belated cherry blossoms

I forgot to update the blog at all with photos of the pretty cherry trees! Here's round one - from the last weekend in April. The cherry blossoms were perfect!

a trip to the met

The other day, I met Matt for lunch and then went up to the Met to see the Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun exhibit. It had been up for two months and was closing that weekend, so it was time to finally see it! On the way, I walked through Central Park - somehow, I went through an area I'd never been through before, even though I'd passed it by a million times. It's right behind the theater where they have Shakespeare in the Park (this year, we will somehow get tickets!!). It's a Shakespeare Garden, and it was really pretty! I know there are a million little places like this in Central Park that I haven't seen, but it's still fun to discover new places.















It was a drizzly day, but it made the park look even nicer! And the city streets looked good, too - I really like it here when it rains.











I headed straight for the Vigeé Le Brun exhibit - but no photos were allowed inside, so the picture of the entrance will have to do! It was a really nice exhibit, a lot larger than I expected. I studied her work in art history classes in college, but had never seen any of it in person before. She was Marie Antoinette's portrait painter, and was friends with a lot of her royal friends. There was one set of paintings that I really liked - one was a portrait of the queen wearing casual, peasant style clothes, holding a rose. It was right next to another, very similar portrait of the queen wearing very fancy royal clothes, holding the same rose. It turns out that the portrait with the casual clothes was shown in a salon and caused such an outrage because of how casually the queen was portrayed that she had to quickly repaint the portrait with fancy clothes. Seeing them next to each other was really interesting - it was nearly the exact same face and background, just that one was regal and one was bucolic. Anyway, after seeing lots of paintings of wide eyed children and women and fancy dresses and ringlets and powdered wigs, I'd had enough rococo sweetness and walked around the rest of the museum a bit.









Then, it was time to go! Back out into the drizzle (it cleared up). Did you know that the Met recently opened a whole new building? It's called the Met Breuer, and it's in what used to house the Whitney, not too far away. It's more focused on modern art and there's an exhibit up right now called Unfinished that I really want to see! Maybe I'll have to meet up with Matt again for lunch?

a short hike at fuller farm

The weather warmed up on Saturday, so we decided to go on a hike at Fuller Farm! It's a network of trails that only total a few miles, but it's a pretty hike and really close to the house. The trail starts out along a road, then cuts through a forest, goes past a waterfall, and ends up passing through rolling hills. We were surprised that there was such variation back in there, since from the road you only notice the hills.



































We didn't actually see any birds on the "bird trail", but when we came out of the forest and onto the hills, we spotted a bald eagle soaring overhead! Even if they're sort of common in Maine, it was exciting for us city folk who don't see those things too often. The hike was only about 2 miles long, but it was nice to get some fresh air. This summer, we want to try doing some longer hikes - in our NYC-area hiking book, there are a lot of trails that look longer and more difficult than anything we did out on the west coast. Someday, I want to do a few in the Adirondacks! It looks beautiful up there.

around the house, in maine

It was really hard to resist a "Maine-ly ____" title for this post - but everything up there is called Maine-ly something or other and it lost its slight pun-ny humor pretty quickly. But this post is...mainly...a bunch of pictures from us hanging out! And cats. But there are three of them, so it's hard to resist a cat photo or two.





Whenever we're not in New York, our fitbits make it really clear that we don't really walk at all unless we specifically try to get steps. I'm pretty sure that the walk score of Matt's parents' house is 0. I honestly didn't even know that there were houses with 0 walk scores! I thought that everywhere had something nearby. But it doesn't! (Our apartment in Brooklyn gets a 91 - when we lived in Manhattan, it was 100!)

So we always go on walks around the development, just to get a few steps in. We discovered that if we walk all the little cul-de-sacs and tiny street-branches, it's about 5k. But it always feels a bit like we're walking in a campground. There's nobody else out walking, cars drive really slow, all the houses are kind of tucked back in the yards...it's a slight change from New York, that's all!



















The weather was good enough to have multiple fire pit fires! We made Easter s'mores, so I got to try my very first toasted marshmallow Peep. It was pretty delicious, even if it felt a little weird to be toasting animal-shaped marshmallows over the fire.