Mother's Day

So what did you all do and get for your Mothers' Day? Would you believe I've been sick in bed for the past 2 Mothers' Day and 2 birthdays?? I'm only now starting to feel normal! (Hence the late post.)

So no little getaways, plus my husband was very busy at work anyway.

But I did get some lovely gifts from my husband and little four year old...

Husband got me a Dulton kitchen scale in happy yellow:



And Hannah got me this watermelon begonia. I love it. (I actually chose it but told Hannah that was her gift to me for Mothers Day.) It is the perfect indoor plant. Loves the cold and not direct sun.



Happy Belated Mother's Day to all mothers out there!



Like the pink glass bottle? Got it at a vintage store cos it made me happy. I love the fern in it too. Reminds me of my hometown.

Pretty stencils and things

I'm a sucker for pretty. (Aren't you?) There are images and things you see that you never ever forget... and things just keep piling into that small pigeonhole of images in your mind.

My friend made a mutual friend three beautiful cupcakes for her birthday last year and that has stayed in my mind since.



I've added 2 images since to that pigeonhole.

Image from erstwhile Martha Stewart

And yesterday, another delectable stenciled cupcake from Donna Hay:

Making it easy for the clean up woman

The title of this post refers to a 1971 Betty Wright song from one of my favorite 80s movies, Maid to Order, starring Ally Sheedy, Beverly D'Angelo and Tom Skerritt. It's a Cinderella tale, with Sheedy playing a hard-partying spoiled brat who gets her comeuppance when her father (Skerritt) wishes, after she's arrested for drunk driving, that he had never had a daughter. Magically, this comes to pass, thanks to a Fairy Godmother (D'Angelo). Sheedy is forced to actually get a job and the only one she can get: maid.




Why is this movie on my mind today? Well, on Monday, I hired a cleaning lady to clean my apartment for the first time ever. I decided after two years in a small space with a shed-happy cat, it was time for a professional to come in. If I ever want gentleman-callers to stay the night, I need to feel confident that they won't leave the next morning covered in cat hair.

I turned to Yelp for advice and found Neide Teixeira, who agreed to come to my studio and give it a thorough scrub-down and dusting. Sunday night, in preparation, I engaged in a somewhat funny ritual: the pre-cleaning cleaning. People who've paid for cleaning services before, you know what I'm talking about -- the cleaning you have to do BEFORE the strangers show up to clean your house. This involves hiding porn (which wasn't issue for me, unless Neide was planning to clean the hard drive of my laptop), drug paraphenalia, and anything else that might be questionable (The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold on DVD) or illegal (pet ferret).

Neide and two other women showed up on Monday and got right to work, while I took Maude to the vet for a check-up. When we came home, my jaw dropped open -- I had no idea such cleaniness was possible. Surfaces were gleaming, my bed was made and THE INSIDE OF MY ANCIENT CRUSTY TOASTER OVEN WAS CLEAN, bereft of the burned residue that had been accumulating basically since I inherited it from my father back in 2003.

Very pleasing.

Epiphany: I just downloaded "Clean Up Woman" and it's totally not about actual professional cleaning women, but rather the woman who steals your man when you've been ignoring him. So "making it easy" for the clean up woman has nothing to do with doing a preliminary sweep or stashing contraband. You learn something new every day.

Flowy curtains from vintage linen

Billowy, crisp white vintage linen makes the best dreamy looking curtains!

I've inherited a set of heavy knit curtains. In a very small home, they do take up quite abit of presence in the space. Very boring looking. So I've been wanting to change them but we might not be here long enough to justify an expensive purchase.

(I've had my eye on a pretty set of Roman blinds on eBay and was considering getting them... but I realised I'll have to drill holes into the window frames... again, not sure if we're going to be here long enough.)

SO I've been playing with just hanging up pretty white vintage linen, instead.

Like these:

image via teacup design

image via philigry

image via LolaNova

image via dottie angel

image via Mundo Flo

A little R&R

Hannah was sick last week with a cold. The little preschooler has now passed on the same gift to her parents, grandparents and aunty. So we're all sick.

Hence my silence. Bear with us... I'll be back! With a blog post featuring some new furniture pieces from Spacify, my new sponsor!

That's "Professor Vagnino" to you

Great news: after a grueling and fiercely competitive application/interview process, I have successfully landed a teaching position at Emerson for the 2010-2011 school year!

I will be teaching two courses: Intro to College Writing in the fall, and Research Writing in the spring. Both are freshmen composition courses that meet 3 times a week (each class is 75 minutes). The pay is basically slave's wages, but I'm not complaining -- I love teaching writing and this will be great experience and hopefully open up other professional opportunities after I leave Emerson.

The first semester course is pretty structured -- already broken down into four units and all the readings come from books that the department has chosen. I'm more excited for the research writing course, which is much more open and allows students to experiment in different genres. Instead of position papers, I can assign them to write memoirs, graphic novels, op-ed columns, manifestos, press releases, film reviews, blogs -- whatever genre/rhetorical situation I deem fit that will require them to do some research into the genre's requirements and audience. And I get to pick all the readings. Mwahahahahaha!

The research writing course can also involve some multimedia projects, if you subscribe to composition theory god Joseph Harris's belief that "texts" are not just written documents. Texts are "objects that have been made and designed -- artifacts that can in some way be shelved, filed, or stored and then retrieved and reexamined" (Rewriting 11). Under this definition, texts can include movies, songs, plays, advertisements, photographs, web pages etc. Emerson students are very tech-savvy, so I plan to take advantage of this. Check out some of these "texts" that were created by freshmen who were studying PSAs as a genre:











Pretty impressive....anyway, I can't wait to start crafting my syllabus!

Emerson College class of 2014: I look forward to meeting you.

Random shots of home

The Family Diva

My MIL's A Favourite Birthday Gift

{her own place}

Still loving my kitchen shelves

... still saving up to paint the walls and beams and kitchen cabinets white!