My tiny home decorating corner

In the corner of our livingroom, I've placed my great-uncle's travelling trunk from his days in the coast guard. It had been consigned to my parents' basement for decades -- I didn't even know it was there. Originally, I intended to use it as a coffee table, but it was too big and blocky. We decided to get something more delicate so that we could see the cowhide rug. We moved it to the corner, where it has provided extra storage space (needed in our 500 square foot apartment), and one of the few flat, open spaces in our home. Currently living on the trunk are a shiny gold vintage lamp (a graduation gift from me to my husband when he finished his Ph.D.), a gold painted bowl from bali, some old books, an antler I found near my family's house, and our record player. Sometimes the record player also hosts a cat, though we strongly discourage this!

After a friend's wedding, we were given six of her leftover milk glass vases, and I have loved clustering these with fresh flowers on the trunk to give that dark corner a bit of color. I first arranged flowers as a hostess in a very nice restaurant outside Boston and loved the challenge of balancing color, structure, and height.

Flowers live so briefly I have been photographing them and then editing them on instagram. I love to share the little bit of seasonality we get here in Northern California.

 

 

Zelda the cat, posing insouciantly with billy balls.

spring flowers  (daffodils, calla lilies, narcissus, fennel, ceanothus, ferns, lavender ) I collected in our neighborhood

I bought a bunch of green wheat in late fall, and the brilliant local florist suggested flax, thistle, and eucalyptus to go with it.

early spring bouquet of irises, tulips, and greens.

Skiing in Tahoe for Spring Break

Found on Flickr --  by Scott Thompson

I am so excited! My friend Kevin, a whip-smart fellow grad student in English, has invited me and some friends to stay with him for a five days at his boyfriend's gorgeous house in Tahoe. Yay Kevin and his retired-at-30-and-bought-a-house-in-Tahoe-because-he-invested-ridiculously-well-in-the-tech-boom boyfriend!

I haven't been skiing since I was like 16, when my mother sweetly took me, my high school boyfriend, and my best friend up to the mountains. My family used to go up to the snow every couple years before that, so I am hoping it's going to be more like riding a bicycle and less like html coding, which I am truly slow and stupid at when I haven't done it for several years. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see if I can stay upright while charging down mountains. I love the thrill of speed on the slopes, and I will just have to not eat much in order to be able to pay for the ski rental and lift tickets for as many days as possible.  Otherwise I'll have to go cross-country skiing, which is cheaper but  no fun at all, as in my opinion it's like walking, but harder, whereas downhill is more like

wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Monarchs are Back

This morning began very slowly, with tea being made very groggily an hour after I should have gotten up. Then, going out to the compost bin to add some food waste to it and turn it over, my extremely annoying neighbor decides it is the perfect time to discuss the supposed problem of animals coming into our back yard and rooting through our garden patch (described by her as "the pile of dirt"). I survived and escaped the encounter, and biked to work at the tutoring center (got there on time!). The library was giving away old books - like, really old paperbacks from the '50s, which I might want to scavenge for paper (more on that in another post -- I keep promising crafting discussions, and I swear I'll get there), and then I settled in at the desk, only to discover that in fact I had forgotten that I had exchanged my shift with another tutor, and I wasn't due in til noon! That's always better news than the other way around, which has happened to me before, where you are still asleep when your shift begins.

Long lead in, I know, but I am setting a mood here! Always having too much to do, I am thrilled to get home to get some work done and get some errands done,