And now my phone's take on art

If I had one photo to capture the summation of this weekend (a three-day one at that) it would be this: me with my back to the beautiful day, hunched over a laptop, reading about genocide. Nothing ruins a lovely, cloudless day quite like writing a few thousand words about the Holocaust. I'm still at work on that, so this will be another lame photo post. One the other hand, I discovered some random app on my phone that makes photos into drawings, so now we can really crank this thing up a notch.

At any rate, I did manage to get out of the house a few times. Once to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday with Turkish food and once to see the Woody Allen movie Blue Jasmine. If anyone else has seen it, I'm curious to hear what you thought. I though Cate Blanchett was awesome, but was not nearly as enthusiastic about the movie as a whole as the New York Times was. Now that I think of it, I guess I went out a few more times than that as I also met one of my oldest friends for coffee (she was in the city for a bachelorette weekend) and helped another friend volunteer out on Governors Island. Our job was ostensibly to educate people at the Jazz Age Lawn Party about what they could recycle and compost, but since everyone ignored our signs, it was mostly just traveling from each trash/recycling bank with our trash pickers and fixing their mistakes. We also attempted to dress in Jazz Age fashion for the occasion (which means I wore the same dress I did last time when I was not volunteering, but just a trash conscious lawn partier). I also tried to make finger waves with a curling iron because some chick on YouTube told me I could. It did not go well, as the large burn on my forehead will attest. Luckily, I found a large, floppy, not-at-all-anachronistic hat for $6, so I could hide my shameful attempt.

Actually, given all these diversions, it's kind of amazing I got anything done at all. With that said, here are some of the artistic achievements of my phone over the weekend:

The red velvet cake I made for Sam's mom. Those fuzzy alien blobs are raspberries. 

Magic and babydreams on Governor's Island. 

The hat, keeping my friend Kim at a safe distance. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton once lived in this water colored home. I took this picture (or rather had my phone paint it...) at my mother's request. 

Now I suppose it's nose to the grindstone time. These words I'm writing right now could obviously benefit my overall word count if only they weren't so off topic.