this chair took over my life

A few weeks ago I fell into crazy love with a chair.  Like, I actually gasped when I saw the picture of it on Craigslist.  Gasped. And then I drove across Texas with my mom to find it, buy it ($15!), and cart it home.  Things seize me like that.  In fact, that’s how I […]

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the mother of invention

I’m taking a little time off from writing.  Not a lot of time off:  just a couple of months. I just need to be creative in different ways for a little bit.  Like sewing kinda creative.  And re-covering old chairs kinda creative.  And cleaning up our house creative.  To the extent that you can call […]

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everything’s a story

So I inherited some lamps from my grandfather’s office last week.  Or, actually, I just claimed them out of my mother’s garage.  They came from this awesome building: my grandfather’s building materials company. My mom found the lamps in a storage room there a few years back, and she gave them a home in her […]

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crazy cross-Texas love

So last week I fell into a crazy infatuated love.  With a chair.  A chair I found for 15 dollars on Craigslist.  But not Craigslist in Houston, where I live. Craigslist in Austin, which is 3 hours away.  What was I even doing looking at the Austin Craigslist?  But somehow it happened.  And you know […]

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before & after

The furnishings in our house have been going downhill for a while.  Kid life has been hard on my decorating skills.  We have a great time here and laugh a lot.  But let’s just say, decor-wise, my house is not even in the neighborhood of its potential. And so, one by one, I’m going to […]

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you can make butter

Today, when my daughter saw I’d bought some heavy cream at the grocery, she asked if we could make butter. So we did! We learned how to do it when she was in pre-school, and it’s super-easy! Here’s how: Pour some room-temperature heavy whipping cream into a small glass jar (like a baby food jar). […]

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the long-awaited kitten post

I apologize for the Blair Witch quality of the kitten photos.  But they do illuminate some true things: 1.  My camera spends too much time at the bottom of my enormous purse–down with the pretzel crumbs and dessicated granola bars. 2. A small person in my house (and I’m not naming any names) threw the […]

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handcrafted buildings

I’m obsessing over this amazing slideshow of photos of this charming cob house in Texas today!  The New York Times just did a profile of it, and it’s so much like a house I stumbled on at the Children’s Garden in Ithaca, New York, when we were just on vacation there.  My  kids were playing […]

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here’s where we’ve been on vacation:

This photo says a lot. But I’ll add these words, as well: Wildflower garden. Yacht club. Farmers’ market. Alpaca farm (with chickens!). Also: 75 degree weather. Gorges, and streams, and a lake. Grandparents. And this, too: Lucky, lucky, lucky.

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art gallery

Summer is officially here, and with it came stacks of art from my children’s schools.  And just as I was looking at the piles and wondering where I would store it all, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to store it.  I wanted to look at it. So began my project of covering […]

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