good to know and guard against where you can:
Disney is unlikely to lay off anytime soon, and neither are the countless other brands in need of dollars. They’re part of a trend—fueled in part by the growth of digital devices—toward aggressively targeting a demographic that didn’t exist, in marketers’ eyes, until recently: infants to 3-year-olds. By getting their logos and iconic characters in front of babies—even those with still-blurry eyesight—they hope to establish brand-name preference before she or he has uttered a word.
I’ve always thought it was manipulative to put cartoons on diapers — we use Huggies Overnights which have characters from Cars on them, before you knew it, Alex is asking to buy Cars themed toys. Which makes me uncomfortable.
Quote found here.
