We love to talk about the weather here

It's really cold here in Saint Paul.  I tried to run from the mundane-ness that is winter, but I ran straight into a snowbank.  And so begins a long, snowy winter.

Spooky.  Future American Horror Story location?

And we're walking...

Another spooky photo. Or is everything spooky when deserted?

The infamous Mickey's Diner

Snow that's waiting to fall on your head

Rice Park: a place you can go to feel better about your electric bill. 

Park Square Theatre and a lovely shoveled sidewalk between two bars. 

The only good thing about snow is it makes winter not so dark. 

St Paul Flavor

Somehow I got caught Running from the Mundane and ended up moving all the way to California!  My impending departure from Minnesota came quickly and as a very lucky girl I have a tall, handsome boyfriend who let me pick anywhere to go my last night in the cities.  Having not been to many fancy restaurants, I had a lot of options to choose from between Minneapolis and St Paul.  My heart has a soft spot for St Paul so I narrowed down my choices to: The Strip Club, Heartland, and Meritage.  Since I don't get the chance to eat seafood often, I leaned toward Meritage which is a French Restaurant and Oyster Bar.  After scoping the menu I found out that Wednesday the special is a crab and shrimp risotto-- Sold!

Forepaugh's

Before heading for dinner at Meritage, my gentleman caller and I decided to go to Forepaugh's in St Paul for happy hour.  This is a lovely old and historic house which we got to explore before settling on a couple drinks and an appetizer of Poutine!  If you've never had this delicious treat (like I hadn't), I highly recommend it.  Although, you may be spoiled getting it here.  Here's the description from the menu: House-cut French fries, Eichten Farm white cheddar cheese curds, spicy pickled chilies, chili glaze, beef gravy.  YUM. 

Even though Forepaugh's is fancy and upscale, you can still get great prices at happy hour (like $4 for my huge glass of wine)!  We thought it was fun and a unique atmosphere to enjoy food and drinks.  Next we headed to Meritage.  I couldn't get by without ordering the oysters (which they are actually known nation-wide for) so I ordered one from the west coast and one from the east at the suggestion of our waiter.  After he gave them over he said, "Ok, just take 'em down when you're ready!"  Take them down?  What was this, some kind of shot?  Actually, yes.  I took it very much like a shot but made sure to get some good tastes of it as it was going down.  It has a very nice fresh ocean flavor and I actually really liked it!  I did however have a lot of vinegar and lemon on it. 

My boyfriend had the Minnesota pork chop with a potatoes and a good sauce.  He's not as adventurous when it comes to food.  I had to change his mind from ordering the chicken! 

At home, we enjoyed a delicious dessert of chocolate covered s'more and sea salt carmels from Candyland thanks to my sister!  Overall, a memorable night in St Paul thanks to a great guy and a great city. 

Rollin Down the River

The other day my friend and I partook in a little rollerblading half marathon on the banks of the muddy Mississippi River in Saint Paul.

We began our journey somewhere in there...

My friend dusted the cobwebs off her 1994 blades, while I strapped on my two-sizes-too-big pair of 1996 K2's and we were off.  All the other participants quickly passed us.  As it turned out, the wheels on my friend's rollerblades were actually rocks.  To the naked eye, they looked like wheels.  How were we to know?!  The roller-rocks made horrific scraping sounds every time they touched pavement.  Soon, we were surrounded by other misfits who, for various limitations, were moving at the speed of walking.

At mile 6, I knew something had to be done.  I mustered up all my leg power, put my pride aside and switched blades with my friend.  In an instant, I knew what hell felt like.  The roller-rocks were the anti-Christ, pulling me backward when I should have been coasting downhill in a forward motion.  My face turned a shade of red never before seen on a human.  I got dizzy.  I contemplated if I could run faster.  As runners passed us, I knew I could run faster.  But I hate running.  So I had to decide which was the lesser of two evils.  At mile 9 I began to hallucinate and at that moment I had an epiphany: we would wear one of each blade.  

Suddenly, the sun was shining.  We were actually laughing.  The color in our faces returned to a forgetful shade of cardio-red.  As we coasted through a swarm of runners, the finish line in sight, we wondered why it took 9 miles to find a solution to the roller-rock crisis of 2012.  We experienced dark times out on the course, but let's focus on the happy times:

We're surprised we made it too.  

And to end, here's a totally random picture of the railroad lift bridge in Saint Paul:

Silverware Jewelry: From the Table to Your Earlobe

Spoon rings, fork bracelets, knife handle pendants: silverware jewelry is alive and well.  If you're wondering what your grapefruit spoon would look like dangling from your earlobe, you're envisioning silverware jewelry a little differently than the rest of us.  Or maybe you really would like to hang grapefruit spoons from your earlobes, in which case, you should.  Who am I to say that's not the next big trend?

The silverware jewelry I'm referring to, however, is slightly different.  The silver is bent, twisted, curled, manipulated in such a way that we can barely identify the utensil, making for a great conversation starter when there's a lull at the dinner table.

Check out these beautiful fork tine earrings from the etsy shop Revisions:

Or this lovely spoon ring from Silverware Jewelry Etc.: 

This past weekend at the Highland Park Art Festival I bought this wonderful fork bracelet from a local artist who calls his shop Tomforkery: 

I absolutely LOVE it!  It reminds me of music notes.  And that's all there is to say today, about the wonderful world of silverware jewelry.  

Natural Dyeing

It's been two years that I've been contemplating, researching, and looking forward to my inevitable first (real) natural dyeing experiment. In fact, I had a stash of onion skins sitting in my cupboard for about a year now. It was when I was WWOOFing in Canada that I was exposed to dye plants and how you can use them to produce natural and even sometimes rich colors of yellow, purple, green, brown, beige and red. I even attended a fair with my host family where we gave an indigo dye demonstration! So, ever the procrastinator (it's not laziness!), I waited for two years until I was presented an opportunity in a college Chemistry course to create my own lab project. My natural dye experiment was born!

You may be wondering how naturally dyeing fabric with plants, roots, berries, and even bugs relates to Chemistry at all. Well, I'm glad you asked. In order for the color to 'bite' to the fabric you usually need to add something to the mix to make it stick. In the distant past, urine was sometimes used. Being the civilized society we are today, we have a better way. So, metallic salts were found to partly attach to the fibers and partly to the dye so it wouldn't wash out right away. These are called mordants and the most common ones are alum (potassium aluminum sulphate) and iron (ferrous sulphate). Some of the other ones, like chrome, can be much more poisonous and their use is discouraged. In my project, we used red and yellow onion skins, blueberries, and black tea along with mordants of alum, iron, and copper.

When dyeing naturally you can only use natural fibers so in our experiment we used cotton and linen fabric so we could compare the results. Below are the results of all three dyes. Each had a different mordant and the darkest color was obtained with using the iron mordant.  My favorite result is the dark army green that was created using the onion skins and iron mordant.  

Dyeing with Tea

Red and Yellow Onion Skins

Blueberries- yum!

Even after washing, the colors held up well except the blueberry which lost it's lovely purple color. Overall, natural dyeing is a science with many variables and it is hard to get the same color twice. Factors such as amount used, temperature, pH, length of time, and even growing conditions of the plant effect the color. The good news is, every time is a surprise!

Rope Necklaces Abound

Lately, we've been enjoying the simple beauty of rope necklaces.  Our roping idols are OG by JM and this is what they do:

I'd say they do it pretty well, wouldn't you?

Armed with inspiration, we decided to venture into the world of rope jewelry for ourselves and see what we could come up with.  Below are some of our latest creations.  You can find them in our etsy shop!

Saint Paul Sunday Bike Ride...

Our ride started in downtown Saint Paul with my bike tires losing air and the air hose missing from the gas station.  We came to the conclusion that I would just have to pedal harder and deal with it.  The fresh air kept my pedaling complaints to a minimum and any whining that leaked out was carried away by the wind.

We then decided to ride up a hill for some reason, which led us past the light rail construction.  

The light rail construction runs straight past our apartment, where the the sound of drilling, plowing and hammering is alive and well.  This section of track, by the government buildings (ahem), appears to be complete.  Such a vision had me wondering how I'd sleep without a jackhammer pounding away outside my window.  I guess I have a rough transition period ahead.  

We rode on, past the capital and on toward the Cathedral of Saint Paul.  

This picture begs the question: is the subject of the photo trees, or the capital?

On our way to the Cathedral, we were rewarded with a hill.

At the Cathedral, we turned right and made our way down Selby Ave, home to some of our favorite restaurants like Fabulous Ferns, Moscow on the Hill (great patio out back) and W.A Frost, a place we've never been, but have heard many good things about.

Biking on Selby is a little rough, because there isn't a designated bike lane, so after awhile we decided to cut across to the lovely Summit Ave.  We rode past mansions and wondered who lived in them.  So fancy was this street that we began to question our casual-cool apparel.  It was decided that we did not look cool at all.  Then I took some pictures and hoped the homeowners wouldn't come outside and yell at me.  

So gorgeous 

Our ride along Summit concluded at the James J. Hill house, which I would very much like to tour someday soon.

Finally, we rode downhill toward the city.  

If Saint Paul Were a Movie...

I have a wild love affair with Saint Paul.  It's just such an interesting city in terms of history and architecture.  The Mississippi River runs right alongside it and I often find myself wandering down there.  Here are some pictures I took at twilight a few days ago.  If Saint Paul were the star of a movie, I'd like to think it would look something like this:

The setting: downtown Saint Paul, MN.

The time: just after sunset.

The characters: I don't know, because there are no people in this picture.  It's really just a cool picture of the docks.

The story: a riverboat that frees itself from the shoreline and takes a journey to the the Gulf.  

The tagline: even the dock can't keep this riverboat tied down.  (wow that was bad)

Biking in High Waters on the Mississippi

I went on my usual bike ride today on the St. Paul loop trail that starts at Harriet Island and ends on the other side of the Mississippi River on Shepard Road.  It's a beautiful bike ride and had I not fallen in the river on my way back, it would have been the perfect ride.

After giving inaccurate directions to a lost couple looking for Fort Snelling (not on purpose), I rode onward over the 35E bridge.  As usual, I was feeling exhausted and upset that my cardio wasn't up to snuff.  This might have had something to do with the 6 cookies I ate earlier in the day.  I'd rather not blame them though.

Once over the bridge, I was rewarded with a wonderfully long downhill section of the trail.  It was great and the car that had to follow slowly behind me felt my joy, I'm sure of it.  That's why he honked and sped around me.  Who says motorists and bicyclists can't get along?

Now I knew part of the trail was washed out - I had ridden through it just the day before.  I knew I could peddle through it and not get my feet wet.  And so, here's the start of the washed out trail:

Check out my stylish Mickey Mouse ear handlebars! 

   And so I started to slowly peddle through, when suddenly, I peddled off the trail and into some kind of pot-hole, which caused this to happen:

When I pulled my foot out of the dirty, murky Mississippi River water, I was horrified to discover I had grown a 6th toe.  That's what happens when things get dipped into the Mississippi.  Luckily my head didn't go under, or I'd have an eye in the back of my head.  Which would actually prove more useful than a 6th toe, but oh well.

After the river conquered me, I snapped this photo of what I left in my wake.  I warned 2 lady bikers headed that direction, but they didn't seem to care.  In fact, they didn't even respond to me.  Does that happen to other people?  Like if you say "hi" to someone on a trail and they just don't say anything back?  It happens to me so much that sometimes I wonder if there's some kind of invisible, sound-proof force shield around me.

After my swamp experience, the trail turned into this picturesque scene:

And then of course, you are rewarded with the wonderful Harriet Island: 

Harriet Island clean up of River's Edge Festival

And on your way over the Wabasha Street bridge you get the to see the gorgeous Mississippi River from a safe distance: 

So get out there and start biking!

Alexander McCall Smith Brings Wit and Charm to Minnesota

The amazingly talented Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith, displayed sharp wit last night.  It was hard to tell if I was at a comedy show, or an author reading and I very much preferred it that way.  It definitely wasn't a lecture, so for the purposes of this article, we'll label it a show, because it was thoroughly entertaining.

Mr. Smith was at the Central Park Amphitheater in Woodbury, MN as part of Club Book, which is put on by the Metropolitan Library Services Agency (MELSA).  It is free and open to the public.  Seating is based on a first come, first serve basis, so if there is an author you really want to see, I suggest arriving an hour early.  That's what we did and there were quite a few people who had to stand in the back, because the tiny amphitheater was already full.

mccallsmith.com

I had never been to an author show before and since my Mom is a huge Mr. Smith fan, I decided to tag along with her.  I was familiar with his popular series of books, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but hadn't read any of them.  I beat my Mom to the library and was greeted by a sea of old people.  I had an inkling that his books appealed to an older crowd, so this wasn't all that surprising.  I just felt very out of place and silently kicked myself for not reading at least one of his books.  I was an impostor and feared Mr. Smith might randomly call on audience members to say something about one of his books.  These are the thoughts that routinely flood a paranoid person's mind.

Dressed in a kilt and blazer, Mr. Smith talked for an hour on a variety of topics.  He began by explaining the orchestra he formed, known humbly as the Really Terrible Orchestra.  He plays the bassoon and according to him, simply stops playing if there are any notes he cannot reach.  As a wannabe pianist, I could relate to this, although I usually just regress to an easier song.  Mr. Smith also talked about etiquette, book readings and the people who attend them.  He said most attendees like to tell you how inaccurate you've been, while others end up at the incorrect reading altogether.  He talked about Proust and recommended book club members memorize just one quote to be used to effectively silence know-it-all book club members, or just know-it-all's in general.  Mr. Smith took a few questions from the audience and we learned his favorite word is fantoosh, which is a Scottish word meaning "fancy".  

He spoke briefly about the books he writes and the characters.  He was tickled by some of the things his characters said and routinely found himself laughing out loud with the rest of us.  He was gracious, smart, effervescent and engaging: are all author readings like this?  What have I been missing out on?  I plan on attending a reading in October with Colin Meloy of Decemberists fame and his illustrator wife Carson Ellis.  Let's hope for a similar show!