This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on August, 2012.
Mykala made this incredible vegan quiche for my birthday. Wish I had gotten the depth of field right on this one, but I think the picture still captures the deliciousness.
Mykala is in this picture for scale — this building was once the department store Gimbels. According to Wikipedia, this Milwaukee store was where “Adam Gimbel had first found success (and alleged to be the most profitable Gimbel store)…”. It became a Marshall Field’s for a little while, and is now a Marriott Residence Inn. You can see at the top of this picture the large, ornate coffers that make up the architrave of the Roman façade. The curtains are covering the capitals of some huge ionic columns. They don’t build buildings like they used to.
This was the tallest habitable building in the United States for 4 years, from 1895 to 1899.
I first saw this in a completely computerized rendering in the singular, incomparable online video called The Third & the Seventh. This is part of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Take it away, Wikipedia:
The view at the beginning of the magnificent Chicago Lines Architectural Tour. The nice bluish glass spire at the middle is the Adrian Smith-designed Trump Tower at center. I think it’s a great building, and the tour guide during our cruise seemed to agree.
I’m not always a huge fan of Frank Gehry, but he sure knocked it out of the… park, when he designed the Jay Pritzker Pavillion. Mykala’s sitting on the “great lawn” that stretches out from the very high-tech bandshell. We listened to a wonderfully-performed free classical concert, put on during the Memorial Day weekend. The music was atrocious (too much modern dissonance). The night was beautiful. So was Mykala.
Just wet newspaper between you and molten glass.
For our third wedding anniversary, I surprised Mykala with something she always wanted to do: learn how to work with molten glass. The look on her face as we pulled in to the Foci Center for Glass Arts was priceless! A few hours flew by as we learned how to pick up glass and try to work with it. We made paperweights.
Check out this amazing picture Mykala captured—George was meowing and this squirrel was barking, with just a screen separating them.
I capital-h hate killing things. I hate killing small things, hate killing big things, hate killing things that are nuisances. I can sometimes make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes, but not always. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only refrain I can come up with if I have to get rid of a spider from our bedroom. And right there, I wrote ‘get rid of’, preferring the euphemism to the reality—I killed a little piece of life that never did anything to me.
Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers:
If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaningless of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality.
This, now this is a bánh mì sandwich. Mykala made this from super fresh bread, garden fresh cucumber, fresh cilantro, fresh jalapeño, top secret tofu preparation, vegan mayo, and love. Anyway, I tasted love when I had it. Stupendous.
Jill Lepore wrote “Battleground America” for an April issue of The New Yorker:
When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.