wishful thinking.

i just got my valentines gift from my dad: josh early nonpareils! it's what i get from him every year, but they are so good that it's still exciting. i already ate half of the box of milk chocolate ones and my stomach is on the verge of hurting. i'm going out to dinner tonight to farmicia, so i hope that i don't ruin my appetite too much. i wanted to wear a dress and look nice, but it's still pretty cold out. i wish that this painting by charlene liu was printed on silk and made into a beautiful summer dress. but i guess that i'd just settle for temperatures over 75. i'm officially sick of jeans and boots. dress weather please come!

valentines day.

this morning i called candy stores all over philly to find what i now know to be called "smooth melty mints." {ew}

image from thechocolateshop.com

cris kept talking about them so i figured that i'd pick some up for him today, but i didn't know how hard it would be! i finally found a shop that had them at the reading terminal market, fisher's soft pretzels. it was a cute mennonite store and the guy remembered me from when i called this morning. i must have sounded really excited. i also picked up some daisies. i wanted to get tulips, but they were looking pretty sad. i hope that he likes them! if not, i'm picking wayne the mini-horse i found while torturing myself on petfinder, to be my valentine! i love you wayne!

paper cuts.

a while ago i was tooling around on ebay and i came across this seller listing a whole bunch of ‘hand made paper cuts’ and they were really cheap and the designs were really neat so i figured i’d risk the $10 {!!!} and get one. well, after sort of forgetting about it {shipping from china takes a while!} i got it yesterday and it’s really really great! i thought that since they have many of the same design it wouldn’t be hand done, but it definitely is not done by a machine. the pictures that they have in the listing are really small, which stinks. here is my crappy scan, which also stinks.

it’s about 11″X14″ and the detail in the trees are wonderful! it sort of makes me feel weird that it was so cheap and someone is doing all of that work, but i guess maybe they are just selling themselves short. ??? i don’t know, but i’m glad that i took the chance!

the seller i bought from is; http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZadatan100. and they have a lot of amazing designs to pick from.

stuff i want right now.

first off, werner herzog’s, of walking in ice. i’ve been looking for this book in store since it was re-released in december and no where has it! i could just order it online, but i haven’t yet, mostly out of spite over the fact that there is no other way i can pick it up. humph.

from amazon: In the winter of 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog made a three week solo journey from Munich to Paris on foot. He believed it was the only way his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, would survive a horrible sickness that had overtaken her. During this monumental odyssey through a seemingly endless blizzard, Herzog documented everything he saw and felt with intense sincerity. This diary is dotted with a pastiche of rants about the extreme cold and utter loneliness, notes on Herzog’s films and travels, poetic descriptions of the snowy countryside, and personal philosophizing. What is most remarkable is that the reading of the book is in continuity with the experience of watching his films; it’s as if, through this walk, we witness the process in which images are born. Although he received a literary award for it, this introspective masterpiece has lingered out of print since 1979. Beautifully designed and emotionally impressive, Of Walking in Ice is the first in a color-coded series of remarkable yet long-forgotten titles being republished by Free Association.

ahh, i want to read it so badly!

next up is, more work by oakland artist chris duncan.

i first saw his work in a group show at space 1026 here in philly in 2004. i really loved his work, but the one piece that i especially loved had already been purchased so that put a damper on the whole thing and i didn’t get anything. regretting it ever since, when i went to oakland in 2006 to visit my friend paul i asked if he knew if there was an artist named chris duncan who was in any shows. he said “he lives right around the corner, let me give him a call and we can go over there.” lucky me, they knew each other from their delaware days! we went to visit his home/studio and it was great! he, his wife, his baby, his home, everything was the cutest possible. he showed me around and i purchased a painting in my price-range. ever since then i’ve been trying to keep up with his shows but i don’t think that he’s been back to the east coast lately. i can’t wait until i own my own home one day and i have permanent places to put things. which bring me to…

a couch.
maybe not this couch specifically [from urban outfitters]. but something nice. something new. something not free [with good reason], covered in cat hair and picked apart. sometimes i can’t wait to be a bit more ‘grown up’.

weekend.

the winter always gets me down. cold weather cancels out anything fun {kite flying! hammocks! swimming in the ocean!} and brings an overwhelming sense of blah. this weekend i tried to combat the blah by actually doing stuff! crazy!

friday i went to a bunch of art openings with my friend katie henry. first, the kris chau show at vagabond in old city.

i really like her work a lot and already own one of her pencil drawings, but i still felt sad about not being able to fork over the 800$ for one of her new paintings. then it was a katie-katie-kat critical mass over to benna’s cafe for photos by kaitlin mosley.

and then a 5 minute walk-through of the “heart show” at jinxed which smelled too much like beer to warrant a longer stay. after a not-so-quick snack of sweet potato fries at royal tavern it was off to bed to get a good nights rest for ACTION-PACKED SATURDAY!

after a quick breakfast of pb&j, me and my special guy cris headed over to the stables at 2nd and george in northern liberties. this is where they house many of the horses for the carriage rides through the city. cris lives right around the corner so we stop by there a lot, and it’s one of my favorite places. usually there’s only one horse there while the others are out working. on saturday it was ‘trump’, who we quickly renamed ‘anthony moonbeam phantom’. he was a beautiful white horse with the best fuzzy ears and the stable hand told us that he was a favorite of PA governor ed rendell. woo.
so lovely. after saying goodbye we took a nice slow bike ride all over fishtown. it’s an area of philadelphia that i’m not familiar with at all, so it was neat to see parts of a new neighborhood. then, off to the zoo! well we just rode up girard and crossed the river to take a breather on the zoo benches then we headed through fairmount park, past the art museum, and off to a great lunch at mugshots, which is a coffee house across from the eastern state penitentiary {hence the name}. neither cris or i drink coffe {ew!} but they have really good sandwiches and it’s a nice place to sit and do the crossword.
they closed at 6 and kicked us out so we decided to head back east to cris’ house. on the way there we stopped at the spaghetti warehouse on 10th and spring garden to get some photobooth pictures! i’ve never eaten there, but it’s a nice place to spend 15 minutes and 3 dollars. after a quick pit-stop at cris’ to do some laundry and watch “jurassic park” we set off for whole foods, picked up some essentials and headed back further south to my house to make a delicious dinner of fake-sausage burritos and a lemon-strawberry cake! the cake was SO GOOD.
after i kicked cris’ butt in scrabble {ok, i only won by 18 points} we watched the “hmmm, hmmm, hiiiiimmm” episode of ‘married with children’ and fell asleep. FULL DAY.

to counter saturday, on sunday i didn’t leave the house once! and it was great! i started and finished reading ’south of the border, west of the sun’ by huruki murakami, watched ‘aguirre, the wrath of god’ , ate 4 pieces of cake, and started reading ‘the enchanter’ by nabakov.

the best weekend i’ve had in ages! as for the last two months of winter, i think that i might get netflix…

first.

i get bored at work and look at the internet all day. this is a place for me to talk about things that i like. here is the first thing:

it’s got all of my favorites; square format vintage photos, cats, dirty white pants and a summers day.

image from squareamerica.com