I'm a Sucker for Plumpers

I'm not sure whether it's true that Lip Venom was the original lipgloss that started the plumper craze, but Lip Venom was the first one I was interested in. It smelled like cinnamon (it contains ginger, cinnamon and wintergreen oils) and felt hot on the lips for a few minutes, and had a nice shiny glossiness to it, but it didn't work as a plumper for me.


Most recently I tried Mac Cosmetics' "Plushglass," which tingles a bit and smells oddly medicinal, like synthetic vanilla and Ben Gay mixed together. It's just okay.

I'm really into the tingle, like the feeling in your mouth and on your lips when you've eaten chile pepper or some spicy food.
A friend of my friend works at Sephora and advised me that Too Faced's Lip Injection Extreme is the most tingly of them all.
I haven't tried it, though, partly because I don't like the "injection" part of the product name. That's just so unromantic. It's not fun, it's not playful, it's MEDICAL. I don't want a lip injection... if I did, I'd go get Restylane injected... I just want something fun.

Instead, I tried LipFusion. My neighborhood Sephora SalesFella informed me that LipFusion is sold with the skin care products rather than with the makeup because it's the only plumper that contains collagen. Thankfully, it's vegan collagen (from seaweed) rather than animal collagen, and supposedly it's miscrosopic enough to penetrate the lips and then suck up the water in your cells, thus inflating each collagen sphere like a little water balloon. I realize this sounds like something only a total airhead would believe, and I was skeptical, however SalesFella won me over by looking at my lips and informing me, "You don't need it, though. You totally don't." Reverse psychology!!! I didn't buy that day, but I went back a few days later and did. I got the clear gloss first. It's extremely sticky, imparts an extremely glassy shine, and sticks to your lips (and any wayward strands of hair) like glue. It smells like grapefruit, which is nice. It tingles just a little; more than that, it creates a slightly heightened awareness, like when your foot falls asleep and then it starts to wake up. I swear, it really plumps. It's possible that the extreme thickness just creates a plump-looking effect... but the lips really do look more plump a few minutes after applying the goo.

After dropping $36 on the first tube, I checked out Ebay and got the pink for less than half that price. The pink gives a really pretty, natural soft color. Yay. Next I'm going to check out the LipFusion liner pencils. Stay tuned!

My Mother... and Her Koi Pond

Whenever I visit my mother's house, I like to walk around her garden and marvel at the oasis of greenery she's created. If you saw it, you might just think, "Yeah, a perfect yard out of a landscaping magazine. Whatever." You'd have to know the backstory--the house is in the high desert, where it reaches 115 degrees in summer. Tumbleweeds roll, and the land is baked to the point of cracking. When my mother and her husband bought the house, there was no yard whatsoever. They chopped at the dry dirt, removed all the rocks, planted every tree, hauled all the mulch, built the fence, dug up the used brick from my grandfather's house and laid a brick patio and walkway at theirs. (I remember lying on my stomach on those cool bricks at my grandparents' house when I was a child, watching ants or caterpillars go by, or just digging at the sand between the bricks with my fingertips. My grandparents are dead now and that house has now been sold to another family, so it makes me happy to think that the same bricks are at my mom's house.)

True, my mother could use less water; she has quite a bit of grass; every blade of it perfectly blue-green and well-watered.
But I can't judge, because all the green really makes it feel like an oasis out there in the summer, and maybe they really need that feeling. Just walking two blocks to see a neighbor's llamas, I thought, "Am I going to dehydrate, fall down and die out here?" And it was only 8:00 am! Walking back and reaching the house, the sight of the trees and that expanse of lawn is reassuring. (If the grass is still alive, so am I.")

My mom is extremely DIY, and she decided to build a koi pond. Build a koi pond, she did! She dug a hole, fitted in a shell ("The shell is prefabricated," she told me glumly), laid the rock around the pond, and installed a pump and filter system.
She added water plants and lastly, the fish. They're doing great, and the pond even attracted toads and a crane-type bird which my mother says swooped down and took off with one of her fish. She was not happy, but the story made me laugh. The pond is always shaded, which is what the fish and plants need. She placed it in a spot that's always in the shade of an enormous tree.

The E is for Exotic...

The other day, DD and I embarked on a rather long drive (San Francisco to LA) and woefully, I realized I had left behind the CDs my friend Meagan had arranged and burned for me. That left the radio.

If you ain't got no money take yo'broke ass home
You say: If you ain't got no money take yo'broke ass home
G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S, yeah G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S

At some point, listening to Fergie spell out "glamorous" I realized that I was somewhat tense, waiting for each letter to be announced and praying the word would be spelled correctly. I conclude that a nine-letter word is not a good choice for spelling aloud in a song. It's too long. We lose interest after about five letters.
This song, "Glamorous", really lacks the punch of, say, The Village People spelling out “YMCA” or JJ Fad’s Supersonic (You see, the 'S' is for super, and the 'U' is for unique/The 'P' is for perfection and you know that we are freaks...)
Four-letter words aren't four-letter words for nothing!

I think Fergie's song should have been called "Glam". She could have just spelled out G-L-A-M!

Leia

Leia and I were just two of many people buying the newly-released Star Wars postage stamps at Star Wars Celebration IV this weekend.

I saw several Amidalas, a couple of George-alikes, LOTS of stormtroopers, and this Aayla Secura... something weird happened to my photo, but I like it anyway!

The Baby Birds Amidst the Poop

A pair of birds nested in an abandoned nest in my mother's backyard. My mom says the nest was left there by other birds, and these birds just added their own fresh poop and set up a nursery.

They took up residence in a potted vine-like tree plant. From the front, the nest is completely hidden, but from the backside, we can get a great view of the babies. The backside is a window, and the birds don't seem to mind or even notice that my nosy face is literally inches from them. The babies are funny-looking, wrinkled things, like little tiny vultures. Their beaks are outlined in a wavy bright yellow sash of color; it looks like a clown's mouth, only yellow instead of red. We counted four baby birds!

Mer-People Matches

A design company called HomArt makes these nice match books filled with sturdy, extra-long matches (not as long as kitchen matches, but longer than the average matches). Oddly enough, I have seen them priced anywhere from $2.90 per box to $5 per box. There are other nice designs, including bees, corals, and goldfish. This one has a mermaid on one side and a merman or Triton on the other. I got them at Arch Drafting Supply for $2.90. I'm no fool! For the $5 version, you can visit PaperSource in San Francisco, but why would you?

It Made Me Do Three Loads of Laundry...

I received a gift today from a pal at work. It's a very pretty glass bottle of fancy laundry detergent! It's mostly natural and has a very soft smell--kind of indistinctly floral and also somewhat like Love's Baby Soft, but very faintly--not overpowering like most big brand name commercial detergents; it's made by the Good Home Co. I'm very fussy about fragrances, especially synthetic fragrances... of course, I do think there's a nice happy medium between Clinique Happy (MOST HORRIBLE FRAGRANCE EVER!) and some of the people I work with, who smell like a mixture of onions, really stale armpits, unwashed clothes and mildew...

I was so excited about the nice-smelling, fancy detergent that I went home (after dealing with a flat tire I discovered as I was leaving work) and did three loads of laundry! I owe all my clean socks and towels and jeans to Ellen at work!

I Said I Hated Ebay. I take it back!

After getting screwed a few times by psycho Ebay sellers, I swore off Ebay. But, like a moth to a flame, I ventured back toward the bright light. What drew me back was the lure of lower-than-retail priced Diesel jeans, after buying DD a pair at full price, which were well-worth the price, actually; the pair he got fit great and are made of organic, fair trade cotton! I just figured why not try to score them in a few other washes, too?

So far the dream of inexpensive, brand-new, perfect jeans for DD from reputable Ebay sellers has not been fulfilled, but people also sell Tarina Tarantino stuff on Ebay!
Lo and behold, I bid and won this mod lucite Tarina Tarantino necklace and paid about 1/4 of what it retailed for originally. Whee! I love it, and I wanted it when I saw it on her site some months ago. Now it's sold out, but who cares? Nyah nyah - I have it now! There's always Ebay!

Paper, Textiles and... Eggs

Most Saturday mornings DD and I go to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. This morning I saw a woman wearing a shirt with the same design as this sheet of paper I have at home. She was rather hungrily eating a plateful of eggs and wouldn't put them down, so it's difficult to tell. Still, that was fun to see!

The Blank White Wall

We hung my beloved sculpture some months ago and just recently started building a little gallery on this wall of our bedroom, around the sculpture. It's made from several different woods, so I decided to use many different wood frames, plus metal, lucite and whatever else on this wall. I'm just going to keep adding things I like to it, and I figure as long as everything has enough white space around it, it won't feel too chaotic. I am adding little by little.

A post from when DD and I hung the sculpture

Better Than Running at Night

I used to teach Literature and Composition to 9th, 10th and 11th graders. (People always ask why I left teaching. Well, it was too little pay for too much heartache, and not enough support from parents, administrators, the district, the state and the federal government. Not enough books, no basic supplies, and too much of my meager salary being spent on novels, copy paper, pens, drinking water, tissue and tampons for the students. Too much sadness-- not enough reward.) I’m not a high school teacher anymore, but I still read a lot of adolescent lit.

It’s my favorite genre…I think it always will be. Francesca Lia Block is still queen of my heart (despite the fact that I think nothing she’s written since the Weetzie Bat books has been as good as they are, and they were written in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s).

I read this the other night; it’s Better Than Running at Night by Hillary Frank. It’s a small novel about a first-year art student named Ladybug who falls in love (or lust, or something akin to love-n-lust) for the first time with a good-looking guy who happens to be a bit of a player, as they say. I like that the narrator is quiet and independent, and serious about her studies. At times you want to go into the story and give her a good shake… but we’ve all been there when it comes to boys and men, I suppose. She’s a character you can empathize with and worry about. You can read the novel in just a few hours, and it’s something reluctant readers would get into, but it’s also grown-up enough for adults. It’s good!


http://www.hillaryfrank.com/

The Beautiful Curtain

I see Tord Boontje's "Until Dawn" Tyvek curtain panel in design magazines and some modern shops here in San Francisco.
I think it's beautiful and fun, and cool, and I imagine it's amazing when the sun is going down or coming up or otherwise moving around...

There's no place in my apartment for it, but I would love to see it in a friend's apartment if anyone had just the right need for it.

Sunday was breezy-cold. DD and I went for a walk and I saw this apartment in an old building, kind of a creepy, slightly decrepit Victorian-style building displaying its Tord Boontje "Until Dawn" Tyvek curtain in the window. I was very excited.

Dianda's Pignoles

I have a coworker who is seriously the biggest foodie anyone will ever meet. She cooks and experiments with recipes A LOT, she works as a wholesale organic produce sales person (selling to the best small, gourmet grocers in the city), she geeks out on new restaurants and goes to them before the ink dries on their menus, and she really spits out the mouthful of wine while wine tasting. She loves food. And she's very cute and generous and experiments on her coworkers. Once, she baked a chocolate bread pudding in the oven at work (she has assembled it at home, but baked it at work) and the smell of the pudding baking was so amazingly delicious that I thought for a moment I was dead and in heaven. (I thought, "Somehow I didn't think I'd be at WORK in heaven, but maybe this is just a transitional moment immediately after death, and I just died at work and I don't know it yet.") She also made an herb salt blend (she washed, semi-dried and chopped fresh organic herbs like rosemary, sage and thyme and pulsed them in a processor with fresh garlic and natural salt) that was coarse, moist and delicious on everything and gave little tubs of it to us for Christmas. If you sniff the salt, you get the scent of all the herbs and it smells so good. Finally, she's close to age 60 (so I hear, thought I'd guess her in her 40's had I not seen a baby picture of her which explained the time period by the cars on the street and the way the nearby businesses looked). And a foodie who has been around longer is naturally going to be more super-foodie than a younger foodie. She's had more time to taste more things!

Her favorite cookies are pignoles (or "pignoli", but the bakery just says "pignoles") from Dianda's Bakery in San Francisco (leftmost cookie). They are made with almond paste and are light and chewy on the inside and crisp outside, with pinenuts all over the tops. Dianda's also makes the cookie without the pinenuts, but pinenuts are delicious, so get the pignoles.

Diandas Italian American Pastry Company
2883 Mission St (between 24th and @5th, but nearer 25th)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 647-5469

My Favorite Tea Goes Organic!

There are many teas I love, so I can't really choose a favorite, but high among them is Good Earth Original tea, which is spicy, sweet, and has a lot of cinnamon in it, in addition to ginger, anise, papaya, lemongrass and clove. I know that sounds weird, but it's weirdly delicious. It smells very wintery, though I like it at any time of year. There was a Good Earth restaurant where I went to college, and my then best friend and I would eat breakfast there often. I have fond memories of the hideous, circa 1968 tapestry they had hanging on the wall there, the sunlight coming through the slats of the wooden blinds, and our good talks. They sold bags of the loose tea there, but I haven't seen it loose for a long time.

I always wished the tea was organic, but it wasn't. Now it is! Skimming the shelves at the grocery store, the beige and brown packaging of the new organic version is completely forgettable, especially since the original is packaged in rather loud yellow boxes with a blue stripe on them. You can't miss it. Keep your eyes peeled for the organic version; it's too easy to miss.

Lapis

I splurged on a piece of jewelry, and it wasn't even the piece of jewelry I've been planning on as my next jewelry purchase, which was going to be a pair of big white gold hoop earrings. Friday afternoon I wandered into my most beloved antique store (Gaslight and Shadows, San Francisco, CA) and tried on this lapis lazuli cabochon and gold cocktail ring. I love it; it's beautiful, it's different, and it's old. Phyllis Nabhan, who owns the store, looked it up in her system and pulled out a bookkeeping ledger from 1961. She flashed it at me--I saw pages and pages filled with her handwriting. "This is how we did bookkeeping before computers," she laughed. "I don't know anything about the ring, because I bought it with a lot of other things in one big lot," she said, "But it's from the 1930's."

Here it is. I know my hand looks dry and decrepit, but still, the ring looks awesome with this kind of orange-red nailpolish...

I Heart Ties

I got DD three new silk ties today. I love ties--putting men's shirts with ties. Ties are pretty weird when you think about it.
They're a phallic symbol. They're purely decorative; not functional. And they're pretty...I love the pink one, and I think it will look amazing with a white shirt and a charcoal gray cashmere pullover sweater. DD wears clothes very well.

Swimsuit Season is Upon Us. Run and Hide.

If you were going to buy a new swimsuit this year, you hopefully did it already, because you're already really, really late.
Oh well--everything is available in any season nowadays--on the internet. Who cares about white shoes after Memorial Day and all that other seasonal fashion stuff? It's always global warming time now. None of it matters!

For a person with the right coloring, this might be the most awesome swimsuit I've seen so far this season. The color is sexy (on the right skin) and the cut is sexy-- grown-up sexy, not Lolita-sexy. The problem is, this only works if you're darker than the fabric. If you're paler than the fabric, it will just be embarassing. Stick to green or orange or blue or whatever. By the way, a white swimsuit is embarassing if your skin is white. Trust me. (Likewise, I will be steering clear of pale yellow swimsuits, I promise.)

This caramel sexy number is by OndadeMar and is $150.

Trade Ya...

I want this armless, mid-century-modern styled loveseat, or small sofa! There's a place in our apartment where we have this chair, left. The chair is beautiful, but it's huge, and only one person can sit on it at a time. I want the little sofa instead! It's got less depth and no arms!
It's simple and elegant. Dang, I wish this had been around when I was furniture shopping, when we first moved into our currrent apartment...