Really digging this art by Brian Lotti.   Great little video segment.   PEOPLE: BRIAN LOTTI from Monster Children on Vimeo.

Extreme Beauty. Minnesota Winter.

Moving to Minneapolis, MN from New York City has been an adventure in many ways.   But lately I am (constantly) reminded that we have moved to the land of extreme living.  In the middle of a long hard winter, it's not unusual to have days where the temperature doesn't climb above 0 degrees Fahrenheit.   That's before wind chill is factored in.  This is weather in which you HAVE to wear a hat and gloves or you may have frostbite before you know it.  Well, I've decided to embrace it.  It's HARD CORE winter.    We gear up and face the day.  With warm clothes, hot tea and warm soups it's really not all that bad.  I've discovered the joys of wool socks (as someone who had perpetually cold feet, my feet are no longer cold with those suckers on).  Oh, and my remote starter helps too, especially with my 2 small kiddos.

So it's dangerously cold here sometimes during the winter.   But the snow!  It's absolutely magical.  The extreme cold this time of year keeps it pristine and enchanting.  Once it gets over 25 degrees it gets all slushy and dirty, so extra cold means extra pretty snow.  The light it reflects, oh the light!  The white of the snow reflects so much light that it brightens up the inside of the house to keep the winter gloom at bay.  To my great surprise,  my street (in the city of Minneapolis) regularly has snow packed over it even after plows go by.  So it's white out my window as far as the eye can see.  I love it.  It's beautiful and refreshing and different.  From what I can tell we should expect snow for at least 4 months and it pretty much stays put.

There is something ethereal about winter sunrises and sunsets too.  Perhaps the snow sets them off.

Then there are the lakes - the City of Lakes turns into the City of Frozen Lakes and they sparkle in the sun.  Huge light reflection spaces.   And locals use these frozen lakes for oh so many things: skating, flying kites, cross country skiing (if there is snow), ice fishing.  There is so much to DO because of the snow.

I've spent years living in Chicago, London and New York City.  I never cared all that much for winter in those places, but it never really got cold enough, even in Chicago, to have a real culture surrounding winter.  I'm intrigued as never before by winter and the places, countries and customs that have evolved around it.

Part of me wonders if I'm still new here and the wonder of winter with it's dangerous and beautiful qualities will wear off and I'll tire of it.  But for now, I'm fascinated by this crazy cold place.

Oh, hello blog.  It's been a WHILE.
Some children's book illustration inspiration for today:



Found on: Booooooom

A year ago....

Can't believe this was a year ago last month...

First Veggies: Radish Harvest

At our home here in Minneapolis we were fortunate enough to inherit (ok, rent) a backyard with a charming veggie garden and 3 raised beds for growing veggies.  This was a pleasant surprise in the spring, as the whole yard was covered with a good foot of snow when we rented the house in January.  As a complete and total big city dweller for all of my adult life, the closest I have ever been to having my own garden before this year was cultivating a couple of window boxes full of petunias at our last apartment and a basil plant in the kitchen window. That's one of the great things about the Twin Cities - you can live in the city and still have a little earth to call your own without selling your first born child.

A couple days ago I noticed that the radishes I had grown from seed were looking big enough to eat.  It seems like a small miracle to me that anything I planted from seed grows into a plant.  Especially one that is big enough to eat.  Amazing.

Here comes my little helper.

Fiona helped pull these babies out of the ground. 

Check out these red beauties.  

Hmmm, probably want to wash them before consumption.  But a little dirt won't hurt.

We harvested the lettuce and spinach today and had a great salad with our radishes.  Fiona even ate her leafy salad.

I hope the Swiss Chard will taste as good as it looks.  Going to wait a little longer to harvest it.

Yum.  

Moving to the 'Minn'ies

   
So it's been a long, long time since I updated anything on this blog.  And a lot has happened in the meantime.   For the last year I've been writing about how our family was planning to leave NYC.  My last post of 2012 was at the end of November.  Things happened VERY quickly and on December 20th we packed up and moved out of NYC. After over 8 years of living in in the Big Apple, where most of the significant events of my adult life have happened, including meeting Patrick, giving birth to Fiona and meeting some of my best friends.

Where, exactly, we were moving was still up in the air until about 2 weeks before we left.  There were a multitude of possibilities: Copenhagen, London, L.A., Austin, Sacramento and Minneapolis.  In the end, it was to be Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota.  A decision that, after researching the Twin Cities, I was excited about.  Initially I was reticent but, other than the cold, no one seemed to have a bad thing to say about it.  It seems like a great place to raise a family, there is good food to be had, culture, art etc. and we could rent a house (a HOUSE) in a nice neighborhood for less than the cost of the rent on our 1 bedroom apartment in NYC.   And still live in the city.

So here we are.  Living in Minnesota.  One of those things I NEVER thought would happen, but it has and so far so good.

Things I like about the Twin Cities so far:

It's quite cosmopolitan - lots of culture, art and theater as well as restaurants, places to go out etc.
Nothing takes longer than 30 minutes to get to.  Even rush hour traffic is nothing compared to NYC or Chicago, where I grew up and went to college.
The lakes and parks in the middle of the city.  It's beautiful.
Tons of free activities to do with kids that are not nearly as crazy busy as the free activities in NYC where you always have to get somewhere super early to get a spot/participate.

Things I don't like:

Ok, so yes, the winter is long and cold.  And the snow this year (most years??) doesn't melt until spring...it just...keeps...piling up.  It's pretty but I miss early spring in NYC.   Although the snow is pretty too.  I sometimes missed the snow in NYC since the winters have been so warm for most of the last 8 years I lived there.

I miss all of our in NYC friends.

And I miss walking everywhere or taking public transportation.   We actually have a little neighborhood main street nearby that is about a 5-7 minute walk with a grocery store, library, post office, hardware store, bakery/bistro/bar, italian restaurant, clothes store, book store and shoe store.  Plus a micro brewery and bar is planning to open up in the summer. So we CAN walk to some things.  Which I love.  But it was too COLD to really do that (maybe I'm just a wimp) until the last month or so.  There is also light rail in our neighborhood that they are expanding and there are city buses that go everywhere.  But it's not Broadway.

So before this post gets too long, I just wanted to mention that I am hoping to share some Twin Cities adventures on the blog.  I'm still settling in here for various reasons that I will reveal in ongoing posts so I've been a bit slow to share but I'm hoping to getting back into sharing a bit more in this space.

So hello from Minnesota!

Copenhagen, Illustrated

As I've been talking about occasionally on this blog, we will be moving out of NYC fairly imminently.  One of the possible places we might be moving to is Copenhagen.  Isn't this illustrated map of Copenhagen by Matt Chase pretty fabulous?