Venice, Spritz: Drink Recipe!

So, my friend, we'll call her T, has a radio show. She plays classical music from 12-1:30 on Tuesday afternoons. You can tune in online! Anyway, I've been hanging out with her during the show, and kinda learning how it works and bumbling around giving announcements. It's great fun, but we only get like 5 listeners online, so you should listen! We play good stuff, and it's a very chill mid-day break. Especially for us.

Anyway where was I going with this? Oh yeah, T & I looked at the internet while our records played, and were looking at the Toast blog (again), and found these gorgeous pictures of travels in Venice. This picture made T swoon because she works as a barista in a bougey coffee shop and is really good at making excellent espresso and foam, and wishes she had such a beautiful machine with which to work.This last picture made us both swoon, probably because we're alcoholics. (Just kidding. Alcoholism is a real and serious disease, and we do not have it. We just like us some booze, preferably European booze in elegant glasses with atmospheric lighting. We will not say no if some sexy Italian bartender makes it for us, either.) So anyway, the next post had a recipe for Spritz, a common drink in Venice, so that night we went home and made it. It is very easy: one part Campari, one part white wine, and top it off with soda water. I had all these things at home, since I bought Campari this summer for aperitivo-making inspired by ReadyMade magazine's recipes for drinks like the Americano and Negroni. Anyway, the spritz was delicious, easy, cold, kinda bitter, and a great mix between T's-roommate's-grandmother's-favorite-drink and sophistication.

Coming soon: T & I swoon over all things Portuguese, and T & I have California Week in preparation for my first trip to the Pacific Ocean!

Listening, Watching, Reading, Wearing, Wanting

Listening: eh, you know, Beyonce, stuff like that. Whatever is loud enough that I can hear it on the train to & from work.
Watching: Lolita, the Kubrick version. Maury on the TV in the Nigerian restaurant where I had lunch. The leaves change color. The interior of offices.
Reading: sure as fuck not my homework, unfortunately. The first part of this post is hilarious, and I completely agree.
Wearing: forget trying to look cute, I'm back to my uniform: cords and button-down shirts, preferably plaid. Actually over the weekend it was hot and I went swimming, and wore my beloved ratty cutoff jean shorts and a uber-hippy loose tank top I stole from my cousin, and a red cardigan from a yard sale.

Rainy Saturday Night by amyinegypt

Wanting: balance

Work Clothes

First Day at Work

Now I'm back to work at a "professional casual" workplace. For my first day, I wore the black pants from Express (the "Editor" pants. My mom made me buy these in high school and I actually wear them all the time--they're insanely versatile, despite the fact that "Express girls" was a disparaging label given to the trendy high school girls who wore stretchy black Express pants at my friend's high school in California). I also wore a saffron or marigold or something short-sleeved sweater, from the Gap via the Goodwill back in South Carolina. I thought earlier that this color wouldn't look good on me, but I've found, since becoming a redhead, that I can wear different colors. Before, tan and taupe just kindof washed me out, and I didn't really like gold or yellow (I always thought it didn't look good when your skin, hair, and clothes are all about the same color) but now I can wear them. I also was skeptical of the concept of short-sleeved sweaters-- when it's sweater weather, you want sleeves; when it's short-sleeve weather, you want something light. But now it's the perfect weather for it, as long as you bring a cardigan, which I did. My nicest cardigan is a black one from Zara via a yard sale, and I was wary of black on black (what is one is more faded than the other or it just looks too black?) but I think it worked since the shirt was so bright. To finish it off, my everysingleday bronze pointy-toed flats (from Eddie Bauer, my new love, via Unique) and some gold and pearl earrings I took from my mom last time I was home. And to break a final fashion reservation, I didn't match my bag to my shoes or non-existent beld--I carried a tan (p)leather one with a kindof woven pattern that my grandma gave me.

Introduction to Polyvore

I ended up going to a party in the cozy wool sweater & LLBean boots combination I wrote about the other day, and I got really hot and I felt kinda dorky and under-dressed compared to all the hip stylish undergrads at the party. There were a lot of girls in short-ish dresses with black semi-sheer tights and tall leather boots. One girl had a gold panelled dress, one had a huge loose gauzy white blouse with huge poufy curly hair. They were so cute, that I wanted to dress up too. So the next day, I decided that one solution to my struggles with making tights and skirts look alright was to keep them all in the same relative color family. Unless you have the ubiquitous sheer black tights and perfect-fitting boots, I reasoned, best to not try to compete. So I wore a light blue dress over a dark blue slip, with light-blueish-gray lace-patterned tights and the gray ankle boots. The boots didn't make me look too much like Robin Hood when the legs poking out of them weren't radically different-colored. The slip showed too much out the top of the dress's neckline, so I wore a blue floral scarf. It was a lot going on for one outfit, especially considering my simplicity trend as of late, but I think it worked.

I don't currently have a working camera, so I tried to recreate something similar with polyvore. I am about to waste A LOT of time with polyvore, uh oh!

Style Inspiration: Eddie Bauer Dorky/Outdoorsy

Somehow the catalog people found my new apartment, and I've been getting all kinds of catalogs unrequested: Eddie Bauer, Victoria's Secret, Land's End, and (my favorite name) Long Tall Sally. The preppy/dorky/outdoorsy pictures in Land's End and Eddie Bauer (I love the cardigan above! SO MUCH!) have caused me to give up on my idea that I should try to dress up more, and embrace the kind of clothes that I usually wear and that make me the most comfortable. A friend of mine usually wears simple, dark colors, like fitted black jeans and loose jersey navy tops. She says her mom dresses like that too, and it's a very understated, urban style. I think I tend to dress like my mom too, laid-back and outdoorsy, with a little ethnic-hippie thrown in ("oh yeah, I got this on my travels in Turkey, no big deal" haha). Of course my mom doesn't always dress like this, which is a shame, because she feels she needs to look more Southern and put-together or "dress her age" or cover her hips or some other total nonsense that she should ignore.

So I totally gave up on nonsense, and today I'm wearing Levis, LLBean rain "mocs" (they're like shoe-boots, if that makes sense, but they were the first totally waterproof footwear I owned and I love them forever and ever), an American Eagle long-sleeve t-shirt that I got in middle school and is wonderfully soft and comfortable, a "Made in England" tan v-neck wool sweater that I got at Unique a couple weeks ago, and a tattered pink silk scarf my mom got from Pakistan 25 years ago. It's the best outfit for getting tea, textbooks, and work done on a rainy, chilly day.

Yesterday I wore the same jeans... and I can't even remember what else, because I was THAT comfortable. Oh right-- a long blue & green plaid button-up I stole from my brother, with an old long leather belt I got at a thrift store in Riverton the day I left Wyoming. The day before that: cords with a ratty silk hippie tank top I stole from my cousin and a ratty thin purple cardigan that I got at a thrift store and wear constantly, with my boyfriend's white scarf to kinda hide the holes and make the loose top a bit more modest. I also have been wearing a gold Huguenot cross that I found on the sidewalk in Paris, on a silver chain. On the first day of class I wore a nice black skirt with a crochet detail at the bottom with some shirt and my new (from Unique) taupe cashmere v-neck sweater and a long striped scarf my coworkers brought back for me from Al Ain, and I froze my butt off because my school building is way too cold. So that's why I'm back to the cords/Levis rotation.

Redmoon and Sartorial Struggles

This morning I woke up feeling unable to get the "Amy's productive day" show on the road. It doesn't help that I was feeling sick again, perhaps from sitting outside in the cold for a few hours last night watching Redmoon's The Astronaut's Birthday. It was a pretty cool show, though I didn't appreciate being packed onto uncomfortable bleachers with irritating children and craning my neck upwards. The show was done entirely with over 4,000 (or something, I forget) hand-drawn, hand-gelled slides and overhead projectors shining from inside the building windows, with occasional people as shadows and puppetry animation. The story was a little "meh" (this review suggests it was too slow-paced, but I also think the overt moral was a strangely uncomfortable one: "don't dream big or shoot for the stars, because love is all that matters.") But I love Redmoon for their commitment to fantastic public art and elaborate low-tech spectacle. And afterwards I got a "blood orange" hot chocolate from a 7-11 and went to a potluck party at a friend's house. I brought a cous-cous salad with grapes, orange pepper, and feta, a combination of two Mark Bittman picnic ideas from the New York Times. Most of them look super good and fast, so I'll be trying them for more than just picnics.

Another thing slowing me down is trying to wear something other than my corduroy pants that I love so much. I think it would be nice to wear skirts and tights, but can never get it to look right or feel comfortable. It's mostly an issue of improper footwear. Somehow, the flats I wore all summer with skirts don't look right as soon as I add tights to my legs, which I can't figure out. And as great as heels look, I just can't bring myself to wear them to walk the 20 minutes to campus, where they will slow me down and make me uncomfortable all day. How do women who wear heels every day do it? I have some ankle boots that I bought last spring and really liked for awhile, but now I feel like they make me look like Robin Hood with my skinny legs poking out of their wide tops. This post from Jane at Ill Seen, Ill Said, inspired me to try to make flats look just as sophisticated, but I can't pull it off. I always love her "Sunday best" imaginary outfit posts, and she's so smart and posts a lot of interesting things about art and books.

Thursday Night Fun

Slowly chipping away at a to-do list this morning: getting ready for classes and internship to start up, cooking projects so food doesn't go to waste, sending a wedding present, cleaning and so on.

On Thursday night I went with some friends to the Chicago Chef Battle at Goose Island Brewery's actual brewery/warehouse. We got in for free (my friend is in a show at Second City and one of her fellow actors works for Chicago Public Radio, which sponsored the event). We showed up late (department beginning-of-term party) and missed the food, which was sad, but the winning chef, David Carrier, showed us a bit around the brewery and explained how beer gets changed by being put in old wine casks. He told us about Cru, a fortified wine made in Virginia that's aged in Jack Daniels barrels, which sounds so good. We actually didn't know at the time that he was the winning chef, just that he was a huge man in a white coat who knew a lot about alcohol. We learned later that he also just got fired from his restaurant on the previous Monday. I'm sure he'll find a new job fast! Good luck to you, David!

We also got to taste a bunch of beers. We saw Goose Island's new beer, Madame Rose in the barrels (I think so, because it said "cherries" on the side) and tried Harvest Ale, Sophie, and Matilda, my personal favorite ("spicy in character," yes please). Fret not, they were only in small samples!

While I was standing around there, some creepy old men came up to talk to us. At one point, one of them was like "Look at the moon? Can you see Jupiter? Have you ever seen it?" And I was like, "Yeah, I see it, I've seen it before," since know-it-all is usually my default when I'm uncomfortable and want to hurry someone along (and away). But I had no idea what they were talking about until today when I learned (from the lovely clothing company Toast's blog) that night there was a Super Harvest Moon, which NASA teaches us that this year was a rare occasion when Autumn Solstice falls on the same night as a full moon, causing a cool glow at sunset, and then, right at 11:09 pm when apparently fall officially begun, Jupiter was right up in the top of the sky next to the bright, full moon.

So where were you when this event of cosmic importance took place? I was standing happily in the quads eating and drinking free food at sunset, remarking happily about what a beautiful warm night it was, and then by 11:09 I was probably in bed! How funny to learn, later, that it was the last night of summer... I'm glad I went out and enjoyed it! Especially because the weather here has really behaved properly, and now we're all getting cozy in flannel and corduroy and sweatshirts.

Other things:

• Here's a funny (perhaps unintentionally) Egypt video.
• If you're in Chicago, check out the rooftop deck at Bottom Lounge (where I went last night) before it gets too cold! It has a really cool view of the city and reasonably priced drinks.
• Tomorrow's the last night for Redmoon Theater's The Astronaut's Birthday! See you there!
• Ooh, maybe I'll watch the marathon at Simone's, a cool bar in Pilsen I went to for the first time a couple weeks ago.
• I don't remember where the picture comes from, but it's a cozy fall-looking room!