rearranging the living room

as you may or may not know, we recently had a leak in our living room that damaged the floors. this necessitated a move, plumbers, hvac technicians, and finally, new maple planks. after weeks (unbearably long when you are already very pregnant and wanting to hang nursery prints rather than deal with stripped concrete floors), we are finally moving everything back this week. hhh and i contemplated a new arrangement for the living room, but i'm not totally sold on it. here are some photos: 

just as a reminder, this is what it used to look like: 

what do you think? should we stick with the tried-and-true or embrace the change? 

reviving the garden

its finally warm enough to take my indoor-wintering plants outside again. they made the move this weekend...right in time for a windy rainstorm. but they seem to have survived! all the dead grass and leaves also got cleared over a productive afternoon. here's a quick look at the progress so far:

those lovely pink and orange ranunculus (ranunculi?) are actually newcomers this season. the spring colors make me instantly happier. the rubber plant was sheltered from the freeze in our guest room and looks happy to be back outside. the leaves of the climbing hydrangea come back each year without fail, but i'm keeping my fingers crossed for blooms this year.  

no idea what this lush thing is, but it looked tropical so it went indoors too. it's grown some since the fall too! i've returned it to its shady spot on the table right outside the door. 

these grasses are coming right back! I'm soo pleased.  

the ones next to it aren't doing as well though. I've been anxiously examining it daily for new shoots.  

the cherry tree always looks so good in the spring and early summer, only to succumb to mildew in august. hope i can avoid it this year!

I loove these mini "blooms"...the stonecrop turns purple later on but they are a nice green now. so glad to see they survived this year's crazy temps. 

willa lounges in a sun patch while i work... 

what else should I plant this year? I need to put in my herbs soon...i'm thinking rosemary, thyme, parsley, and basil. the mint is of course coming back by itself (weed that it is) and so have the garlic chives (super excited about that since i didn't expect it). I also picked up a little pot of oregano at the farmer's market. man do I love spring. 

working from home

i usually work from home. there is bottomless coffee (and the good kind, too!), an ergonomic chair for my creaky back, and willa sunning herself somewhere nearby. all my books and papers are here, and i can stay in my pajamas. for all these reasons, i'm usually pretty happy here, and productive. but there are also distractions: like when i decide to photograph my workspace for my blog instead of actually using it, or when i decide that all the rugs need a good vacuuming because i have no idea what words are supposed to come next in the dissertation. (note that these procrastinations only happen when i'm dissertating and never when i'm doing actual paid work, for some reason....) 

there are of course those days where i end up in a coffee shop, but it doesn't happen very often. i realized that i spend a lot of time in this space, but haven't yet talked about it here! so here are a few photos...it's still pretty cluttered but much tidier than it usually is. (especially the desk area.) 

the office has been rearranged a couple of times...initially, the shared desk was in the middle of the room, since we thought we might also use it for dinner parties. (no photos, unfortunately.) that never really happened, so we eventually moved it off to the side of the room by the window, so that there was room for a living area with a sofa and a coffee table. this is what it looked like for for a year and a half or so: 

when we got hhh a campus place in poughkeepsie, we moved most of the furniture in the photo above to that apartment. i also took the opportunity to acquire a new, lovely sea foam green couch. the white shelves are elfa, and that midcentury credenza was a move-in splurge from circa60. hhh got the hsieh teching on the wall at a charity auction hosted by the now shut exit art.  we saw a hsieh exhibit at the moma on our epic 8-hour long second date, so it's a nice reminder of the early days. :p (even though frankly, i find it a little depressing, given that it's of tally marks on a cell wall to mark off the days of self-imprisonment.) 

so that's where i spend most of my weekdays! let me know if you want to come work with me sometime.

dwell magazine!

highlight of the week: our apartment was featured in the recent special issue of dwell magazine! (ahhh!) 

and the one-page feature! my job here is done.

(you can always see more of the apt here on the blog.) 

have a great weekend, everyone!

snow day

i was going totally stir crazy today indoors. it snowed last night, but it's quickly turning into that special brand of yellow-ish brown new york city slush that you want to avoid at all costs. everything is dead and sad (by everything i just mean my outdoor plants, not people or anything). and on monday, the semester starts and i have to (i mean...get to) teach, so i can't just sit around watching my paperwhites grow anymore.  i've been propagating some jade plant cuttings too, but recently realized that i was doing it all wrong. this seems to be a theme with my gardening...i really should research then cut, rather than the other way around. anyway, we'll see if i was able to save them...stay tuned. 

my sad dead yard.

how i wished my yard looked. (this is actually a garden near the river cafe and brooklyn bridge park in the summer of 2014.)

so instead, for some insta-plant gratification,  i went up fifth avenue to zuzu's petals. zuzu's is the neighborhood florist (it's weirdly also the name of the ramen shop in the neighborhood, but there's no relation that i can see), and i'm always tempted to submit a job application when i go in there so i can be surrounded by beautiful flowers all day long. everyone in there is living the dream, if you ask me. 

so i trudged through the said slush and got myself some snow day plants. this is what i came home with: 

the green leafy thing with purple undersides is a calathea, and the pinky-green plant is a chinese evergreen.

a close-up of the bright pink edges of the chinese evergreen. it went perfectly into the crinkle planter from cb2. 

i instantly felt 1,000 times better. aren't those lovely? the google gods say that they are both low-light plants, and the calathea is from the tropics. the "siam aurora" chinese evergreen is apparently a new hybrid - they don't all have the variegated pink coloring. anyway, now that i have these plants, i suppose i can go on living until spring comes. but i may need another new houseplant or two if this miserable weather keeps up. (hhh, don't say i didn't warn you.)