Retrolite, Bakelite

My newest bauble is from Classic Hardware--they make this plastic jewelry and they call it "Retrolite". It's supposed to be an homage to Bakelite. There's a wonderful little antique shop near my home and the woman who owns it has owned it for thirty years! One day she told me all about Bakelite--how it was this miraculous plastic and it was used for knobs, appliances, etc. It was incredibly strong and took color very well. Then they started making napkin rings, bracelets, pendants and other jewelry out of Bakelite because they could make the colors so vibrant and beautiful. Then, people who worked in Bakelite factories started getting sick. Yup, Bakelite was toxic. So, no more Bakelite.
Now, people collect Bakelite--the finished products aren't toxic, it was the manufacturing process.

(Boy, that was a pretty crappy explanation of Bakelite, but you get the idea.)

A Sucker is Born Every Day

Although I've grown out of See's Candy, as far as their chocolates go (they were always around at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Halloween when I was growing up), I still love their square lollypops. My favorite ones are the butterscotch and cafe latte flavors, and the chocolate flavored one is pretty gross... like a Tootsie Roll... that type of weird artificial chocolate flavor. They used to have peanut butter, which was gritty and kind of weird, too.

Now comes this Pumpkin Spice flavor... I had to try it. It's kind of strange and waxy or plastic-y at first, but then it's okay. Overall it's like that vanilla pumpkin spice flavored product that they pump out of an enormous jug at Starbucks. One of my friends loves that stuff. All through the holidays she carries around an enormous Pumpkin Spice latte from Starbucks, although she only sips at it and never drinks more than a few inches of it. She found the one Starbucks in San Francisco that had still had Pumpkin Spice into February last year.

If you try See's square lollypops, definitely go for butterscotch or cafe latte. I think you could safely skip Pumpkin Spice and you'd not be missing anything.

From Harry Potter to Mary Gaitskill

I was happily reading a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when DD said he had to return it to someone at work. "You can't just take it away from me now..." I protested, but he promised to buy it for me the next day. (Cut to a full WEEK later... I still don't have the Harry Potter book...ahem.) Anyhow, I began reading a book of Mary Gaitskill's short stories which someone lent to me. The book is called Bad Behavior, and the stories are mostly about characters who are somehow getting sexually involved with each other, and their inner thoughts about each other, many of which are quite mean and unkind. I guess that's realistic. One of the stories is "Secretary", and it was the basis for the film "Secretary" starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. The original story is very interesting; it ends after the attorney spanks the young typist once, for making typing errors, and after he makes her pull up her skirt once. After those two incidents, she doesn't go back to work for him any more, and the story ends.

Barbra, Soft as an Easy Chair...

It's Barbra week here on my blog. I love Barbra Streisand. It's practically genetic-- my mother loves Barbra Streisand and I grew up thinking Barbra was the right music to clean house to, to have dinner parties to, and to take a bubble bath to! Fortunately, DD also loves Barbra Streisand, or else we probably couldn't be together!

This is my favorite Barbra Streisand style era-- when she had long, flowing hair and looked very soft. Kind of like Gisele Bundchen... except Barbra came much earlier, of course!

Of Nails

Last Friday I was getting a manicure at the end of my day, which was around 3:00 pm, and my co-worker R. came with me in order to take a break in the middle of her day, which wasn't going to end till well into the night. She wanted to get acrylic nails put on, but she didn't have an appointment and not everyone at the salon applies acrylic nails, and no one who applies them was there at the time. "Well, just get a regular manicure and get the acrylics next week," I said. But she was really bent on getting acrylic nails sometime in the very near future, like probably Saturday.

I was really surprised when she showed up Sunday afternoon at a party we were both attending-- without acrylic nails. She's a very determined person. But it turns out her boyfriend dissuaded her from getting them.

All the talk of nails made me think of this teacher I had in 8th grade for Social Studies. She made us copy the preamble to the Constitution out of our textbook while she read the newspaper. She had super long, curly nails, painted dramatic colors like metallic ruby red and purple.

Then I started thinking about this song by Lil' Kim (with Lil' Shanice) where Lil' Kim goes, something like, "Keep my hair done all the time/even got a manicurist in the booth while I rhyme". The song is "Shake Your Bum Bum" and involves diamonds like disco balls, Dolce and Gabbana flip flops, and Lil' Shanice's anus.

Briefly, I remembered Florence Griffith-Joyner, the amazing athlete known as the fastest woman ever. Now that is something-- the fastest woman ever! She was also known for her flamboyant running clothes and her long, dramatic fingernails.

Speaking of long, dramatic fingernails... last but not least, there's Barbra Streisand! Her long nails are a signature style, and they're almost always painted a natural color. They're very elegant, but sometimes they're downright distracting, like in the movie The Prince of Tides.

Hmm, maybe long nails go along with confidence and power.

Carrot and Stick Press

I got these beautiful letterpressed skull and crossbones notecards at an art store the other day. They're made by Carrot and Stick Press in Oakland, California.
The paper, or cardstock, is wonderfully thick, and they make designs ranging from sweet pink polka dots to classic candy stripes to the skulls, which are my favorite notecards ever ever EVER!

Carrot and Stick Press

Pink Pearl apple

A coworker gave me two Pink Pearl apples on Friday at work. Hers were grown by Apple Farm. I like tart apples, and Pink Pearls are very tart and crisp, like Granny Smith apples. The apples she gave me had a white and pink mottled flesh.

At the Farmers Market on Saturday I saw that De Voto Gardens, from Sebastopol, CA also had Pink Pearl apples so I bought a few pounds. Theirs are sweeter than the ones I had on Friday, with a deeper pink flesh. The Pink Pearl apple is a hybrid that was developed in the 1940's. The skin is yellow or cream colored, and you can see the blush from the flesh through the skin. The people at De Voto Gardens' stand said these apples have a very short season-- late August through mid September! They compared it to an Arkansas Black apple for density, crunch and tart flavor.

Steven Shein jewelry

Sparrows, roller skates, rainbows, skulls, butterflies, old school boomboxes, anchors, headphones and many other iconic shapes, made of wood, laminate, glittery stuff and gold-- Steven Shein's made-in-LA jewelry is wearable pop art.

The heart-shaped one that reads "break this" is my favorite piece of jewelry lately!
It's made of five candy colored layers: purple, green, orange, pink and white, and is thick and chunky, suspended from a delicate chain.

Check out the amazing array of designs here...
Steven Shein

Limited Edition

The two worst words to see when it comes to some beauty product you love: Limited Edition. "Limited Edition" sends me into a panic and the need to stock up on Limited Edition items throws all budgeting and spending planning into chaos!

On a shopping venture the other day, looking for a bridal shower gift and a birthday gift, I walked hurriedly through the middle aisle of the cosmetics department at Bloomingdale's. The middle aisle is pretty much the straightest shot through Bloomingdale's, if you can keep your head from turning and keep your gaze trained straight ahead, lest you catch a glimpse of the various shimmering, glimmering colors and pots and sticks and spray bottles of fun makeup and lotions and potions to the sides. Unfortunately I made eye contact with a salesperson who smiled at me, which wasn't the true undoing, it was the fact that I smiled back. "BOBBI'S EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR IS COMING SO IF YOU'RE A BOBBI FAN" she screamed at me, and about fifteen people turned to look at her and at the person she was talking to (me). I hurried over to her just to get her to stop being so goddamned embarrassing and picked up a bar of soap that had sand all over the top. I sniffed the soap while the saleswoman prattled on about Bobbi Brown's "Beach" fragrance. The soap, called "the Sandbar" is impregnanted with the fragrance, which really does smell fresh and reminiscent of suntan lotion from the 1970's. That smell has a lot of sense memory and happy emotion associated with it for a lot of people, I am sure. Flash forward... I bought the soap.

It's rich and creamy and smells great, and I love it. I was thinking about buying another bar soon. Then I found out the Sandbar is Limited Edition! Time for a freak out. The only thing worse is the dreaded "DISCONTINUED".

The Edible Woman

Someone left this book on a table at work with a note saying that it was good and whomever wanted to read it should go ahead and take it. The pages were yellowed and there was an orange "clearance 1.00" sticker on the front cover.

It has been a long time since I read Margaret Atwood's books Surfacing and The Handmaid's Tale. I read them both in college... a million billion years ago.
That was when I starting getting the itch to be done with school and go on to law school and be done with English majors and English professors and theory theory theory and deconstruction. We were always deconstructing everything. Well, I was stupid. Law school sucked some major ass and I only went for one year. It goes down in my own personal history as the most wasted year of my life, mostly because I had to study so much that I did nothing creative--absolutely nothing. It wasn't even studying, it was just mind-numbing memorizing. Of course, once entering The Workforce I quickly realized how much better it was back in school. Ah, hindsight!

Anyhow, back to The Edible Woman. It was so good that I read all over the weekend. (I'm currently reading some books that I've been reading for weeks, and two I've been reading for months. I should just give them back to the people I borrowed them from and admit, "I can't read it".) It was written in 1965 and published a few years later. It's about a woman who is engaged to be married. Her boyfriend is dull. He's a lawyer, up and coming financially. He's good-looking, dresses well, and is self-centered. Marian, the narrator, is nowhere near as "together" as he is. In one interesting part of the book, she describes how bad her kitchen has gotten. There's not once single clean dish, there's a scum on top of the cold water in the sink, the sink is piled with dishes, and the fridge is full of rotting food. After becoming engaged, Marian starts to get grossed out by meat, and then eggs, and then she's a vegan, and then a carrot one day freaks her out, too. She can barely eat. At the end she breaks free of her fiance by baking a cake in the shape of a woman and telling him to eat it instead of eating her. He thinks she's weird and he leaves. She eats the cake herself, and then she shares it with someone else. I like her because she seems really on the verge of losing it. It's kind of refreshing.

That was a horrible synopsis; I kind of feel the way you feel when you're trying to explain a dream to someone, like all bogged down and heavy. Anyway, The Edible Woman is really, really good.

Elizabeth McGrath

I like to visit the creepy, always-Halloweeny world of artist Elizabeth McGrath.
I want her book, entitled Everything that Creeps!

Elizabeth McGrath's site

Put down the tweezers!

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TAG. You're it.

Get a really good, really precise pair of sewing scissors, and don't dull them by using them for cutting your bangs or the woody stems of hydrangea (for Pete's sake). Slip the point between the thread that holds the fabric of the tag to the fabric of the panty, and CUT THE TAGS OFF YOUR PANTIES. Do it because tags are crisp and hard and scratchy.
Do it because tags are white. Do it because if you don't, someone will take a picture of your panty tag sticking out of your pants!

(All bets are off it it says "La Perla".)

Do Not Try This at Home

Goldfish are really messy; they eat a lot, produce a lot of waste, and tear the heck out of aquarium plants. You have to change their water very frequently. Goldfish are not a low-maintenance pet! Well, emotionally they are. They don't climb on your neck while you're sleeping and jab their curved sickles of death into you the way cats do...
But they're not for the lazy, the forgetful, the procrastinators.

My goldfish has been alive and well in my care for over two years! Yes, I'm a bit smug and self-congratulatory about it. These plants are really cool; when you first buy them, they're like moss, and you tie them to a rock. In time, they affix themselves to the rock and grow onto it. It's a really beautiful effect. I also use plain ole' elodea. The fish destroys it and then I replace it. He seems to like to hide in it (and eat it), and it's like a miniature kelp forest.

Lush Ice Blue Soap

This soap is so good. It smells weakly like peppermint and something else... ocean or seaweed. It looks like it would be drying, because it's kind of translucent instead of creamy-opaque, but it's really plushy feeling, it only lathers a little bit, and it makes you feel cool without feeling all tingly and cold, the way Dr Bronner's Peppermint soap makes you feel. It comes to the LUSH stores in a huge round cake, and there's a white salt crust on the top of the cake. If you get some of this soap, be sure to get some of the salt!

LUSH Ice Blue Soap

Juicy Couture Charm Mania

Some months ago, friend M. and I were passing through Bloomingdale's on the way to Out the Door, Slanted Door's lower-priced but still delicious inside-a-mall restaurant. (Oh, excuse me- it's a Shopping Centre or Center, not a MALL). It's hard to pass through Bloomingdales, walking a straight line from the door to the opening on the other side, for glittering lights, sparkling display cases, polished floors and heavily perfumed salespeople smiling alluringly at you beckon you from every direction. Hold your wallet closed and just look and walk straight ahead, if you can.

We couldn't. A display case of Juicy Couture charms and starter charm bracelets got hold of us and we stared at the amazingly detailed miniature charms in grudging awe. Juicy Couture-- the ubiquitous and played out velour tracksuit of years past, the rather vulgar logo "JUICY" spelled out across the buttocks of overly sexy pre-teens, with the legs of the pants terminating in pink Ugg boots... Ugh, indeed.
And yet, the charm bracelet! So charmingly heavy, so shiny, so tongue-in-cheek feminine... and the array of wonderful charms! Pegasus, headphones with miniature mesh in the earpieces, cherries that are twin tiny lockets, a black butterly with moveable wings, a roller skate with a rhinestone in each wheel (and the wheels roll!), a tiny treasure chest that really opens, with strands of pearls and gold chains inside!

Yeah, we were hooked like two largemouth bass.

For M.'s birthday in June, friend R. and I conspired to get her the bracelet and a few charms. R. gave her the green and white headphones, and I gave her a pink cassette tape, which it turns out is a pretty rare one, which has been discontinued.

My current obsession is looking for these charms on Ebay, where sellers post Juicy Couture charms that were discontinued before I caught the mania. I don't even have the bracelet yet and I just bought my first charm, a little deer or fawn, which I'm happy to say is long discontinued and rather hard to acquire. I also like the owl and the acorn.

Neighbor Woes

Before I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area five years ago, I never hated my neighbors; any of them. I grew up in apartments in a rural area with other poor, trashy people (I'm not saying poor people are trashy. Middle-income and wealthy people are often also trashy. I'm just saying I lived near trashy people), and neighbors were never a problem. When my mom was finally able to buy a house, it was a little tiny 800 sq foot house that cost less than $90,000, therefore there were a lot of young people in the neighborhood, struggling people, and people who packed ten relatives into one little house. The couple I babysat for both worked at Mc Donald's, okay. Their kids were hopped up on junk food and would frequently exit the house in a whirling ball of screaming fistfight through the torn screen on the windows rather than use the door, while I dejectedly ate a few of their frozen blue ice pop thingies and hoped they wouldn't kill each other on my watch.

When I went to college and lived in apartments, my neighbors never bothered me.
When I moved to Los Angeles, my neighbors never bothered me, except for some stray wisps of cigarette smoke and a few late night yelling fights, but it was rare.

Since moving to the Bay Area, I've hated every since neighbor I've had, in the three apartments we've lived in.

I thought new Miss Downstairs was going to be okay. She has some kind of weird emphysema medicine in the back window of her Jetta, so I figured she's either an invalid or in the medical profession, and if she's in the medical profession she must be responsible, right? Fast forward to her either building a bed or a dresser or both at 2:00 am and possibly installing a disco ball into the ceiling (my floor).
There's nothing wrong with being awake at 2:30 am, but hopefully you'd be coming back from dancing or a bar and you'd simply pass out quietly on your bed, rather than putting your clothes into your dresser and slamming the dresser drawers 300 times.

You know it's time to look for housing where there are no downstairs or upstairs neighbors when you find yourself lying awake at 2:30 am hoping Miss Downstairs will drink a refreshing glass of bleach or have the bed collapse upon her while she's trying to hammer or nail something in, killing her instantly. That's where I'm at.
I feel trapped in crappy apartments by my paltry income and foolish lack of savings.
Or maybe it's living in San Francisco, where $2,000 a month rent gets us (barely) a basic, clean white box, a tree outside the window and a guaranteed parking spot. For less, you can have mold, layers and layers of old lead paint dating back to the Victorian era, a streetcar right outside your window, and a view of the peeling paint on a neighboring apartment's wall. Sigh.

Rebecca Barry

I just received this pretty little deer bauble, by Dallas-based designer Rebecca Barry. I'm kind of getting into the deer motif...

Toilet Seat Covers... P - f*ing - lease!

I went to a paper store this morning, and having had a glass of water and a cup of coffee and walked around the store about ten times, I had to pee. Why on earth would I take a photograph of Kelly Paper's rather average and unexciting bathroom, you ask?
Because it has a very special, very sanitary, very comforting thing that the bathrooms at my work do not- yes indeed - TOILET SEAT COVERS.

We have 101 employees, and four bathrooms with a total of five toilets. One bathroom and toilet belongs to the Human Resources manager and is attached to her office. Yes, she has a private bathroom. That's twenty five people per toilet for the rest of us.
"Can we have toilet seat covers?" I asked our resident person with a Master's degree in Public Health. She loves to make people cross at the crosswalk instead of running across the road, she loves to chastize us for not putting the cream cheese on ice, and she likes to tell people they're too fat and should ride a bike more. I figured she would take up the cause of the toilet seat covers once I got her going on it, but she didn't! I told her I know we can't catch STDs from a toilet seat, but still, people SPRAY and DRIBBLE. It was very fun saying this to this prissy woman, so much fun that I added in a loud whisper, "Menstrual blood...I dunno... kinda gross..."

So she tried to pass the buck to me by telling me to research what kinds are best for the environment, etc. I passed it back to her by saying I didn't have a preference as to what type or brand we get. "Whatever you choose is fine," I wrote.

Honestly, we're not all good friends enough to simply share unprotected toilet seats. Yes, there are a few people there with whom I would not mind sharing a meal, a car ride, or a movie with, but that doesn't mean a toothbrush, our saliva, OR A TOILET SEAT! It's just so barbaric... I hate it...and she should get the damned toilet seat covers, since she's the busybody, preachy annoying Health and Safety nutcase and head of the Health and Safety Committee!

Letterpress Cookie Cards

I found this really cool card at Park Life in San Francisco. Park Life is a great little store and art gallery; I love it! It, along with the Burmese-fusion restaurant B Star is my current favorite inner Richmond district destination. The card is letterpressed, and it's on nice, thick nubbly paper. They had ice cream sandwiches, ice cream bars, and these cookies.

by Motormouth Press