Okay, folks, we're doing it. It's a revolution. You pledge to read the printed word, and not just blogs and tweets and phones, but physical words. Books! Newspapers! Zines! Once you take the pledge, you put this kickass badge on your blog to encourage the revolution to spread like wildfire.* Here are some good books in case you need something to start with. This edition: fiction to feed mind and soul:
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden. A fragment, published posthumously.** About troubled love, writing, creation, birth, death, life, and drinking Pernod and skinny dipping in the South of France.
Sherman Alexie, Flight. About the violence of history and the possibility of overcoming it; about haunting and pain and transcendence.
Philip Roth, Everyman. About the death of your father, whether or not that has happened yet. About age, infirmity, and the too-quick passing of life.

* But NOT the kind of fire that burns books. Boo.
** I have issues with this, but not enough to keep me from loving this book.

I found this cool old slide case at an antique store for cheap. I thought they meant slides as in slide projector, but now I'm pretty sure they meant lab slides. Oooooh.
I want to convert it into a jewelry box, because I've spent two years looking at conventional jewelry boxes and I hate them all. Ideas on how to do this? Science people, is there a place to get little wooden dividers, or even glass slides, for cheap? Maybe little compartments? Line with cloth?

They're just Anthropologie windows, but in the dark, with snowdrifts outside, they seemed to me quite magical.
Up close it's tissue paper, doubled and ruffled and whirled and stacked.
Can someone please teach me how to DIY a giant puffball? I think I'd like to hang one up somewhere.

Here is a tiny cottage in which you can actually stay, if you are a hiker in Peru's Cordillera Negra. If I lived here, however, I would not be a hiker but would be adapted to alpine frolicking in the manner of Heidi, and would have some goats and lllllllamas. Inside, there would be a potbellied stove and a ring of toasty warmth around it, where I would card wool and knit enormous, Nerudian socks. Breakfast would be dried meat and toast and fried cheese and yerba mate, and I would have a grand collection of winter hats with earflaps. At night I would wear footsie pajamas to bed and listen to the wind running through the great empty sky above me, on its way quickly quickly to faraway places.

(Photo by Ian Anderson, who got to stay in this cottage, via Tiny House Blog.)

I may be late to this party, having just watched Frost/Nixon last night, finally, but I have decided that what I need more than anything else in the world is the wardrobe of Caroline Cushing. If you haven't seen the film, you must rent it to check out the phenomenally executed seventies style. Rebecca Hall, the actress, has fabulous Gainsbourgian silky dark hair, and bangs.* She gets to wear a fantastic parade of dresses, from wrap-jersey-DVFy things to backless seventies miracles. And don't even get me started on the handbags. For some insane reason, there are hardly any photos of her around, at least in this character. Why? Why? I must re-watch the movie and take photos of my damn tv for inspiration.

That photo above is the only one that showed any clothing at all, and it's the least rad of all the outfits despite the perfectly coordinated espadrilles.

* I have serious jealousy of people who can pull off bangs.