Some sightseeing

here you see the boston skyline from the cambridge side, close to MIT.

Wedding shoot

whenever i see a wedding shoot going on i get excited. i like to take some pics too. but not the standard ones the real, professional photographer is taking.... this one seemed like a real fancy one! i have often wondered about the clothes for the bridesmaids. who pays that? who chooses the dresses? so i asked some real americans and they told me that sometimes the bride let them decide, "just" tells them the kind of fabric and/or color. or she chooses, or all of them together. often all the dresses are the same, as above. but the bridesmaids themselves pay for them...

when we were wathing (and photographing) the wedding spectacle a security guard ask everyone not to do so. "since they paid for their privacy". they were in the brooklyn botanic garden. on a saturday. while the blossom trees were in full bloom. so... what privacy?! i just looked up, a shoot, for up to 20 people, costs 300 dollars (thats for the botanic garden, and ofcourse does not include the costs of the photographer and so on...), is 45 minutes and comes with a security guard to enforce time limit and to make sure the session is not "disrupted". ah well, by then i had taken my shots... :)

Spot the...

.... deer!

do you see them? we saw them when having a walk in the woods in lynn, 2 weeks back. 1 was actually on the main road, but ran away upon hearing/seeing us. they were not very scared and just did their grazing a little further away from us. amazing how they just blend in... i guess thats how they were designed... :)

Happy feet

just a quick post. we were so busy cooking/baking various homemade things (bread, dutch apple pie..) this evening, that we didnt have time to eat... or almost. it was almost tempting to go to the mc donalds to have something quick, which we both found very funny. then we did make some dinner...

above stone i found at the local cemetery. i expected somehow that it belonged to a young(er) person, but he was quite old. i only took pics of this side of the stone, and dont remember the name anymore. there was no reference as to why this was on the back. i found it a little odd!

for other taphophiles, that probably did a lot more effort for their posts, go here... :)

Dutch baby!

it is theme day again, and this time its "bakeries". this evening we spent quite some time making bread.... tomorrow we will bake it, so no picture of that.. anyways, as i wrote before, im not that good at taking pictures of food..

above a dutch baby we now sometimes make during weekends. its so good! i had never heard of a dutch baby before, and it has nothing to do with the netherlands, as far as i know. there is a wikipedia-entry about it (here), if you would like to read more about its origin; apparently it was introduced during the first half of the 1900s somewhere in seatlle. wikipedia also says that its similar to the dutch "poffertje", but its not!!

how to make one? preheat the oven to 400F. then mix 3 eggs, 2T sugar, 2/3 cup milk (buttermilk is ok-ish too, if you dont have milk, but it wont puff up as much), 1/2 cup + 2T flour, 1/4t vanilla, 1/4t salt and 1/2t cinnamon. while doing that, also put an ovensafe dish into the oven (like a round pyrexdish) with 1 to 2T butter. the dish should get hot and the butter melted, then spread it evenly over the pan. dump in above mixture and put it back into the oven until it puffs up. it really puffs up, thats so funny to see! then sprinkle some lemonjuice onto it and some powdered sugar and enjoy!! (i like to add a lot of lemonjuice, it tastes soooo good with the pancake and the sugar). above we went a little crazy, and added sliced strawberries. we got 3 entire boxes for only 5 dollars, but their taste was not the best. to get it better, i incubated them for a while with some liquor (like rum, or whatever you like), sugar and lemonjuice. when the dutch baby was done, we put the strawberries on and put it back in the oven just until the strawberries were nicely warm. hmmmmmm......!! the recipe i got from here, i just reduced the butter as it is far too much and upped the cinnamon... now i just hope our bread tomorrow morning will turn out good...

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While driving...

... dogs like to stick their head out of the window. i always find it so funny, even cute, sometimes... :)

this was taken when the weather was a bit better. now we have heavy rain, and its a little chilly. but it makes boston very green, trees are getting leafs again and grass is coming back. pretty! 

(this should have been posted last night, but somehow i fell asleep on the couch. that usually doesnt happen to me on a monday.... grrr!)

No news

no news today... (that sentence always reminds me of this song, which i only know because it was once used in a dutch commercial for... milk). i still didnt look at the pics i took yesterday (grrr!), and i didnt take any new today. it was time for some house cleaning. i keep finding it frustrating that this task is never ending. it takes so much time to do, and it can be tiring. worst of all...  the reward is... that you have to do it again, eventually. and again. hmppf.

ah well...

(this pic was actually taken at the occupy boston-camp, but i didnt find out what you are supposed to tell all your friends)

Freaky image

who doesnt know this image? i never entirely saw the movie, but i think more or less everyone knows this scene, and to which movie it belongs...

today we drove a bit around boston, and went to see the remains of a psychiatric hospital. once, the grounds were huge, but now only one building remained. it is abandoned, but it was interesting to see... i actually wanted to post a picture of it and write something about it, but i spend the entire evening reading about hospitals for the "mentally ill", looking at other blogs, reports of such places being haunted, photographs of people more brave than i am who went inside such buildings to picture all the creepiness. there are many huge psychiatric hospitals in the us, and many are closed by now. many abandoned, others converted to luxury apartments... highly interesting (but also sad) to read about all that stuff! but.... its way past midnight and now im too tired to look at the photos i took myself. grrr...  so... you will have to do it with this freaky iconic image of jack nicholson that we saw in new york last weekend. 

good night!

Free ride!

saw this on the window of some shop, quite a while ago... 

the week has gone by so fast! this evening me and tim both started with (almost) the same ingredients for making bread. only he used yeast and i used a sourdough starter... and... he is better at kneading the dough it turns out than i am. tomorrow morning we will bake them to see which bread tastes better. im very curious!! perhaps soon we wont be buying bread anymore...

Police car

somehow (unattended) police vehicles have a huge attraction on young people (i feel very old writing that), numerous times now i have seen scenes like the above. why? because its fun to have your picture taken in some weird pose with a police car in the background? because if there would be an officer inside the car it would be totally unacceptable? i dont know! whenever there is a parade or whatever going on and a lot of policemen are present, people also often ask to have their picture taken together with the officers. they usually oblige. passersby see that happening, and immediately ask for the same. i dont think this happens that much in the netherlands... :)

the girls above were really crazy. i managed to capture them at their most decent pose, somehow... when someone saw me taking their pic as well, he said; "yep, their real classy...." this was on st patricks day, back in march. the brown bag on the ground most likely contains a bottle of alcohol of some sort...
we are back to wearing jackets, and its a little rainy...

Center of....

...attention! in the brooklyn botanic garden. under the blossom trees... :)

just by being a (cute) baby, you get all the attention... nothing more is required. some people strive their entire life to get that attention back... how many actually achieve and/or earn it...? i think its funny....

Utterly indecisive....

indecisive as to which picture to post, from which cemetery, which grave, what to write.... grrrr.

eventually i choose this angel. i think it is absolutely gorgeous. it is in the holy cross cemetery in malden, not too far from our apartment. in fact, we biked there (the route was something like this, with some sidestreets here and there). our first bike ride on the streets this year! there are some 3 or 4 cemeteries close to each other in this area. i actually intended to go to another one, but my internal gps system was not working very well, and we ended up on this one. it was huge! rows and rows and rows of stones that were more or less the same shape, either black, brown or grey. only on the sides were some more elaborate stones, like the one above, perhaps placed there so that everyone can see them easily when driving by (most other visitors were by car). on the back of this stone is the family name, but i could not find anything about them on the internet, unfortunately. its the bertagna family, the first person buried in 1932, the last in 2001. 

the holy cross cemetery is a catholic cemetery, and most names sounded italian to me. one of the actors from the movie the godfather is buried at this cemetery too, but i think without knowing at least approximately where his stone is located, it will be impossible to find.. anyways, i never saw this movie and am more interested in what i just happen to stumble upon (preferrably something beautiful or something weird, haha...)

i really didnt know how to capture the beauty of this angel. and i also didnt know which pic showed it best, i.e. none does; i settled for this one. i placed 4 more on flickr, which you can see here.

for more taphophiles, go here!

Flowers, flowers!

in the brooklyn botanic garden this saturday we mostly saw scenes like above. everyone frantically taking pics of the (beautiful) flowers. or posing in front of the flowers. it was quite amusing to see.... seems like almost everyone has a real big camera, or even bigger.. :)

Two wives...

new york seemed bombed with ads for the new movie with johnny depp; dark shadows. at first i didnt even recognize him and thought it was for some weird tv series or whatever. i like johnny depp (the rum diaries was great! i guess that was his latest), but this one does not particularly interest me, certainly not after seeing this advertisement, or when tim told me it is about some vampire that is set free. but... its with johnny depp... so, i just looked it up, and even watched the trailer, and it might be quite funny! besides, its from tim burton, so his wife helena bonham carter is in it too, and these 3 people usually make for great movies, or at least interesting... (someone once mentioned johnny depp being the second wife of tim burton, which seems sort of true... :D).

this year we havent gone to the cinema much, which is unusual, but there is really nothing interesting playing. this one comes out in may, so i need to have a little patience...

oh, and now i see that originally dark shadows was indeed a tv series, playing during the end 60s, beginning of the 70s. the actor who played the vampire in that series just died april 13th (a friday), at the age of 87...

in boston we have horrible weather right now; heavy wind and rain (since hours already)...

Blossom snow!!

have you ever been surrounded by so many blossom trees that their branches formed a beautiful roof? i had not, until yesterday! as the wind blew lightly through the trees, pink snow was everywhere.... the cherry blossoms in the brooklyn botanic garden where at their peak so we went to see them... we had been wanting to go to new york since a few weeks, and reading about these blossoms was the nudge we needed to finally really get some bus tickets... we decided to do another 1-day new york trip, like we did in december. at 4.15 the alarm went off, and at 6.15 we were in the chinatown bus to new york! jeeejjj! before 11 we were in the botanic garden, and for whatever reason we did not have to pay the 10 dollar entrance fee... (when we left everyone did have to pay, we were lucky once again). it was soooo beautiful! and there were sooooo many people. and kids. and cameras.... and flowers, ofcourse. it was the perfect place for people watch... and i took a lot of pics..

after that we went to see some other stuff in new york, which i will show you soon, probably! when we got home around 11.30 last night we were too exhausted to do anything and also today will be a pretty slow day... :)

The flowers

and here are THE flowers i was allowed to snatch from a table after wednesday's dinner... arent they pretty?! or actually, tim had to take it off the table, it was so heavy!! but then i proudly carried it most of the way home. 

and they fill our entire apartment with their fragrance... nice!

Boston skyline

boston is visible from many smaller towns... above, for example, we were in lynn, some 11 miles from boston. we hiked a bit in lynn woods, and this photo i took from a tower we climbed. as it was such a clear day, we could see pretty far!

Harvard apparatus

i saw this machine in the lab and found it very funny. those pursuing a phd/having one will understand what i found so funny about it. does this machine really infuse and/or withdraw a phd? and in this case a harvard phd? tim is one of those "unlucky" ones who performs his phd work at harvard, yet will get the actual doctorate from the much less "prestigious" utrecht university in the netherlands.... (thats where i got mine too, haha).

anyways. unlike me, tim is a genius, as he won a price for his work. his work was selected, as well as 15 others, from a pool of some 300 harvard scientists. the price; 1000 dollars. not directly for him, but to spend on /towards the costs of a scientific conference (so that includes the travel/accomodation/conference fee, etc etc). on top of that, we had the honor this evening to dine with the scientific research committee, and other important harvard-people (i guess there were 100 or so). it was extremely fancy, and the entire affair probably costed more than a yearly postdoc salary.... which i somehow found extremely sad (as a postdoc salary is very meager (and does not include retirement savings. not even if you are american, i found out recently); but to spend it to feed some grey men from the scientific research committee and some "chosen" scientists at some fancy location it is quite a lot...!)

but well... for me the evening ended delightfully, as i joked to one of the ladies from the organization that i just saw a lady walking away with one of the bouquets from the dinnertable, and her reply was; please, take one too! otherwise they go to waste! and so we now have a beautiful new vase at home, with probably at least 50 dollars worth of very nicely smelling assorted flowers..... :D

Indelicate & unladylike

one of these stones is from sally morse, whose stone i showed you last week. this cemetery, the central burying ground, was actually established to alleviate overcrowding of the nearby cemeteries that i showed you earlier. as this burial ground was the furthest away from the market center of boston, this was the least popular cemetery. the graves here are from british common soldiers who died in combat or of disease during the revolution, foreigners who died while in boston, and some american patriots.

 a few commenters last week said something like "imagine everyone would would have their cause of death listed in such detail on their grave!" well yes, that probably would be weird. although i really didnt mind in this case. i guess they were just really surprised that "some stomach cramp" for just one hour resulted in her sudden and unexpected death. so much so, that they (her husband?) wanted it engraved on her stone...
a little more googling around about sally morse (thanks julie for pointing out she was named morse, and not morfe!), and i found the same article in 3 different newspapers, published around 1921, about a lady who apparently was not happy about sally's stone either. this lady went to the cemetery office and demanded that sally morse's stone be destroyed as the inscription is indelicate and unladylike! the secretary replied that he is in no position to destroy a stone. the lady then demanded that some sort of action will be taken while she waits in the office, to which the secretary replied, as it is the best/first that comes to his mind: "madam, that stone is of great value. harvard university has just been making an investigation and has pronounced that stone important evidence of the first authentic case of appendicitis. madam, that stone cannot be destroyed". "at the magic name of harvard the visitor retreated, vanquished, and went forth to tell her friends of the "appendicitis stone" as it came to be called". 

i have no clue whether this story is true, or when exactly it happened. i could not find anything about that, nor the original article in the detroit news to which this article refers, but surely it was an amusing find... . here you can read the entire article for yourself (and look at the advertisements too, they are funny!)

for more taphophilia, go here...!

Marathon Monday

the entire weekend it was pleasantly warm. but today, monday, it was HOT! it was some 30 degrees celsius (86 F). being the third monday in april, it was patriot's day in massachusetts, and the boston marathon. a day off for some, but not for everyone... (although this morning in the subway it seemed we were the only ones headed for work).

in between work, we went to finally catch a glimpse of this famous marathon. by now it was the third time that we were in boston during this day, and we had never seen it! it was hot! so hot. and all we had to do was walk a little and watch... that was almost too much for me already.. imagine all those that just ran 26.2 miles (some 45 kilometres!!) in this weather.... unbelievable... but 27,000 people did just that today.

most of my pics were crappy, so above a picture that tim took. amazing how so many runners still could smile while at the end of the race. or perhaps just because of that; this was at the 26 mile-point, they were almost there...