Who knew Tupperware was art?

This morning I awoke to the sounds of my little 4-year-old niece, Atala, traipsing around, playing, just being her usual happy self.  She accidentally came in to our room while looking for something else, so I was up for good.  No problem - I hadn't seen her in a couple of months.  We had a great time just talking for a little while.  She showed me all of her new little princess dolls, etc.

After I got up and around, my brother-in-law Keith and I went on a little trek downtown.  I was thinking it was just a short little jaunt to Wrigley Field - it looked like a short jaunt on the map!  Turns out it was about a mile and a half one way!  So we walked all the way down there, through all of the Cubs fans (grrrrr!), not to mention Mets fans (grrrrrr) and Iowa Hawkeyes fans, who were in town for a game against Northwestern (also grrrrr - not a fan of Iowa in general!).  I really felt like I was in hostile territory! :-)  Of course no one knew I was a Cards fan, so I guess I was safe.

We hopped on the train and went downtown, getting off at Chicago Ave.  Keith, who has been here quite a bit, showed me around the immediate area, including the old Chicago Fire Tower, the only building that made it through the famous (or infamous) fire that burned Chicago down.  After that we walked over to the Museum of Contemporary Art.  That was really cool, and gave me a lot of inspiration for new pieces of art - not just painting.  There was a fun piece made up of all sorts of things: wood, plastic, pillows, even Tupperware!  Modern art rocks!  Who knew Jenny and I were sitting on a gold mine of art in our kitchen cabinets? :-D

There was a whole gallery dedicated to some really interesting pieces by an artist named Alexander Calder, who worked a lot with metals and other objects ( a lot of which literally came out of a trash dump during World War II, when he couldn't get any of the materials he wanted to work with).  What he mainly wanted to convey with his work was balance, and balance is exactly what he did!  There were absolutely astonishing pieces in which the piece, probably 10 feet tall or more, would literally sit and sway in the wind (even the small bit of wind made by people walking by), they were so balanced on each other! 

Anyway, my stroke tonight is a bright red, in honor of a really great red that I saw on one of Alexander Calder's pieces.

I'm just so glad that the picture thing finally worked!  Now I've gotta go back to see if I can put a picture on yesterday's blog!