A turkey gave of its life...

...so that we could have a great Christmas dinner!

Robbie once again proved he's the supreme turkey-frying-master (Tina's a long way behind, but in the race, and now supposedly Paula and Rob want to get in on the act) as he served up another delicious bird, this time in Washington DC for Christmas Chez Ollie and Fongie (or is that Ollfong/Olifong/Olivfong/Oliann/Olivann...any advances guys?!...).
Injecting the special marinade and into the pot

Even though the oil thermometer wasn't working, and it was raining (it always rains these days when he's frying a bird!), he turned out another superb crispy, moist, well-seasoned 13 pounder.

We had a sensational Christmas. Fongie has obviously been preparing for weeks (she could write her own "Christmas Planning Guide"!). We even had our very own embroidered stockings hanging on the ballistrade - stuffed filled with little wrapped boxes of goodies and the Christmas cake was superb.

Fongie got Vuitton, Robbie got Burberry, Maria got Prada (and mink!), Fongie and Maria both got new iPods!, and Ollie got a Maria Original. We were definitely spoilt and supremely treated - thanks guys!

Famous Couples Visit "Fallingwater"

Bradjelina photo: Cara Armstrong

The road trip to DC for Christmas afforded us the opportunity of stopping enroute at Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater, recognized as one of Wright's most acclaimed architectural works. Set amid the wilderness of western Pennslyvania, the house was less than an hour from our direct route from Chicago to DC.

The house had been in the news lately...Bradjelina had visited just a couple of weeks before on December 7. Angelina had organised a private tour for Brad, an avid architecture buff, as his birthday present. Tours are run through the property every half an hour or so for around a dozen people at a time - but they had the place to themselves for the day - secured, no doubt, by a decent donation to the preservation fund!

It was designed by Wright in 1935 for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh who owned the major department store in the city. Following the natural flow established by the rock ledges of a rushing mountain stream, Wright placed the house over the falls in a series of cantilevered concrete "trays," anchored to masonry walls made of the same sandstone as the rock ledges. Although the house rises over 30' above the falls, strong horizontal lines and low ceilings help maintain a sheltering effect. Almost as much floor space is taken up by outdoor terraces as indoor rooms.

Fallingwater is recognized as one of Wright's most acclaimed works, and in a 1991 poll of members of the American Institute of Architects, it was voted the best all-time work of American architecture. It is considered a supreme example of Frank Lloyd Wright's concept of "organic architecture", which promotes harmony between man and nature through design so well integrated with its site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified composition.





Interior shots Western Pennsylvania Conservancy

One of the most stunning features was the large open plan living room which takes up most of the main level. The ceiling was only about 6'4" high throughout most of the interior. As you walked into the room the visual effect had you drawn completely towards the windows and the natural wilderness on the other side of the glass - you felt almost at one with the natural environment. Today we are so drawn to high-studded spaces, but standing in this room you felt sheltered and nutured, and yet intimately connected with nature.

Used mainly as a vacation home (what a holiday home!) the property was gifted to the State in 1963 by the only son of the Kaufmann's. What is so special about the property is that Fallingwater is the only great Wright house open to the public with its setting, original furnishings, and art work intact - it's as if the owners have just left the property. Almost all of the original Wright-designed furnishings are still in place.

Sadly we weren't able to take photos of the interior, but there are works by Diego Rivera (who was a guest) and Picasso hanging on the walls, several of the famous Aalto vases, and the Wright Barrel chair (which apparently Mrs Kaufmann wasn't that fond of so it was banished to a guest room).

It was stunning - and a must-see if you are ever near Pittsburgh.

Fruit Mince on the Stove...

It's Christmas - well almost. While I wait for my pot of fresh fruit mince to simmer down to it gooey aromatic comination of deliciousness (for the mince pies and icecream for the Big Day) I thought I could share some Christmas observanaces from this part of the world.

I perhaps have made a mistake. I subscribe to various magazine email newsletters, in the hope of getting the jump on advice and information when it comes to living the lifestyle. In fact, as a result, I'm feeling like a major underachiever.

In the past week I've had several emails from Martha (normally just one a week but it's prime season; she's firing on all cylinders), Real Simple, Gourmet and Domino magazines all with tips for being the perfect hostess, perfect Christmas elf, just straight Perfect Woman.

To do this I will have needed to have done the following:
1. Packed away the Thanksgiving decorations (that is after having put them up after having packed away the Halloween decorations) and put up at least one tree, of course fresh, and I would have lhad to choose between a fraser fir, the balsam fir, white fir, the white pine, the douglas fir or the colorado blue spruce - for the record we got the fraser - it lasts the longest, but turns out the damn thing doesn't smell! Every house I have been in has had more than one tree...This should REALLY have been done the weekend after Thanksgiving - no pressure.
2. Made a wreath (pine cones v sticks v glitter v balls v fir branches) for the front door.
3. Made a garland for the fireplace.
4. Decorated the front garden with motorised glowing or inflatable animals, Santas and snowmen - preferably all at once.
5. Covered the house in lights (hey, the movie "Deck the Halls" really happens!)
6. Made handmade gifts for everyone
7. Invited everyone over for a supper party - handmade invitations, bring a toy for a charity for under the tree, made eggnog, hor d'oeuvres, homemade cocktails, come up with clever ideas for lighting the front path with candles, gift favours for everyone to take home when they leave..
8. Made handmade gift tags, wrapping paper (bugger, Martha hasn't said how to make handmade sellotape yet..), wrapped each present in a different style (all colour co-ordinating though)
9. Made cookies and cakes for school/work charity bake sale.
10. Tipped the paper boy, garbage man, doorman (if you live in NY!), nail technician, hairdresser, teacher, babysitter, pool cleaner, UPS man, personal trainer....RealSimple.com has a web page devoted to what/how much/tip + gift or just tip, and two of the TV networks have had stories on the same.
11. Made hostess gifts for everyone who invites you to a party.
12. Made a centrepiece for the table.
13. Made an Advent Calendar - if you're Catholic.
14. Partaken in at least one other religious holiday occasion - lighting the menorah, or sending out kwanzaa cards
15. Taken photos in the snow for the cover of the Christmas card.
16. Bought multiple gifts for all members of the family and made sure to get gift receipts for all the presents you bought in case you have to return some.

Martha's on hand to help - she has a Planning Guide on the website - runs to 13 pages (help!).

I've done 1, some of 6 and 8 (the tag bit), 9 and 15. But the mantlepiece looks pretty.

The Sunday Paper

The local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel costs .50c each day but Sunday. On Sunday you have to fork out $1.75 (that's a lot of quarters). Here's what you get.



On the left is the paper: 14 sections - a total of 116 pages - with two-thirds of the sections being only 6 pages (that's not a section, it's a long story...).

On the right are the supplements - 27 separate advertising brochures/catalogues/weekly special foldouts that bring it up to a wooping 2 1/2 inches in thickness. Now I know it's the weekend before Christmas, but still....

So we're paying (paying more!) to read advertising. And, presumably because there are concerns about recycling, they ask you at the grocery if you want paper or plastic...

I want my money back (and a job in advertising).

On Thin Ice... Iceboating - Wisconsin style...

After the snow blizzard which welcomed us to Wisconsin last week some of the guys at Harken have been pestering Robbie to join them in their iceboating exploits. The lakes in Lake Country, Wisconsin, have started to freeze...!

The sport is legendary around these parts but as the Al Gore change in climatic conditions has meant the lakes are freezing with less frequency than is ideal, the number of opportunities to spend time on the lakes has been dwindling. It says a lot about this season's winter we've started to experience that they're sailing already!

A typical season is only a few weeks long, and there are years in which boaters hardly ever get a chance to take their boats out because of either poor ice conditions or heavy snow.

Ice boating takes a small narrow hull of varying lengths depending on the class, with a small outrigger either side, with a blade on each outrigger and one at the bow. You practically lie on your back lifting your head just enough to see out the front of the boat. Helmets are a must, not only to save your head from a tacking boom, but to protect you should you upend at 60mph plus! Not all the classes have brakes - you stop by sailing into the wind, and putting your spiked shoe onto the ice to slow you down - or at least, that's how I saw how it was happening!

I learnt the other night how the sport works: 80% of the time is spent in preparation, tweaking the equipment, talking with your mates about how to make the boat go faster, talking about which lake is almost ready and speculating on the weather, 15% of the time is spent getting to the perfectly conditioned lake (last week one of the guys drove to Fargo, MN 8 hours away!), 3% of the time is spent rigging the boat, and 2% of the time is spent sailing.

Last year at one weekend-long regatta they sailed for a total of 47 minutes! Mind you the smaller DN class (12 footers) can top speed at up to 60mph so at those speeds that's one hell of a buzz for 47 minutes!

In the chaos of our unpacked luggage (still pending places to put things!), we managed to pull out all our thermals and necessary layers. Nellie, thank you SO much for the hat - it was perfect!

Robbie had a blast and I think is probably hooked...thankfully the mileage in the Land Rover will probably mean he'll restrict himself to lakes within two hours radius of Milwaukee!

Check out a YouTube video featuring on the home page of this website to see what it's all about.
http://www.iceboat.org/

The hidden cost of cheap furniture.

My last issue as Editor of Simply You Living included a feature story on the question of designer knock-off furniture - to do or not to do. We extolled the virtue of buying the classics rather than succumbing to the cheaper fake copies cluttering the market.

While we haven't knowingly bought any copies, we have (over the past two weeks) make two trips down to our nearest Ikea store in Chicago and added considerably to the national surplus in Sweden by throwing a bunch of money their way in return for a whole stack of flat packed boxes...The trips weren't without consequence!(check out the snow-plough created snow "mountain" in the Ikea carpark!)

The first time we had set ourselves a budget of $1500 (otherwise I was likely to go ballistic!) and were hoping to get some of the basics...We started shopping and checked in with one of the staff to see if we could get things delivered to Milwaukee. All good, they said – it was going to cost about $280 but we figured it was worth it....

Five hours later (it took me nearly an hour as a I anguished over couch v. sofa bed v. single cool looking sofa bed v. an uglier queen sofa bed), after we lugged the boxes off the shelves, realised they were out of stock of some of the pieces we needed, queued for the checkout, rushed to wrap the delicate bits on the conveyor checkout as the people behind us had their pieces heading our way, then queued for other pieces; we were standing at the exit with three loaded trolleys of flat packed boxes and a few other “essentials”!...Robbie deserved a medal for patience. That man is an angel...

We checked out, pushed our three trolleys to the Home Delivery counter only to have them tell us it was a base charge of $260 + .40c per pound (we were looking at 1000lb!) - AND it was going to be 3-4 weeks delivery....By now we WERE OVER IT! As some of you may know customer service in the US is usually amazing but there was only so far Ikea were going to go being a warehouse-style store...the best option they offered was $300 delivery (but it was still going to take three-four weeks delivery) or they’d store our goods for 24 hours and I could go back and get the rest.

We loaded up the Land Rover for the drive home, and the next morning I rented a cargo van for $50 and drove back to get the rest (...which of course included another 1 1/2 hour shopping for bits we’d forgotten!). Our uber-patient landlord and two of his workers who are still working on the downstairs apartment then helped me lug it all up into the attic (I arrived at the house with brownies as a peace offering!).

We moved in a few days later - and Robbie spent the first day on the end of a allen key while I played chief box opener and folder of cardboard (and cushion stuffer).


All in all we spent about $2250 but have completely furnished our bedroom with a bed, three sets of drawers, two mirrors, a sofa couch (which will end up in the spare room eventually), lights, cushions, tv cabinet, two groovy chairs and an ottoman, two side tables, crockery, glassware, full size rug + a few other bits and pieces...

We headed back again this past Saturday for Round 2. We were counting on two hours instore plus another three hour round trip. We should have known better.

Seven hours later (that's four hours instore!) we have desks for two plus chairs, filing drawers, a coffee table, more lights, a kitchen workbench/table, and more fillers for the kitchen cupboards. All up we've pretty much furnished a house for under $5000 (not including our uber-expensive Tempurpedic mattress that we splurged on; we're now coming to terms with "memory foam"!) but if you added up our combined hourly rate that we would charge out on an average day I think we could probably have afforded an Eames Lounger!

Still, the great thing about Ikea for us is that it perfectly suits our current budget, lifestyle, and unknown future living plans. Who knows where we'll be in two years, but by then we could probably either replace it, leave it, take it with us, or sell it to the students who live in the neigbourhood. Robbie's telling everyone I need to get a job quick otherwise we'll need a 40ft container.

P.S Have found the best (and only!) decent furniture designstore in town - Design Within Reach - www.dwr.com - which sells pieces from the Hermann Miller and Knoll collections, amongst others. Found out they have a twice yearly Hermann Miller sale...upon securing a job in the New Year I will be splurging on a coveted Eames Molded Plywood Chair, just to keep the Swedes in line...!

A little blog hiatus...

We're currently yet to have our internet service connected to the house....one of the joys of arriving in the US - things take about three times longer to get done than they should. As a consequence the ability to get on line is a little curtailed right now...I could sit in our great little cafe round the corner where they have free wifi and blog all day long, but then I'd be like one of those tossers who walk around with their bluetooth earpiece glued to their ear - I don't need to. Talk soon.

-4C and 3" of snow!

I woke this morning to Robbie excitedly trying to wake me up to go look at the snow... At 6am it was pitch black, there was a thick blanket of snow covering everything, and the tv news shows were all littered with weather warnings, school closures and the snow plow trucks struggling to keep up with clearing the roads in what has been the first big snow in Wisconsin for the season. So what'd we do....we jumped in the Land Rover and headed off to drop Robbie off at work - thank heavens for Traction Control!... Welcome to Winter!

While the temptation was to fall back onto the snow and do "snow angels" ("...flap those arms and legs!") somehow they always make it look cuter on the tv ads than the reality of then coming inside covered in wet snow! No doubt Robbie's excitement will wear off as we come to grips with getting the hang of snow shovels and ice scrapers, and as our uniform of choice becomes all-weather boots and ear muffs (they may look daft but they're a necessity in this clime!). The best investment I've made so far was a pair of weatherproof leather and rubber boots on sale the other day for $50 - somehow the Paula Ryan suede boots just don't cut it in the snow up here, sorry Paula!

Let's Back Up the Truck

The trouble with starting a blog one month into the adventure is knowing how much retrospective action to include, but as this mainly designed for all you family and friends wondering what we've been getting up to I'll do a quick summary...
- Arrived in early November to the US. First stop: Houston, to purchase a car through contacts of OJ's, Robbie's Dad. After being vespa riders for the past 6 years we're now the proud owners (or "eco-Nazis" as friend Richard put it so eloquently) of a Land Rover Discovery. It's only 5 years old, has only 40,000kms on the clock and has had only one owner - the famous oil fire fighter, Red Adair who was from Houston. As someone said, if nothing else we could probably sell the car on ebay for more than we paid. It was his "ranch" car.

- Drove north on a 2 day road trip from the Texas bible belt of Baptist churches, trailer parks and auburn trees looking like the cover of a Martha Stewart Thanksgiving issue cover, through Arkansas (yep we drove through Hope, birthplace of Pres Clinton), Missouri, the wheat plains of Illinois, and on into Wisconsin. We played spot the WalMart/WalMart truck enroute...we saw almost as many WalMart logos along the way as we did McDonald logos. The highlight - the pulled pork sandwich with a side of coleslaw from a roadside BBQ house in Texas - multi-serviette-lickin good.

- First mission: apartment hunting. While Robbie started work the next day after we arrived, I headed into Downtown Milwaukee to go house/apartment hunting. We had the choice of living in the Lake Country area around Harken, or moving Downtown to Milwaukee which is about 25 minutes away. The later is possibly a better choice as a source of work for me, socializing, and closer to the better food outlets in the area. I trawled through most of the lofts for rent in the redeveloping area of the 3rd and 5th Wards - a little like what the Britomart area will likely look like in Auckland in a few years. But in the end we've settled for the top floor of a little blue house on the Eastside - one suburb from Downtown, close to the University, and Brady Street (Ponsonby Road-like). Our landlord is a painter who owns and lives in the house (the orange one) next door. He recently bought our place off his elderly neighbour who's gone retirement homing, and he's completely gutted the place, repainted throughout and put in new bathroom and refurbished the kitchen. So we have a 3 bedroom, 3 living room character-filled little home which we'll be moving into this weekend.

- New Orleans - Turning 40. With the house deal sorted it was time to head to New Orleans to celebrate the 4-0. What a spoilt girl I was...a week of hotel living in the French Quarter courtesy of Robbie's aunt who's the GM of one of the hotels there, surrounded by friends and family on both sides, including a special guest appearance of Tina - my birthday present from Robbie!






















We had a great time - ate, drank and partied too much but what the hell. Highlights included:
- crying for more than 20 minutes at the sight of Tina - check out the puffy eyes!
- chasing alligators on a air boat in the bayou
- beignets at Cafe du Monde - I think we went 5 mornings out of 7!
- the food at Bayona, and Cafe Amelie
- Thanksgiving with Kathleen and David
- the stretched limo ride to the Saints Game
- the pulled pork sandwich at the Superdome (there's a pattern developing here!)
- trawling the junk shops on Dauphine
- seeing again the devastation created by Katrina, On one hard it's incredible to see how far the city has progressed since we were there last November (mainly around the Quarter and in Downtown), but on the other hand the worst hit residential areas are still a long way from being back on track. This time we went through the devastated 9th Ward - where many of houses near the levy have been completely removed. For blocks there is no sign of life. Incredibly sad.