stephanieNY

Why aren't more things made of concrete? Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and awesome all year round.

Look how beautiful:

Sowa Unit by Kensuke Watanabe

More pictures, here.

The newest tallest building opened today in Dubai. Check out this video of the fireworks ceremony last night. kah-RAY-zeee.

The Burj puts all the other skyscrapers to shame. It's over 1000 feet taller than the now second tallest, or 1.6 times as high...!!!

(The poor Sears Tower is cheated by the Petronas Towers whose spires are part of the architectural design and therefore trump the Sears Tower's inhabitable space height.)

I got these amazing vintage candlesticks as a birthday gift from my friend. I love love love them and the foot-long skinny yellow candles they came with.

So naturally I went online window shopping for some furniture to match them, and found these gems at Reside.

All these things should probably live together in one room some day...in my home.

This week, instead of "what's for dinner?", it's "what soup is for dinner?"

Side note:
I'm going to start putting "loose recipes" up on my blog, for my own records. I've found myself wanting to make something for the second time and thinking of a picture of it on my site from way back when, and wishing I could remember how I made it. I suppose I could write them down the old-fashioned way and put them in some sort of accordion recipe-keeper, but my kitchen life isn't that organized right now. On another note, Adam got me a great book for Christmas called "Ratio: The Simplest Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking". The idea being to understand the basic ratios of ingredients in doughs, sauces, etc. For example...the ratio of flour to water to fat is 3:2:1 for pie dough, versus 3:1:2 for biscuit dough. With hopes of thinking in "parts" someday rather than "cups" and recalling recipes from the logic part of my brain rather than the memory part, here starts a temporary written log of loose recipes for now.

This round of pea soup:
1 lb split peas
3-ish potatoes
3-ish carrots
1-ish fennel bulb
1-ish onion
garlic
12-ish cups of stock/water

Adam and I came away from Christmas dinner with the leftover ham bone and are one soup into our ham-based soup creations. We've been living off a huge pot of minestrone that Adam made.

And I have some pea soup plans for this stock this week.

Thanks K&R!

To borrow a blog post format from JB,

Overheard in Sears at the Hanover Mall on Monday [read in a thick Boston suburb accent]:
The spraytan'll stick good this time, 'cause I took a showah last night.

Mmmm...It's good to be home.

Things I didn't do yesterday:

• Study for an exam
• Write a paper
• Go to school

Things I did do yesterday:

• Had coffee with my friend
• Went neighborhood food shopping
• Drank champagne
• Wrapped presents
• Watched 2 movies
• Baked cookies

http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/thumbprint_cookies/

The bus to Boston and I need a little time apart after a crowded and unpleasant time at Thanksgiving. So today, I'll be luxuriating on the train. I'll stretch out, plug my computer in, watch a movie maybe, and look out the window at the trees instead of the traffic. Aahhhh.

Oh, and I'm done with finals. Yes.

I could potentially be writing my last paper ever right now. I haaaaaate writing history papers, and every semester here we take a history class. And every semester, at this time, I am tortured by the task of spewing out some lame analysis of Thomas More's Utopia or Bramante's Tempieto. Not that those things are lame, I'm just not very good at saying something about them that someone else hasn't already in some book down in the library, so the papers end up being a bit lame. But I'm kinda digging the one I'm writing now. It is for my History of Theory class and our assignment is to analyze a piece of architectural theory. It's more of a subjective opinion piece, so I can blab on about what I think and how I feel. I read, and am writing about, Moisei Ginzburg's Style and Epoch in the context of Russian Constructivism...really good.

Aaaaaanyway, so next semester I am registered for a history class where the final is in the form of a presentation and not a paper. Yay!!! So moral of my story: since I don't plan on writing papers for fun after I finish school, today marks the end of my paper-writing days. It's been a rough road, but it's ending on a relatively good note.

Elizabeth and I, we like to talk on the phone sometimes.