Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Caged Gracie

this is a life-like statue of grace sherwood allen. she died before turning 5 years old, of the whooping cough (an awful bacterial infection still affecting nearly 50 million people each year, killing nearly 300,000), in 1880. the statue is made of marble, by sidney h morse. without the glass vitrine, it would not have been white like this, being exposed to harsh winters and hot summers for over 100 years. it would have been greenish from algae and what not, like all the other stones and statues. but.. to me it was a little eerie. poor little gracie. caged forever. even worse; during winter this glass cage is covered by a metal one to further protect this "historical object" that it now became.
this is at the forest hills cemetery, of which i showed you pictures earlier. early march, the trees were still bare and the grass was yellowish (normally covered by snow, or just recovering from snow during that time of the year). we had visitors this weekend (from texas), and they themselves wanted to see a cemetery! jeejjj! so we drove to this one, as i have decided it probably is the most beautiful/interesting cemetery in boston. had it been beautiful last time, it was even more amazing this saturday, with the grass so green and blossom trees full in bloom. that time i sort of searched for gracie, but could not find her. we did see some metal thing that we joked could be a rocket of some sort; she then was still caged! and we just had walked around and around and had no clue that gracie was patiently standing underneath. poor little girl. 
her dress is very pretty, also from the back, but i now see i did not really take pictures of that side..... next time, as we will surely return to see how this cemetery looks like in summer.... (if i have the patience to wait till summer).
for more taphophilia, go here..., and here are some more pics of little gracie.

Monday, May 7, 2012

From afar...

... you can still faintly see the boston skyline! just compare it to this picture...
above we were in gloucester, rockport, or somewhere in between.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Whats there...

... to see?! 
this is an old pic, taken during the st patricks day parade. it was funny to see the kids all like above, suddenly. something interesting surely was coming! (it turned out to be a big red elmo....).
this weekend was busy, we had friends over and did "boston sightseeing". even so we do that almost every week by ourselves, im somehow quite tired now!! but it was nice (and i ate too much. beehh. tomorrow i have togoto the gym)! we even went bowling, saw some cemeteries, a museum and whatnot....

Some sightseeing

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

Friday, May 4, 2012

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... :)

Thursday, May 3, 2012

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... :)

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

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... :)

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

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...

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!)

Sunday, April 29, 2012

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!

Saturday, April 28, 2012

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...

Thursday, April 26, 2012

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....

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

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!

Monday, April 23, 2012

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.. :)

Sunday, April 22, 2012

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... :)

Friday, April 20, 2012

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!

Thursday, April 19, 2012

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!