As Christmas fast approaches my native land is not exactly a place high on hope as the dastardly pantomime villain Economic Woe and his evil side-kick Recession hold fast their icy grasp on this fiscally challenged isle. A troika of wise (?) men visit us regularly but instead of bearing gifts of gold (if only) frankincense and myrrh they bring instead directives for the implementation of austerity measures from their (and our!) masters at the IMF. Yet, despite all that, when I went, this Saturday, to visit the pop up shop that was part of Christmas on the Square I came away filled with hope.
Christmas on The Square: Pop-Up Shop
The List Book
I wish I was super organized, never forgetting anything, with everything I need for daily life neatly labelled, properly filed, or even just simply in its rightful place. As I say it’s a wish the reality is slightly a lot different.
Filed under Musings
Shopping in Dublin: Cleo
Cleo is an independent shop, located on the ground floor of a Georgian town house on Dublin’s Kildare Street, that sells clothes and a range of gift items. Cleo specializes in clothes and hand-knits made from natural Irish fibres such as: wool, linen and tweed.
Filed under Craft, Dublin, Shops/Shopping
Baking: Tomatoe and Chilli Tart
If you read the post immediately preceding this one you will now that, for the month of November, I am on a sort-of-a-detox and a sort-of-a-diet (hereinafter known as a double SOAD). Strangely since I started said double SOAD food hasn’t dominated my thoughts nor have I obsessed for a nano-second about some mega-meal I might eat on the first of December when I have finished the double SOAD.
Dieting and Detoxing (sort of)
Dieting apparently makes you fat and yes I mostly agree that it does. But, I also think the only sure-fire way to lose weight is to eat less. And lose some weight I must. It’s not that I am an uber-tubby heffalump, just that some of my winter clothes don’t fit me anymore – exhibit A is a much-loved black jacket that maddeningly I am no longer able to button up. I know that a horrid malign fairy hasn’t cast a malicious spell which caused my clothes to shrink. Rather I have eaten too much or I should say too much of the wrong sorts of food – exhibits B to Z are various slices of cake mostly of the coffee kind. So what I need to do is to change my eating habits to healthier ones and hopefully in the process lose a little weight.
Filed under Healthy Living, Musings
This Week
This week Barack Obama was re-elected president of the USA. JAA doesn’t normally drift into political waters so I will just briefly say I was pleased and relieved that he will serve for a second term. Michelle Obama is highly intelligent, extraordinarily articulate, and blessed with a preternatural ability to connect with people; for those reasons it seems a bit shallow to obsess about what she wears. But I do: she is one of my style icons.
Design Week 2012: Living with Design
Designers shape their creations out of nascent ideas in their fertile imaginations. Imaginations that have themselves been configured not just by the sparking of the creative gene but also by the objects, people and place that impinge on their lives and, of course, by a wealth of aesthetic and design history. The designs they conceive shape the lives of the rest of us: good liveable-with design enhances our individual worlds in so many immeasurable ways .
An Instagrammed October
October swished by very quickly like a speed skater slicing across the ice. I spend the first three weeks of the month anticipating my holiday in Italy and the last week of said month enjoying it.
Filed under Musings, Photography
Coffee in Milan: Peck
It is a few years since I was last in Milan and then only for a short stay so I only remembered, and just in a gossamer-fine way, some of the city’s most famous set pieces: The Duomo, La Scala and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle. As I was unsure of how to negotiate the city’s labyrinth of streets and as I was heading into Milan for just a day from my base on the shores of scenic Lake Como I thought that it was best to decide in advance exactly where I was going so I could make the optimum use of my time and to avoid ambulating around the city like an aimlessly spinning top.
Filed under Coffee, Food/Wine, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
Postcard from Lake Como
I arrived at Milan’s Linate airport yesterday morning and at my hotel in the village of Cadenabbia on the shore of Lake Como around lunchtime. It was a painless journey; the only downside was that I had to get up at the ungodly hour of four am to get to the airport on time. It’s not the four am start per se that’s the pits but getting up to catch an early flight is always proceeded by a fitfully sundered night’s sleep as I worry that the alarm on my phone which functions perfectly well every other day of the year might fail to go off.
Filed under Travel
Just Add Attitude
Just Add Attitude 