bookcation and boatcation.

“being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.”

―john waters

we recently got back from a tremendously fun boatcation (which is old news if you're following me on instagram or twitter), and as with any 'cations of any sort, i did m'self proud in the reading department. fully immersing myself in reading for four straight days was MAGICAL. i have recently been reading in spurts on my iphone or the kindle, but for this trip, i went straight old school with tactile books purchased at the airport.

gone girl-gillian flynn: holy crap ballz; just read it right meow. i promise there is no weird kinky sex going on like the last book everyone on the planet recommended.

a hologram for the king-dave eggers: probably the most beautiful book cover i have ever seen; the story is not bad and really takes you away to a place that-heavens forbid-i'll never have to go.

sense of an ending-julian barnes: highly recommended by b-rad and his dad; probably better reading if you are a dude or an older dude, or don't naturally gravitate to books of the twilight variety, but it was enjoyable and really makes you think about not being mean to anyone ever.

as for the boatcation part (aka TEXAS FOREVER, part one), we flew to corpus christi to meet sugarbear's parents, who had taken their boat to port aransas previously in the week. i'd never actually seen any of the texas gulf coast (especially from the water), and it was amazing, partly untouched by civilization and also full of aquatic super structures, like enormous boats and bridges. daytime bay fishing and max relaxing at night was the only thing on the agenda before heading back to space city, which was a 15-hour trip by boat over the course of two days. to accurately describe the experience, my feelings would best be expressed by reciting the lyrics of any jimmy buffet song, and that is not just because b-rad's dad is a committed land shark drinker and tommy bahama wearer. you really do nibble on sponge cake and look for lost salt shakers and drink boozy blender concoctions all day, while you marinate in the salty ocean air and let the troubles of reality melt away. it's like fancy hillbilly camping at sea and i highly recommend it to anyone who's not afraid of a little skin cancer.

so many dinghy jokes.

TEXAS REDFISH NOM NOMS.

did i mention it was a three-boat caravan? here's the whole crew.

sugarbear would totally be smiling more in this photo HAD HIS FRONT TOOF NOT FALLEN OUT.

martyn lawrence-bullard in the flesh.

as i mentioned previously, marty b came to town on tuesday to spill some secrets about his million-dollar design projects (and clients), and it. was. faaaaabulous. the house was packed at alkusari stone's showroom and MLB didn't wait long before bustin' out words like decadent, delicious, diva, daaaahhhling and VIBE (i learned a long time ago that if you're in LA and have to talk about design, you just say VIBE a lot and people are like oooohh yeeeessss, everything you're saying is crystal clear: indonesian vibe. spanish vibe. in-and-out burger vibe. you get it.). martyn had great stories about buying solid gold tapestries and meetings with cher while she takes a bath and buying a condo with elton john so joan collins couldn't have it, to name a few. also the osbornes have 26 dogs but zero rugs because none of the dogs are potty trained? in between the juicy bits, he had wonderful tales from the world of interior design and the entire audience was truly in a trance. it was fun and a nice break from my home away from home, aka the office, plus i got to meet a great designer during the book signing.

posing + pocket square combo = camera gold.

please note that martyn lawrence-bullard has some of the finest penmanship i've ever seen. if he decides that he's sick of all that international travel and hanging out with celebrities and making mad bags of cash, he has a solid future in calligraphy, which i TOTALLY mentioned to him whilst he was signing my book, and he was pretty much like, please go away, crazy lady.

julia rothman: farm anatomy.

i gave my nieces and nephews (current total: six) julia rothman's new book for christmas (and i totally got one for m'self, duh). it's pretty much the cutest, most educational thing ever. every page is an illustrated cornucopia of farm knowledge, inspired and informed by her husband and in-laws (from rural iowa). don't you want to know about bees and barbed wires and how to plow a field? even if you don't have a natural inclination to agriculture, julia rothmans's illustrations are captivating. seriously, how do you not own this book already?

arubacation-slash-the big read.

hey bitches! happy sunday to all. we are back from a great week in aruba, where i wrote what could have been the best blog post ever (it wasn't), which promptly was lost into the depths of my iphone blogger app. to give you the highlights of that blog post that never was, aruba was lovely and i learned one arubian word, which is truly the only word you need to know in aruba... DUSHI. papiamento is the 'official' tongue of aruba (but they all speak-a the englay) and dushi is a generic term of endearment toward females and items in general, meaning nice, sweet, good... for instance:

Mi dushi: My sweetheart 

dushi 'om: Delicious or great 

hole dushi: Smells good 

so you are welcome. aruba was lovely, but i will warn you that travel time is about 12 hours from space city and the island is largely inhabited by new yawkas on holiday. if you want to hear murray, nicollette, vinnie and barbara argue about the whether or not you should be making your sauces with oregano, or the best way to cook any meats (in a shallow aluminum pan, with a little bitta waaaaatttaaa), GET THEE TO ARUBA.

also in aruba, i read about twelve books, which was fantastic. OKAY NOT TWELVE, but i did read mindy kaling's book (is everyone hanging out without me), all three of steig larsson's dragon tattoo books (which were great but caused me to stay up until the wee hours during the first few days, as i could not put them down), tina fey's bossypants, emma (a re-read, and frankly kind of a snooze after all that swedish rape), and then i re-read all three of the hunger games books (because i am real excited about those movies and obvs really love a book series) and last was farm city (another re-read, but it is really, really terrific). so that is ten books, which is not twelve but is still a lot. i made this collage of images thinking i could link it somehow to each book, but then i remembered how i dropped out of whatever class could have taught me how to do that. HUGE NERDS 101, i think it was called?

this is really the perfect time to link back to one of my 2K11 goals, which was to read a whole lot more. i will say that i have read none of the books on my list, HOWEVER, if someone hasn't recommended the dragon tattoo trilogy or hunger games trilogy to you by now, you live in a van down by the river. other books i've read this year include (and keep in mind, i'm basically reading at a 16-year old girl level):

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me - Mindy Kaling
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Played With Fire - Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Emma - Jane Austen
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Farm City - Novella Carpenter
Room - Emma Donoghue
The Birth Order Book - Kevin Leman (possibly the best book ever, if you are into this sort of thing)
The Blessing- Nancy Mitford
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford (how i never heard of these prior to april 2011 is a shock, because nance-balls is amazing)
The Paris Wife - Paula McLain (ernest hemingway's wife! oh, it's fiction? lame.)
Bergdorf Blondes - Plum Sykes (and this totally derailed me to a massive google and wiki stalking of the entire sykes family)
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ)
Night Road - Kristin Hannah (suuuuuuuper bad. like bad bad, but i accidentally downloaded and paid for it so i was like OH WHAT THE HECK.)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell
Garden Spells - Sarah Addison Allen
The Peach Keeper - Sarah Addison Allen
The Sugar Queen - Sarah Addison Allen (these are three super terrible books, but i could. not. stop. myself. )

so here are some before-the-end-of-the-year goals:
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

and here is the list (and the rules) for the big read:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
5) Reprint this list (preferrably in your own blog) so we can have a collective gasp about whether or not you've ever been caught up the romatic escapades of Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery BEST. BOOK. EVER.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

i'm a giant (weirdo) update: ch-ch-ch-changes.

first of all, how about a tiny round of applause for emily henderson, who not only dreamed up this hobby extraordinaire, but also did a round up last of everyone participating in the challenge. it's awesome to see what all the other nerds are doing with their spare time, so danke emily. you can check it out here.

i really thought the dollhouse would be poorly received, like a manrepeller of the hobby variety. we can all agree that it is strange (YET TOTALLY NORMAL AND COOL) for a childless woman to obsess over and build an intricate replica of what i'm affectionately calling 'marie antoinette's country coke den', but everyone who i've told has been politely interested. some people have also been enthusiastic about my participation, which has been a nice surprise. i've also started to remember all sorts of weird dollhouse references from the past, such as this super creepy awesome video that was part of my sesame street programming as a child:

i also recall that one of my favorite books as a kid was the borrowers, which were little people who lived in the floorboards and borrowed things from the owners of the home to survive. arrietty clock anyone? anyone? i kept my eyes peeled around our house as a kid, but i'm pretty sure either a) borrowers didn't live there or b) they might not be real. which sucks, because i could really use a borrower or two to help me reupholster some of this tiny furniture that has been arriving on tiny moving trucks. 

so after taking a tiny step back, i decided i wasn't digging the blue walls in the kitchen or the black and white floor upstairs. although wallpapering is tricky, i've added paper to the kitchen (a vintage map of paris) and re-done the floor in the bedroom upstairs to be something much more ridiculous and gaudy. animal print floors? MEOW, people... really a no-brainer. i am purchasing tiny crown moulding and baseboards, and i've been unable to resist strange tiny things, like parrots and trivial pursuit and the tiniest little heads of lettuce in a crate! so that's where it's at. i should finish the front of the house today and then it will be more little things like painting, before i do a major overhaul on some furnishings.

in five years' time.

i bought this today, be-yotches.

i figured i will start it on our first anniversary, which is sunday, for those of you who are not my husband (b-rad is right on top of that, rose, when it comes to anniversary celebrations). and here's why: a whole lot has changed in one years of life-slash-marriage, people. for starters, one of my bridesmaids is back in the U.S. of A. again, as opposed to singapore, where she lived one year ago. one of my bridesmaids moved away to live with her boyfriend (BOOOOOO). other friends got hitched and are already preggos. the last harry potter movie came out. sugar bear won a golf tournament. prince william got himself married. i wrote a poem about a sofa. wilson phillips really made a comeback. i met jonathan adler and suzanne kasler. target for missoni happened. kelly wearstler started a blog. important people passed away. this list could go on, but you get the idea.

so i think this will be cool. we shall see how goes it. i mean, one line a day, right? life's not hard when you're setting realistic and attainable goals. plus it is small and pretty and has gold-edged pages. plus it reminds me of this tremendously awesome song from the processional to our wedding, by noah and the whale. i would have pasted it up in here, but embedding has been disabled by request? what? say it ain't so, noah. so instead,

happy fourth.

{all images via wayfarers and whiskey; last image via decorno. images below via pinterest.}