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January 27, 2007
Good New York flicks?
We're thinking about going to New York City in the springtime, so we're starting to watch films taking place there to get the feeling of the place before we go. Anyone have suggestions--movies or books?
So far, some of the ones we've watched/are watching/plan to watch are:
*Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence (Joanna's read the book, and we're planning to watch the movie together.
*Ric Burns' many hour documentary New York.
*The haunting indy film In America, taking place in Hell's Kitchen
Any other ideas, folks? We'll put together a list...
Posted by Tim and Jo at 3:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 25, 2007
ancient odds and ends
No fair! When we clean the church, all we find are last week's bulletins and ladybug carcasses.*
Church's Kneeler yields a trove of artifacts
Tim chuckled at the bit about the gum wrappers hastily hidden from the "patrolling nuns." It brought back his own childhood memories of nuns: "Stop slouching and sit up straight young man!"
*Ladybugs are apparently quite a fertile--and short-living--species, as we discover several times a year.
Posted by Tim and Jo at 6:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2007
Chicken Tagine
Here's what I made the other night.
I started out with a recipe for Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons, but I made a bunch of changes, adding lots of vegetables, changing the spices, and using rice instead of couscous.
The cut-up veggies reminded me of a brightly colored Easter egg.
The preserved lemons and the olives were bright and shiny. We found the preserved lemons at our favorite little Middle Eastern store in the Strip District. I hadn't had a chance to use them before, but they're wonderful--like an exoticly perfumed lemon, missing some of the sourness.
Then out come the exotic spices...
And finally...
Eating this reminded us of being in the Latin Quarter in Paris--walking down a narrow alley, we heard a woman shouting "Couscous! Couscous!" and found ourselves walking into a teeny hole-in-the-wall Moroccan restuarant, Chez Momo and eating some of the best food we had in Paris.
Posted by Tim and Jo at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2007
Random fragments...
I've been feeling rather unbloggy lately--Trying to Figure Out Things That Shouldn't Be Blogged About In Public + the busyness of the beginning of the semester. So, here are just a few bits and pieces to try to get back into a bloggy frame of mind...
*I dressed up nice to try to make a good impression as I taught my first class a couple weeks ago. When I drove to school, one of my shoes felt rather loose--I figured it had come untied (a perennial problem for me). When I got to school and went to tie it, I realized that I was wearing one of my shoes and one of Tim's shoes. So much for being all put together!
*Teaching has been really fun this semester. I'm teaching "class piano"--to very beginning students. There are twenty keyboards that I can hook into my keyboard at front. So far, though, I've been fairly low-tech in the way I've taught it. They're a fun group of students, many of them seniors looking for a low-key, fun class to finish out their college careers.
*I finished a round of grant/fellowship applications for next year, and one job application. Phew, I'm glad that's over for now--it's time to get back in dissertation mode.
*I want to cook more this winter, fun unusual foods when I can. Now that Tim has finished his degree (woohoo!), he's no longer gone for night classes (more woohoo's!). The other night I made a middle-eastern chicken stew with preserved lemons and olives. It tasted exotic and perfumey. Maybe I'll post the recipe...Next week I want to try my hand at a beef curry.
*We've gotten hooked on BBC renditions of Dickens novels. And the novels themselves. I'm reading Pickwick Papers for the first time, and I've fallen madly in love with Samuel Weller--he's a cockney Sam Gamgee--and with dear Mr. Pickwick.
"I never heerd, mind you, nor read of in story-books, nor see in picters, any angel in tights and gaiters - not even in spectacles, as I remember, though that may ha' been done for anythin' I know to the contrairy -- but mark my words… he's a reg'lar thorough-bred angel for all that; and let me see the man as wenturs to tell me he knows a better vun."--Samuel Weller, Pickwick Papers
Tim just finished up reading Martin Chuzzlewit, so we're watching that together.
*We've had a lot of fun with the high school group at church. We've been teaching them about some of the nineteenth-century attacks on Christianity--Nietszche, Marx, Darwin--and tomorrow we're going to wrap up by having them find pop culture references to the ideas we've studied. We found a great clip from Hitchcock's Rope dealing with supermen, a short bit from Firefly that contrasts rational modernism with postmodernish neo-orthodoxy, possibly a segment from The Simpsons, maybe a bit from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and of course, John Lennon's "Imagine." They're such a fun, bright group of guys (
*Christmas was really fun--we went down to Atlanta this year, and I stayed for almost two weeks. Here's a picture of one of our fun presents--once I get the gumption up, I'll make some nice chocolat chaud pour deux.
Posted by Tim and Jo at 10:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack