FRED & GINGER SNAPS!!!

Some of my all-time favorite movies are the ten films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers filmed together between 1933 and 1949.  While a friend and I were completing a marathon viewing event of their movies recently, I was struck by a craving for a cookie, and I thought of ginger snaps, and then the moment of genius happened: we could make Fred and Ginger snaps!   So we did.  We decided that the best way to get Fred into the ginger snaps would be either to bake them in the shape of iconic props or items from their films or to decorate them, post-baking, with images evocative of Fred (and Ginger) and their films.  While shaping the cookies didn't work so well, our decorations were a success!  And the cookies were delicious and the perfect accompaniment to our movie marathon.

The shaped cookies looked really good--until we baked them and they turned into blobs!

all 10 movie titles, plus some assorted designs

"top hat, white tie, and tails" --from the song "Top Hat" in the movie Top Hat

Fred and Ginger!

Meanderings in Massachusetts

Now that I'm officially a college graduate, I once more have time to do fun stuff!  (Okay, I had fun while finishing my last semester in school, I'll admit it--but now I have time to blog about it again.)  Anyway, to spice up my summer, I decided to visit some friends in Western and Central Massachusetts.  My first stop was Northampton, a delightful college town (home to Smith College).  On my second day there, we explored Smith's delightful botanic garden.  Their plants were fantastic enough to make it worth spending about an hour in various greenhouses on an afternoon topping over 90˚!  I took too many pictures to share them all here, but below are some of my favorite plants.

Okay, so this isn't a plant!  But I thought I should include a photo of the greenhouses that we visited, one of several components of the college's botanic garden.

Cool cacti!

Maybe the weirdest plant I've ever encountered!
It perhaps doesn't show in the photo,
but this looked very much like a string of small, dead, animals...

Poppies!!!  One of my favorite flowers.

The first day I was in Northampton, to backtrack in my tale, we ventured up to Shelburne Falls, Mass., to visit its famed bridge of flowers and glacial potholes.  (These last are not, in fact, extra-large divots in the roadways but a neat natural rock formation.)  It's a really cute little village, actually part of Buckland, Mass. and Shelburne, Mass.  There isn't much to do, aside from checking out a few dozen cute little shops and eateries, and of course, the bridge of flowers (an old trolley bridge, now a foot-bridge, planted with all sorts of flowers and shrubs) and glacial potholes.  It's a very beautiful spot to visit, worth the trek to the north-western quarter of the state.

Kinky books?  There were a lot of funky shoes scattered around Shelburne Falls... I'm not sure why... 

irises on the bridge of flowers

roses on the bridge of flowers (which spans the Deerfield River)

bridge of flowers...

the bridge of flowers seen from the iron bridge

(about the potholes)

an example of said potholes

After my stay in Northampton, I ventured east across the Connecticut River for a lovely meal with a friend at the Amherst Brewing Company (in Amherst, Mass.), where I enjoyed a very interesting glass of one of their own brews, titled "Gone Postal."  Happily, it did not make me go postal, and was quite pleasant.  Then I continued eastward to Ashby, a small town right on the border with New Hampshire, in central Massachusetts, where another friend resides.  There isn't much to do in Ashby (it's a very small town), but the whole area is very scenic--think lush greenery and rolling hills.  We enjoyed an afternoon keeping cool in the town's lovely public library, as well as a trip to Peterborough, N.H. on a gray afternoon, and a sunny morning picking strawberries at Barrett Hill Farm in Mason, N.H.  We were rewarded for our work with a delicious strawberry pie for breakfast this morning!  And now I'm back home in eastern Massachusetts, having enjoyed a lovely trip through some other parts of the state.

My picturesque picking partner!

Very Elegant Vanderbilt Estate

Last weekend, my mom and one of my aunts came out to visit me at Bard. We did a lot of local wandering, but the most noteworthy place we visited was without a doubt the Vanderbilt Estate in Hyde Park, NY. It's the smallest of the Vanderbilt homes scattered along the East Coast, but what it lacked in size (it is still a pretty sizeable home, with three stories above ground and two below) it certainly made up for in elegance. What makes this estate so fun to visit is that it was donated to the government with all its original furnishings, so you really feel as though you've stepped back in time to about a century ago (except for the presence of the other tourists, of course). I personally felt like I'd been transported into a novel by Edith Wharton, and I mean that in the best way. But enough of what I thought; I'll let the photos do the rest of the talking.

the estate from outside

the foyer

the ladies' salon

a guest bedroom (I believe)

one of the bathrooms
(pretty snazzy plumbing for the turn of the 20th century)

Mrs. Vanderbilt's dressing room

Part of the servants' quarters... this is in the basement!
(That's a pretty nice window for a basement, huh?)

The kitchen--also in the "basement."

Awesome Chai at Atomic Cafe

The photo pretty much says it all! Whenever I come to this hip little cafe in downtown Beverly, MA, I get their chai tea, and it is always delicious. Being there today with my French reading even made me feel like I was back in Paris, for a moment.

A Pleasing Puzzle

First of all, my apologies for not posting in so long! It was a busy end to the semester, and of course the holidays, although lovely, were also busy, busy, busy! One of the nice little activities that was keeping me occupied was this great puzzle that my dad gave me for Christmas. I especially liked it because it reminded me of my road trip from a couple of summers ago. I had a lot of fun putting it together!

PICKLE FEST 2012!

Today was the day... a big day... a day I've been anticipating for a good two years: PICKLE FEST 2012!

I couldn't go to last year's Pickle Fest as I was in France last November, but I went my freshman and sophomore years at Bard, and it was a blast!  This year's festival did not disappoint!  It was just as I remembered it: a kind of awkward event in a series of tents set up behind the community center of Rosendale, NY, a rural hamlet about 30 minutes south of Bard on the other side of the Hudson River.  Oddly, the inside of the community center and two of the three tents were occupied by vendors selling largely un-pickle related merchandise, as in past years, but it's really the pickle tent that counts!  The biggest of the tents, it is lined with various pickle-sellers from across the Northeast, offering lots of free samples on little toothpicks and hawking everything from traditional cucumber pickles (dill, sweet, sour, new) to other pickled products (pickled beets, dilly beans) to the slightly unusual (pickled garlic, pickled fruits) to the truly bizarre (pickled meat, chocolate-covered pickles).  After all the samples I tried today, I feel I'm becoming something of a pickle expert!  Anyway, we all had a great time, even with the bittersweet knowledge that we will probably not be in the area for next year's Pickle Fest.

Chocolate covered pickles!  (On a stick!)

It was a sweet pickle inside.

Pickles on a stick!
(Because you couldn't get sticks and do this at home...)

LIVE MUSIC at Pickle Fest!

Because it wouldn't be a pickle fest without funnel cake...

The pickle's lackey isn't the best photographer...
But we still got a photo with the giant pickle!!!

I'm not sure where to begin with this...

The back of my sweatshirt...
the grammar is pretty atrocious, but they're pickle people, not writers...

The front of my sweatshirt!

Fabulous Fall Foliage!

Autumn has been a busy season for me; although our foliage here at Bard is long gone, I managed to sneak in a study break a few weeks ago during peak foliage and capture some of the colors!  Now that it's cold and gray and I have a moment to spare, I thought it would be nice to look back at all this brightness.  It's the next-best thing to being back on that sunny stroll!

Bard Farm

Bard Farm: glamor shot of the lettuce (which is really yummy)