Last year Ikea had some garden chairs that were perfect. Soft, comfortable, with a retro grandma’s house vibe. Oh, I wanted those chairs. But I had just been laid off and couldn’t responsibly get them, and then when I was back to full time work, they were gone. I hoped this year they would have them again. Sadly, no. They did have a set of plastic-wicker pieces that you can use to configure a couch. I played around with them on polyvore to set up my room.

ikea garden furniture by nestmaker on Polyvore.com

I liked it on the computer, but once I got out there, they were smaller and lighter colored than I pictured them.

I liked this Ikea set better, although I’d want to replace the cushions with some much more substantial. Still, I’ve got my heart set on an outdoor couch.

So much for super-bargain-prices, at least while looking online. Some more hunting, this time at Crate & Barrel, Z Gallerie, and Target.

garden furniture by nestmaker on Polyvore.com

I had been looking at these white squarish garden stools at Target (strangely, I don’t see them on their website, only in the store), which are a bargain under $100, and one weekend, they were on sale for $67 (kicking self for not buying then). Of course now that I’ve seen the more expensive yellow stools, I’ve fallen for them.

I’m not getting anything this spring, I have other priorities, but some day, I hope to be hanging out on my patio living room.

I also really enjoy the notion of buying something where the site prompts me to select an animal. So long as you can’t really buy a monkey on the internet.

Update: The LA times reported some wonderful news for elephants in India this week. Elephants will be no longer be kept in zoos and circuses. The elephants will be released to camps where they will no longer be chained up and confined, but allowed to roam and forage as they need for both their health and happiness. Now if we could follow suit here in the states. There’s a wonderful elephant sanctuary in Tennessee that has been tirelessly doing the sometimes heartbreaking work to rescue elephants from bad situations and give them a happy home, so there is hope for our US elephants.

The Atlantic Avenue subway stop begins the journey on a not super charming busy street, but in one of those sidewalk crack by a church kind of places, there’s this curious plant/weed that I have yet to identify. How fantastic are the leaves? At first I thought they were damaged, but no, that’s the actual shape of the leaf. Probably too good to be true, that it would be an actual plant you would grow on purpose, that could grow in the punishment of the sidewalk, and wouldn’t be weedy, but I’ve added it to my ever-growing list of mystery plants on my wish list.

Another view of the overall plant: fabulous!

I love when you’re in an area where the residents are clearly deprived of soil to work in, but you see signs of a gardener showing through anyway. Loved the hopeful spirit of this tiny window box, knowing someone loved it, size be damned.

This community garden must have been around for some time, if it won a Dress up your neighborhood contest back in the 1985, but this is the first time I had my eyes open walking by it.

Pity it wasn’t open while I was there, but the fencing was open enough that you could appreciate it from the street. Portland’s going to have to start doing this too, fencing in the community gardens while no one is there to keep watch, since we’ve had some unfortunate garden vandalism around here lately. But this was a very happy looking garden.

Maybe part of the garden’s good condition is due to the faithful watch of the mossy garden Doberman facing the street.

I like to get brunch here when I’m in the neigborhood, on the patio at Jolie. I get hungry just thinking about the mini ravioli gratinee.

Continuing on, if you keep your eyes peeled down the side streets, you’ll see GRDN, a sweet garden shop and nursery that was the first place I came across in my original trip to this neighborhood, that was the magnet that kept drawing me back.

How delicious is this view?

I love the back area, browsing a nursery for plants is always a treat, but the backdrop of the nearby buildings always gets me.

I spied what is POSSIBLY, but then again maybe not, the mystery ruffly leafed purple plant from a community garden in Manhattan a few days prior. Even if it’s not the mystery plant, it’s a close second, definitely worth seeking out next summer. Coleus Lancelot. Yes to those leaves!

And circling back the other side of the street, there’s another garden shop I just visited for the first time, Dig. F-A-N-C-Y.

Beautiful still life compositions in Dig, I wanted to take everything home just as it was arranged.

And I found the source for those moss/wire dog sculptures, apparently from a place called GreenPiece. Pretty sure I need the Boston Terriers.

I love how compact the stores’ displays get in places where real estate is at a premium. Shops have an intimate feel about them with such narrow corridors.

And in total lust-worthy vintage furniture, I like to stop at City Foundry. If only I could get those chairs home!

And my absolute favorite store to, as the French say, leche-vitrine (window shop, or literally translated, window licking, which seems more appropriate), Darr.

Darr has this poster I’ve been wanting for years. I’ve found a print at the Parisian Deyrolle, but it looks like I’m going to have to trek to France some day to get it, since they don’t let you buy online. The print in Paris is a few hundred dollars, but the original poster at Darr is far outside my budget, and more than a trip to Paris would cost me. But still. *swoon*

All this, and a charming neighborhood walk too. And THAT is what I call a good vacation day.

Dear people who lived in the one mansion in the neighborhood when I was 7 and 8, Yes, you have a crazy huge house, we are all very impressed. Did you know that all the kids talked excitedly about your house at Halloween? How you were on everybody’s list, and everyone fantasized that you would hand out FULL SIZED candy bars, because you were obviously rich? So tell me, what was the thinking behind handing out pencils? Pencils? And when we were sure that was just a mistake, that you forgot to buy candy, but surely the disappointed faces of children would prompt you to do better the next year, what was it that made a handful of pennies seem like a good idea? Are you dentists?

Dear people with the awesome rock garden, Yes you have a terrific yard and house and everybody looks at you and sometimes you’re featured in the newspaper. Nicely done, bravo, with all the evergreens and interesting shapes and textures. But do you feel like something’s missing since your Agave flowered and died, and you replaced it with a plain old New Zealand Flax? Nothing wrong with New Zealand Flax. I have 3. But so does every Starbucks in town. Your Agave was special. Do you have the same Agave shaped hole in your heart that I have when I look at your garden?

Dear super nice next door neighbors, I’m really glad you are here. This is way better than the years the house sat vacant. I don’t want to be THAT neighbor, but would it be too much to ask you very nicely, after a good year, if maybe the front yard couch could move along? Or not. No big deal.

It passed the point this year where I could have people over, and Thanksgiving is coming up fast. I’ve hosted Thanksgiving ever since I came to the decision I could no longer try to go have dinner at my mom’s, my dad’s, Justin’s mom’s, Justin’s dad’s every year, but there was also no way to pick just one place and tell the others sorry. Now they all come to me. But I can’t make them sit on these couches. The cats have finally done them in. I sort of thought my oldest cat, the one with the enlarged heart and a fondness for the arms of sofas, would sort of, you know, leave this world soon? I was waiting some such event to fix the couches, but he won the waiting game, and something had to be done.

I looked for replacements including a new version of what I already had, but they stopped making it, but the store recommended their upholstery guy just fix what I had. So I had Juanito’s Fine Furniture come and bid and Juan was super nice and said he’d get it done by Thanksgiving (fingers crossed!) and the bid is way less expensive than buying new, and all of this led me to one of my puzzlingly favorite things to do: fabric shopping. I hardly ever do anything with the fabric I buy, I just store it and look at it, so I’ve been grounded from the fabric stores for a while, but this time it had to be done.

Out in an especially charmless stretch of road, by car dealerships and strip clubs, there’s a huge fabric store warehouse, Fabric Depot, home of the nearly constant 40% off sale. There was a limo outside on this particular trip. Do you think someone really takes a limo to Fabric Depot, or was it waiting for someone at the establishment across the street?

The store is a huge warehousey building with frumpy dresses hanging from the ceiling on display. It’s a place that reminds me of one of my all time favorite quotes from my brother, who once said of an old rug in the hallway, “looking at that makes me feel poor.” I’m not sure why, but once I start looking around, that doesn’t really matter to me. I start wanting everything.

I was looking for exactly this fabric two Thanksgivings ago, to recover my dining room chairs in my dining room, which has black walls. It would have been perfect. NOW they have it. Those chairs took the better part of a week off to recover with what I did find, and I never have that much free time anymore, so I passed it up. *sniff*

I love the stuff I don’t need but I imagine I might need, like this fake snakeskin might be good on an ottoman with a chrome base, which only exists in my imagination.

What possible use could I have for sock monkey oil cloth? Do I have whimsical style in home decor? No. Do I have children who might like it as a picnic table cover? No. Do I have a picnic table? Do I even like picnics? No and no. But something makes me want the stupid stuff. But I resisted.

One of the things I like about fabric stores is that there are usually things that are sparkly. I LOVE things that are sparkly. Diner looking sparkle vinyl? Sure.

Sometimes I do minor upholstery myself, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. It’s just me with a staple gun and some fabric, doing what I can, but there are all these bits and bobs that look like, if only I had those, I could recover anything!

In the end, I got what I came for, some neutral colored ultrasuedes to recover two sofas, since that’s the fabric that stands up to animals the best, that I can wipe off if a dog throws up, that I can take outside and hose down if necessary, and that tolerates cat abuse the longest.

I pretty much got out of there with only what I planned and needed. I also got 14 yards of curtain lining, which I am SURE I’m going to use to insulate the curtains before winter. I’ve already started measuring and cutting, so halfway there. Just need to make myself sit down at the sewing machine to finish up.

As of yesterday, I have shiny new gas log set in my fireplace. While not as nice as a real fire, perhaps, I was excited to have a fire that can be turned off and on with the push of a remote button. I was always afraid to have a real fire, because what if you suddenly needed to leave the house? What if a pet needed to go to the animal hospital unexpectedly? What if you forgot something at the store and needed to run back out? What if you wanted to go to sleep? Can’t, there’s a fire burning. Which led to many nights where I didn’t even want to have a fire, only those rare times where I knew I had hours to be at home.

So I splurged, gas log set it is. Because of my safety concerns about the real fires. Because now I don’t have to worry about the house burning down and everyone dying, right? Except, to work with the push of the button, to have a remote controlled fire, I have to leave the pilot light on. It’s noisy and a little fire burning all the time, and what if something happens when I’m not home and a cat manages to light its tail on fire and run around the house and I come home to a pile of embers? Same problem as the real fire.

I’ve settled on lighting the pilot every time I use it, which takes some of the convenience out of the remote control operation, but I can sleep easier. Except I go to figure out how to turn it on, and there’s this warning about the imminent explosion and loss of life, which does nothing to ease my fears. But it says only if you don’t follow the instructions exactly, so I try to follow the directions exactly. Except they make no sense. “MAKE SUE THE THERMOCOUPLE AND PILOT ASSEMBLY ARE IN CORRECT ALIGNMENT WITH EACHOTHER.” Um, okay, just one question, then, WTF is a thermocouple? And a pilot assembly? And every time you smell gas before lighting, you’re supposed to turn it all off and wait 5 minutes. So after every failed attempt, I had to wait 5 minutes to try again.

Basically there is a knobby thing with three positions, off, on, and light, except the knobby thing is in the back of the fireplace behind the logs in a position where you can’t see it that gets your arm all sooty from touching the sides of the firebox, and there’s no way to tell what position you’re in. What you do is turn on a valve outside the fireplace, stick your face over where the flames come out so you can reach the knobby thing, try putting it in a position so the pilot will light, reach over to the other side to push a piezo ignitor(?!) button to spark and eventually light the pilot. Then you have to hold on to the knobby thing for a minute so the pilot burns enough to stay lit, and then slowly turn it to the on position so the flames can start shooting out toward your face. That’s okay though, because it just goes out most of the time. Either because you didn’t hold it long enough, or because you can’t remember which direction is on.

After repeating these steps 10 times or so last night, I finally managed to light the fire. I turned it off and on with the remote a few times just for fun. And continued to read the manual, looking for additional safety information. Is it right that the fuzz that’s supposed to look like embers catches fire a little? Are the logs too close to the flames? That’s when I found I had been reading the instructions for a totally different unit. Mine was on the next page. Still didn’t make any sense, mine has a generator instead of a thermocoupler, but I still can’t tell if they’re aligned. And then at bedtime I shut the whole system down, and I get to do the same thing again tonight. Jealous?

This time, I had my own version for a long time before they ripped off my idea. About 10 years ago, I got a children’s book of animal skeletons at an estate sale for a quarter, and put them in a clearance price frame from Kitchen Kaboodle, and stuck them up over a doorway my kitchen.

Leafing through the new catalog last night, I see some familiar shapes on appetizer plates in their holiday collection.

Well I am offended! But also adding these to my list of Halloween decorations I’m buying once they go on sale November 1, because I like the macabre decor year round. Who’s creepy now, Pottery Barn?

The big old oil furnace in my basement gave out this spring, and with fall approaching, it was time to get the repair guy out to take a look at it. I loved the big monster, because it made the house toasty in a matter of minutes, and I had it running pretty constantly in winter because Oscar shivers and looks pathetic when it’s 65 degrees.

I knew it was bad news when Mr. Service Man emerged from the basement, and he was VERY CAREFUL in trying to break it to me gently. “Well, you know, it’s old. Very old. It’s probably lasted far longer than it should have. You see, it has this pump, and they just don’t make them anymore…” and so that’s it. Furnace is done. I knew this day would come. The rudest part is that it died with a recently filled, obscenely expensive tank of oil. A tank of oil that would have halfway covered the cost of replacement. I see the silver lining, for sure. This furnace is the size of a room. I can use the extra space to remodel the laundry room some day, so that I don’t have to use a spare bedroom as a drying rack. The oil bill was getting comically painful. You might be able to say it’s all for the best. Except that I have to cough up a bunch of cash I don’t have to buy a new one, and I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m at the mercy of what the salesmen tell me.

My neighbor actually owns a heating & cooling company, and it’s always an awkward thing between us, because he’s right there, and loves to talk about it, and it would be so easy to just ask him to take care of it, but then I worry that something will go explosively wrong and then there’s this big weird rift forever, until one day, like in Justin’s childhood building, the 80 year old lifelong enemy neighbors end up shooting each other. That really happened.

My neighbor is a nice guy who loves to talk, and he is such a natural salesman. Not in a pejorative way, it’s just his nature, it makes him happy to talk people into things. He reminds me of Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck, in the scene where he’s telling his skeptical but clueless customers, “There are three kinds of pipe. There’s aluminum, which is garbage. There’s bronze, which is pretty good, unless something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. Then, there’s copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves money.”

I was out weeding after the repair guy left, and I hear Dave’s voice over the fence. He’s quiet, calm, sitting with his back to me, smoking a cigarette. “So you’re having some trouble with your furnace?” And right then and there, I knew I was on a slippery slope. He’s all helpful, describing my options, what’s a hybrid, where to put the money, where to save it. “Just as an objective consultant, no strings attached!” He says, “You know, those guys you called, they’re OK, they’re perfectly fine. Of course they’re not what they used to be. They’ll sell you a great unit. They have all the same stuff we have. They’re certified, just like us. But then if you want the best deal in town, we can give you that.” I know, I KNOW it’s a bad idea to do business with your neighbor. But even though I know of his salesman ways, it is hard to resist.

When Justin’s dad got married last year, it was the most Grown Up wedding I’ve seen in real life. My father-in-law-to-be and his wife, Robert and Ramona, aren’t life-of-leisure, rolling-around-in-bills, throw-your-money-in-the-fireplace rich or anything. They held their evening, open-bar wedding with about 200 guests at the Governor hotel downtown, and a month before the wedding, we all got an email from the hotel notifying us that we had a room reserved and pre-paid. Even though a lot of people, like me, live about 10 minutes away from the hotel. They requested no gifts, but if people wanted to do something in their name, they could donate to the American Diabetes Association. The whole thing was classy as shit. It’s a lot to live up to.

Justin and I got engaged after 14 years together, and 2 years later, we still don’t have any firm plans for a wedding. We move at our own pace. The thing is, we don’t see any reason to hurry up and do it if we’re not going to do it right, and have the kind of party we want to throw. An open bar is just a requirement, and if we’re doing that, you have to arrange for transportation, and then if you’re getting everyone limos, I don’t know, the planning always dissolves at that point when we start adding up the numbers. This is going to require some saving, and we’re going to try to pay for everything without going into any debt. My dad did offer to help, since, as he put it, this is my first wedding, but I’m in my 30s and I’ve payed my own way so far, and probably will keep it that way.

These are not firm plans or anything, so mom, don’t read this and think we’re getting close or anything, this is just an idea. What about, instead of a big wedding in town, we just pack up close friends and family, hop on a plane for a couple hours, and stay at a luxury rental house and have the whole thing there over a long weekend? Does that sound like party?