Hidden In France

NYC it is!

I'll tell you more soon, but here is where I'll be sun tanning this summer:

I'm NOT complaining!

Pictures borrowed form this website before I can take my own.

Tomorrow

On pins and needles.  

Tomorrow is the day when I should know if we're going East or staying West for the summer.  Each possibility  presents its own sets of challenges and confusion.  Maybe some fun too along the way. One is far more lucrative. I'm hoping/fearing one and dreading/finding comfort in the other. Neither involve my own work, by the way, which is highly portable.  

We'll see. We'll see.  

Meanwhile I found one more amazing photographer on Flikr.  Whatever Sas from the Netherlands' technique is, I just love her vision. This is her blog here so you can say hello.

Look at all this:

This is a nail biting sort of week.  My sixteen year old has his driver's test on Friday.  My ten year old is running for school president (not my idea I assure you.)  This might not be the week to quit chocolate.

Île de Ré

There is a great series of pictures and articles on Coté Ouest Magazine that really makes me want to go to the beautiful French Île de Ré.

Here are pix I found on google (quite unscientific when it comes to giving the photographers proper credit.  They will probably find me out and shut me down...)

 I like the color palette of this house and the touches of pink and purple.

I also want to go to this hotel/hamman les bois flottais. 

I think this hotel must have been decorated by the same people.

But to me, the Ouest is and always will be this:

This is what the French call a bouquet de Fruits de mer.  Fruit of the ocean bouquet. I love this.

The website for île de Ré is here.  and for an article in English about the Island look here.

Beauty for the week-end

This has been an adrenaline-filled week.  Things are good, though.  Things are shaping up.  Anyone here beside me needs a break from thinking, rehashing and basically driving myself nut with inconsequential things that won't even matter an hour from now? 

Who else in the room needs to CHILL?

Here are gorgeous and soothing images by Janne Peters styled by Maria Grossmann via the delicious Hiccupings. 

By the way, have you ever smelled a magnolia flower?  Is it me or is it entirely odorless?  How can they make perfume out of odorless things?  Is this a vast conspiracy by perfume conglomerates?  Is the joke on US? Have we been manipulated?... Oh, ouch, my brain hurts now... Chill, I say.  Chill.

thoughts on blogging

I had no idea: 

via swiss miss, the work of amazing Jennifer Daniel.  Party poopers those two. 

Everything and the bathroom sink

Here are images that have been collecting.  Sorry I don't always have the proper credit for them.

If I had to own something invisible, it would be this lucite table via Trixie's table.

if I was to redesign my kitchen, it would look like this one, via pink wallpaper.

If I dared a different floor, it would be this one: (no credit?)

If I was to sit in this room, it would be on either of those laps:

If I was to eat a cookie, it would be this one via design sponge.

if I finally learned how to knit, i would have to start with this size yarn. (via les carnets du design)

If i was to purchase one piece of clothing, it would be this ethereal little number by Etsy seller plum pretty  sugar, via shoptalk:

... And if I had collected over the years all the nose hair a certain person insisted on trimming over the bathroom sink and 'forgot' to rinse off , I could easily have made a couple of these:

Patrick Dougherty creations via The fab Miss B.

wardrobe malfunction, the French way

Remember the superbowl debacle?  Remember the outrage, the ridiculous censorship?  Breasts are that scary in the US.  But in France, things are different. 

Sophie Marceau handles her mauvais fonctionnement de robe with charm and humor.

Sophie Marceau... et Boom
by tiphain

via mes petites fables, a French blog full of intelligence and passion.

My house in order

As some of you may have noticed because of lackluster posts and my failure to visit your blogs, my mind is elsewhere.  See, lately, my house is not in order.

My mind is on my mother and the type of relationship we will (or won't) be able to have now that all the hurtful things have been said, now that the abscess has been pierced a million times with a rusty needle. This could be the beginning of a real relationship, at long last...or the end of any relationship whatsoever.  I've managed all right without her in the past but I wonder: what does it say about me that i can't seem to have a decent relationship with my mother? Right now is too raw, too soon, too weird. I can't forget, i can't forgive, I'm stuck.

My mind is on this summer:  what will happen, I don't know.  We're in the worst sort of limbo, soon to hear about a job out of state and in the mean time I can't start dreaming, imagining or planning.  If we go, we go in a month. How am I supposed to plant the kid's summer if I don't know which bloody state to plan it in?  And who will take care of our vegetable garden? Our pets? I am powerless at anything but wringing my hands, and not even sure what to hope or wish for. 

My mind is also on a certain big ass, alas my own.  How much bigger it is going to get!?  I am gaining weight but not eating more.  Wtf.  If this is what aging does to people then furgetaboutit.

My mind is ***ON!!*** at night, way off during the day. I'm not sleeping enough and what follows is a bad case of the fuzzy brain syndrome, with trouble concentrating, trouble creating and some drooling.

As therapy, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time organizing. I've arranged my grocery bills on Excell by ingredients (this is not a joke), my underwear is put together in decreasing order of holes, the bathroom cabinets is alphabetized in cyrillic, I even caught myself absentmindedly combing the spaghetti before serving it. 

What I need is rest. A respite from my own brain and personality.

Pictures via desire to inspire, because I always  find the though of white floors delicious and so calming. The thinking is that white floors cannot happen until you have achieved complete control over your life and environment. And this is precisely what I'm after.

One for the road.

That made me laugh.  Happy Sunday :-)

.

her little happy place

Here is someone who caught my attention, when she did this:

to this:

Yowzer girlfriend!  This is what i call cahones!  Because you see, I happen to own the same (or almost the same piece of furniture) but i was too CHICKEN.  All I could muster was a measly coffee table painted blue, and I thought I was brave.  See: 

Alison, of My Little Happy Place seems to me like a fearless woman.  She's from texas but is creating a new life for herself in a  BRAZIL.  She's a law graduate who is following her passion for design.  Her blog is full of the kind of stuff that makes me look:  great images, a sense of humour, a passion for life and real life adventures and challenges.

Also, she's a Hidden in France sponsor as of last week.

Check her out. I asked her 'what do you sell?'  'Nothing,' she said.  I say nothing yet, but something tells me she has big plans.  People who paint their antiques a glossy shade of turquoise usually don't mess around.

Oh, and she is redoing her house one room at a time, and you can see for yourself in these before and after pictures.

Rice is here!

It's always a party when Rice has a new collection. Irresistible as always, Rice Denmark keeps delighting me year after year. I like the cute music too.  Now you can look at two separate rice catalogs. (images borrowed from there. I could not choose, I want to eat them all.)

Purple and turquoise extravaganza.

That wallpaper!!!

Yeah, I don't know what that is either.

Open shelves to show off all your heirloom plastic.

This last one is summer personified. 

via brown button

Elsewhere

Is where i'd like to be today.  Images by Debbie Treloar.

Via the lovely hiccupings. 

Not sure what this is

But I like it:

.

Cisma's "Le Sens Propre" from glossy inc on Vimeo. (via Swiss Miss)  I would turn off the sound and use your own soundtrack.  The soundtrack kind of ruins it for me.

Mate, we've got a barbie.

Here is where I post unrelated pretty images and talk about my mother's day week-end.

Having bought a barbecue for my birthday five days ago, we spent mother's day week-end building it.  That was my mother's day present, the fact that the box did not sit in the garage for six months. Result; we now have an operating barbie, but best of all we were able to cooperate on a building project that actually did not fizzle into the usual crap, with each member of the family whimpering and pointing a finger towards another. 

Of course i had this wild card i brandished:  'It's mother's day, you have to get along with your brother'. ' It's mother's day, no we're not hiring a handyman to build the damn grill.'  'It's mother's day, you have to fetch a (forgotten) propane tank five minutes before our guests arrive.'

 Oh I milked it something shameful.

The weather cooperating we were able to swim for the first time this year without heating the pool and ate heaps of grilled --anything i could get my hands on--foods al fresco. Overall a good week-end.

And now, but ONLY if you have patience for other people' s annoying kid's poems, here is the (school-prompted, but still) card my ten year old son wrote.

Funny, caring, loving

Wishes to soar like a bird

Dreams of people living in a better place

Wants to get her message to the world

Who wonders what Obama does in his spare time

She likes art and life

She loves to spend time with her kids

She loves to live and lives to love.

I don't know if it's just me, but I was quite impressed. The kids knows me. I'm keeping this for when he turns into an ungrateful teen, as a reminder that i wasn't always a terrible mother:-)

Images borrowed from shootspaces, via deco detectives, a blog i did not know existed, where have I been? I spent hours gorging myself on hundreds of images that so closely fit my esthetic.

Gretchen Kelly art

The other day I was browsing through my favorite blogs with my husband looking over my shoulder.  Suddenly he said:  Hey, go back:  

I don't want to go back.  What?

I want to see that.

'That', was an original watercolor nude by Gretchen Kelly. 

I know her, I said proudly, she's one of my blogging friend.  

She's good, he said.  

Gretchen is now a sponsor on Hidden in France.  More are on their way to send me their buttons, but Gretchen Kelly was fastest.  Thank you Gretchen for the vote of confidence.  

Here are a few paintings.  This is original art that is still affordable.  Prints are nice, sure, but to me nothing compares to the pleasure of owning original art. Gretchen's work is mostly of nude beauties.

Which pictures to choose for this post?  I love them all!

She tells me that she paints gestures poses and gesture paintings. On her website, GretchenKellyArt, her work is arranged by categories such as 'boudoir, minute poses, intimate apparel.  You can buy her work there but also on her blog.

Now Gretchen, I told you that my husband liked your work.  Enough to google you himself when i refused to cooperate (I don't like when he tells me what to do.) What I didn't tell you is that when I met him he was an artist too. A photographer.  He does other things now, but his photography has been exhibited all over the world, including the V&A and Paris' Pompidou center. All over the world, that is EXCEPT in the US where his work was considered a bit too risqué for mainstream. (This was 20 years ago.)  All this to say he is not afraid of nude paintings of beautiful women, au contraire.

See, I know pretty, but he knows art.

44, but i'm okay!

Wow, that was a LOT of birthday wishes, guys!  Thank you, it helped the medicine go down, it sure did.  

Well, it wasn't just my b-day and Cinco de mayo I was celebrating.  It was also the arrival of my period and 48 hours of migraine headache that had me squinting though life and fearing any sounds one decibel higher than a murmur. 

There also was that rather unpleasant, though necessary, phone conversation with my mother after six months of careful mutual avoidance.  A lot of fun was had by all.  

I am back though battered and bruised, drained, still self-righteously angry yet feeling guilty as sin. Feeling like the bitch, as always.  Weaker in some areas, but stronger in some, I guess.

Today, the air is crisp and clear.  I'm starting fresh.  Life is beautiful and I feel blessed for all that I do have, those who do get me, and love me; my kids, who wrote me such ridiculously thoughtful cards it made me weep; my husband who said in his card that I was his best friend, and after 20 years that's a pretty damn meaningful endorsement, my sisters and the bond that can never die, and my friends, (especially those who feed me baguette with butter and jelly, you know who you are :-) . Voila.  Feeling sentimental, that's all. Or it could be the high doses of excedrin migraine pumping through my veins.

Those images have nothing to do with what I'm talking about.  It's that home you've all seen, designed by (maybe also for) Johnathan Adler.  I did not like it at all back when I first saw it, now it really appeals to me. I find it interesting how my taste changes via exposure to your blogs. 

The ugly truth

No post tomorrow because I will be busy being 44 years old.  How did I let it get this way?  What happened?

And though I'm reluctant to post ugly things on my pretty blog I have to make an exception because this cheered me up. These devastatingly ugly cakes all borrowed from cakewrecks.  

Happy bitrdhay to me.

Cake ordered:

cake received:

ordered:

received:

and my favorite; ordered:

and received:

I don't see the problem.  Do you?

Going coastal (magazine)

Today i indulged in the virtual tour of the idea cottage in Scarborough Maine.  This was way too much fun.  I might be the last person in the blog world but I just found out that Coastal Living online lets you tour some houses room by room, go up and down, zoom (apple+ shift on my mac).  I don't know how they do this but you can even look up at the ceiling. To tell you the truth it's a bit dizzying, my idea of a roller coaster ride. 

I happen to like the house a lot.  Beautiful ocean colors and white floors, what's not to like?

Taking a peek in the cupboard

and zooming:

I like how the kitchen in not matchy-matchy.  And I LOVE the green stripes.

But where do they hide their mess?  Do they have people running ahead of the camera carrying the dirty socks, old magazines and dirty dishes?  

This is the craft room, OGM.  My dream is to have a craft room with white floors.  Not to perform actual crafts, Godforbid, but to imagine myself as the type of person who does.

bravo girls!

Just a wink, a shout out and BOTH HANDS CLAPPING FURIOUSLY for two talented women:

Patti of Liberty Post has open an etsy shop where she sells her photography as well as those cool banners that are so uniquely hers.  I'm a huge fan of her blog which tells it like it is, fearlessly, and always blows with me away with its finds.  When I need inspiration for a post, I often read Liberty Post and find myself with a reaction, then an opinion of my own I never knew I had, which I then develop as a post. 

And Pia Jane Bijkerk , you know, that girl of my heat wanders who had us seeing heart everywhere we looked?  She has published a book of her very own, Paris: Made by Hand, which tells us about secret Parisian addresses using her gorgeous photography.  You can purchase the book here here on The Little Bookroom, a website that gathers, and I guess publishes, all kinds of exciting books on France, one more drool-inducing than the next.

I'm so buying it.