My former employer is on a roll this year producing products that strain the boundaries of their Things No One Really Needs (…Except Maybe If You Have Too Much Time On Your Hands and Lots of Disposable Income) category. They’ve done well filling out that category in the past with their $500 margarita machine and the infamous Electric Vacuum Marinator, both genius ideas that I’m sure will someday achieve the success they deserve in the general marketplace. I’m totally holding my breath for that. I’m a little blue, but I’m hanging in there.

This season, Williams-Sonoma and their sibling, Pottery Barn, are in a dead heat for the top useless spot. WS blew into first place last month with a $300 see-through toaster.

Ever since I saw it, I can hardly imagine a kitchen without one. Why just this morning, a piece of priceless toast was burned to a crisp in my kitchen. Imagine: the tragedy might have been averted had I had the foresight to buy the Magimix Vision Toaster the instant the catalog arrived. Well, that and if someone had been paying attention to the toast in the first place. I think the market here is not really, “People Who Burn Toast,” but, “People Who Still Burn Toast While Standing Over the Toaster Waiting for The Aforementioned Toast,” since you really need to be hanging out right there watching your transparent toaster to avert a sooty conflagration. If you had that kind of loitering time, you probably would’ve been able to avoid burning your breakfast bread in your old toaster too because you could have smelled it going up in smoke, but who’s keeping track of those silly details, right? It’s a glass toaster for Pete’s sake! What’s not to love?

If you needed any other incentive than its obvious excellence and indispensability, the suggested retail on this wonder machine is $350, so you’re actually saving $50 if you buy it from WS instead of, um, well, traveling to Belgium to pick one up from the factory, since no one else in the States seems to carry them. So you’re actually saving, like, $1000 if you factor in the airfare.

Anyway, bravo Williams-Sonoma: you have definitively put to bed that old adage, “A watched toast never boils.” Apparently it does, my friends, apparently it does.

I was so ready to just hand over the blue ribbon to Williams-Sonoma not halfway through 2010 but then, lo and behold, WS’s sister company, Pottery Barn, upped the ante in their most recent catalog with the…wait for it… yes, it’s a giant abacus.
retailing for only $249!! Can you believe it? What luck. Just what I’ve always wanted.

If anything, this is catering to an even smaller market than the magic toaster: “People who need to do a lot of math but can’t. And who can’t work a calculator. And are blind.” Well, huzzah, Pottery Barn for finding a tiny need and filling it with a giant solution.

The abacus is an impressive two feet by four feet which means you’re going to have to do some serious rearranging of your Math Room to make it feel at home, but if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. And on a bizarrely outsized scale. That’s all I’m saying.

So now the pressure’s on West Elm, the third brand arm of the Williams-Sonoma empire. What’s it going to be, West Elm? A collection of 1000 tiny egg-shaped figurines? A life-size map of Istanbul for your living room? A live elk? Your pals have set a high standard: for the low, low price of $600 I can see my toast and do basic addition and subtraction visible to a sizable audience. The gauntlet is down.

2010 is shaping up to be a big year in retail people. Hang onto your hats.

Someone gave me, in my Christmas stocking, a box of Band-Aids - sorry: Boo Boo Kisses Adhesive Bandages. Fine. Good so far. Who doesn’t need sexy band-aids?

The package says, “FREE TOY INSIDE!”

OK, still with you. Everyone loves a toy, especially a free one, especially me.

Here’s where things get weird. Turns out the “toy” is a tiny plastic man in a black tie, grey dress pants, and heavy black-rimmed glasses which frame his catatonic zombie eyes. I can see that being stuck in a metal box of Boo Boo Kisses Adhesive Bandages for an extended period might make you catatonic. That I get. But is this guy really a “toy”? He has no moving parts and, more disturbingly for the category, he looks like a mental patient. And he would definitely get caught in my throat if I swallowed him, so not so much a toy for, say, a cat. Or a child under the age of…well, 38 apparently.

Why are they putting a tiny non-action figure from Mad Men in my box of naughty band-aids? That’s weird, right? Right?

It’s my own personal winter tradition: every year I pick a pair of new boots and fixate on them. Mind you, I already have plenty of boots. It’s not need-based, it’s want-based and man have I wanted some of them badly.

Last year, I was on about these insulated Uma boots from Salomon (different pattern last year, but you get the idea). Toasty Christmas present for Emma.

This year, I set my sights on these Kenneth Coles. They fit with my pregnancy fashion plan: no mumus, no maternity-only clothes if I can possibly help it, lots of black, and cool footwear. My concession to schlepping another person (albeit a small one and internally) around with me all the time is that high heels may have to (mostly) take a back seat, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to wear trainers every day.

Welcome to this year’s boot pick.

Sadly and inexplicably, these are only available through Eileen Fisher and Garnet Hill, both of which companies were sold out for the last several weeks. But lo and behold, a Christmas miracle: earlier this week, more arrived on the Eileen Fisher site, so you too can have these super-comfortable mid-calf, buckled boots for gallivanting about in the winter. You’re welcome. Happy holidays!

In the spirit of the holidays, let’s start our Tuesday with a little shopping, shall we? Minor shopping. $1.99 App Store shopping to be exact.

Last week, my brother’s company released an excellent iPhone game called Categuru and you should run right over to your phone (or pull it out of your pocket or your purse or your dog’s mouth or whatever) and buy it. At the very least, you need to try the free lite version.

Here’s the deal, per their web site: “Categuru is a new original word and trivia game. You are given five words, and your goal is to figure out what category they belong to. The catch is that you get the words one letter at a time. The fewer letters you use, and the faster you solve, the more points you get.”

So if the screen displays “GHTMS” (vertically, not horizontally like that) and the next slide reveals “RAIAA”, you might guess “sharks” as the category. As in great white, hammerhead, tiger, mako and…I can’t remember that last one. Salmon?

It’s brilliant and addictive and you should try it. And I’m not just saying that ‘cause he’s my brother. Really.

I came across this gorilla over the weekend and even though I have an inexplicable lack of enthusiasm for primates, I love him. I wish I’d had him when I was a kid and am seriously considering making up for that gap by buying him now.

Aside from his flexible limbs and hardwood solidity, my favorite thing about him is this candid photo of what he does when he’s alone with the housepets.

The tour included business and theater in London (humid, grey), a wedding in Switzerland (formal), a couple of sweltering days in Milan, holiday with family in Venice, a little down time in Zurich, a lot of time in flight, a couple days on trains, and short trips on trams and boats. That’s a lot of different climates and even more transitions from flats to hotels and back and forth between countries.

Across all that, there were a few things that stood out as being incredibly handy to have and made the trip’s insane logistics so much easier to manage.

The Best Bag Ever (especially on the road): Marghera Convertible

I, like most of you, have spent an undisclosed portion of my adult life seeking the perfect bag. Luckily for both of us, I’ve found it. Aside from its excellent green-ness which works for day and night, the features I love the most are its ability to switch from a handled bag to a shoulder bag (it folds over) and to contain my laptop without betraying its presence.

To be fair, that laptop is a Mac Air (which, incidentally, I love like my unconceived children), so its weight doesn’t put a strain on the bag’s leather shoulder strap and its unusually slim form allows it to slide horizontally into a bag like this that wouldn’t accommodate either its Apple bretheren or any other standard size laptops. Don’t look at this as a drawback though: this is your opportunity to justify both a new computer and a new bag.

When not housing your ‘puter, the capacity is generous enough to hold small purchases in addition to the usual wallet, iPhone, keys and assorted cousins. Two flat outside pockets are exactly the size of your airline ticket and one small one inside will hold your passport.

Where to get it: Sundance Catalog. Currently on sale for $250.

iPhone

R talked me into an iPhone the day before we left the country, mainly so I could make international calls and send text messages in Europe without buying a just-for-international phone with a different phone number everybody then has to remember. I was ambivalent. Did I really want to get worked up about something so many people are already worked up about? Wouldn’t it be more fair to the coolness marketplace to get worked up about something more obscure? And wouldn’t I look cooler if I did that second one instead?

Also, I liked my little Blackberry Pearl and the consistency of Verizon. Why move to something bigger with AT&T’s terrible coverage?

Because it’s pocket-sized awesomeness, that’s why.

Really, though, the main thing was having a phone and text messaging which meant we could split up for the afternoon and still coordinate keys, dinner, and so on. I don’t know what we’d have done without it.

Where to get it: Apple.

iPhone App: Hi Converter

It converts things. Correction: it converts EVERYTHING. Do you want to know how many hectares are in a bunder? How many ngarns are in a square angstrom? Did you know there was such a thing as a square light year? The area converter can help. When you’re done there, the distance converter will turn your miles into gnat’s eyes (.00000007761). You can do electric current and digital image resolution conversions in your spare time.

Aside from its clear entertainment value, it will also convert your euros into dollars based on today’s exchange rate, your size at Bloomingdale’s into your size at Harrod’s, and 40 Celsius into a more comprehensibly crispy 104 Fahrenheit.

Where to get it: App Store.

iPhone App: Collins Italian-English Dictionary

Since I speak German and a chunk of Spanish and can get by in French, I’ve been arrogantly cruising around Europe for quite a while without having to feel like a complete tourist. Those days came to a jarring end at the Italian border. Enter the iPhone (again).

Of all the dictionaries I tried, the $25 Collins was the best. It covers a lot of ground: direct translations, peripheral usage, colloquialisms and common (or, in the best cases, not at all common) phrases.

$25 is a lot for an app and I know no one wants to pay more than 99 cents, but the frustration of looking up a word and finding no results repeatedly on other apps gets old fast. You spent $1200 to get to Italy, you can spare another $25 to pull up with, “L’ho gettato nel water,” to explain the whereabouts of your passport/hairbrush/traveler’s checks. (Translates to, “I threw it in the toilet,” by the way.)

Where to get it: App Store

Hideo Wakamatsu 20” Viewer Trolley

The day after we got back from Barcelona in June, I biked over to the Hideo Wakamatsu store to check out superlight international carry-on sized luggage. I biked home with a silver 6.5 lb., 20” Viewer Trolley hanging from my handlebars.

Why the post-trip rush? Because you have to seize the moment when your shoulder still hurts from schlepping a non-rolling bag and your ego still smarts from looking like a hands-full-of-stuff schmuck, and solve your problem.

My problem is that we have a bunch of stuff - some of it heavy - that I won’t check. R’s 35mm camera, my jewelry, things I’ll want on the plane (sweater, megaphone, another sweater, snacks) and essential clothing (an extra T-shirt and undies, plus whatever we would die without if they lost our luggage, like a swimsuit if we’re going to be beach or my dress for the wedding we’re attending). That pile of stuff always ends up being more than I want to carry in a shoulder bag, but I don’t want to drag around an actual suitcase with all the rest of my non-essential stuff too. (Besides, most American 22” roll-on suitcases are too heavy, once packed, to meet international flight restrictions.) What to do? Until last month, I chose “suffer” rather than add another suitcase to the mix.

That was the wrong choice. The Viewer kicks ass. It’s super light for getting in and out of bins, and its four wheels allow you to roll it next to you with your computer bag on top. It’s like walking a very quiet, rectangular pet. Your hands are free, your shoulder is relaxed, and you look like the seasoned traveler you actually are.

Quick warning: the lovely matte finish on the bag will mark, so brace yourself for that before you check it (if you ever decide you need to, that is). I haven’t checked it yet myself, so I’ve no idea how well it holds up to airline abuse, but it’s done beautifully inside planes, trams, and trains.

Where to get it: Currently out of stock at the eponymous shop but available - albeit inaccurately described as having two wheels and not four - at Flight 001.

Business Class

Traveling in business class (or above) is the way to go. I know there is no one (except possibly this jerk) who is in favor of the turn that air travel has taken in the last ten years. These days, the coach cabin on a long-haul flight looks more and more like the back of a Central American chicken truck. Between the the addition of bad things (longer lines and delays, ineffective security, fees for everything) and the elimination of good things (space, food, customer service), there’s pretty much nothing positive to say about flying except that you will get where you’re going not dead (mostly).

R travels for work, which rots but has a significant up side: he accumulates crazy numbers of miles and little stacks of upgrade certificates. We use the former to get me where he’s already going and the latter to get us there, occasionally, in business class. I don’t need warmed nuts and real china, but the quiet and the space bring the airborne experience back from the brink of catatonia into the land of, “I might not maim someone first thing when I get off the plane.”

Where to get it: Get a job where you a.) travel a lot (our way), b.) make a lot of money or c.) can commit a lot of untraceable financial fraud.

Maybe this is the missing piece in all the protests and negotiations.

T-shirt available here.

I know you, the small business owner, spent a gajillion dollars on your web site, dollars you probably didn’t have in your lovely little small shop’s budget until some friend of yours or (more likely) some consultant friend of a friend of yours dropped by wearing a trendy scarf and very expensive shoes and convinced you that to stay competitive, to stay current, to make a statement, you needed to have a web site with lots of sensual images and flowing movement. She said it was essential that you build this site in Flash. She said all the cool kids were doing it. And you fell for it.

You probably know nothing about how to develop web sites and maybe you don’t want to. Maybe - probably - you just want to go about your business of selling specialty teas or lipstick made out of ground up fairies or balsa wood harmonicas. You had a dream, a small business dream, and your web site was not part of that dream. Your web site was like that trivet you bought before that party that one time: it’d be nice if it were pretty but mainly it just had to preserve the finish on your coffee table.

I’m sorry to have to break it to you but you blew it.

I know it’s Monday and I know it’s raining and you were probably hoping to just sort through your grey day and go home for a nice cup of tea without anyone getting all up in your business, but there it is. You made a mistake. You dropped the ball. You took the wrong tine at the fork in the road and the end of that road is your very expensive, extremely irritating web site.

Unless you are either a game-crazed teenaged boy or a deranged person with a lot of time on your hands at the residential facility where you live, a Flash home page is a blight.

When you build a Flash movie into your home page (e.g. here), your visitor’s very first experience of this business of yours - the one that you have so carefully planned and built - is of waiting. Waiting while you get yourself together. Waiting while you go get your slide deck and set up the projector.

I hate to break it to you, but a musical slideshow of your best features is not of interest to anyone but your beloved and even then, s/he is probably only being polite. I know it’s hard news to get, but your customers do not want to see your slides or your movies. (At least not until you’ve gotten them drunk or offered them a shiny object and maybe not even then.)

Let me give you an analogy. You see a store. You go into the foyer. There is a clock in front of you blocking the door into the store itself. The clock starts counting to 100. You wait. You have no choice. The clock is at 17, then 23. You wait some more. There is nothing to do but wait or leave. If you are me, you leave. If you are not me (or a more patient version of me), you wait. But you are getting progressively more impatient. By the time the clock gets to 100, you are annoyed. Then you get to go into the store. But since you’re annoyed, all the nice things in the window look annoying now. To make things even more scream-out-loud frustrating, the actual store doesn’t have an address, only the foyer has an address. So when you come back (not that you’d want to but maybe you have short term memory loss) you have to go through the whole thing all over again.

See? Not good, dude, not good.

It’s time to get back to basics. Pull the plug. Strip out the Flash and build a usable site with clear navigation and no pop-up windows (you’re not selling porn, are you?). If you must, take your pretty pictures and create a gallery that your customers can visit if they want to, but no more countdowns and mood music and movies of flower arrangements.

I don’t even know you yet. That crap is not first date material so just cut it out.

Don’t argue with me, just get one.

It’s a knitted coffee cup sleeve. It keeps your fingers cool, your latte hot and your sense of social righteousness toasty.

You say you don’t need one. You say it’s silly. You make smart alecky remarks when you see mine, but secretly you are filled with envy and wish you had one of your own.

There’s no need to be sad and twisted inside: just go get one. It’s a little, happy sweater for your Starbucks and it will make you happy and sweatery too.

Here’s me. I am an efficient grocery shopper. I have a life. I have places to be. I am buying groceries with a plan and would like to continue on with the rest of my life as soon as possible. I believe that the people in line behind me would prefer to move on with their lives too.

Here’s you. You are a dawdler. You have no place to be. You are creating purpose in your life by taking way too long to do things that do not take long to do. You are holding up other people’s lives.

Here’s me. I was a waitress. I worked at a store. I believe that waiters and checkout girls are people too. I swipe my credit card while the girl swipes my stuff. I bag my stuff while she gets my receipt. We are a well-oiled machine. We are buddies.

Here’s you. You stand perfectly still. In line and while the girl rings up your groceries into a pile, you stand perfectly still. You do not look for your credit card before she is done because you are standing perfectly still. Instead of bagging your own groceries in the bag that you brought, you stand perfectly still while the girl waits on you like you are a princess.

I have news for you: you are not a princess and life is not a straight line of one event following another. You have a tiny negative effect on the world around you because you are so passive and not helpful. You should stop that because it makes us not like you. Also, it will very slowly make you not an interesting person. So stop it.

OK. Now let’s all move on with our day. Have a nice afternoon.

I need these things. I do. Really.

• First, I will buy a Soo-Per Cap which I will wear while I go shopping. I might buy a back-up Soo-Per Cap in case things get tricky and I lose the first one.
• I’ll round out the outfit with this excellent T-shirt. “Everything you like I liked five years ago.” Boo-yah.
• Then, I will get a ZÜCA Pro, the most fantastic piece of roll-on luggage, to carry around my loot. When I am overwhelmed with self-satisfaction at my purchase, I will sit on my new luggage’s little built-in seat platform.
• When I’m back from my hat-centric outing, I’ll print the photos on the Epson Artisan 800. Then I’ll scan the print-outs and fax them to myself. Because I can.

The winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year has come out and I can’t wait to lay down $1,139 for it. Yes, it’s “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais”.

I’m hoping the outlook is good, because I do love fromage frais.

Other titles I will be tracking down:

• “Waterproofing Your Child”


• “The Large Sieve and Its Applications”


• “Strip and Knit With Style”


• “Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Nude Mice”


• “How to Avoid Huge Ships”

If you want to experience the full force of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize, you can get the lists, photos included, in this lovely volume. Which I already own. Naturally.

It’s been a busy week Chez Emma: my birthday was Thursday and on Friday we headed to Vegas for the Deranged Running of the Casinos. I’m mostly recovered but woke up with a phantom hangover this morning out of habit.

I know you’re wondering how the birthday went, and I’ll tell you: it was excellent. R took me to lunch at Serpentine, a new-ish restaurant in the Dogpatch that we hit over the holidays and have been wanting to go back to, mainly because I didn’t try their butternut squash bread pudding then and have been wanting to since. And you can’t have that sort of thing on any old day because it’s just too damn rich and obviously full of things that are bad for you. But on your birthday, it’s time to bring it, don’t you think? So I did and all I have to say is that savory bread pudding is the way to go, people.

Weird menu glitch though. See that first photo up there? What do you think it says? Puree of Celery Root Soup? With…I’m sorry, what? Peanut butter? “Glob of Jiffy with your yuppie soup, miss?” Oh. No wait. That’s “pinenut butter.” Never mind.

Then we picked up cupcakes (which you should always get from Kara’s Cupcakes instead of Miette*) and went to the California Academy of Sciences (more on that later) and visited the little seahorses and the alligator. (The alligator didn’t eat anyone while we were there, so that was a bit anticlimactic - it was my birthday - but maybe next time.)

Recently, I’ve been getting myself presents for my birthday and I recommend it to anyone who asks (which no one does, because it’s odd and why would they? But there you go: now I’m offering it out there for the taking). This year, I got myself a Nest Egg. I couldn’t resist. It’s a white ceramic egg about 4” high, it comes in its own nest (see photo), and it has a slot for coins or folded up bills. Since it only has one opening, there’s no cheating: you have to break it to open it. Brilliant. I haven’t decided what to save for and on what deadline, but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? Yes. It is.

(I got it at Rare Device, a store I’d never been to but will definitely be going back to because it has all kinds of wonderful things from small designers: jewelry, books, stationery, glitter elephants, and the like.)

Also got myself a knitted coffee cuff, which matches my egg, and which R says undermines any edgy bad ass vibe I had going, but I don’t care because it’s cute and effective.

Speaking of R, he gave me a beautiful necklace by Evfa Attling from Hus (which has closed their West Village store - so, so sad - but whose online store still has some of their products for sale). It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? So lovely. What a great fancy.

Then we had dinner with a few friends at Dosa’s new location on Fillmore. (Same great food, but a much swankier space than the original Mission location, plus a full bar.)

All in all, big birthday fun. Hooray! Thanks everyone!

*I don’t love cupcakes because they get dry, like Miette’s. Somehow, Kara’s avoids this and theirs rock. You have to try the Java (mocha frosting) and the Chocolate Velvet (absurdly smooth frosting) and, if they have it, their new Meyer Lemon filled one is a dream.

Chuck Williams, the 94-year-old founder of Williams Sonoma, was asked by a magazine a couple of years ago what the one thing was that every kitchen should have. Cuisinart food processor? $300 KitchenAid mixer? Sabatier knives? Nope. He went with the, um, potato ricer. Search me. I didn’t know what it was either and I worked there.

So I bought six and gave them away for Christmas.

Basically, it smushes boiled potatoes to make mashed potatoes and does not require you to dislocate your shoulder using an old-school hand mashers.

I will admit that I have never used the one I bought for us. A.) It is heavy, and b.) mashed potatoes take too long to make. However, two people have recently assured me that the gifted ricer makes bad-ass mashed potatoes, so I guess this is a recommendation for the potato ricer. Sort of.

(And please don’t ask me what makes Williams Sonoma’s version “deluxe.” Maybe that’s their tactful way of saying that it’s overweight without hurting its feelings…)

Get this. We all need one for those off days. Not today. I don’t mean today. Today is fine. I’m just saying: be prepared.

Question: do you buy birthday presents for yourself? If so, how nice are they? Do you feel selfish, like when you bought that very expensive bag for yourself instead of feeding your 12 kids who lived in a shoe? Oh…hang on…different thread…

Last year, I bought a piece of artwork for my birthday from my friend Molly Meng and I love it.

It’s a good backstory - let’s digress. I saw an exhibit of Molly’s work in Candystore, and the one I wanted to buy for R was already sold. Sadness. Then I saw mine. So I bought that and kept it wrapped up until my birthday. Yay birthday!

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the sold one, so I got Molly’s name from the store owner and tracked her down and asked her if she’d make another one for me to give to R for his birthday. She said, “Yes,” (as they always do in lovely stories), I met Molly, she’s excellent and now we’re friends. Yay friends!

So here’s the thing: was buying the artwork the right choice because birthdays are awesome and we all deserve our day or am I happy about it because I got the artwork and a friend? Because that’s gonna be a tough mark to hit again. “Hello, yes. I would like to buy this handsome necklace. Also, do you have any interesting people in the back? If so, I would like to meet them. Could you wrap him/her up with the gift? No, I don’t need a bag.”

I have a weakness for jewelry with print on it. It’s my version of tattooing. Depending on the day, you might have to read for a bit when we run into each other. Jeanine Payer. Serge Thoraval. Eva Attling.

Naturally, I’d like our wedding bands to be a little off the beaten path. I saw these rings with EKG tracks etched into them a while ago. Fantastic idea (albeit maybe expensive). Yesterday, a friend sent on these, which I like even better: rings with your beloved’s fingerprint etched into the surface.

What do we think? Worth the cost even if it’s just us who knows?

Here’s what you should do today. It’s a little “help the planet” plan that will also mean kicking high maintenance water to the curb. And it doesn’t involve hemp or Al Gore or wiccan rituals or weaving anything.

Get yourself some polished Japanese charcoal briquettes to replace your Brita water filter.

See? Easy.

As long as you can find the briquettes that is, which might take some legwork.

If you need some convincing (and I have to say that that hurts me a little bit - I thought we knew each other and you trusted me by now…), here’s why:

1. Brita tastes funny. Compared to tap water, maybe it tastes better, but it’s still not the tasteless water you’re looking for. Charcoal filtered water tastes like nothing.


2. It’s waaaay cheaper than Brita. I pay $5 for four briquettes, each of which lasts for about four months. You pay $6 each for Brita replacement filters.


3. You don’t need no stinkin’ pitcher. Put your little briquette in a multi-colored bucket for all it cares.

In San Francisco, you can pick up a four-pack at Boulettes Larder in the Ferry Building. If you want to really invest and can’t part with your pitcher habit, you can support Design Within Reach and get theirs. I’m going to do some checking around for you to see if Whole Foods or someplace national carries it as well. (If you want to order from Boulettes Larder, you can go here, but be warned: it’s fax-based.)

Old news: I left my corporate job at Williams-Sonoma, Inc.. New news: what did I buy on my way out that I do not regret and will not be returning? I know you’re so excited to find out that it’s getting hard to breathe. I know - it’s super exciting isn’t it?

Before we get to that though, let me set things up for you. Due to my (former) employment by a leading purveyor of overpriced, high-end cookware and related tools, our kitchen is stocked with food preparation equipment that no couple with our skills has any business having. R mentions this often.

I do not enjoy cooking. You spend an hour or more in the kitchen producing something that will then be consumed. How is that relaxing, to see your creation getting all chewed up? I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy munching up food other people have created. I’m just saying I don’t get anything out of prepping it myself.

This state of affairs has made for some interesting conflicts with R, as he’s the one who cooks and I’m the one who buys the cooking stuff. It seems like a charming, if illogical division of labor, no? (Just to be clear, I do the cleaning. It’s all fair and square, so just calm down.)

I purchased a ton of stuff on the way out the WSI door. Here’s what’s staying:

• Calphalon One frying pans. Ooo, baby, are these nice. I love them. I, who would willingly use a whisk as a pastry blender, notice the difference. These are some kick-ass frying pans and you should register for them if you’re getting married or buy them the next time you’re in need of a new set (or just one). Screw Circulon and all the rest of the them. These are totally non-stick and hard as nails. (If you go into one of the Wm-Sonoma stores, they might still have one of the sets of an 8” pan + a 10” pan for $70. N/A on the site.)


• Primo Milk Frother. $20 well-spent, my friend. I am not a coffee snob, but years of shelling out $2.15 to Starbucks for my cafe au lait (which they insist on calling a “misto” for reasons not understood by me) has spoiled me for drinking coffeemaker coffee with cold milk in it. I am not going to invest in an espresso machine just to get steamed milk. Primo is my answer. Milk in mug, froth, microwave, add coffee, done. Just make sure you submerge the frother ring before turning it on. Trust me.


• Microplane Graters. Grating cheese with these (we have the medium one for hard cheese and the rasp for citrus) is like swimming with floaties. You never knew you could have it so good. Kick your collegiate box grater to the curb with that hippie wall hanging you scored that weekend in Michigan at the truck stop and move on already.

This guy does not look British or like the kind of guy I’d buy suits from (British ones or otherwise), but that doesn’t affect how much I love his recession plan. Completely rational. My two-pronged plan of simultaneously being very nervous and ignoring it completely hasn’t been working very well for me.

What else do I love? The word “bespoke.” (You have to read the article to get the connection. You can trust me that it’s in there though if you don’t feel like reading the article. Really. Can you be “bespoken”? Like, “I was bespoken but then he interrupted me”? Never mind.)

How do you deal with people’s lack of disposable income?

I’ve got my own little recession plan—everyone needs to make an evaluation of the three little shops that they like, and they need to spend in them. That’s something I’m personally doing. I go to the little restaurants I like, the place I get my glasses. Even though the spirit of the city is shot, if there are things in your neighborhood that you don’t want to see go away, then you have to support them. Otherwise, the big brands will just come sweeping in, and there’ll be nothing left.

I’m going to make a little list of my candidate businesses…. I’ll be right back.

Dude. Cheese. Mad cheese. More cheese than you can shake a stick at. (Not that you’d want to in this place because you’d definitely knock over one - maybe two - hundred things.) With a little perseverance, you can get your very own salesperson who will offer samples of anything you want to try and point you in the right direction. Ask about local offerings and cheeses that might be hard - or impossible - to get elsewhere.

We - well, I - went just a tad overboard, buying five cheeses for four people, but we were not disappointed. I grabbed onto a small round of Chaource, which is hard to find in good condition in San Francisco, half a round of Coulommiers (too much: get a quarter round for your average cheese plate), a Manchester hard cheese that had a nutty bandaged cheddar flavor, a Belgian blue (medium strong as blues go) and a lovely creamy Italian goat cheese (Robiola Pura Capra Carlina) that had just enough flavor to hold its own next to the Coloummiers. (Do you think “Carlina” is the name of the actual goat?)

Ihsan and Valerie Gurdal own the place - and sister stores in the South End of Boston and in Essex Market in New York - and stock it with excellent gourmet goods of all types. You can snag the baguette you’ll be wanting (as well as other kinds of breads) at their bakery counter, any condiment from anywhere in the world (try the chili and red pepper jams with your soft cheeses), goodies from their pastry counter (their small meringues with their chewy insides are the best I’ve ever had), wines from anywhere in the world, all manner of olive oils, pâté, crackers, honies and on and on and on.

As with Whole Foods, I wouldn’t recommend doing your general shopping here. It will definitely cost you to score the perfect picnic dinner - that chili jam runs $11 - but it’s worth it for an occasional anti-recession splurge or a mini splurge if you’re after a specific product (or just want to try something new). Also, don’t even think about going at peak times - the place is a zoo. Go on a weekday afternoon or first thing on the weekend when you can get some of their stellar service, enjoy some samples and generally rummage among the goods.

I look in the fridge for butter for my English muffin. This is what’s there: Challenge Butter. A nice rectangular box of butter sticks emblazoned with a throwdown of a name and what looks like a very irritated buck.

Seriously, people? Really? Now? In my last week on the job? With everything shifting, my dairy products are bringing it?

What’s with the attitude, deer? You’ve got a nice view, a calming view, a lake, mountains. What’s up? Anger management issues? Someone cut you off at the salt lick? Or is this just who you are? Seeing red for no reason? Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re just itching for some action.

You know me: I can’t walk away from a fight. I’ll take you down, I swear I will. Don’t push me. Put down that broken bottle and let’s take this outside and settle it like…a girl and a ruminate.

The countdown to departure from my job has begun in earnest. On Thursday evening the light at the end of the tunnel flared enough so I could see it. I think it was because my computer’s hard drive was thrown on the burning pyre.

The drive crashed Thursday morning and I spent two of my remaining six days at Williams Sonoma, Inc., recovering files and rebuilding a machine I will use for four days before returning it to the company stockpile from whence it so recently came. That crash was the last of the last straws, and it pushed me beyond the village of strain where I’d set up camp, shrugging into the land of What Are You Gonna Do?

Now all that’s left is buying the rest of the goods we so urgently need for our kitchen at 40% off. This is driving R bananas. He contends that not only do we need nothing else but we should consider returning some of the things we already have. He is clearly wrong.

What home does not need a Pineapple Easy Slicer? R maintains that the ratio of “pineapples consumed in our apartment” to “space consumed in our apartment by said Easy Slicer” is out of whack. I maintain that the Easy Slicer made its value apparent on the very first demo pineapple and it should not be required to reestablish that value on a regular basis. How would you like it if you were reevaluated every couple of weeks on your utility-to-space ratio when your ability to do your job had not apparently diminished? So what if you were not actually required to do your job in that time frame? You still could do your job if asked. That’s all I’m saying.

The item I will be most certain but sad to leave behind unpurchased is the Electric Vacuum Marinator. That’s right. You heard me. The Electric Vacuum Marinator. It does exactly what its name suggests: “Just press a button, and the marinator creates a powerful vacuum seal (no pumping required) that stretches and opens fibers. This draws the marinade juices deep inside the food for maximum flavor and tenderness.”

The “no pumping required” note still baffles me after 2+ years with the company. Was this product preceded by the Hand Pump Vacuum Marinator? Or is it a reference to other vacuum products requiring pumping? My vacuum cleaner is not hand crank, is yours? I guess the Swedish penis enlargement pump works on the same principle, but that can’t be what they’re referencing, can it?

At first, I thought, “If you have time to discover the EVM, earn the $200 to buy it, learn how to use it, use it and then clean it, you probably have time to marinate meat in a Ziploc as God intended.” But then I thought, “Who am I to stand in the way of progress? This is a wondrous application of modern vacuuming / pumping technology to a problem no one knew they had! What’s not to love?”

Even if R would let me buy it for our home - which he won’t - I almost certainly would not use it for its intended purpose. I would put cheese and olives and hard drives and other things that don’t need marinating in it, just to see what would happen and no doubt it would be broken in a weekend, so he’s probably right to veto it, but it’s still a sad loss for our crowded cupboards.

So I will live on without my beloved, intriguingly useless and surprisingly compelling Electric Vacuum Marinator. Farewell! Adieu! I’ll be over here with my unmarinated but smoothly cored pineapple.

The Dexter coat finally arrived from France a few days ago. I love it like a child. Like my child. If my child were toasty warm (in 25-degree NYC winter), dramatically stylish outerwear. I love this coat. And I paid about half what the Cop Copine store in San Francisco was asking for it. That cost was so absurdly high for an unlined wool coat, I wouldn’t even consider it despite my deep and abiding love for its perfect French lines. So I ordered it from France. For about half the price. Hooray, France!!

I was a rabid fan of Cop Copine before, but this coat has taken me to a new level. It fits like a glove and has a wide collar and tapered waist that make me look curvy and dramatic like a forties movie star. Get one if you can find it. They run true to size, which for me is a wide-shouldered 40 to my usual 8/10 jacket.

I asked for an iLap for Christmas. It’s possible I didn’t get one because I referred to it as The Lapinator. Which is not what it’s called. But it should be.

Anyway, the week after Christmas I ordered one for myself because I could not imagine living one more day without one. (I am very susceptible to marketing. I prefer to characterize this as “charming” rather than “gullible” and I hope you will join me.)

The iLap(inator) is all I hoped it would be. Its brushed aluminum makes the lazy circumstances under which I use it seem a little less uncool. It tilts my laptop towards me at a typing-friendly angle. And, most essentially, it magically protects my lap from my toasty laptop. This is why I got it in the first place. I can only stand about an hour of laptime before I get super-heated. The iLap(inator) is the crazy simple solution to this problem. Hooray. Seriously hooray.

The only negative I have to report is that either the round pad on the front has an unstable design, or I am mechanically challenged / blind. Even though the latter is quite likely true, I’m settling on the former for now. I’ll keep you posted if I sort it out one way or the other. In any event, this “defect” does not materially diminish the excellence of the iLap(inator). You should definitely run out and get one. Or, more in keeping with the whole product, lie down and order one online.

I got a package today from Athleta. Check out the opening instructions on the envelope. Am I the only one who finds the wording charming? “Gracefully”? Not just, “Tear along dotted line,” or, “Open with care,” or even, “Do not open with knife.”

I know the comma’s after “open” and not “gracefully,” but I prefer, “To open gracefully, tear along perforation,” to, “To open, gracefully tear along perforations,” as if grace is a gentle suggestion rather than a direction. But I’ll take it either way.

The lovely ladies of Athleta feel that even when opening what is basically a plastic bag in the privacy of my own living room, I will want to do it gracefully - or at least that I ought to do it gracefully. Right they are.

Ingenious. The butter bell. Keeps butter at room temperature without letting it spoil. Not that it does spoil at room temperature. Not for a while anyway. But boyfriends who shall remain nameless insist that it does, so butter bell it is. Also, the bell looks nicer than room temperature butter in a melty brick.

Not so ingeniously, Lucky is discontinuing my favorite jeans, the Easy Rider, so get ‘em before they’re gone. And don’t let the salesperson tell you that the Classic Rider is the same because they’re not: no button fly means Not. The. Same.

Since we’ll be away for Thanksgiving and are not - I repeat NOT - going to be biking around in the rain four days before Christmas picking up gifts, it’s a big Christmas planning weekend.

This one isn’t really a gift per se, since I’ll be getting it for myself. In fact, I am ordering one of these RIGHT THIS MINUTE. Because I need to wear it to every meeting I will be having this coming week.

I approve of an eco-friendly Judeo-Christian holiday season, but this is ridiculous. For one, mermaids don’t have LEGS. And for two, if they did, they wouldn’t wear pants with zig zags. I didn’t even wear pants with zig zags in 1974. Pull yourselves together.

For the displaced New Yorker (non-displaced New Yorkers are still living in New York and have nothing to prove on that point): New Yorker notecards. (Shout out to my fellow displacee, LB, for that one.)

I love me some narwhal and all the friendly accessories included, I’m just not quite brutal enough to get this myself. Seems tame in the age of Halo tho… The Avenging Narwhal Play Set.

Same deal: I’d love to have the cajones to actually get one of these myself. Instead, I’ll just steam silently. Except when I leave passive aggressive notes for offenders when they go the Starbucks bathroom. But that’s another story for another day.

A couple of ideas that are going on my Wish List:

- A set of four diner plates that remind me of home. $38
- The iLap for when I’m sick, Like today. Again. (Rats.)

And a couple that are going on my Gift List:

- The excellent haiku T.
- The Maharam Memory Game is only $36 and will go with the Eames House of Cards you got for that couple last year.

Well kids, let’s just say that I’m glad we’re still in pre-NaBloPoMo state ‘cause I just missed my second day yesterday. Man. As soon as I started this whole pre-November thing I got swamped at work. Of course. Naturally.

To pay you back, check out these two.

First, Ann Taylor put out these totally comfortable, classy short boots to wear with jeans and to work. I love mine and they’ve just been reduced to $89.99. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

Second, speaking of hotness, Newport News has faux fur legwarmers on sale. I prefer to think of them as “boot covers” ‘cause I’m just not-‘80’s like that.