paris, tired but a good tired

our apartment, the richelieu

it is our second day in paris and we've continued to walk non-stop as we have done in london. katie met us friday and we all walked up to rose bakery. katie thought it was funny that our first meal in paris was at a british establishment, but she had never been and we all loved it.

my lunch

cakes at rose bakery

after lunch we walked around the marais and got ourselves a bit more oriented.

the bibliotheque historic

bon bons

katie left to meet a friend for dinner and leigh and i came back to the apartment to rest for a few minutes before my birthday dinner at le fumoir. our dinner was delicious and we had secured a reservation in the "library," which turned out to be a dark and cozy room filled with books. we didn't want to leave but two hours later we were stuffed and so tired that we were happy to have a very short walk home.


i slept badly that night so it was 8am before we woke up, and we got off to a late start. on the advice of the apartment owners, we stopped in for pastries at stohrer's.

leigh got this shot of me looking at postcards before we went inside

next we walked a few short blocks to the bilbiotheque nationale. i was a bit overwhelmed and unfortunately hadn't really made a plan so we looked into some of the reading rooms and headed off to the centre pompidou. a few hours looking at braque's, picasso's, matise's, and léger's and we needed to eat again.



after eating, our next stop was pierre herme, which entailed a walk across the siene and down to st. germain. after snagging some confiture de framboises a la violette, which i had been dreaming about since katie brought me some two years ago, and some sablés citron, we were off to the have a glass of wine then stroll through jardin du luxembourg.

the wind kicked up and the rains came in so we hopped into a taxi to come home, warm up and plan our dinner outing. we're both very tired, but in a good way. the city is beautiful and inviting and it does feel like you are walking through a movie.

freedom

now that school is done for the semester i sort of don't know what to do with myself. it's weird. i've been waiting for this for 15 long computer-driven weeks, and now i'm stumped. i need a project but i don't want a project. i keep trying to talk myself into making a design to gocco cards for this year, but then i don't want to write and send the cards. then i think i should just sit around and read all day, after all it's cold and rainy. but i am enjoying my current book so much that i don't want to finish it too quickly, and i talked al into reading it with me so he's trying to catch up. i decided i needed another book to read as well, so i got the the portable mlis from the library to see if i want to buy it, but that just feels like reading school stuff and i can't get into it. maybe it's time to start baking again, something from breakfast, lunch, tea looks good. i went to sandbox bakery this week with sarah, it's really good but we wanted to sit so had to walk back to her house. hopefully tricia and i will venture out to eat something yummy today. i should go check out the prelinger library. also probably time to go back to outerlands, and i want to go to farm:table. crap now i have all this stuff to do before i leave for nc next week for two weeks.

modernism

this week i wrote a post based on a ted talk for for my information & society class. it's funny to say i wrote a post, but we write lots of posts to discussion boards in all three of my classes because we never meet in person. joshua prince-ramus' talk on the design of seattle's central library is about 10 minutes of this talk and really fascinating, check it out if you have a spare 1o min. i love design, i love modern, and i love architecture, but most of all i love the library. the library is a really social place for me even though i usually don't talk to anyone when i'm in one. prince-ramus really speaks to that in this talk. another classmate, alana, pointed us to a blog post comparing the seattle central library with our main library here in san francisco. most of us who have been to the main SFPL have complained about entrances that get you nowhere and just the overall bad layout. what i didn't know is there wasn't enough room for all the books when the library was built and the director had many of them tossed!

i'm heading to the main library for a behind the scenes tour today and at least two of my classmates will be there as well. i'm really looking forward to meeting them in person and getting into some of the rooms i've never seen.

image from http://kanhom.com/author/enagler/

mcsweeney's

i don't do a lot of browsing at the library, i usually know what i want. today i ran into glen park to see if i could find a smaller book to take to portland this weekend. i'm currently reading my sister, my love by joyce carol oates and it's great, but huge. i guess i've never noticed mcsweeney's on the shelves, but glen park had a bunch! i came home with #21 (paperback) and #29 (hardback). i need to do some pre-reading to see which to take. very exciting.

dewey

i passed filing & my dewey decimal tests yesterday, then made it through the interview. after my finger printing later today i'm all set to begin my new job, volunteering at the south san francisco library. they are loaded with volunteers right now and i was lucky to squeak in as the last one for a bit. i'll be there just 2 hours a week for at least 3 months, mostly just filing and shelving books and materials, but it sounds good to me. it's bound to help me prepare for school.

new american paintings

i love to peruse new american paintings at my local news stand. there are six regional issues per year, and each artist showcases three paintings. their resume is included as well, and i love to see when and where they were born. if i like their work i try to relate to the painter based on where and when they were born.