Becky's photoblog

Jane and Rose invited their friends, family and godparents over to celebrate their third birthday 🙂 They had a wonderful story-teller who kept them giggling for an hour! They just get cuter and cuter.

The Castle at Boston University. Not a bad view from my morning meeting.

Four of us devoured two of these at Blue Dragon. It’s a big melty chocolate chip cookie topped with ice cream and caramel sauce. Delicious!

The VFW Parkway is always so pretty in the snow

Finished-ish

I had a much needed museum-day, wandering around the MFA with my sketchbook and my camera. It had been too long since the last time I brought my pencils to the galleries.

In one of the galleries, there’s a beautiful sculpture that has caught my attention before, and this time, the most magnificent light was shining on it from the nearby foyer. My photos don’t do it justice, but the light made this gorgeous marble sculpture look like it was made out of fresh snow. I couldn’t get enough of it!

The sculpture is called Blind Cupid, because it depicts Cupid hiding behind Venus, playing a little game of hide-and-seek (so the card says), and Cupid’s eyes are closed. It’s by Bela Lyon Pratt, whose name rang a bell. I ran in to Gardner friends who helped me figure it out – Bela Lyon Pratt is also responsible for the gorgeous sculptures in front of the Boston Public Library.

Please click here for the MFA’s page on Blind Cupid

Bela Lyons Pratt created two grand sculptures for the main entrance to the Boston Public Library. The sculptures depict Art and Science (this photo shows Art), and they are each displayed between pedestals inscribed with notable names from each field.

The MFA also has Pratt’s miniatures of these sculptures: Art and Science.

Our second stop on New Year’s Eve was at our cousins’ house. It was great to catch up with our cousins and see the babies! They are ridiculously adorable, and always squirming around, so I got a bunch of blurry photos.

After that, our third and final stop for the evening was a party at Aaron’s house. We rang in the near year, with a great group of friends, and then we realized we’re all way too old to spend the evening party-hopping and staying out so late.

We had a busy but perfect New Year’s Eve. First stop, the Cravens’ for some dancing and bouncing, and a delicious meal. The girls wanted to show us some of their new moves, so we got to hang out with them before we all sat down for dinner together. They love saying “cheers!” so we toasted with champagne and sippy cups to a happy new years!

2013 was a lovely year, filled with family and friends, weddings and babies, little trips around New England, trips to Pennsylvania to see family, a trip to California to see old friends, and of course, our endless wanderings around our beautiful city. Life, as it should be.

Here’s a few of my favorite photos from this year’s photoblog entries:

I asked Brian to pick up some flowers for the baby shower to go with the purple and green color scheme, and he did a great job (they look blue in this shot, but trust me, they’re purplish). These gorgeous flowers look amazing in the light.

We hosted a babies shower for our friends Liz and Lee, who are expecting twin girls in March. A late-December Saturday evening is a weird time to have a shower, but as a little surprise for them, I prepared a Havdalah ceremony to bring a little light and warmth to our evening. Havdalah is the ceremony marking the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the rest of the week, and Liz and our friends used to do Havdalah together a lot back in our Jewish youth group days. It was really nice to be together again for Havdalah, and extra special to have Becca join us from California via Skype, and sing harmony from 3,000 miles away!

Sara showed up several hours early for Liz and Lee’s babies shower and helped us get the house ready. While the afternoon light poured in, Sara fought with tissue paper flower centerpieces (which she had way more patience with than I did). I love this lovely lady 🙂

Brian’s parents have a popular bird feeder, and the birds put on a little show for us while we are our breakfast. My favorites are the cardinals and the blue jays because I love the colors.

I love the little story that goes with a family’s Christmas tree ornaments, and Brian’s family has many lovely ornaments. Here’s a few of the photogenic ones.

San Francesco in Assisi, a magnificent cathedral with gorgeous Giotto frescos.

The MFA’s Christmas tree, looking up towards Sargent’s Rotunda:

We saw ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the gorgeous Hanover Theater in Worcester.

After stumbling upon the rehearsal of the Old South Ringers (handbell ringers) last year, I was hooked. We returned a year later for their concert of Christmas carols from around the world. I’ve visited many different churches, and our own Old South Church remains one of my favorites, especially when it is decked out for Christmas.

Please click here for the photos I took of Old South Church at Christmas last year.

Gargan Hall in Bapst Library, Boston College

Brian’s an active BC alumnus … hockey games, football games, etc … but today was a little different. Today we went to a BC event for alumni art lovers.

BC is home to some absolutely gorgeous art and architecture, and we attended a talk about some of the spectacular stained glass. I’ve seen spectacular stained glass in many many churches, so I’ve seen religious themes represented in glass in countless ways. It was so refreshing to see a gorgeous cycle of windows in a library where the themes included art, literature, poetry, science and law, etc. I’ve seen the Passion of Christ in stained glass plenty of times, but I had never seen scenes from the Iliad or from Hamlet. Absolutely gorgeous.

A scene from the Fine Arts window (Gargan Hall in Bapst Library). This scene depict Michelangelo, painter, sculptor (the David) and architect (of the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral).

The talk started in Bapst Library’s Gargan Hall, which looks a lot like a church. It has fourteen spectacular stained glass windows depicting important figures and scenes from the history of key disciplines in Jesuit education:  (in order of the windows) religion, oratory, poetry & drama, prose, modern languages, fine arts, history & education, useful arts, natural science, political science, philosophy, theology, law and medicine.   Then, we went in the adjacent stairwell to look at the renowned Shakespeare window, and then a window representing significant moments in the history of the written word.

Then we went in to the Thompson Room at the far end of Gargan Hall (technically part of Burns Library at that point). This space would have been the main alter of the hall had been a church, and this room was filled with stained glass scenes from epic poems: The Iliad, The Odyssey,  The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid. Then, we headed over to Casson Hall to talk about a spectacular window in the Irish Room before adjourning for refreshments in the rotunda.

Then Brian took me on a little tour of his own to point out a few memorable spots around campus. We popped in to see a lovely Courbet exhibit at BC’s McMullen Museum of Art, then went for tuna melts.

Click here for a pdf that goes in to detail about each stained glass panel in Bapst Library

I went from decorating zero trees to decorating three trees this year! We helped our friend Becky decorate her tree, we’ll be getting our tree soon, and we’ll decorate my in-laws’ tree on Christmas Eve. I love hearing the stories behind the ornaments.

The first of three …

The Bunker Hill Monument is one of the distinguishing features of the Boston skyline, and we got several great views of it as we drove around Charlestown this afternoon.

One of my favorite signs of the season is the Christmas lights on the trees lining the Commonwealth Avenue Mall (the tree-lined path running between the two lines of the wide avenue along the spine of Back Bay between Mass Ave and the Public Gardens). As I walked down the mall, I got this year’s first glimpse of the lights and I even saw the guy who was hanging some of the lights!

Another puzzle that looks lovely in the gorgeous light that pours through our front window every morning.