NYBG Holiday Train Show - Flickr album + special Doodle Du Jour, NYBG edition!

What a weekend! Paddling got short-changed in favor of getting in some holiday fun; on Saturday I joined in on Holiday Hymns for Hounds, carolling in Union Square to raise funds for the Mighty Mutts shelter dogs for the second year in a row, and then on Sunday I went to see the New York Botanical Garden's amazing Holiday Train Show. The NYBG is a bit of a hike from deep in the heart of Brooklyn, where I live, so I've only been to see it once, years ago when friends from Seattle were visiting with their then-very-young children, who are now in high school (and one of them maybe college even? yikes!), but it's a spectacular thing, so when my friend Mandy mentioned that she and her friend M. were going, I asked if I could tag along, so yesterday she and I rode Metro North up to the Bronx (or is that properly Da Bronx?) where we met M. and M.'s friend T. for a fantastic afternoon. The exhibit, which consists of large-scale model trains running around amazing scale models of NY architectural gems of all sorts, with the buildings (and even a couple of the trains!) all being done in plants and fungi. It's definitely grown since the last time I was there, and I think my very favorite addition was an amazing Coney Island part, complete with Deno's Wonder Wheel and a Cyclone with passengers shrieking in terrified delight!

Great stuff, too many pictures for a blog post, click here for the Flickr album.

I can't resist pulling out an excerpt - with 50+ pictures I tried to keep the captions short, but there was one exception which I can't resist sharing as one of my "Doodle du jour" series. I got to doodle somewhere MUCH fancier than my usual doodling venues - check it out! 

This was really fun - after we saw the trains and took a tram tour of the garden, we stopped at the library building to see the "Redouté to Warhol: Bunny Mellon’s Botanical Art" exhibit, and found that the American Society of Botanical Artists had a table set up there with paper and pencil and various things to draw - and there were chairs free! 

T. and I turned out to be a like-minded pair when it came to drawing, we saw this and our eyes just lit up so bright that the folks who were working there pulled us right in. So we sat down at the table and had a great time while the other checked out the exhibit, which was just one room - when they reappeared we decided it was time to wrap up, we then went and had a high-speed look at the gallery. Good fun! I wish I had thought to have someone take a picture of the two of us holding up our drawings, we took very different approaches and they both came out well and that would've been a fun picture, as seeing our different takes was really interesting; I also wish I had gotten a picture of the watercolor that the artist was doing of that spiky seedpod thing under the light, it was beautiful!

Here's mine, though - "Mini Still Life with Almond, Cherry, and Hazelnut". MMM. Wouldn't that make a good chocolate bar? :D