The Hamilton Bakery

Why Do We Love This Place?
- It's organic!
- They grow their own, local wheat!
- The owners live upstairs!
- They serve my favorite, locally-roasted coffee!
- We can walk to it!

Come visit us. We'll go for a walk. :)

Patterson Park

The day after Thanksgiving, we ended our Zippy Tour at this spot, and I was reminded how beautiful this park is. So, upon arriving home I scooped up the girls and headed back. They rolled down this hill a million times, played on the awesome playground, and I watched the sun set.

We've got to go back here on a Sunday--that cool, Victorian-era Japanese pagoda is open and free to the public every Sunday from 1-6 pm! (And it is NOT leaning like the Tower of Pisa. That is due to the angle at which I held the camera.)

A Musical Outlet

I didn't realize how much I'd missed singing classical music until I joined this little neighborhood ensemble last fall. Alan took video of the first piece on our concert last Sunday, Poulenc's Ave Verum Corpus. Feel free to listen here. (It's only 2 min. 45 sec.)

It was one of my favorite pieces on the program--it's not easy (we didn't sing it perfectly), and it's a nice balance of "out there" and "accessible."

The concert was additionally meaningful because Mom was the accompanist (wish I had a video of one of our accompanied pieces), her friend Cindy played flute, and Jon and Courtney's friend, Anna, was our guest soloist and fellow working-mom-who-didn't-realize-how-much-she'd-missed-singing. That made for not only sweet music, but sweet fellowship. Very sweet fellowship.

Trying to Travel on a Dime!

Our friends, Mindy & Raleigh, who live in beautiful, rural upstate NY in a huge, renovated farmhouse w/wrap-around porch, joined a Home Exchange website hoping to trade houses w/someone in the Portland area for as many weeks of the summer as possible. Lots of people do this kind of trade-houses-for-vacation idea and it got me and Alan excited--so we joined a Home Exchange website, too! There are people all over the world looking to vacation in other places while you vacation in THEIR place.

We still have to work on our website page, but here are a few pics we put up to advertise our very cool, pedestrian neighborhood and our nearly-100 year old house. Now...if only the lady in Versailles would want to come HERE! :)

We'll keep you posted, and I'll share the link to our house on the website when it's ready.

Lovin' the 'hood: Part 5

We love our local coffee shop, the coffee they roast, and the pictures Amelia took while we were there last Saturday morning.

Lovin' the 'Hood, Part 4

Tuesdays are "Taco Night" at the Clementine. The Tuesday before Christmas we all went there with Shelley. If you arrive at 5pm (easy to do when you can walk!) you can have the place to yourselves and score a table right next to the kid area. Did you hear that? They have a KID AREA. (However, it occurs to me looking at this picture of Amelia with her hands all over those plastic dinosaurs, that perhaps the kid area was one of the culprits of the massive germ warfare we've had since Christmas....)

Check out Clementine for yourself!

And take note--the light fixtures hanging in the windows are two metal colanders clipped together around a hanging bulb. Cool, eh?

Lovin' the 'hood: Part 3

Hamilton has culture! One example is the newly-formed Hamilton Community Women's Ensemble, which I joined this fall. I've enjoyed rehearsing some lovely Christmas music with these ladies for an hour and a half on Monday evenings. It's a bonus that I can walk to the rehearsals, and it just feels so good to SING!

Anyway, Hamilton Presbyterian is the church that sponsors the ensemble, and also hosts a little concert series. Tonight I took the girls to hear a lady sing a program of Broadway musical numbers. The girls were SO good (even though they asked if it was over each time they heard applause), and it felt kind of nice to be doing something like that right in our neighborhood.

About half way through, Evelyn looked up, eyes wide, and pointed as she whispered, "Mommy! That lady's voice is so pretty, it's putting that man to sleep!"

Well, I've seen people fall asleep downtown at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall to the lovely sounds of the BSO, too. :)

Lovin' the 'hood: Part 2

What else do I love about where we live? The things I've ever seen anywhere else. Sure, we've got gas stations, Jiffy Lubes, pizza joints, banks, 7-11, dry cleaners, Family Dollar.

But really--have you ever seen a sign like this before? It's in the window of the pawn shop we walk past going to the grocery store.

You gotta love Hamilton.

Lovin' the 'hood: Part 1

I've been wanting to do this forever but kept forgetting to take the camera on our walks. I love where we live. This is the first installment of why.

On Mondays, June-November, we walk to Church of the Messiah to pick up our CSA vegetables.

I love this place. It's a beautiful building with a cloister and a real bell tower. (Ran the video while it was ringing--LOVE this!) The swings in the big tree are a bonus.

And the pickup? Nice math practice (not to mention vegetable identification. I'd never seen white radishes before.)

Even the walk is fun. Like this week, when the girls brought their dolls in a stroller and a plastic sled.

Thus begins a sharing of the reasons we love Hamilton.