6 Beautiful Nail Colours

Top (L to R): Essie in ‘Cocktail Bling’; Bobbi Brown in ‘Pink Cloud’; Nars in ‘Chinatown’

Bottom (L to R): Nars in ‘Thakoon’; Essie in ‘Bobbing for Baubles’; Chanel Le Vernis in ‘Skyline’

January Treats

Life got a little tastier since I started dipping clementine wedges in melted dark chocolate, sprinkling them with sea salt and putting them in the fridge for a few hours.  The simplest treat – that is pretty much guilt-free (especially when you compare it to my December diet).  These babies are delicious.

Originally spotted on Express-o – thank you Diana!

Sales Shopping

I almost never find anything in the sales when I’m on the lookout, but this year, when I was trying not to shop the sales, I stumbled upon this gem in Warehouse at 70% off. 

I think these photos don’t even do it justice – the length and shape make it a classy look but the lacy bodice top almost has a lingerie feel.  So. very. sexy.

It’s the most beautiful item in my wardrobe and still on sale, here.  A steal.

If Our Bodies Could Talk

When Joanna (from A Cup of Jo) revealed Dr. James Hamblin as her latest celebrity crush, I was a little confused.  I usually agree with her on just about any topic imaginable, but this confession had me like whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?  At first glance, he looks like a skinny socially-awkward adolescent.  After watching a couple of his videos, it not only confirmed my first impressions but also showed how he has managed to make a lucrative career out of that persona.  Kudos to him, but surely this doesn’t grant him eligibility as an object of our affection?  I happen to know that Joanna shares my fondness of facial hair and this fellow looks like he has never had reason to shave in his life.  There’s also the fact that he isn’t exactly a celebrity;  I mean, Joanna herself is arguably more well-known. Shouldn’t your celebrity crush be more famous that you?  Isn’t that the point? I didn’t get it. 

Admittedly though, his video series If Our Bodies Could Talk is very, ve-ry entertaining.  I will warn you now that I binged watched the entire series, although if it should happen to you it won’t affect your life in the same way as say, Breaking Bad, given each video is only about 5 minutes duration.  Watch them… or my favourites at least:

Tabless Thursday is a concept I have successfully introduced into my life.  Single tasking is the new multitasking.  I’m all about it.

Things not to say to a pregnant woman.  This made me laugh out loud.  I didn’t say LOL because that doesn’t explain how I was actually laughing at my computer screen.  I was, for reals.

The case for napping at work.  Do you love him yet?

A take on the sad desk lunch. 

Is breakfast the most important meal of the day?  Maybe, as outrageous as it sounds, breakfast is…just another meal.   It is weird how preachy people get about not skipping breakfast!

After the sixth or so video, you might begin to find Dr. James strangely endearing, although I can’t put my finger on why exactly.  Us ladies are complicated creatures.  I’m not saying I’m on that bandwagon completely, but I get it.  I get it now.

Advice

I’m hesitant about posting on the topic of life advice, particularly at this time of year when every blogger is publishing their resolutions for the shiny new year.  You don’t need my two cents.  You can assume (correctly) that I have similar list of predictable intentions.  Anyway, this isn’t that kind of advice. 

This article, with excerpts from a “Dear Sugar”  column by Cheryl Strayed (author of Wild) , was one of those thoughtful pieces that I read, read again and then decided that it might be just the kind of soul-soothing guidance that your January self needs.

Here are my favourite bits:

 

On how to treat your parents…

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her sceptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.  Say thank you.

On love

I recalled a time fifteen years ago, when I was sitting in a café with Mr. Sugar. We’d only been lovers for a month, but we were already in deep, thick in the thrall of the you-tell-me-everything-and-I’ll-tell-you-everything-because-I-love-you-so-madly stage, and on this particular afternoon I was telling him the harrowing tale of how I’d gotten pregnant by a heroin addict the year before and how I’d felt so angry and sad and self-destructive over having an abortion that I’d intentionally sliced a shallow line in my arm with a knife, even though I’d never done that before. When I got to the part about cutting myself, Mr. Sugar stopped me. He said, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.

On being a (female) writer…

How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of 'I could have been better than this' and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And 'if your Nerve, deny you –,' as Emily Dickinson wrote, 'go above your Nerve.' Writing is hard for every last one of us — straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

On becoming stronger with change…

Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to his wedding; the woman who decides to spend her Saturday mornings in a drawing class instead of scrubbing the toilets at home; the writer who won’t allow himself to be devoured by his envy; the parent who takes a deep breath instead of throwing a plate. It’s you and me standing naked before our lovers, even if it makes us feel kind of squirmy in a bad way when we do. The work is there. It’s our task. Doing it will give us strength and clarity. It will bring us closer to who we hope to be.

Hello 2015!

Just to say… Happy New Year and that 2015 will mark a return to regular posting on little t.  I hope that’s exciting news for more than just me.  Love to your mothers.

Dolce Vita

Do you remember in The Brady Bunch when one of the family members would need an obscure sum of money for a particular cause ($2, 140 to give a stray puppy a life-saving vaccination… or $8, 232 to stop the town’s library from being bulldozed… for example).  It would always seem as if their luck had just run out, when Marcia (Marcia Marcia) would spot a poster for an equally obscure competition and a top prize of the exact amount they were trying to get their hands on.

If real life were like that, I’d be staring saucer-eyed at a prize jackpot of €203.16 right now and the only thing standing between me and this dress would be the minor obstacle of winning some brother- sister dance competition.

Daydreaming takes up a big portion of my real-life.  €203.16 is too much to pay for a sundress. Is it? (I love it)

If I were a rich girl (a whole other daydream), I’d be taking the whole dang collection.

How to Frost a Cake

I made this Peanut Butter Birthday Cake (adapted from Joy the Baker’s recipe – here) for my bestie Marie’s birthday last month. (Marie is one half of the awesome duo responsible for this surprise last year). 

Everyone agrees that the peanut butter frosting is the best part of this cake.  Here’s a guide to frosting your birthday cake (the easy way) in 7 easy steps.

A few tips before we begin:

Tip 1: Make more frosting than you need.  Frosting will inevitably end up stuck on the spoon, and the sides of the bowl, and on your clothes and in your hair and mouth.  That excess icing adds up. I doubled the recipe.  That may seem extreme, but I’ve never heard anyone complain about too much frosting before.  “Oh dang, just what are we going to do with the leftover frosting?”  We’re going to lick it slowly off a cold spoon while staring dreamily into space, that’s what.

Tip 2: Once it’s made, chill your frosting for an hour or two, then take it out of the fridge precisely 15 minutes before you start the frosting process.  This is the only part of my step-by-step guide that must be followed exactly.  It ensures the frosting is still chilled, but malleable. (I just typed the word malleable on my blog – whaaaat?)

Step 1:  Place the cake on the cake stand you intend to serve it on.  There’s no moving the cake post-frosting. 

Step 2:  Spoon a lot of the mixture on to the top of the cake.

Step 3:  Start smoothing the frosting out over the cake with a metal spoon, pushing dollops over the edges.  Add more frosting as necessary.  The spoon should never touch the cake, only the frosting.  We don’t want crumby icing.

Step 4:  Keep smoothing and dolloping until you can’t see any more cake.  Your cake will look like a messy blob at this stage, but don’t panic.  If you can only see frosting, you’ve done it right.

Step 5:  Take a clean metal spoon and make a swirly pattern on the top of the cake.  Work from the outsides in, again not touching the cake.

Step 6:  Now, take a flat (butter) knife and trace around the rim, roughly flattening the sides.  This will ‘trim’ a lot of excess frosting from the sides, which goes back in the bowl (for later).

Step 7:  Take a dry, clean napkin and wipe the messy frosting from the edges of the serving plate.  Immediately follow with a clean, damp napkin to remove the sticky frosting residue. 

And that’s it!  I kept the decoration pretty simple this time, but you can be as creative as you like!

Happy Birthday Marie – I loved our mini celebration! xo

The Creative Process

Made me smile.  Happy Friday! xo

Bibliomotocarro

Antonio La Cava (pictured) was a schoolteacher in Italy for 42 years.  After retiring, he wanted to continue to spread the love of reading to children. He created the Bibliomotocarro by restoring and modifying a used Ape motorbike.  It is a portable library housing 700 carefully-chosen books.  Antonio has been traveling throughout Italy in his cheery bookmobile ever since.  Don’t you just love this?

Side note:  The name of La Cava’s contraption, Il Bibliomotocaro, really tickled me.  I’m currently trying to learn the Italian language and always joke that you can add ‘o’ to the end of English words to translate them into Italian (perfect-o; fantastic-o…) – this moto carro sort of follows my rule.  Sort of.

via Messy Nessy Chic

To-do List

The Tuesdays that follow bank-holiday Mondays are the most hateful of all.  Worse than regular Mondays.  I spent a significant portion of yesterday sobbing on Skype to my boyfriend.  The rest of the day was just about getting through it.

Today, I’m focusing on one task: to slow down.

(This song helps)

Soul-mates

Go Pro

This is what a go pro looked like in the sixties.  We’ve come a long way after all...  via Swiss Miss

Best of… April 2014

via Facehunter

via Cocogroove

via Coohuco

via Could I Have That?

via Express-o

via Facehunter

via Sincerely Jules

via Fashion Toast

via Modern Hepburn

via Sincerely Jules

via Sorakeem

via Tuula

via Where Did You Get That?

April was a very beautiful month.  On a sidenote, if leopard print is making a comeback, I’m all over that. More (leopard print and everything else) on pinterest.

Mayday; M’aider; May Day

Mayday Mayday Mayday is used in military operations throughout the world as a signal of distress in radio communications.  But do you know where it came from?

A man called Frederick Stanley Mockford coined the term in 1923, when he was working at Croydon Airport (London) as a radio officer.  Most of the air traffic at that time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport (Paris), so he adopted a French phrase in emergency situations, to summon help from French pilots and ground staff.  “Venez m’aider” (pronounced ven-ay may-day) translates as “come help me” and from that point on, Mayday stuck.

To signal distress, the call must be given three times in a row ("Mayday Mayday Mayday") to prevent any confusion in noisy conditions, and to distinguish an actual Mayday call from a message about a Mayday call.

This piece of nerdy trivia comes to you today because it is May Day (1st May) and because I can write about whatever I darn like.

p.s. It’s Summer!  It’s here!