Good music to kick January to the curb!

To close out the month of January:  Fitz & the Tantrums, along with a little Young the Giant, have gotten me through the snowy, windy and sometimes dreary month of January.  Bring on February!

 Pickin' up the Pieces of Love - F&T

 Moneygrabber - F&T

 Apartment  - Young the Giant

JPG Tribute to Amy Winehouse - too soon?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/amy-winehouses-dad-gaultier-fashion-tribute-in-bad-taste/2012/01/27/gIQAHE3fVQ_blog.html?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost

24 Clever Ideas to Make Life Easier

Ideas to Make Life  

Easier



        Hull strawberries easily using a straw.


     Rubbing a walnut over scratches in your furniture
             will disguise dings and scrapes

      Remove crayon masterpieces from your TV or
              computer screen with WD40.


    Stop cut apples browning in your childs lunch box
             by securing with a rubber band.


    Overhaul your linen cupboard, store bed linen sets
     inside one of their own pillowcases and there will
      be no more hunting through piles for a match.


    Pump up the volume by placing your iPhone & iPod
    in a bowl. The concave shape amplifies the music.


   Re-use a wet-wipes container to store plastic bags.


    Add this item to your beach bag. Baby powder
       gets sand off your skin easily, who knew?!


    Attach a Velcro strip to the wall to store soft toys.


    Use wire to make a space to store gift wrap rolls
  against the ceiling, rather than cluttering up the floor.


      Find tiny lost items like earrings by putting a
              stocking over the vacuum hose.


        Make an instant cupcake carrier by cutting
                   crosses into a box lid.


For those who cant stand the scrunching and
       bunching: how to perfectly fold a fitted sheet.


       Forever losing your bathroom essentials? Use
       magnetic strips to store bobby pins, tweezers
             and clippers, behind a vanity door


       Store shoes inside shower caps to stop dirty
        soles rubbing on your clothes. And you can
            find them in just about every hotel.


   A muffin pan becomes a craft caddy. Magnets
       hold the plastic cups down to make them
                      tip-resistant.


        Bread tags make the perfect cord labels.


      Bake cupcakes directly in ice-cream cones, so
         much more fun and easier for kids to eat.


   Microwave your own popcorn in a plain brown paper
    bag. Much healthier and cheaper than the packet
                             stuff.


     Install a tension rod to hang your spray bottles.


  Turn your muffin pan upside down, bake cookie-dough
  over the top and voila, you have cookie bowls for fruit
                         or ice-cream.


      Freeze Aloe Vera in ice-cube trays for soothing
                       sunburn relief.


   Create a window-box veggie patch using guttering.


      Use egg cartons to separate and store your
                  Christmas decorations.

Aida - What a spectacle!

Last weekend I left my house exactly three times: once, in the middle of the snow storm, to go to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  Yes, in Chicago, 8 inches of snow does not cancel classical music.  To wit, the CSO was packed. We saw a great show that included three main pieces: 

• Strauss  Overture to Die Fledermaus 
• Beethoven  Piano Concerto No. 1
• Dvořák  Symphony No. 8
• 
  
• It was fantastic.  However, I was 75% certain that I was going to freeze to death before we got home.  Fortunately, I am still alive (and blogging) today.  
• 
  
• Saturday morning, the snow pretty much cleared out and we ventured out to Trader Joe's to pick up some odds and ends.  We were really just looking for an excuse to get out of the house.  Saturday evening, we headed to the Lyric Opera to see Aida.  I had heard of Aida, but only in that way that you hear about Cats or Fiddler on the Roof - read: I knew nothing about it except that a lot of people like it.  
• 
  
• Luckily, the program had a great explanation of the plot, which I thought was much easier to follow than that of the Magic Flute.  In a word, Aida was amazing.  The production and cast were phenomenal.  The arias were beautiful and moving.  I did start to fall asleep toward the end -- it was 3 hours and 35 minutes, with 2 intermissions.  Looooong. But worth it.  
• 
  
• If you're curious, Wikipedia has a brief synopsis of it HERE. 

S$&@ Chicagoans Say

On a daily basis. Wow. Oddly accurate.

http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4ozmbjrg5&reload=3#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOfy5gNkKGOo&v=Ofy5gNkKGOo&gl=US

New Year's Eve - courtesy of Alma S. Photography

I took my camera to Alma & Doug's fabulous NYE party, but sadly did not take any photographs.  Thank goodness for Alma! I swiped a couple but you should go HERE to check out the rest. She's got so much talent! *and yes, I realize that I am posting about NYE at the end of January.  I missed a few weeks, so I'm trying to catch up.  Slow news month . . . :)




Love this photo - some of my favorite people in the city! (& not in the city :( )

I like this one - mid-laugh.

Gross - you should read this.

No really.  If you don't think about where your food comes from, you very well should: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-rodale/top-10-reasonsbr-to-avoid_b_1201560.html

Great idea for getting out the door on time!

Courtesy of Apartment Therapy: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/create-a-get-ready-playlist-to-leave-the-house-on-time-164525

 

 

Trip: Day 2 Vienna, Austria

I'm posting my trip recaps in small bites so as to not bore you with long posts full of beautiful Vienna photos :). 


On the second day, we woke up early to a fantastic full breakfast provided by our hotel.  We stayed at Hotel Royal in the middle of downtown Vienna.  We very seldom needed to go anywhere that we couldn't walk or take the u-bahn.  Because of our familiarity with public transit in Chicago, it is not difficult to quickly become familiar with the system of a new city.  Vienna's public transportation was consistently clean, quiet and comfortable.  I never once felt threatened, disgusted or even inconvenienced.  It was a very different experience than I have on a day-to-day basis in Chicago.  I am routinely disgusted, often inconvenienced and more often than not, intimidated by ominous-looking loiterers around my el stops.  I digress. 

After a great breakfast and bundling up, we headed to Schloss Schonbrunn (Schonbrunn Palace) and gardens for the morning.  This was the summer home for the Habsburgs, the ruling family of Vienna.  Schönbrunn Palace is a former imperial 1,441-room Rococo summer residence in Vienna, Austria. One of the most important cultural monuments in the country, since the 1960s it has been one of the major tourist attractions in Vienna. The palace and gardens illustrate the tastes, interests, and aspirations of successive Habsburg monarchs.

 After the weirdo museums, wandering around Spittelburg.  It used to be quite seedy but apparently, it has become adorable. :) 

 I don't even pretend to understand art like this.  

 Yum. Free breakfast. 

 Schonbrunn back gardens. 

 Palace in the background. 

 I love art, but this museum was aptly nicknamed the Wiener museum after we spent several delirious hours exploring rooms full of art, mostly by Egon Schiele and Herman Nitsch.  Just google them or watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhrPgx7G3qU. 

Claudia Bosse's art installation, featured about a minute or so into the video, (the name escapes me) was a padded room with voices and weird glass boxes.  I felt crazy.  If that was the intended emotion, she did her job. 

 It was at this point in the Wiener museum (I use that term ironically), when I was falling asleep standing up/horrified by so many Wiener self-portraits, that we decided to breeze through the other two levels and grab a snack and some coffee.  

On Schonbrunn: We took what was probably the best audio-guided tour of any museum or any monument I've ever experienced.  It was very detailed and even allowed us to walk through the room in which Franz Joseph kept his private quarters, the family's dining room and even the room in which a little Mozart made his debut to the ruling family.  After that, we headed to the gardens and monuments behind the palace.  We were afforded some of the best views in Austria.  It was overcast and chilly, but we arrived early enough that there were few crowds.  After we finished wandering around, we explored yet another Christkindl Markt before heading back to our side of Vienna for a couple of museums: The Leopold and The MUMOK. 

The Magic Flute

I'm a little obsessed with it right now.  My husband and I saw it first in Vienna at the Statsoper, which I'll post about later this week.  We recently saw it again at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  We saw MacBeth there about a year ago.  It was beautiful but the production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte wins my vote.  It is is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue.  If you're interested in the backstory, click here for a brief synopsis from The Met's website. 



Our interest in the Magic Flute has led to us exploring the possibility of seeing other shows very soon.  Aida is up next, I hope. By the way, you'd probably be surprised by how much of the music you're familiar with from the Magic Flute.  For example, try listening to the Queen of the Night Aria.  Beautiful!

Sunday = Pie Day

 

My husband made a chicken pot pie because we decided it was too cold to leave the house today. 

It was my idea to use the remaining dough to make mini blueberry, banana & pecan pies. 

Pretty things: Kiel James Patrick

I've blogged about KJPbefore, but I can't help it.  I love it.  So beautiful. 



“O time, thou must untangle this, not I.

It is too hard a knot for me to untie”. —Shakespeare

Snow last week. . .

With more to come this evening!