This time of year, my head is full of images of falling leaves and forest walks, little creatures scampering about stockpiling root vegetables and nuts for winter.  Perhaps it's an autonomic response, fall's rhythms bringing back memories from one of my favorite childhood books, "Old Man Rabbit's Dinner Party".  Kirkus Reviews describes the 1949 book as "a story of generosity, with Old Man Rabbit sharing what he has with his less fortunate friends."  It neglects to point out that Old Man Rabbit got his piles of "purple turnips, orange carrots, red apples, yellow corn and brown potatoes" by plundering Farmer Brown's field.   I can sympathize just a little bit with Farmer Brown; I haven't eaten a tomato from my own garden since July.  There's always next year.

We've had quite a week in the studio.  Thank you for your support of my small business and for all your kind words.  You have no idea how much this means to me, and I am still working my way through responding to each of you.  People see the glamorous side of what I do - gliding down the escalator in my fabby new leopard fur, but there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that's just plain old fashioned toil and travail.  Farmer Brown would understand, and may even be sympathetic, I suspect.  READ MORE

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And why not let them eat cake?  Or should that read, let them be cake?

Well my darlings, it's that time of year again.  Another birthday is peering over the horizon, and while I am inclined to overlook the precise number of candles (assuming I could even remember the exact count), I am certainly not inclined to overlook an excuse for a party!  And it's a double celebration, because the Love Note just turned SIX.  She's veritably in all day kindergarten.

And what a party we're having!  I have never in all these years had the opportunity to burst out of a cake wearing silver and pink fringe, sequins and a tiara, but never say never?!  Especially if I get to wear that double dose of blue eyeshadow.  READ MORE 

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October is for coziness.  For making soup while hanging out in one's pajamas, perusing cookbooks and planning dinner parties.  For ordering firewood and spring bulbs.  For staying in bed to read instead of leaping out of bed in the dark morning hours, and tucking in early to read some more.  I'm reading The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Volume 2.  What are you reading?  This is what I'm listening to, an appropriate soundtrack to today's note.

The Brits know something about the special sauce for coziness.  After all, how do they make drafty 300+ year old country houses feel like the epitome of a timelessly chic cozy snug?   Perhaps it's their embrace of floral upholstery, in tones of blush pink combined with browns and softly muted pastels.   Perhaps it's their inherited disdain for stark neutral interiors, or their refusal to banish either dark wood or an enormity of books from a room.  Or maybe it's that they're British and most of us are not, and that is just something pretty "brilliant" right there.   READ MORE

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