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.

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.

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.  😦

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:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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That’s all for now.

Happy Sunday!

♥

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

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Little Bits of Halloween

The first thing I decorate in my house for each new season is the china hutch.

In the Fall, I usually stow away my small collection of blue and white Delft (and other) figurines to make way for miniature pumpkins, leaves, and all things natural.

This year, I am so eager for our HOT HOT summer to be over, that I can’t wait for pumpkins to appear in the grocery store.

I decided the little Delft troops and I could get the party started without them, so I made some hats.  🙂

(This amazingly cute photo of a baby chick in a felt hat got my wheels turning.  Thank you, random little-felt-hat-making cute baby chick owner!)

Here is what I did this week…

Got the cat plate from mom #2 many moons ago.  He kinda fits right into the Halloween theme.

I made this little banner thing too.  I’ve never made anything like this before and I can see all its flaws in this picture, but it was fun to do and now I know what I would do differently.  (Like maybe have my ten-year-old print the letters because his handwriting is officially better than mine now.  😳 )

This is what I have labored over this Labor Day.  What did you do?

Happy Monday!

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Painted Doors & A Birthday Party

About a week ago, I was very inspired to paint the inside of my front door.

I was thinking purple.  Or apple green.  I bought a quart of each.

I was all prepared to paint – supplies gathered and commitment made – purple for the front door and green for the coat closet.

And then one of my Facebook friends posted a picture of a black door…a beautiful, giant black door.

Black!

I think I actually gasped.

Sorry purple.

Sorry green.

It was fun while it lasted, but I’m in love with black.

Here is the coat closet door and the teeny piece of wall at the foot of the stairs.

Those are hand-cut paper designs in the frames.  I’ve had them in a big envelope for years.  It’s great to finally hang them on the wall.

I found the giant “R” on clearance for $0.49 at Burlington Coat Factory.  It was white when I bought it.  🙂

Here is the coat closet door next to the front door.   I think the smaller one looks like a hobbit door or something, next to its big brother.

That’s my grandfather’s cigar table in the corner.  It’s my favorite piece of furniture.  It was in my dad’s office while I was growing up and I just loved it.

I was constantly opening and closing the little door to hide tiny treasures or notes and I love that my son now does the same thing.  I feel certain that my dad, and his dad before him, would both be pleased to know that this humble little piece is amusing yet another generation.

♥

And speaking of amusing another generation…

here is the boy on the morning of his birthday party this past weekend:

Husband inflated six or seven beach balls to give to the guests.  That seemed grand to the boy.  He took them all into the jumpy before anyone arrived.

Hey Thomas, do you want to eat your cake now?

Okay, I’m tired.  Exhausted, really.

I have pictures of his new yellow room to show you sometime this week, but not right now.

I need to get a big iced tea and put my feet up.

Happy Monday!

♥

P.S.  What’s happening at your house?

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Starting In The Middle

As usual, I started a project without preparation.  I think I have concluded this is the only way I can start a project.

I have to follow my heart, dive right in, figure it out in the middle, and then do the “prep” work.  Or the project won’t get done.  Ever.

I had a pint and half of white primer in the cabinet, so I started covering the polka-dotted Moroccan circus paint job on the wall above the stairs.

It’s a BIG wall and the circus paint is dark goldenrod.

I’m going to need a lot more primer.

But I’m in my painting jammies, with splatters on my face and hands.  I’m sweaty everywhere and my hair is sticking to my cheeks in a tangle of neglect.  I am just not fit for public viewing.  😳

Just a few weeks ago, I painted my son’s room a cheery yellow, so I know how this goes.

I will get dressed and go to Home Depot to get the primer and a few other supplies.

Then I will return home, put on my paint jammies again, and then realize I didn’t get a roller or a brush or something essential for moving forward.

In frustration, I will dress and go to Lowes…you know, because I’m too embarrassed to let Home Depot see what an amateur I am.  😳

Did I mention that my mom-in-law is coming to visit on Thursday?  And my mom’s birthday is Saturday and my son’s birthday party is Sunday?

Oh, and because my son’s actual birthday is this Wednesday, I sort of have to get his gifts, blow up some balloons, treat him to a Toys-R-Us run or a visit to Balboa Park or something, you know?

That leaves today and part of tomorrow to finish this project.

You know what though?

It looks better already and I am motivated, so bye bye, Morocco.  I loved you for a while, but it’s time to say farewell.

Now how am I going to deal with this?

♥

What’s on your agenda for the day?

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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/

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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.

♥♥

9th Birthday Pictures

The Doll

The boy was very excited about his new doll.  He held her sweetly and seemed proud to pose with her.

These two pix are my favorites:

It pretty much went downhill from there.

The Cake

The boy chose a Happy New Year theme.  He liked the clock and all the colors.

It has only taken me nine years to figure out exactly what kind of cake to order:

1/4 sheet of chocolate AND
a 1/4 sheet of white,
both with white buttercream filling,
frosted & decorated together as a single cake.

It’s not as pretty later in the day, but both halves taste really good.

The final improvement over last year’s version was the omission of the fruity filling.  The sliced strawberries do that sliced strawberry thing and look kinda scary the next morning.  Blech.  😕  They had to go this time.

This year, his name was even spelled correctly.  Thank you, Vons bakery manager lady!

There’s a ton of it left in the kitchen.  Wanna come by and have a slice?

The Helium Balloons

I can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is to me that we didn’t get a single photo of the helium balloons.  😦  I thought they were magical.

Our front room has a 24-foot ceiling.  Sounds grand, but it’s really more problematic than anything else.

Every year, the balloons head up there and are impossible to get down when the kids want to play with them.  I’ve never really liked tying the balloons to chairs or anchoring them with toys or weights, so this year I paid extra to have twenty-foot ribbons.

The balloons floated skyward as usual, but the long ribbons (two dozen of them) dangled down and made a little rainbow ribbon forest that we could walk through.  It was very festive and I am determined to do it every year from now on.

The floral department was NOT pleased with my request.  Right from the start, I even offered to pay more and they still gave me crap.  Then they called me at home to give me more crap.  World ribbon shortage or something.  Annoying.  Small minded.  Not service oriented.  Whatever.

It’s funny to me that the skills I’ve built advocating for my kid spill over to stuff like this.  Heh heh.

The Other Balloons

The husband blew up a zillion extra balloons to leave outside the boy’s door the night before the party.  This is what he woke up to:

The front door was like a vacuum.  Every time we opened it for a new guest, the balloons were sucked out at lightening speed.   The scramble to retrieve them was funny, but rather unsuccessful.  Many met their ends on the porch or lawn.  It was kind of a nice icebreaker for our friends and family though!  😀

Miscellaneous Other Birthday Photos

Happy Birthday Party, Little Boy!!

♥

P.S…

Dumbest thing I did at the party?

Putting the pizza boxes on top of the piano.

The “protective” towels made it worse.

Jenifer, don’t look.  😦

Anybody know a good piano restoration service?  😐

♥♥

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!

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