tortoisegirl

Ever since wednesday42 posted pictures of her visit to her local junk sculpture garden I've been jonesing to go to the one around here, and I finally got to yesterday! It's called the Magic Garden, a beautiful place that consists of a city rowhome and a small lot/courtyard next to it. I'd walked past it before and saw the mosaics on the wall and part of the courtyard and thought that was all, but it turns out there's much more. I was the only one there when I visited and had plenty of time and space to wander and take photos.

I took a lot of photos so I'll post some here and the rest are here in a scrapbook gallery, with a few comments beneath the pictures. And those photos aren't resized if you want to see them really big. Feel free to leave comments or questions about those ones here!



( Onward to the Magic Garden. )

So I learned of the existence of the Toynbee Tiles yesterday, and when I saw that there’s a bunch of them in Philadelphia I realized that holy shit, I’ve seen them. At least I’ve noticed the odd squares embedded in the concrete around Center City, but I thought they were just maintenance markers from the water company or something. On my way home from work went to go look for some :D I walked a few blocks down Chestnut and Samson where there are supposed to be some, but didn’t find anything. It was around 5:30 though, majorly crowded with the after work crowd so not the best time to be walking in circles on streetcorners staring at the ground. But I found two on Broad Street! Unexpectedly, just waiting for the light to change at Broad & Chestnut and looked down at my feet and there it was. No time to read it, but I definitely saw the word “Jupiter”, and then there's another one a block up that I couldn’t make out at all. They were a lot smaller than I thought, about the size of postcard. Must continue to look for more during adventures in Center City. I was so annoyed I’d never heard of these before; I love weird stuff like this, and here I’ve been walking over strange mystery tiles all this time and I didn’t know it. Their existence makes me happy.

Also making me VERY happy is that the tattoo I've been jonesing for for ages might happen soon. I got some money for my birthday, and my dad is even buying me a bus pass for April so I don't have to spend the bday money on that, so once I'm absolutely sure tuition is paid off I'll actually have money to spend on, like, things. Which is amazing. I got to talk to one of the artists at No Ka Oi on Saturday with Melanie, and was happily surprised that the price she quoted me was cheaper than expected. I was so bummed at Christmas when I didn't have the money, so I'm ridiculously excited about this :D :D THE TATTOOING IS NIGH.

It's 2010! Time for a post.

The semester ended with the usual amounts of stress and sleep lost over procrastinated papers, but I survived and my grades are better than expected. Better than last semester, which is a huge relief. I've got classes for the coming semester, but I still have to put down some tuition (or, y'know, wait for the financial aid to kick in) before I'm technically registered for them. I'll post about them once it's settled since I feel like I'm jinxing it otherwise.

Christmas was lovely, New Year's Eve was boring but well stocked with alcohol, New Year's Day was spent in hungover misery. My dad and his girlfriend got me a membership to the Philadelphia Art Museum! And here I was just going to use my dad's girlfriend's name to get in and hope they didn't check IDs. One disappointment is that I didn't get any cash to finance the tattoo I want, and I can't really justify spending what little money I have on it otherwise. For my birthday then, maybe.

I have a Christmas disaster story! It's not really disastrous, but certainly depressing, and things were broken. Lisa made a gingerbread house; baked all the gingerbread herself and cut out the shapes and did all the decorating, and it was going to her present to our Dad. Walking from the car to Dad's apartment Julia was carrying the house on the tray, and gods of Christmas decided that that house would not make it. Julia slipped on ice, landed on the house, and broke it into a sad pile of little gingerbread shards. Our Dad never even got to see it, and we didn't take pictures. The picture of the gingerbread house I posted earlier was the 2d one we made. Turns out my dad baked a house too there was going to be some decorating after dinner, but we ended up just taking the house home and decorating it the next day. So one house was smushed and a second one turned out bright and colorful, and they all taste the same in the end.

I saw Sherlock Holmes, which was AWESOME and Holmes and Watson were so adorable together I couldn't stop grinning for hours afterwards. I almost started explaining the concept of slash to my mom on the drive home, but she didn't seem interested when I started talking about how H & W were cute together, so I didn't go any further. But it was a lovely movie, and I really appreciated all the Tesla-esque streampunk elements, and of course RDJ is just damn fine to look at. I think I have a think for Victorian menswear, because damn everyone looked hot in those clothes. That needs to come back in style.

In unrelated news, John Frusciante has left the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which makes me cry sad, sad, tears. But! Soundgarden is getting back together, I guess the universe evens out, musically at least. I'll still be fangirling over John's solo albums. Maybe over the Peppers still, depending on what happens with the new guitarist.

Work starts up again this week (and, uh, might be where I am right now. It's boring here today.) The days off are nicer, though, when I'm actually doing something with the rest of my time.