De-Vine Dorothy

My latest favorite book relating to my study is, Entertaining is Fun! How To Be A Popular Hostess. In it, Dorothy Draper gives the reader the straight talk on how to throw a swell get together. Now I know how to whip up a snappy tray of canapés and adjust the lighting in my living room with a mix of candles and table lamps to give a gala feeling to the evening!

I discovered Draper a few months ago in my Historic Interior class and fell immediately in love with her bold use of color as well as her use of colossal mirrors and black and white floor tiles. What cemented my affection though, was Draper's friendly, throw-care-to-the-wind tone through out this book; plus, she must use the word charming at least a hundred times in the text, who wouldn't love that?For all of you interested in more on Draper, there is an exhibit going on right now at the Museum of the City of New York, and there is a new book out featuring her interior design called, In The Pink.

This is a drawer in the desk my computer sits on. These are my top, most favorite pens and pencils. I always knew that pens and pencils tweaked my heart in a special way; you know that kind of thing when you think Staples and Office Depot are better than DSW Shoes, I just never realized that the tweak had spilled over into obsession.
I cleaned out my bedside table yesterday, and this is a feat because it has four large drawers, lots of room for lots of stuff. Anyway, one drawer holds a basket filled with, you guessed it, pens and pencils.
While deciding which would stay and which would go, I began to wonder just how many writing utensils I had. So I started in that top drawer of my bedside table and counted out 24. Moving on to the kitchen I discovered 21 mechanical pencils in a cup on the shelf of the pantry closet, 22 assorted pens and pencils in a container on the kitchen counter, a sloppy handful of Sharpie markers in the junk/pen drawer in the kitchen, (the better to ruin the kitchen table with), and 72 in this drawer in my desk. Of course, there are the 6-7 pens in my purse and the thick fist full stuffed into the center console of my car.
This realization hasn’t dimmed the thump in my heart for more pens though. Just last week I discovered a new favorite, The Uni-ball Signo 207 in purple. I bought a modest pack of two, but already I feel the urge to have one more, no, two more, I mean I have to have my purse and my car covered.

My New Favorite

 

We’re having our driveway, sidewalk, and front stairs re-paved this week. They actually began in the garage, ripping out a floor that had settled quite dramatically. That meant that we had to drag everything out of the garage and pile it up on our patio in the back yard. All this disorder is really yanking my chain. Here I am reading handbooks written in the 1950s about entertaining and running a successful home, which already had me readjusting my startlingly low standards in terms of house keeping and cooking, and now, I’ve got clutter all over everything and muddy shoes tromped through the house.
So I swing from running around trying to get the recycling out of the sink and picking up orphaned clothes; to wandering out into the street to watch the cement being poured. I try not to be conspicuous, but I end up taking pictures and edging closer and closer, and soon I’m chatting up the foreman, getting him to explain the importance of a four inch slump, and why we need a conduit laid under the sidewalk. What’s that for, I ask him over and over, much the same way my kids would crowd around me when they were little, pointing and asking questions when I was doing something exciting like cleaning the cat box.
Tomorrow the cement workers will be finished and then a new crew of masons will come to lay the brick on the front steps. As soon as one of them gives me a friendly nod I’ll take that as an open invitation to step closer and yell over the machines, Whatchya doin’ there?

Get Your Pattern On

Another tip from my Aunt M; check out the V&A sight for great info and pictures of 1960s fashion. My taste in vintage seems to swerve severely towards the loud, although I'm not sure I'd ever take on a swing dress made out of PVC.

Time Capsule

My Aunt M, who has has lived in New York city since the early 60s, sent me two boxes of her things from those early years. What a Bonanza! Not only did she send me a ton of dresses, but the costume jewelry she wore with them. She also sent along loads of black and white gloves, fish net stockings and linens. Then there were the handbags, more than I can show here. She told me that the red bag with the long handles was one of her favorites, my daughter thinks it is the best one in the bunch. I'm pretty partial to the small red clutch and the black buckle bag.
Needless to say I feel incredibly lucky to have these little pieces of history. Thank you Aunty M!! 

There Are No Pictures

You know when you're worried something may turn out badly but you Polly-Anna yourself into bravery? Well all my cheery, positive thinking and sardonic humor deflated when I stepped into my own little corner of hell; Omaha cabin. I'm not sure of the exact moment when my outlook began to wither. It could have been the mouse, well I think it was a mouse but it ran up the wall so fast I couldn't really see it, or the black spider in the window above one of the bunks, whose legs would have spaned to the edges of my palm if I had wanted to hold it. It was also the spider that must have had wings because it jumped and charged at the other mom chaperone as she came towards it.
It was almost silly. Every corner had scary-movie-sized cobwebs, and even though a large broom was provided for clean up, it didn't help get the mouse dropping out of the wooden-box bunks.
Ultimately, it was the spider that concerned the teachers the most, so we were moved to another cabin before nightfall; CROW cabin. It was freshly painted on the inside with only a small spider or two scuttling around. Hey, that's what flip-flops are for. Then night fell and the HUGE cockroaches came crawling out of....
the wooden bunk-beds! OK so, THAT'S what flip-flops are for. After killing everything I could see and checking under mattresses and under bunks for more surprises, while trying to comfort some (rightly so) homesick and freaked out little girls, everyone settled down for a whopping four hour sleep. When I opened my eyes the next morning, a large black beatle was sitting on my pillow and my first thought was, how many of his buddies are in my ears?
But that didn't top the last night at camp, where, after being stuck in the mess hall untill 11P.M. due to a severe thunder and lightening storm that cut the power to the entire camp, (the mess hall had a generator), we walked throught the pitch night with slivers of flash lights to our cabin which was now in the full controll of more cockroaches. While I was doing my bunk bed check and bug smashing routine, I noticed a very long black snake that was coiled behind a built in cabinet.
The story goes on and on from there, so I'll shorten it up a bit by saying that I didn't say anything to the girls, just told the other mother and then we piled the girls into our cars to drive over to the main building to talk to the teachers, (the five girls in my car fell asleep). The rest of the girls weren't so lucky because the other mother chaperone left us at 3 in the morning. Rather than try and move everyone around again, I told the supervisor that I would stay up and watch the remaining three girls while they slept in the cabin. What she didn't realize was that staying up wouldn't be hard for me because I was COMPLETELY freaked out by that point. I sat in a chair for the remainder of the night reading a mystry novel one of the teachers lent me while keeping an eye on my pal Mr. Long Black Snake.
Thankfully, no one seems to have suffered any spider bites, and I made all of them shake out every-pickin'-livered-thing they brought with them before they packed up to go home again.
They will bring home their memories though, and I can only hope that the sunny days spent t-shirt painting and canoeing will blot out, or at least dim, the bug-sodden nights.