Sweet Little Treasures

Thought I would share a few of the teeny sweet goodies I’ve picked up here and there in the last few months.

Acorny Bird
This little birdy came from Bazaar Del Mundo in Old Town.

He is cast in resin or ceramic or something – not the carved wood I usually prefer, but the hat!  I love his little acorn hat!  So sweet.  He makes me happy.

acorn hat bird

Hammered Heart
Continuing the bird theme, this two-sided hammered brass and decoupaged heart is also from Bazaar Del Mundo.  It was part of an after Christmas sale, but it’s really rather perfect for Valentine’s Day.

brass heart

brass heart2

Cigar Box
I bought this cigar box at a Salvation Army thrift store.

When I first saw it, I picked it up and examined it for a long time.  There was nothing wrong with it and the price was right, but what would I do with it?  I put it back on the shelf.  Such a mistake.  When I spied it in someone else’s basket a few minutes later, I felt really disappointed.  😦

cigar box

I even briefly stalked watched the other shopper browsing ahead of me and I thought about the Mary Randolph Carter book I recently received from my mom-in-law:

51-xrBVky2L

I had stopped to think about the cigar box.  Shopping fail.  Fortunately, the other guy changed his mind and plopped it onto a shelf near the registers.  I scooped it up and felt lucky for the second chance.  After the 50%-off-day discount, I paid a meager $0.75!  Ha!

That Book
And speaking of that book above, it’s great.  It’s really fun to learn about other people’s collections and obsessions.  The pictures are true eye candy and the writing is very engaging and thoughtful.  Over all, it’s a delight to read or just browse through.  It’s a large, thick, heavy, well constructed coffee table volume that I am eager to share, but will likely never give away.  I am enjoying it so much!  It’s a keeper.  Thank you, Jenifer!

Bundting Baby
I also added another fabulous large Nordic Ware specialty bundt pan to my collection.

fairytale cottage bundt

These things are generally $20 to $40 in stores or online, so I always snap them up when I find them.  This one was pristine and only cost me about $5 at the local Goodwill bookstore.  It’s called the Fairytale Cottage Bundt Pan.  It holds 10 cups of batter.

I actually put this one to use right away with a cream cheese pound cake recipe.  The cake was good and it helped me to learn a few things about using the pan.  That said, I’m not as concerned with function, as I am with form, when I buy these bundt babies.  I just like the way they look and feel and I enjoy putting them on the wall or stacking them in my kitchen as decoration.  I have a lot of them…you know?  A lot of them.  🙂

Kokeshi Dolls
And last, but not least, here are pictures of something I’ve been hiding away for over a year.

kokeshi shelf

I got this collection of kokeshi dolls from my sweet friend, Leighann.  As part of a spontaneous cross country move, Leighann and her family shed half their belongings a year and a half ago.

kokeshi babies

They uprooted their entire lives and trekked thousands of miles with two kids, two dogs and a u-haul in less time than it has taken me to display these kokeshis!  And really, I’m not done with this.  The wall will eventually be painted and the shelves rearranged with a few more items, but you get the idea.

The real reason I think of this as a recently discovered treasure, is the fact that those two little minis in front were a surprise to me this week.  They were stored inside the two mamas on the right and left and I didn’t even know!  Such a sweet discovery, from a sweet friend.  Thank you, Leighann!

That’s all for now.

Happy Sunday!

P.S. What little treasures have you added to your collections this season?

♥♥

 

Art, Furniture, Halloween & a quick Jig ditty

Art I Didn’t Know About

I got a card in the mail from Father Joe this week – the usual holiday request for donations.  He sends them every year.  I like Father Joe and I have deep respect for his lifelong commitment to serve those in need.  One year, we gave him my old Grand Am.

This year, the request came with a postcard picture of a glass mosaic by artist Botti Studi.  In 2003, this giant work of art was installed on the face of the Villa Harvey Mandel in downtown San Diego.  Until I received this postcard, I didn’t know anything about it.  (Insert picture of fog-brained autism mom here.)

My goal for the week is to see this mosaic in person.

Receiving the postcard has also resurrected a goal I made last year, and subsequently forgot.  😦  Every Tuesday, there are a handful of museums around San Diego that offer free admission.  I haven’t been to any of them in years.  My goal is to go at least once a month.  Come with me!

By the way, did YOU know about that glass mosaic?  Why didn’t you tell me?

New Furniture

Our new tables arrived in plenty of time for turkey day.  Yea!!

Nine-year-old child + a bunch of cookies and some chocolate milk = perfect justification for buying glass to cover them:

Here they are with a little less mess:

I hope to tackle that wall of clutter to the left sometime in the next few weeks.  Sigh.  There’s always something.

Halloween

Halloween is almost over.  The candy bucket is empty, so I have been giving out leftovers from the boy’s July birthday – bubbles, bouncy balls, etc.  The trick-or-treaters actually seem happy about this.

A couple of teenage girls just knocked on the door and informed me that someone is getting in trouble up the street,  Sure enough, there are cop cars and detained kids parked on the corner.  Great.  Where the hell am I living??

Oh well, I guess no Halloween is complete without flashing lights and a bit of law-breaking.  Right?

And another thing…

If you read this post, then it shouldn’t surprise you that the boy made up a song about our jig.

My apologies for the static on the audio – not sure what happened there.

Enjoy!

Happy Halloween!

♥♥

A Day At The Beach

My front room is a disaster again.  😦

What I wouldn’t give for a few feet of formal entryway, just a little something to soften the blow and keep every visitor from instantly seeing exactly how we live.

Right now, this space contains two large dishwasher-size boxes, a power sander, a heavy duty orange extension cord, a laundry basket full of cds, and five extra pieces of furniture.  I can’t stand it.

There is clutter everywhere.  A lot of it was generated by the little boy, but plenty of it is mine and a bit belongs to the husband too.

I want to get organized before the holidays blow in, you know?

Gotta tackle this disaster!

There is a loose plan brewing in my head for all of it, but it seems I never have time to implement the plan.  When I do get a few free minutes, I am usually so exhausted that I haven’t the brain power to make good decisions.

Consequently, I am easily defeated, sometimes teary, and a little depressed over this space.

Today, I needed a distraction from it.

Thank goodness we had plans for some family time at the beach.  🙂

Husband and the boy ventured much farther into the water than I cared to go.

I took pictures with my crappy phone.

My favorite part of the day (not) was trying to discreetly change to our clothes, in the street, next to the car, while another vehicle full of beach goers waited for our spot.  Awkward, but sooo San Diego, right?  😀  Heh heh.

Enjoy the pix!

Happy Sunday!

P.S. Come back in the next few days to find out if I solved my front room clutter dilemma.

P.P.S. Do you like my hat?

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Art & Artists

Light at the end of the tunnel

Just two more days with the painters here.  It has been very claustrophobic inside the house.  The windows have been closed and covered with plastic, the air off, and the temperature rising every afternoon.  I’m done, you know?

Today, thankfully, they peeled the plastic off of my sliding door in back, so at least there’s that to open.

I feel motivated to make changes in my home right now, so it has been killing me to have my schedule dictated by someone else.  I have stuff to paint and sand, but I can’t open the garage door to do it until these guys are gone.  I hear the sewing machine whistling for me too, so I need to get the house in order.

It has been great organizing the kitchen a bit, now that we have the new storage there.  I just need to channel that energy into other rooms and keep my momentum up once the painters are gone and another weekend passes by.

Wish me luck!

Eye Candy

Today I was surfing the net for inspiration and I came across a fascinating website.  It belongs to a Seattle photographer named Bradford Bohonus.  You can read about him here.

I am in love with his “high resolution interactive panoramic VR photography.” He peeks into the studios of other artists and he brings us along for the ride.

His photography is amazing and makes it possible for you and me to see how these artists work – the colors, the textures, the views out their windows, what they have on their walls.  It’s all so interesting to me.

I am amazed how much these people look like their art and their environments.  Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like where there are clean lines in the work, there are clean lines in the studio and clean lines in the artist – neat hair & neat clothes.  Where there is chaos in the art, there is chaos in the studio, and a sense of freedom about the person – wild hair & funkier clothes.

See if you think the same thing.  And see if you don’t share my awe-struck respect for the photographer too.

Enjoy!

Happy Wednesday!

http://www.bohonus.com/galleries/personal-projects/artists-studios/

♥♥

The house, a dresser and a beautiful cake stand.

Will someone please tell me why I decided to get the entire outside of the house painted?  It’s loud, and today is just the power wash and prep.  😦  Next week will be unbearable.

We need to do this and, for the first time ever, we can actually handle the expense of it.  Sort of.

Wait.  No.  Not really.

I wish we were having the inside painted too.  Remember how my wall looks, the one right inside my front door?  You know, the first impression wall?

A few years ago, I tried to gussy it up with honey-pot orange polka dots.  Fail.

It’s the wall at the bottom of the stairs, where the boy has repeatedly bashed his makeshift cardboard sleds, over and over and over and over again.

Polka dots don’t help that.  No, siree bob, they don’t.  😐

The fact that there are men in my yard, preparing to paint the outside of my house is really quite painful and confusing to me as I look at this inside wall.

Oh well.  Home maintenance is a beast of burden.

We did do one thing to improve the interior of our house this week.  We bought a ginormous dresser from IKEA.  I wanted the blue one, but at the last minute I wisely thought better of that impulse.  I don’t want to be committed to blue if we ever do get the interior walls re-painted.  It might not go, you know?

We had glass cut & polished for the top of it and we stuck it in our kitchen to use as a buffet and some much-needed major storage.

This thing is HUGE.  If we ever lose the house, we can just live in the dresser.

I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally have all of my baking items corralled into one spot.  It’s life changing, I tell you!

My favorite thing about this?  I can fit all of our daily-use cloth napkins into one of the smaller top drawers.  All of them into one drawer.

In a drawer and out of sight means I don’t have to fold the napkins ever again.  This is possibly the most liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.

Thank you, IKEA and C&C Glass.

Last week, I found this interesting cake stand at a thrift store.

It reminds me of an old fan.  It has such great lines and not a single spot of rust or any damage.  I can’t wait to put a pretty plate of something tasty on top.  😀

Maybe you can come over to eat some.

Here’s the boy.

Happy Friday!

P.S.  It’s killing me that the BlogHer 2011 Conference is happening in San Diego!  I know I will be there one day in the future, but I have a long way to go before I find a comfortable public voice and can commit to speaking with it every single day on my blog.  I am in awe of the wonderful writers who will gather just miles from my home to talk, share, laugh, and cry this weekend.  There are some incredible people out there, writing with deep conviction about everything from the mundane to the extraordinary.  They’re amazing.  I want to be one of them.

♥♥

It’s Friday Night.

I’m already in my jammies – so much more comfy than my heavy black jeans.

The boy has showered, put on his jammies, played out his evening computer time, and is happily eating a fruit roll while I type.

He’ll be off to bed shortly and it’s not even 8:00 p.m.  I still get knocked over in amazement at our evening routine.  I can’t believe it actually works, but the little boy is definitely a creature of habit.  All we had to do was make him a habit that we liked.

Husband just returned from the store with stuff for cheese bread.  We had a craving.

The house is kind of a wreck.

There are still balloons all over the floor from the boy’s birthday party on the 16th.  Man, was that really two weeks ago?  No wonder some of the balloons look like this:

and greasy these:

and pointy this:

We like to leave stuff lying around after our special occasions.

I guess I’d better pop the balloons this weekend though.  Three of my friends posted comments on Facebook today about the sudden appearance of Halloween stuff in the stores.  Seriously?  Seriously.

Even more disturbing is the fact that I’ve already started thinking about decorating for Christmas.  😮

I can’t help it.  I went to Bazaar Del Mundo on Tuesday.  That place always makes me think holidays.  Or rather, HOLIDAYS!!!

It didn’t help that they had this charming addition to the painted tin ornament display:

I had to have him.

And really, if you’re willing to purchase a Christmas ornament in July, then you’re pretty much a sucker for all things holiday, right?  Bring it on!  I’m ready!

Halloween first though…

Happy Friday!

♥♥

P.S. What are you doing this weekend?  We’re probably going on another little nature walk.  I’ll post pictures if we actually do it!  😀

Antique Store & Flea Market Treasures

Thought I’d share a few pix of some things I picked up recently…

Beautiful, generous Leighann gave me several goodies when we met for the Rose Bowl Flea Market last month.

Here is a little spoon that I just adore:

Leighann also gave me a very amusing bunny by artist Debbee Thibault.  I love Ms. Bunny’s serious little face, her bright red dress and that heart dangling from her hand.  She goes well with my new beaded strawberries.

I bought the berries in my mom-in-law’s favorite little shop in downtown Brentwood.  They were fifty cents a piece.  I should have bought ten more.

I can’t say enough wonderful things about the shop.  It’s called The Vintage House.  They don’t have their own website (that I know of) so I joined yelp just to help put them on the internet map, so to speak.  Go here to see my review.

The Vintage House also had this sweet little rusty blue birdcage.  It cheers me to own this.  I am still looking for just the right spot to put it.

My small collection of blue and white figurines grew by two at the Flea Market.  The salt & pepper shaker pair on the right called out to me very loudly.

Despite the fact that I already had an almost identical little boy (on the left), I had to buy both of them.  You can’t break up a set, after all.  Right?

I don’t really know what I’m doing with this collection though.  I don’t think I want to grow it any larger.  I sort of like having just this one little corner of blue and white cuteness in the cabinet, but we’ll see… 🙂

At a thrift shop, also in Brentwood, I found a mason jar unlike most I’ve seen.  I stole mom-in-law’s idea of using it for measuring spoon storage on my counter.

I wish the picture were a little better.  The jar is marked on the sides with measurements too.  Very cute.

Last, and maybe least, I picked up this swirly candle sconce.

It’s made of light weight wood and measures almost eighteen inches long.

I was drawn to it because of my friend Erin and the similar sconce that she painted bright turquoise and listed in her etsy shop.  I love Erin’s unstoppable energy and am hoping to channel it myself to make something of my strange purchase!  I’ll post pix if I do!

That’s about it.

Happy Tuesday!

P.S.  The boy is back to school tomorrow, so probably no post since I will be out exercising my freedom somewhere.  😀  Look out thrift stores, here I come!!

♥♥

Just Emptying The Brain

I got a $135 rebate on my new washing machine.

I got a $133 delinquent registration fine on my van.

I want to go back to Pasadena and stay for a long time.  And while I’m away, I want a team of cleaning specialists, carpenters, painters, electricians, and pretty people from HGTV to attack my house.

It’s so depressing to return to an unorganized, inefficient, stressful mess.  I am back to the ever-burning questions – have there really been faded sheets hanging over my windows for the last ten years and why do we have so many wires everywhere?

My fattest boy cat is snoring soooo loud from his perch across the room,

that I keep checking the sweet girl next to me to see if it’s her.  It isn’t.

The little boy slobbered and slurped, then abandoned his Lula Mae spiral sucker on the desk last night.

I have already gotten stuck to it once.

I am sweating.

There is a five dollar Denny’s coupon on my printer.

The cat stopped snoring.  Is he dead?

Last month, the little boy taped a pencil to the wall in our hallway.  It stayed there for almost two weeks and a couple of times, when I threw my dirty laundry down from the landing above, my undies got stuck on the pencil and hung on the wall for over an hour.

While I was gone this weekend, husband blew up every balloon we had.

The child wrote words and drew faces on most of them.

And on this yellow one, he wrote the word “clear.”  Backwards.

We don’t know why.

But for some reason, it’s beautiful to us.  🙂

Meeting a friend soon, so I gotta go.

Happy Tuesday!

♥♥

#15 – Things I sorta already knew…

but learned again this week:

  1. Accidentally cracking off a chunk of your tooth kinda hurts and immediately makes you feel anxious, paranoid and kind of depressed.
  2. Sometimes a little humiliation is the best motivator for getting a project finished.  😳  You know, like when the air conditioning guy comes to your house and tells you he has to go into the attic and you suddenly realize that he’ll have to stand on your sewing table in the hallway to get up there and you remember that you started cleaning up your sewing stuff, but you never finished and your stuff is sitting in piles all over the table and the floor and the nearby counter?  You know, that kind of humiliation.  “Oh, sorry Mr. Air Conditioning Guy, don’t mind the mess.  I’m sorting my sewing area this week.  Sorting…you know…present tense.  Because I was definitely gonna finish.  I mean, who leaves piles of crap like this everywhere?”
  3. I am tall.  And heavy.  And I have bad feet.  I can NOT wear cute shoes.
  4. The little boy likes to rip things into tiny pieces.  Hey, Grammy and Grandpa Bud, do remember all of those cardboard blocks you assembled on Christmas morning?  Yep.  Shredded.  😐
  5. If I buy a new packet of sewing needles every time I reach for one and can’t find it quickly, then I will eventually have enough sewing needles to last 100 lifetimes.  And if my mom does the same thing in her sewing years and then she gives all of her sewing stuff to me, then I will have enough needles to last 200 lifetimes.  Maybe more.  Seriously?  What were we thinking?  Anybody need some sewing needles?  Or elastic?  How about some elastic?
  6. The slim price mint chip ice cream sandwiches are really good.  😀  Really.  Good.
  7. Fear of the knife gets you stabbed by the fork.  And sometimes the grapefruit spoon.  Grrrr.
  8. Ribbon makes me happy.  Organizing all of it brought me immense joy this week.  It also taught me that I never need to buy any gold ribbon again.  Ever.
  9. I actually do like blue cheese.
  10. I am in denial over the teeny hole in the back of my favorite purple t-shirt.
  11. I am very interested in the royal wedding, but you would have to pay me an awful lot of money to make me watch it live at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.  Seriously?  I’m asleep then.  I love my DVR.
  12. While my interest in general cookbooks is waning, my passion for books about chocolate is growing in exponential proportions.  Next on my wish/hit list is Small-Batch Baking for Chocolate Lovers by Debby Maugans.  I was all set to join the The Good Cook again, but they don’t seem to carry this title anymore.  Double drat!  Might join anyway…
  13. Biscuits from a cardboard tube will do in a pinch (like when you break your tooth and don’t want anything crunchy), but then you mostly just want to barf them up and start your food day over.  😐
  14. When properly fed, the little boy lives in a world of joy, surrounded by interesting shapes and fascinating colors and remarkable sounds.  He jumps and squeals and laughs and TALKS and sings and enjoys life more than I ever knew to.  He is the cheeriest creature I know.
  15. Our oldest cat does not do well without us, even for a few nights, even with visiting friends seeing to her needs.  Really, it’s flattering, even kind of reassuring to some of my mothering doubts, but I worry about her.  She’s old, you know?  How many more times can we leave her before her little nervous system just can’t take it anymore?  Pretty puddy.
  16. There is no substitute for a chat with an old friend.  Nothing calms, energizes, inspires, challenges, comforts, or fits quite as well.

Happy Thursday!

♥♥

Happy Birthday, Muffin Man and Books

Happy Birthday

No, it’s not his birthday, but I asked him to sing and that’s what he chose.

It cracks me up.

Please ignore our messy house in the background.  😳

You probably have to know him personally to enjoy the next one…

Muffin Man

His class sings “Muffin Man” at school in the mornings.

Judging by this performance, I can’t be certain it’s the same song I learned at his age.

I do know that it’s his favorite.  Or rather, it’s the one he always requests…

maybe because he is desperate to know the words??  😕

Books

I have thoroughly enjoyed and am nearing the end of the The Birchbark House.  Whatever will I read next??  If you had to choose from the list below, which would you pick?  Don’t forget to tell me why!

Happy Monday!

♥♥