While I was building the decorator slide shows for our Best of Decorating list, I could not stop staring at some of the tableaus created by stylist Delphine Krakoff and others. As it turns out, I could move pretty things around for hours...

If you were this lucite lamp, what kind of a shade would you want? You're maybe a foot tall and you have a cute little crack in your top tiera, but you're not ashamed. And you probably aren't going to go here. You might go on a messy, mid-century Wooton-esque desk.

Guess who now owns five bedside tables? Yeah. But this latest table, like the Ferm Feather wallpaper, is a puzzle piece, a living testament to gut instinct. I know it goes somewhere in my apartment, I'm just not sure where. First I tried the living room. I have a favorite spot, but you go first.

Oh and incidentally I bought it for ten dollars from a very nice stoop salesman at a garage sale in Park Slope, so if I'm totally off base, don't feel bad about saying so. As if!

I wasn't drinking Pastis to celebrate Bastille Day. Nor was I shopping with Kim from Desire to Inspire who went antiquing and got loads of stuff, including this fabulous bench that her kitties love. I am looking for claws but I am seeing none. Do yo hear her complaining about the cats? What's the matter with me? What's the matter with my cats?

My friend Julia (whom I've known since I was eleven) and I took Latin class together from sixth through ninth grades. Mom used to say, "Latin is a dead language, dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans, now it's killing me." I don't know about Latin (I did okay on my SATs), but translating Cicero was killing us. So Julia (who's now a professional storyteller with her own company, Stories that Move and Sing) decided that we needed to jump out the window to escape the torture. We would run down the hall of our private girls' school and pretend to hurl ourselves out the front windows. Then we'd roll down the stairs and onto the grass where we lay giggling in modern English. We really did this. (If you click on the other pictures on Julia's site you'll believe me--I mean, the hats...)

Anyway, Julia now attends graduate school where she studies mythology. And she told me I'm full of Hestia, by which she means that I'm very domestic.

Now, how a girl whose oldest friend thinks she's domestic turns out to be so bad at making the decisions that make a house a home is beyond me. I'll have to lie on the couch and think about it for a while...

This week was supposed to feature some brilliant scans (as opposed to scams) from my childhood home, accomapanied by some depth psychology entries about why I am the way I am, excuses for why I haven't put curtains on the windows, etc. But I can't get the dang photos to load in Typepad. I'm trying one more time. If it doesn't work, you're just going to have to read. Hopefully you did okay on your SRAs.

Majority rules (until it doesn't); and it seems most people think the tall mid-century modern lamps that were born on top of the small glass coffee table from my youth must have been adopted.

But in fact, I have a confession to make. The lamps don't look exactly as they did when we were kids. They're missing an outer shade that was made with a stiff netting material, which floated around the smaller cylinder, outside the wooden base. Let's call them satelite shades. I looked around, but couldn't find a Kodachrome picture of the lamps in the old house. I'll keep looking.

In the meantime, what do you think of this combination?

Remember my coffee table? She had a few little sisters, and one of them is back. I finally, finally, finally, finally had the glass top replaced. It was relatively easy. I just traced some brown paper in the shape I  remember the table top having; lost it; waited a year and a half; then did another one, and took it to the glazer NEXT DOOR to my building; left a deposit and voila: a new side table.

Now, where do I put it? Do we like it on this side of the sofa with the mid-century lamp on it? Is it going to drive you all crazy if there's nothing on the other side? What if I bought some other sort of table to put on the other side?

I'm full of questions today.

I live in an apartment that would fit into many an upper-middle-class person's garage anywhere else in the country. So why is it taking me so long to decorate? I'd tell you why, but you already know: money, indecision, fear. Yawn. Even when I get clarity, it goes.

Take this morning. This dark, dark green-sky stormy morning. I woke up to the cat's meow at around 6:30 am. Only it looked like it was about 9 pm and about to get dark for the night. Especially in my apartment.

Picture this: My very thick glasses are still on the bedside table, so I'm looking at shapes and shadows. And here's what I see: the highlights in the chiaroscuro that is my bedroom, in other words, the wall where I was going to put up the Ferm Feather wallpaper. I can't do it, dear reader. It's the only wall in the whole house that gets and reflects light. If I put dark paper on it, how will I photosynthesize?

My new idea: paper the small hallway that's now turquoise blue. I know what you're thinking... Maybe I should start a dating blog instead.

Thank heavens for the Dutch. So efficient. Such a get-it-done sort of people. Take Telmen from The Netherlands  who submitted this How To Paint a Tree Mural article to Apartment Therapy. Is someone trying to tell me something? Maybe my friend Karell over at Jotterblog who sent me the link...

Someone's looking out for us: Check out this bed from Shawn Lovell Metalworks that a reader tipped us off to today. Shawn makes this bed (and other furniture) by hand.

...for a number of reasons...

"I just found your blog yesterday when I had nothing to do at work and I read it straight from beginning to end."

Welcome AllieCat!!

Thanks to froglegs...I mean frogpajamas, I don't need an imagination! She (I think it's a she) photoshopped the two wallpapers in question onto my bedroom walls! Lookie there. I think I like the Feathers...

Click on that image. Seriously. If you need a laugh, just click on that image and read the letter I got with my Elektra wallpaper sample. Tee hee.

What does it mean?

Don't these lights remind you of my boudoir lamps? I've got the real McCoy in the bedroom, but these seafoam green remakes of classic Art Deco light fixtures might be great in the bathroom if I didn't have, um, peach tile. They're called Adrian lights from Rejuvenation. Thanks to Eliza for the tip!

My friend David sent me this. Think my living room is getting old enough to need a Vaseline lens?

The sample of the 70's vintage wallpaper came. Elektra it's called. Which scares me. You know who Electra was in Greek mythology? She was the daughter of Agammemnon who was killed by his wife and her lover when he returned from the Trojan War. Electra later orchestrated the murder of her own mother to restore her father's good name. Freud had a field day with her brother Orestes, and Jung played up the myth of Electra herself.

So what's with the name? Feathers I get.

Oh, and how does it look?

On Friday afternoon the city was nearly empty. This Kelly green vintage sofa from Henredon fine furniture sat in the window at Housing Works Thrift Shop waiting for people to do their bidding. It was hot; everyone was on vacation; I thought I might be able to get the piece for a song. Turns out I was wrong. Only 11 people have bid on it and it's already up to $2,000. Don't these people know that you're supposed to bid in tiny increments?

When I was in fifth grade, I thought my mother was having an affair with our wallpaperer. Seriously. Here's what I think I remember: he had a mop of black curly hair (like the young Albert Einstein you see above); he sang opera while he worked; he cooked us dinner; and my mom laughed a lot when he was around.

You see your mother happy and somewhere in the back of your little eleven-year-old mind, you invent things. Apparently my mother was not having an affair with "Curly," and he didn't sing. But he did stir things up a bit around the house. He was a trained chef who had gone to culinary school at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. Then he gave it all up to wallpaper houses in suburban St. Louis so he could be at home with his wife and child. The man loved his job--he would come to the house early and ask my mother what she wanted for dinner. Then he would send her out to the store to get ingredients. He'd work until 3, and then cook up saucy dinners even my father liked.

The man was good at what he did. Much of the green-flocked, gold-foiled, tree mural wallpaper he hung almost thirty years ago is still hanging in my mom's house. And what doesn't is etched on my unconscious mind and making it's way into my own house in some form or other. Seriously.