Happy winter solstice everyone! It’s the reason for the season, and it means from here on out, the days are only going to get longer! Praise!
And in the spirit of the season of stuff, I want to share with you some of my favorite material possessions.
These are on the wall of my living room: The centerpiece is the green splatter paining, a prop I made for a play The Grey Boy wrote in college. (It was the first student-written play to ever go on the mainstage theater, so props to him!) And around it are bubble pictures that I made out of watercolors on top of an old book collage with frames from Ikea. In the foreground, my iPod. I did not make that.
Extreme close up of the bubble picture, which was not intended to be bubbles, just blue circles. But darn if they don’t look like bubbles.
Hugh Laurie, another favorite thing. He was on TV while I was taking the pictures, so I couldn’t help myself. Sadly, he is completely sold out at the moment.
These, I love. They hang opposite the bubble pictures, and I made these out of some graphic novels I had. While it hurts to hurt a book, I was never going to read those novels again, and they were so pretty that I wanted to make something more of them. I hope the artist/writers don’t mind, and I hope that they’re not collectibles that go up in value:
Extreme close-up: I did this by folding the pages in triangles, starting at the center. Then I just tacked them to the wall near the spine. That’s Art with a capital “A.”
I got these angles at K-Mart the first year that I was living in my own place. They remind me of these gold angles/candle holders that my mom always put on the mantle. These guys have matching bows and ornaments from the “purple, green and gold” collection that K-Mart was touting that year.
As you know, I have three purple trees this year, and I love them. I have a lot of ornaments, so it’s nice to be able to divide them up. The medium tree has all my 50-state ornaments collection (I have about six so far, but I only just started.) The big tree has all my real ornaments, and the small tree has all the ornaments that The Grey Boy has given me over the years. Notice that they are all sheep. There is a really good reason for that, and the reason is that we have a thing about sheep. And that stems from a story for another day, my friends.
This is my mother’s coffee pot. It is older than I am. It is proudly AVOCADO colored. It is not used to make coffee. It is used to make hot apple cider. When you take the pot out of the box, you are overwhelmed by the awesome smell of apple cider. The way you do it is that you pour a gallon of cider into the pot, and then you fill the top with cinnamon sticks, cloves, and whole allspice instead of coffee. Then the cider brews through it.
If you really want to go nuts, like I did for our kickball friends party last night, you add whipped cream, caramel, and nutmeg to the top of the cider, and a shot of rum to the bottom. I strongly suspect that’s why I have as many friends as I do.
Lastly, when my mom makes the cider (sans rum) for Christmas at the house, she always serves it in these red-rimmed glass cups. Except these are not the exact cups. This picture was taken at a thrift store in Ventura, California in 2005. There we were looking at various vintage wares when I realized that someone was trying to sell us a set of something already owned in my family. The note at the store really should mention that hot apple cider only truly tastes right out of those glasses.
If you’re in the area, I recommend picking them up, provided some lucky family hasn’t bought them in the ensuing three years.
I also like whiskers on kittens, but that too is a post for another day.
