Child says: “I made this for you!”
Translation: “Here, throw this away when I’m not looking.”
Parent Says: “I love it!”
Translation: “I’ll throw this away when you’re not looking.”
Tag art
Business Travel: Occasional Distractions from Melancholy
It sounds cool: traveling for work. I promise I am WELL aware of that. And that the following will sound so entitled- but traveling the country for work sucks. Big ones. I travel to Portland. Indianapolis. Denver. Salt Lake City. Dallas. Pittsburg. I have to travel to Canada regularly too. Know what I get to see more than anything? The inside of Marriot hotels. Airports. Conference rooms at engineering firms, which all seem to have the same tables and chairs. And it’s just excruciating to be away from my family. All I ever want to do is get back to them.
But every once in a while… I can carve out just a tiny bit of time and literally force myself to look up and enjoy the places I visit. So occasionally I can eat lunch and walk in an old growth forest in Washington (honestly? I felt like bear bait on that one.) I get to go to an awesome bookstore in Portland. Once I stayed in an AMAZING Bed and Breakfast in Seattle because the entire city’s hotel rooms were sold out. And this last trip… I got to carve an hour and a half from the afternoon and went to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. It’s an Art Museum! It’s a Natural History Museum! Here are some pics.
Van Goghe
Another Van Goghe
From the Colonial Era Room…
Cezanne (my favorite painting from the entire museum)
…And then there is the Modern Art Wing
“Art”
*Eyeroll* Heavy Sigh…”Art”
But my FAVORITE part of the museum was the Natural History Museum. I took more videos in that wing, so I don’t have pictures of the T-Rexs or Brachiosaurs, but here are a few of the pics.
IT’S A TWELVE FOOT TURTLE! Dude!
And my favorite thing in the ENTIRE place- a two foot fossil of a prehistoric flower. Amazing! And that’s more art than a tire in pantyhose- Fo’ SHO’.
Denver
I recently took a new job (which- let me just say: Love it. Would have quit the old one sooner if I’d known you could enjoy a job this much) and we’ll be relocating to Denver this summer. Which sounds big, and is… but it’s so much easier than I thought it’d be too. It reminds me a bit of the feeling I had when I met my husband. It was so easy to accept the fact that my life, in the moment of meeting him, was going to change completely- fundamentally and permanently. I knew all of that looking into his eyes all those years ago… and it was so easy to accept, be excited about, and welcome in my life. My life was never going to be the same again- it was an amazing feeling.
And now, again- this is a huge change. Moving across the country changes not just my life, but my husband’s, my daughters’, my family in Texas… so it’s big. But it also is surprisingly easy to accept and welcome. My husband and I are in Denver this week- I’m working, he’s applying at school districts, and we’re house hunting. Plus fitting in as much fun as we can.
Anyway, so this bear is outside of the convention center right around the corner from the hotel we’re staying at in downtown Denver- and it may be one of the best known pieces of art in the city. I love it- it makes me smile. And outdoor art… there is a lot of it in this city, which I both like and was a bit surprised by. And it’s all pretty good- not pretentious stuff like Austin has.
Ugh- seriously, let’s talk about Austin for a second. Austin is as over praised as Breaking Bad, bacon, Starbuck’s bitter-ass coffee, and Andy Warhol are. Seriously- why are those all put on a pedestal? It’s baffling to me. Having lived in Austin and gone to school there I can easily say- give me San Antonio any day. Or Denver. I’ll totally take Denver too.
the something garden 