It’s That Time Again…

You know.. that time where you realize that your youngest daughter (YOUNGEST!) is turning 22 and graduating from college.

You know.. that time when you need to stop, close your eyes, and remember to breathe.

Vintage in The Village.

Question: What does one do when one realizes one is not taking advantage of everything one’s new life has to offer in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area?

Answer: Obviously, ones makes efforts to correct such blunders.

Which is how Hal and I found ourselves rendezvousing with  Alexa one recent Saturday to spend the day flea market and vintage shopping round Manhattan. Starting at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market, we ended up traipsing all the way down to Soho (and beyond!) in our efforts to find  the most interesting, not so new things. Mission: Accomplished. So accomplished, in fact, there is another blog post just about it. (Don’t you just love a cliff hanger?)

That having been said, along the way we were quite impressed with this nice lad named Jake Wright who owns/designs for Stockpile Designs. Pulling discarded artilary together into lights and whatnot, his product set is really quite clever and unique (to me at least!).

Were I in need of a lamp… just saying!

The full set of photos – minus the find of the day – is HERE... but I thought a random sampling might be fun!

Ghosts of Christmas Past.

With the holiday season behind us and 2012 under way, I have a bit of a confession to make: Christmas this year was an odd one. Not ‘odd’ in the crazy-wacky-insane-person-yelling-from-a-car way’; but odd in the sense that it was haunted.

Let me explain: this year, we all arrived for our holiday celebration from various points for a mere 48 hours. By necessity, gift giving factored in how things would make their way back to everyone’s life. As such, non-useable items were kept to a minimum. This is where it gets complicated… as I was formulating christmas checks lists for my daughters I found myself crossing off the bright candies I normally toss in stockings (they tended to be left behind for Hal and I to finish off). The glossy fashion magazines I liked to procure also left the list (with Google readers and Kindles, they seemed like dead weight), as did the small funny stuffed animals and obnoxious slippers I liked to slip under the tree just for fun (and of which Hal has recently donated stashes of to charity).

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Along the way, it occurred to me, what I was actually doing was being forced to look at my daughters as the rather grown up young ladies they have become. It was this epiphany  that opened my mind’s door to a million memories of Christmas’ past… to 5 year olds ripping paper off devices that bedazzled and  ”glittorated” anything… to 10 year olds dancing to boy bands’ Christmas music… to 16 year olds and Ugg boots. It was these ghosts of Christmas past which haunted me throughout the day:  sitting next to my 22 year old daughter on the sofa was her 9 year old self. My 3 year old daughter sat next to her 20 year old self. It was as if twenty plus years of Christmas had somehow managed to fit into one room in Palm Springs.

Yes, it was “odd” like THAT. But, I could not help but smile at all of them. To realize that those same small girls turned into their older counterparts was, perhaps, the greatest gift I received.

| Christmas 1999. The Ritz Carlton; Dana Point CA |