Monthly Archives: July 2010

The New Mistress

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Have I mentioned the latest new thing for me to worry about?

She’s loud. She’s fast. She has sexy curves. She makes every single male in our neighborhood do a double-take when she roams the streets, and she draws several of our men neighbors over to our house on the weekends. …

She’s rough-and-tumble where she needs to be, but shiny in all the right places.

My husband dreams about  her, and talks about her incessantly. Sometimes he goes out into the garage just to be with her. …

Should I be worried?

Shag Gallery in Palm Springs

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One of the cool places (… literally … A/C on … cool) we went to during our last Palm Springs trip was to the Shag store and gallery. It’s very small — you can stand in the center of the room and “see” it all in a flash — but we walked all the way around the room and took a longer look at each of his fun, midcentury-modern-themed art works.

Shag (Josh Agle) is an illustrator and artist whose pieces were originally meant to be commercial, but were quickly nabbed up by collectors and elevated to pieces that people just wanted to collect … and show. Some of his illustrations can be disturbing — men are often portrayed as wolves, preying upon beautiful women, and there’s a lot of garish excess shown off in his illustrations — but his original spirit is always still there, and the rest of his illustrations are still simply focused on fun.

He clearly has all the same loves my husband does: midcentury modern, tiki culture, surfing,  Southern California. And those always come through. (I read that he lives in a midcentury modern house in the hills of L.A.) There was a neat collection of “Zodiac” paintings in the store (Cancer woman, Aquaries, etc. — all portrayed in midcentury settings) that I really liked. And there’s a classic one of Palm Springs (complete with guy in Hawaiian shirt and the aerial tramway) that my husband reeeeeeally has his eye on. I’m sure it’s going to show up in our bedroom someday. (It’s “Desert Polynesia” — totally reminds us of our Caliente Tropics visits!)

It was fun to walk through the gallery and store and look at several pieces at once. He also has three books out now.

If you like midcentury modern, and are in Palm Springs, be sure to stop here:

Happy Birthday to Me

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So I’ve never been one of those people who hates birthdays, or lies about her age, or who counts down toward the day with blood-pressure pills or anything. Not normally, anyway. 

But this year … I think I’m feelin’ it. I think I’m starting to become one of those people. Not too happy about the birthday this year for some reason.

So I decided to try to cheer myself up with some quotes. I asked people what their favorite “getting older” quotes were, and they came back with some good ones. Now I have to decide if I’m in this feel-good camp, where I believe these:

  • I’m old enough to know what I’m doing and young enough to enjoy it! (thanks @babysarms!)
  • It’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years. (thanks, @HILLontherun)
  • The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older. – William Phelps
  • It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides. – George Sand

Or if I’m in the down-on-birthdays, starting-to-feel-really-old camp, because I found all these to ring reeeeeeeelly true:

  • The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.  ~Jerry M. Wright
  • They say that age is all in your mind.  The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.  ~Author Unknown
  • Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that’ll get you home earlier.  ~Dan Bennett

How about you? How do you handle birthdays? With aplomb? Or with dread?