Oh hellloooooo, best Goodwill find ever.
Ya ya, I know everyone and their blog are all about midcentury arc lamps since like 2012, but I can't get over how much I love them: they're just so clean. And elegant. And timeless and lovely and chic and et cetera et cetera. I've always wanted one, but I have also always not been particularly interested in shelling out billions of dollars for a vintage original.
And then, a few days ago, I wandered into Goodwill, and:
My view today, doing a bunch of video editing from bed (doctor's orders, sighhh fiiine).
So yesterday was weird.
You know how whenever you read a story about a celebrity going to the hospital with "dehydration" you're like "mmmmhmmmm, suuuuure, and how were those drugs"? Well, apparently 'tis a real thing. (Or at least sometimes 'tis.) Remember how I said I got all fevery on Sunday? Yesterday morning I started feeling the kind of bad that sort of seems like one should get oneself to the doctor, but the gastroenterologist I called (because my symptoms were starting to remind me of when I had an ulcer years ago) couldn't see me until Thursday and told me to head over to the emergency room.
Today on Lonny: a fun article about my cross-country move, as illustrated via Instagram. Over the next few weeks, I'll be doing a series of several of the home renovations we have in the works with Thumbtack over on the site, so stay tuned for tiles and barn doors and much (much) more!
You know how sexy cutout suits are amazing-looking sitting there on the hanger, all full of sexiness and cutouts?
I decided to try one on once. It was not good. Basically, everything unfortunate that a swimsuit could possibly do to my body, that swimsuit did. Squishing and widening and flattening and smushing parts of my body out of places where no body parts should be smushed. Ever since then, I've been a little gun-shy about the things. I love looking at them on Pinterest and shopping sites and such, but wear one? Nothankyou.
Except just yesterday morning I saw this article on PopSugar, and they assured me that there is this one Mara Hoffman swimsuit that apparently looks good on everyone, and that statement was supported by none other than Mindy Kaling (who posted two shots of herself looking lovely in it). Apparently "the world went wild" over these shots, which seems a touch like overkill, but who knows, maybe it really is that great? ...Maybe?
In any case, Mindy Kaling seems like a trustworthy soul, so I had to see it.
Da daaaaa!
OH I LOVE IT.
See, the thing about our old dining room furniture - that distressed round table and clear Ikea chairs - was that I loved it, too. But it really didn't work in the new space: our round table, which had felt so perfectly sized in our teeny colonial dining room, looked like dollhouse furniture in our California place (which isn't massive at all, but for whatever reason has a disproportionately big dining room).
I can point to the day when we decided to move here, I think (or at least decided that it was something we'd very seriously consider were Kendrick to be offered a job at the end of his internship). It was the day that we drove out, on a reader's recommendation, to the Whale City Bakery in Davenport, and ate huevos rancheros and muffins, and then wandered up the coast and found an abalone factory and a little house where people who were selling pottery and having a party on the front porch invited us in for wine and strawberries. Eventually we ended up at a practically deserted beach, where our son rolled around pretending to be a crocodile and I laid down and fell asleep in the sand without even meaning to.
We went back yesterday - to the bakery and to the beach - but this time there were four of us. Goldie did her best to consume an entire beach's worth of sand while Indy built sandcastles with a kid he met down by the water and told us about moats and seaweed and sharks, and - once again - I fell asleep without even meaning to. When I woke up, though, I had a fever, and on the drive back I felt worse and worse.
When we got home I crawled onto the couch, and turned on the TV for Indy, then started trying to figure out what we were going to do for dinner. When you're sick as the parent of very small kids, you don't really get to peace out, you know? I mean, of course your partner picks up the slack, but still: someone will need something, or want you and only you, or whatever, and you don't get to do what you want to do, which is lay there catatonic and stare at the Kardashians.
The weather here is funny. It'll be all 90 degrees and clear blue skies in our back yard, and then we get in the car and drive twenty minutes away, and all of a sudden it's 50 and overcast. Last summer, I remember the first time we drove from the South Bay into San Francisco, our son looked out the window and said, "Mom, look! The clouds are falling down." Which is an incredibly creepy and Stephen King-story-ish thing to hear a three-year-old say, but it was true: the clouds were literally rolling down the sides of the hills. If you've never seen it, you wouldn't believe how dramatic the climate here is: you can actually see a wall of fog coming at you. Like, an actual wall. That you will hit.
Weird.
via A Beautiful Mess
Blogger homes really stress me out.
They're all fiddle leaf figs in adorable woven pots and white carpets that my dogs would destroy instantly and lamps that I can't afford and perfectly arranged gallery walls of expensively framed prints that look like they were collected during a succession of impossibly glamorous round-the-world trips.
1954 Trailer | Pasadena, CA
...But I have a feeling I'm not going to succeed.
OK, so I was really late to the AirBnB party - I stayed in my very first one during our house-hunting trip last March, which is approximately fifty years after everyone else started staying in them - but...I mean...that's how I want to travel.
I've always had a major thing for fairy lights. And yet, for whatever reason, I've never hung them other than at Christmastime, because the logistical issues have always vexed me: I don't want them on all the time, but I would like them on some of the time, but I don't want to have to remember to turn them on because then I'll just never do it, and et cetera ad lazyfinitum.
But we have a yard now, and not just a yard: no no, a California yard. Which is basically a second living room. We spend a lot of time out there, and there are big windows all over the house leading out to it, so visually it's just a really significant part of the house. So: fairy light time it was, but not just fairy lights: no no, lighting bug fairy lights. Which are tinier, more delicate versions of traditional ones, and which gently blink off and on, creating the (surprisingly realistic) effect of actual fireflies. It is lovely.
Lovely lovely lovely.
