Today the Washington Post announced the winners of their 2nd Annual Peeps Diorama Contest. I think it’s pretty awesome, but there are some hardcore competitors out there who have been hording Peeps from other holidays throughout the year to use for their entries. My favorite was the runner up “Peep Art,” which I wish I’d thought of! I think I might have to start planning a submission for next year….

Happy Easter!

Every week or so when it’s time to plan meals and make the grocery list, I have a habit of camping out on the sofa with a half dozen or so cookbooks and flipping through them page by page, reading recipes after recipe to Drew (this is not his favorite part of the week).

I’ve only recently branched out from cookbooks to books about cooking. On the plane to LA last week I finished up Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. I have no particular memories of watching her cooking show, but DO remember the first time I saw her kitchen at the Smithsonian. And of course, no true cookbook aficionado could be without Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Even if you’re not all that into cooking, it’s a very interesting read—she attended the wedding of Ernest Hemingway’s son, her husband was investigated during the McCarthy era, she was buddy-buddy with James Beard. Another little-known tidbit is that Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published by the same editor that brought The Diary of Anne Frank to the US. Of course, if you DO like cooking, there’s a lot to be inspired by. I was especially happy to read that Mrs. Child was all about the kitchen gadgets, which I believe fully justifies my desire to buy quiche pans, tart pans, scone pans, popover pans… you get the picture.

After enjoying “My Life in France” so much, I picked up Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I’m about halfway through now and am finding it a little less enjoyable—I think Bourdain tries a little too hard to be shocking and the book kinda jumps a bit much for my taste. I think next on my list will be Julie and Julia, a book by a woman who resolved to cook every single recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a single year (and recommended by Astrid!). I’d love to try the same thing myself as I’ve barely cracked my copy, but can’t imagine I’d have the time or energy! Maybe I could handle one a week, though… My goal for this week is to test out the recipe for chocolate souffle—I’ll let you know how it goes!

OH HAI! Sorry about that ahem online leave of absence. We’ve been busy? I guess? But now it’s March and a young blogging couple’s fancy turns to updating their blog, finally.

It’s been a long few blustery Arlington winter months—not a snow day, not even a snow delay to be had this year, though. We had the best time visiting the Wisconsin family in January, culminating in an amazing trip to the NFC Championship game at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. We got to watch Brett Farve’s last game, even though we didn’t know at the time. It was a heartbreaker of a game, and the coldest I have ever been ever. FYI for our mid-Atlantic readers: -7 degrees for five hours is cold. Man, oh man.



Sarah’s been on two business trips this winter: one to sunny Miami and now a second to sunny Los Angeles (where she’s feeling under the weather!); I’ve been to NYC. For 19 hours. However, I got to go to the gleaming Apple Cube store on Fifth Avenue, so all’s right with the world.

I’ve also been enjoying my introduction to studio portraiture course at the Smithsonian. Dear Rolling Stone: if Annie Leibovitz is too pricey for your next celebrity headshot, gimme a call.

So last weekend the hottest ticket in town was at, of all places, the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was the last weekend for Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, a much-hyped retrospective of the famed photographer’s work from 1990-2005. The show was sold out for the whole weekend, but luckily we had bought our online earlier. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have to wait in line, though. The will call line to just get in the building was down the block. And then when we finally made it inside, it was like Disneyworld—another room full of snaking lines. We were only left with about an hour and a half to see the show, but we managed to plow through without too much trouble.

But back to the exhibit… conventional wisdom suggested that this would have been a deeply personal show for Liebovitz given that it chronicled the death of the births of her children, death of her father, and the long illness and eventual death of her partner, the art historian Susan Sontag (referred to throughout the exhibit as her “long-time friend”… don’t even get me started). I was expecting something not quite a swan song—she’s 58 and clearly has many productive years ahead of her—but something approaching that idea. I expected to see some kind of tangible shift in her work during the highs and lows of that time. I expected to leave with the same “heavy” as walking out of Sally Mann’s What Remains. What we really saw more of Liebovitz’s established style chronicling events that just happened to be taking place in her own life. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, though. Knowing the personal loss she suffered, I actually saw in the photographs a hope and perseverance I wasn’t looking for.

Generally speaking, the photographs of her family were much more interesting than the celebrity photographs that made her famous. There were only a few of the celebrity portraits that I hadn’t seen before—the iconic photos of Demi Moore, Mick Jagger, Hillary Clinton, Chris Rock, Scarlett Johanson, HRH Queen Elizabeth (it was actually the first time those photos were on public display, even though they hit the AP wire a couple of months ago), etc. Not terribly surprising, but no one does it better than her. The family photographs, on the other hand, were presented in a smaller scale and had much more of a spontaneous snapshot quality. I was also pleasantly surprised with a small collection of really elegant photos of athletes.

The show ended with a newer series of landscapes shown in monumental scale, and while the symbolism of moving forward with her work following personal tragedy was clear, I wouldn’t consider it her best work. Overall, though, great show that you should try to catch if it travels near you.

You know how they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Same is true for Craigslist. Drew and I have been in desperate need of a new dresser for a loooooong time now and have been checking out Craigslist regularly for a used one. I got super-excited today when I found the the PERFECT dresser, almost new, solid wood, big enough for all of our clothes, and about 1/8 the price of a comparable new one. I got Drew onboard, we reserved our Zipcar truck, and headed out to NOVA to pick it up. And that’s when things started to suck. A lot.

So, naturally, the people selling the dresser live in one of those very tall, narrow townhouses where the front door is even a floor and a half above street level. And the dresser was on the top floor. As I already mentioned, this thing is SOLID wood. It weighs approximately 4,000 pounds. It does not come apart like IKEA furniture. To call it a dresser is really an understatement. It is more of an armoire with drawers on one side and a door with shelves on the other. It is as tall as I am.

So after wrangling the dresser down the first double flight of stairs (very narrow, sharp angles, low ceilings, loose carpeting), which easily took 20 minutes, we had to get it down to street level. Another double flight of stairs. Ug. We pretty much alternated smooshing me against the house and nearly losing the thing over the railing. Also, Drew was on the bottom and I suspect that if we had lost our grip from the top it would have flattened him like a pancake.

But things got really bad when we got back home and it was just the two of us to move it. By that point, we were so exhausted from carrying it down the stairs, we couldn’t even carry it on flat ground from the truck to the apartment. So we slid a blanket underneath the thing and dragged it in. We completely shredded the blanket, but the dresser is in the apartment (though not the bedroom, couldn’t handle that). Our backs hurt, our arms hurt, our legs hurt, our hands hurt. Was it worth it? I dunno:



BTW, Drew has requested to be the hero in this tale, and it’s true. He’s a big, strong, helpful husband and I take full responsibility for nearly killing us both with an extremely large, extremely heavy piece of furniture.