Sites in Cincinnati

Before I went to Hungary, Brian's parents came to visit us in Cincinnati. We spent a nice afternoon together, despite the chilly, windy weather. We went to the courthouse, saw a bit of the downtown area, and visited some nearby neighborhoods. Here are some pictures from that trip.

The courthouse downtown:

Fountain Square, downtown:
A downtown restaurant (the car is now gone--I saw workers removing it the next week!):
Mt. Adams neighborhood:
Hyde Park neighborhood:
Our apartment:

Pre-trip goings on

I am heading to Europe soon, so I wanted to post a few pics from the last few weeks before I go. On Oscar night, we went to see some friends from our Wooster days. It was very nice to see them and also to meet their large black dog, who was super friendly.

The ferrets are doing okay, although they are definitely showing their age more these days. The spend more time napping than ever before. That is pretty normal behavior for older ferrets. Here is Rex sleeping in the sweatshirt I keep on the floor just for him.

Since I will soon be going to the land of pork and cabbage, I have been eating a lot of fresh vegis now, while they are still available. We had sushi again this week, along with spring rolls.

I also experimented a bit with hand rolls, which is sushi formed into a cone and eaten whole. This is a pretty good way to use leftover sushi ingredients I think.

Cincinnati Art Museum

A couple days ago, Anne and I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum. It is very close to our house, so it was a long overdue visit on my end. It is a very lovely museum, and it has free admission because of a generous endowment. I will definitely need to go back sometime soon to see more of the permanent collection. Anne and I looked as several general galleries, as well as the special displays (Monet and Picasso) that they currently have. I forgot my camera, so I found some pictures online to show some of the things we saw.

living room decor and hair cut

I have spent some time this week setting up a few more things in our house. Now that the living room is painted, I was able to make the large bookshelf and attach it to the wall. I also started unpacking artwork and getting it put up.

In the evening, we often have a lovely view of the sky from the front windows. Here is a picture a took a couple days ago, as the sun was setting. We often have pink light filling the front room around 5:30 pm, which looks very nice.

Here are the results of some of the work I described above. We still have a few boxes sitting out, but the number is decreasing. Now that the bookcase is attached to the wall, I was able to fill it with books and photos. I was actually pretty impressed with the number of books that case holds.

Today, I got my hair cut! I wanted to have it short for Hungary, so it will take less time to wash. Plus, it was getting annoyingly long. Here is the before shot:

And here is what it looks like now:

A warm winter walk

Ginger stayed with us for a couple days again this week, and we took a nice long walk together. Since she can't work the camera well, I took a few pictures with her in them.

We headed south from our house to walk in the Eden Park area. There are a lot of nice paths and a string a small parks. One we walked through has an interesting tower:

Here is a close up of some of the tower's details:

We also walked through a park with two duck ponds and a beautiful view of the river. There were many birds flying around when we were there, along with many ducks and geese in the pond. Ginger wanted to get a lot closer to the ducks, but I made her keep her distance. She did watch them for a little while, and she even barked at a couple of them (who ignored her).

Looking towards the ducks:

Looking back towards the river:

Another nice park in the area is Mirror Lake. I took this picture a few days ago, on a clearer day. You can see Kentucky on the horizon on the right. It is a nice lake to walk around, although it is really a shallow artificial pond.

Warm winter?

We have been having an unseasonably warm winter this year. The last couple days have been especially nice--up to 60 degrees each afternoon and sunny! All this nice weather has me out walking more than usual (for the winter). Today on my walk, I saw these confused crocuses in a neighbor's from yard. The bulbs in our yard are definitely up, but none of them have bloomed (yet). I will let you know if they bloom in the coming days.

And now for something completely different:

We are still eating sushi, since Brian has decided he likes it and I like to practice making the rolls. Here are the filling ingredients I prepped tonight, before making the rolls. I tried using asparagus for the first time, which tasted good.

Steamed dumplings

I originally bought the bamboo steamer (see previous post for pics) because I wanted to make dumplings and I don't like frying. Yesterday was my first attempt, and I think they came out pretty good. A lot of the filling recipes are mostly ground meat (beef, pork, or chicken), but I wanted to try some with mostly vegetables. So after flipping through a recipe book for a while, I adapted some ideas to make a couple fillings. Filling #1 was ginger, garlic, scallions, yellow pepper, and spinach. Filling #2 was onion, corn, and cilantro, with a healthy shake of hot chili. I cooked the fillings before using them, since then it is easier to know when the dumplings are finished. I also used Filling #3, which was leftover from yesterday's stuffed mushrooms (onion, zucchini, mushroom stems, spicy chicken sausage).

The most time consuming part was filling the dumplings. I used pre-made dumpling wrappers to save time, which worked well. I forgot to take a picture with them all on a plate, but here are a few that I ate last. :)

And now for something completely different, here are the ferrets hanging out together. So cute!