It was simply my best day, ever.
In truth I hadn’t expected it to be–grand yes, but so many aspects of the celebration sounded much more grand in planning, and the ceremony itself was not the most thought-out part of what we now call our Nine Day Wedding (& Four Hour Honeymoon).
I was rewriting the text [...]
It was heaven. A hangout of the original Bloomsbury Group: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Keynes, E.M. Forster, and also Piaget, D.H. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill. It is believed that English botanist (and special friend of Woolf) Vita Sackville-West planned the garden. It was the setting for the legendary elopement of actress Greta Garbo and Leopold [...]
For my birthday we visited Le Grotte de Frasassi and it was incredible. Thirteen km of the caves are known (it is thought that they extend at least 35 km); we were invited to see about a kilometer and a half of that.
“The speleologists held their breath when the stone began to fall [...]
“I am so awake,” Ali says into the darkness. Me too. Late night talk ensues: this weekend marks the halfway point {week 20 of 40} of our time here and as such, the mind turns to evaluate how we’ve been doing thus far.
I had many fantasies about nine! whole! months! to do whatever it [...]
“…the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup, but in myself.”
~ Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
guest artist: Selena Kimball.
I am of the opinion that the path to ecstasy is generally paved with something less than ecstatic, much of which is memory-based. In my world view, memory is a key to essential truths and transcendent [...]
is what my boyfriend is.
(he also rarely reads this blog, so I am at liberty to out him while twirling my dastardly mustache…)
I relish a good range, and the Alps are the finest–grand, playful, spooky–but I am not moved to throw myself down in the wild pansies and make grass angels, and that’s precisely what [...]
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it,
can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
~Galileo Galilei (Heliocentric extraordinaire)
Florence is known as a city of art–as well it should be–but the underpainting of the city is science, specifically the Medici science [...]
It is perched in a blown glass egg, the base of which reads Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza. The right middle finger of Galileo–this heretic’s reliquary–is tucked in a case among telescopes, celestial globes, solar orbs, and tellurium.
Or it would be, if the museum’s wonderous objects were not mostly hidden away while they [...]
We do a lot of driving on these trips. I’ve learned to do much from a moving vehicle–edit manuscripts, serve thoughtfully prepared snacks, take in the view, photograph it at 120kph. I’ve even overcome my sad public school grasp of European geography. It is different when you are…There. I often feel like a dog with [...]
We traveled to many villages and towns in Provence and the Luberon Valley–there was Avignon, home of Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes), called by poet Petrarch the “most foul and stinking city on Earth” (its not, but it sure is touristy!), and where we saw a couple waltzing in the morning sunlight on [...]