Thursday, September 21, 2006

Visiting the Floating Glass Onions

It was a beautiful day on Sunday and we took les parents to see the Chihuly glass exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens. It was incredible! It's on until October 29th, and there are also lighting the installation some evenings (Chihuly Nights). In the first picture (one of the first pieces in the exhibit) the reflection is as much a piece of art as the glass. Some of these pieces took 6 assistants to install over several days. Mom liked the snaky effect in this one, I loved the way the colors mutated as you went up, from blue to green, and echoed the conservatory setting.

I especially liked the 'floating' walla wallas. Well, actually, they were tethered--they only appeared to float. I guess you can't have hundreds of glass pieces and a glass filled boat floating wherever they want and crashing into each other! The most interesting part about this exhibit though was how the glass interacted with the settings and how it made you look and appreciate the plants (and animals) more. I love this photo because I managed to capture one of the large goldfish swimming around the similarly-colored glass sculpture.


The last installation was a greenhouse filled with these beautiful objects. Are they flowers? Bowls? Canvasses? All this and more. We took about a million pictures, this is one of few without people in it so it looks like it could be in the brochure, IMHO.

The glass chandeliers are a specialty of his, and I particularly liked this one because it looks like a very artful bunch of birthday balloons. Festive!

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Manhattan Gesture Mysteries

Am I the only person who follows people around who are making weird gestures wondering what the heck they are doing? Last week I found myself on the block where I am working, about 10 paces behind a woman doing the strangest thing with her left hand. It was a kind of "air piano" movement of the fingers combined with a certain amount of lift and shake of the hands. I thought, keyboard player? High-level executive engrossed in cell phone conversation? Then she switched her coffee cup to the other hand and started shaking out the right hand. Which is when I realized she was carrying a leaking coffee cup.

I promised mysteries, not mystery...the second mystery is that I can now blog from work again. A pleasant surprise, but it begs the question, how long has this been going on? Was my hiatus of the past few weeks then due to a random firewall blip? But there is no need to dwell on this for long, things are going to change in my life very soon that will make all such musings about the IT department at my day job unnecessary.

Meanwhile a great blog found while browsing last week, on a favorite subject of mine, the Happiness Project. Do check it out!