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.

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.) 

dining area

on a whim one day when hhh was out of town, i changed around the entire room: the sofa went against a different wall, the fireplace went into the nook where the dining table currently is, and the table went into the middle of the room. it didn't look quite right though, so i moved it all back. at least it was a good workout. this is what it looks like: 

what do you think of the gallery wall? too cluttered? thinking of switching it out for one bigger piece. 

there's something about autumn that makes me want to change things up around the apartment. (although i should probably be focusing on work now that school is back in session, and not on random household improvement projects.) so here are the photos of the dining area, because i'll be mixing it up soon. 

(actually, that floor lamp has already migrated to poughkeepsie and a new one has taken its place.) hhh found the chairs upstate for cheap. one of the terrariums are by twig, the other is by me. vase from anthropologie. the art deco mirror was found at the ps 321 flea, before it was the bk flea. art on the walls: a couple from clare elsaesser, custom artwork by yina kim done for this piece by hhh, a black and white photo of mlk jr. eating a slice of pizza, a bunch of giraffes, and a bunch of dogs. 

rainbows

there's some reshuffling going on in the guest room and office, and this little shelf of delights is going to be finding a new home soon. but i love the orderly colorfulness, don't you?

i grabbed the dachshund bookends from a jonathan adler warehouse sale a few years back. the acrylic shelf is from cb2. the books are wallpaper city guides, and the tapes are hhh's.

saturday

today will be a working day for me, so it's a good thing there's coffee. hope the rest of you are out there enjoying the sunshine!

the trusty chemex, a marimekko mug from a former student of hhh's, and a gorgeous wooden canister i received a gift for dogsitting grimke.