Browsing a friend’s blog (Blue Print — you should check this out! Rachel has fabulous taste: she has some wonderful finds on here, AND we have the same blog design/theme. She also has some lovely prints in her Etsy shop) I came across These Are Things, a fabulous site owned by a couple of designers who specialize in funky silkscreen maps. I took advantage of their January sale and ordered this:
I was hard-pressed to pick from their beautiful collection. Here are some of my other favourites:
Speaking of colourful things… I’m dreaming of Kitchenaid Stand Mixers. Ever since it was released, I’ve craved this 90th anniversary shiny red edition, which looks magical on Williams Sonoma shelves. I’m particularly enamored of the big glass bowl, which I think looks even classier than the regular stainless steel. And I love this vibrant red:
But there are so many other fabulous colors to choose from, and I think if this “Majestic Yellow” came with the glass bowl this might be my first choice. I love how sunny and cheerful it is!
This Almond cream model would work no matter what your kitchen palette: 
And I love the vintage feel of this Pistachio model. So beautiful!
And if those colors aren’t enough…
One of my biggest temptations: Anthropologie. Beautiful (if always too pricey) stuff that always inspires me to sit outside Parisian bistros in cute hats and funky boots or decorate my (imaginary) light-and-breeze New York apartment with eclectic-but-tasteful fabrics. Alas, I can usually only afford the odd sale item, but this weekend that meant leaving the store with a satisfyingly weighty bag filled with four of these:
These cheerful latte bowls come in a bright assortment of colors (see below), but the benefit to the orange ones: only $1.99 a piece 
Now I want more colors. And that’s the thing with a lot of kitchen stuff; you need all the colours side-by-side for the real impact. Examples: these magnetic kitchen timers (also from anthropologie):
And these fabulous melamine spoons I bought from Illum Bolighus in Copenhagen last summer:
The spoons are made by a Danish company called Rice, which specializes in all things colourful. I also bought this chicken plate (!) from the same designer:
And I wish I’d brought home some of these melamine cups and plates:
I only just returned to Durham from Christmas at home, and already I’ve got the travel bug again. I’m itching to go somewhere. M and I have been talking about scheduling in another trip to Asheville, which lies directly in between me in NC and him in TN. Perhaps there’s something about this time of the year that makes Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains sound attractive, since it M and I have spent two Valentine’s weekends there. One of those weekends involved a day in the luxurious Grove Park Inn Spa — bliss! But most of the time we just explore, visit some of the fabulous restaurants downtown, and drive the Blue Ridge Parkway:
But lately I’ve been dreaming of places farther afield. For some reason, I keep thinking Istanbul (humming “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”). Really, who wouldn’t want to visit a city that was once the capital of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Latin Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (yes, I’ve done my Wiki-research) and that is situated on two continents. I want to visit a hamam, see the Blue Mosque, shop in the Grand Bazaar, eat lokum (Turkish delight) at the Egyptian Spice Market, stop off at a tea-house under the Galata Bridge, and of course visit the Haghia Sophia.
New year and time to start anew and afresh, including (hopefully) more regular posts on here. The beginning of January, despite the miserable weather, usually feels full of possibility. A whole new year to write on. Having made the switch to Google Calendar, I really miss the tangibility of a paper planner or calendar. Something with blank spaces that ends up tattered and loved (or hated?) by September or October. I tried an academic planner at the beginning of last semester, but I’m just so tied to the ease of keeping myself organized electronically that I just let it go after about a month. But I love the idea of something like this (by dozi on Etsy):
My family are better with calendars than I am. My Mum always updates the family calendar in the kitchen, which is usually a week-to-view one with blocks of time for each day. Dad has a page-a-day calendar upstairs in his office which is usually filled with inspirational messages, and there’s usually another cat-themed page-a-day in the kitchen too. This year, I supplied not only the 2011 cat-a-day specimen, but I also provided my cat-obsessed family with a personalized family calendar. Made using mypublisher, this one features pictures I’ve taken over the years of our two amazing cats, Tiger (who we lost last year) and Lia. Here are a couple of pages:
Perhaps I’d be better going with something practical and pretty that lets me off the hook when it comes to keeping it up-to-date… Like this pretty letterpress one by Sarah Parrott:
If I hadn’t been biking around Berlin, I would have carried a few extra pounds home. And not in my luggage.
First of all, Berlin has amazing pastries. On day one, while Maggie taught her class, I explored the area between Museum Island and the Brandenburg gate with the aid of a red East German bicycle Maggie’s friend had lent her. After a poke around the Pergamonmuseum and a few close encounters with German tour buses (the bike was one of those you have to back-pedal to break, making it impossible to slide the pedals backwards to get a good starting position when you’re stationary. Not so good when you’re at a traffic light in the middle of Berlin) I chained up beside the Opera and sampled two different kinds of sausage (currywurst and bratwurst) from a road-side stand, and then somehow found room for a giant slice of buttery apricot-filled tart and tea at the Opera cafe (it just looked too delicious to pause for a “before” photograph…). Later, in a local Kreuzberg restaurant, Maggie and I shared a plate of käsespätzle (creamy cheese noodles) washed down with a hefeweizen (so good we repeated the same meal on day 2).
And then there was Maggie’s culinary flair… I was staying with Maggie and her friend Melanie, both instructors in the Duke in Germany program (Maggie — creative writing; Melanie — German 2) for six weeks of the summer. Before I arrived, Maggie had succumbed to a summer fruit craving (watermelon and cherries) and had stocked the fridge full of German breakfast goodies, like smoked fish and an irresistible creamy mango-vanilla yogurt. When I arrived, she tossed up some curry-tossed fish and a big green salad. Each morning, we had pretzel rolls from the corner store (an ingenious idea really; I’ve always thought that the best part of the pretzel was the warm fluffy middle, but there’s never enough of it). On my third and last night, after we had already had sausages and fries for lunch and shared two desserts from the world’s largest chocolate house (Fassbender & Rausch at the Gendarmenmarkt), we had a sort of potluck 
of pesto-tossed gnocchi (courtesy of Melanie), a huge salad, giant German pasta parcels (I can’t remember the name, but they looked like giant ravoli) tossed with sauteed onions, and ciabatta. Afterwards, at a restaurant where the students and instructors gathered for a German language session, I somehow managed to cram in a slice of apfelstrudel and another hefeweizen as I tried to catch the sense of a few German phrases.
The morning of my departure, Maggie presented me with a plate of scrambled eggs and a warm pretzel roll. I needed my protein for the journey home, she said. I’m sure my body had enough protein in reserve, but I ate every last delicious bite.
And I went home with a cherry streusel slice in my handbag. For the train ride from London.
His iPhone 4 sits on top of his iPad (in its funky case that converts into a stand), which sits on his macbook pro on the coffee table in my parents’ living room. A little Apple shrine. My brother has just come home from Glasgow (where he flies 737s for Ryanair), and he’s brought with him all his Shiny Apple Gadgets. And I’m ridiculously, stupidly envious.
My phone makes calls. It can manage predictive texts, but nothing qwerty or emailable. It takes tiny fuzzy photos, just about big enough to fill its fuzzy little screen. Dave’s phone has two cameras (5-megapixel with LED flash and 5x digital zoom) that facilitate face-to-face phonecalls (“facetime” in Applespeak). My little phone has a selection of very irritating alarms. Dave’s phone can track his sleep patterns so it wakes him when he’s in his lightest sleep cycle. He can check the weather, use it as a compass, a game console, a calendar, music library, GPS navigator, movie-maker etc. etc. etc.
And then there’s the iPad, which will do all of the above (save the phone part), but with even more panache. It’s just downright beautiful. AND he had the pinball app on it, which has overtaken the ridiculously addictive “Angry Birds” app as the current black-hole of all my attempts to get anything done today.
I’m completely green with envy and seriously questioning my career choices. Why didn’t I do something cool and lucrative like maneuvering giant metal tubes through the air? Perhaps I can justify “investing” in an iPad; after all, it has an amazing selection of free classic and out-of-print books through iBooks and the Kindle app (these, of course, are the things I should find enthralling; instead I’m in Deep Sea Pinball mode, desperately trying to complete the yellow missions and open up that darned treasure chest). There are Wilkie Collins books galore on here for $0.00. AND I’ve discovered that iBooks now has annotation capabilities, the lack of which had given me a good “excuse” not to even think about buying one of these very unnecessary gadgets — I can’t make reading useful unless I can take marginal notes, highlight, and bookmark, all of which are now possible. Hmmm… but could all the Wilkie Collins books out there really justify spending $629 on a 3G-enabled iPad when I get paid in September…?
For now, I’m just going to focus on beating Dave’s pinball score.
Digging around the dusty corner shelves of a second-hand bookstore in Winchester this week I discovered a lone bound volume of Dickens’s journal, All The Year Round, dated 1861. This musty, densely-typed Victorian tome taps into my latent materialism: I love getting my hands on (and, admittedly, owning) these little pieces of nineteenth-century print history. Since no author names appeared in the issues, it takes a little learning (or a 3G phone and Wikipedia!) to identify the lesser-known works in these periodicals. This one includes the complete serialization of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s aptly-named A Strange Story. The real treat, though, is the Christmas issue in the back: Dickens’s “Tom Tiddler’s Ground.” I handed over £20 and promptly went home and went shopping… online. Two days later a nicely preserved 1865 volume of Cornhill Magazine including both a few numbers of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters arrived, a score for £10. And I’m holding my breath for that 1856 Household Words on ebay. Oh dear…
Today I took my parents to the North Carolina State Fair.
Now, from an American perspective, I can imagine it could be a little tough to really appreciate just how different this country can be. A State Fair — or any type of country fair, for that matter — is a breathtakingly strange cultural experience. As a child, I watched Templeton the rat scurrying around the fairgrounds after dark, gorging himself on leftover corndogs and the like (wondering to myself, what is a corndog?), and returning to Wilbur’s little livestock pen. But I had no idea how weird and wonderful a State Fair could be. I have had my own share of culture shock in the nine years since I first began living in the U.S., but today I got to be the insider, the almost-American girl introducing her British parents to the wonders of the American midway and livestock exhibits.
The North Carolina State Fair has apparently graced the Raleigh area since 1853. It now attracts some 800,000 NC residents to its 344 acre grounds for 11 days of cow-gazing and fried foods. I first went two years ago with M, who took me up in on the Ferris wheel (my first time, unless you count the London Eye!) and indulged me in my love of furry creatures with big ears. We even came home with the obligatory cheap-and-tacky stuffed toys, the dubiously happy result of an I’ll Guess Your Age guy with poor skills (hmph). This time, there were no stuffed toys. We elbowed our way through crowds of macho guys holding penguins and huge women eating huge turkey legs and headed for the livestock exhibits.
I love pigs. I love how they smile when they’re sleeping. And how content they seem in their little swine worlds. We watched a pig auction (Be careful not to nod, cautioned my Dad. I don’t want to go home with a piglet). And then on to the cattle judging, where shiny black cows were patiently enduring what looked like a cross between a car wash and an up-market salon. Happy farm hands were combing and blow drying their cows. My parents were incredulous. Even more incredulous when we saw the winning cow’s price tag: $7000.
As we trudged out of the fairgrounds, carried along by a wave of well-fed North Carolinians carrying stuffed penguins and Nemos, my parents tried to sum up their impression. ”Well, that was an experience.“
Tonight was the last night of a four-week photography class at the Durham Arts Center. I don’t think I really learnt all that much, but I did have a little fun playing.
