I am trying to find the bright side to packing.  I hate to pack, the only thing I hate more then packing is unpacking. I read once that there’s a Four Season’s in Indonesia that will unpack for you when you arrive.  It has become one of my #1 dream destination spots, solely based on this rumor.  I would love someone to unpack for me. Okay, so there has been one positive and that’s finding all these cute shoes that I forgot I owned.  My closet is pretty organized, everything is color coordinated and shoes are in neat rows, the problem is I have a sliding closet door that has been broken for awhile thus making it impossible to see into one side of my closet. I had to summon Herculean strength to move the door the other day and found quite a few pairs of shoes that I must have bought in an obvious cute shoe buying frenzy.  Shoes that I have never worn and shoes that I hope to wear more often.  I tried wearing a pair the other day when we were going to get bagels & coffee, but my husband refused to get bagels whilst I was wearing ‘that get up’.  Which was actually all casual with a pair of Gucci high heel clog knock-off’s, that may not sound cute, but trust me they were good knock off’s and they were super cute. I think it must be bad enough that his wife will not go outside without 52 coats of mascara on, the high heel clogs must have put him over the edge.  I should really get back to packing, because willing these boxes to fill themselves does not seem to be working.  Eight more days to go, I am freaking out a little  lot.  I am wondering what I have got myself into? What the heck was I thinking when I agreed to move 2500 miles away from home to a place I have spent less than five days in? Oh gosh, I must be crazy….

I thought this little vignette of plates was quite charming.  I don’t think I would ever do anything like this in my own home, but I can appreciate the cheeky nature of it.  My style is more airy and comfort driven (at least I’d like to think so), so walls of mismatched plates would not work for me, but they do work here on this boutique hotel wall. I suppose when I am on the East Coast I will have to go to Miami to get my quirk fix in, there’s nothing like this in NYC that I know of and you’d be able to blow me over with a feather if I saw a hotel like this in NC.  I’ve never been to Miami, unless you count the time I was stuck in the Miami airport for 5 hours, (I don’t).  One of the things I am looking forward to most about this relocation is the ability to easily travel to other states.  I haven’t had the opportunity to see much of the U.S. and I have always wanted to explore more. How about you? Been anywhere amazing in the states? Don’t say California, it’ll make me homesick before I leave and I can’t have that now can I?

Okay, the title should really read, “The Fountain of My Youth”, but that didn’t sound as alluring.  The real fountain of youth is in St. Augustine, Florida, Ponce De Leon discovered it, remember him?  But as usual I digress.  Where I live there are supposedly 23 major fountains and innumerable non-major fountains (meaning in residents homes).  I have always dreamed of having a large Spanish style fountain, with aqua tiles, sparkling water and fuchsia Bougainvillea growing wild around it.  In fact, I always dreamed of a Spanish style house, my very favorite. I love the curved archways, tiled floors or dark, large plank wood floors, beamed ceilings, wrought iron staircases and light–lot’s of light.  I don’t think I will be finding a Spanish style house in North Carolina. I know I will have to forgo the architectural style I covet, but I am already scheming of ways to bring some of my favorite parts of the City of Angels into my new home. I have been researching my ‘zone’ for gardening and have made insane demands on which way this future house is to face in order to get the best light.  I noticed in the area we were looking that the lawns were green and overgrown. I have plans for our future home to grow large walls of shrub so we won’t need a lawn, bring in Bocce ball gravel with a tinkling fountain of course.  This is all just dreaming out loud, the place we end up may not even allow any of this crazy talk, but a girl can dream right?

P.S. We just started watching Arrested Development on Netflix.  I don’t think I have ever continuously laughed out loud at a TV show in my life.  I have a major crush on Jason Bateman now, I am a sucker for gapped teeth. If you need a laugh, I highly recommend it.

Yesterday I made it to the beach, no it was not a pupil free day.  I had a doctor’s appointment in Santa Monica (a mere 15 blocks from the ocean). I knew it would take forever, it always takes forever. I discovered that my self diagnosis of vertigo is not vertigo at all but extremely low blood pressure. That made me chuckle, because I am so stressed out all the time I would think that my blood pressure would be off the charts high. It was so low the nurse took it a few times just to make sure the machine hadn’t malfunctioned and that I wasn’t dead. One of the side effects of low pressure is extreme dizziness and sometimes fainting, how very Victorian of me. They drew a bunch of blood as well, just in case I wasn’t feeling dizzy enough. To make up for my being tortured my husband took me to the beach as planned so I could try to get some ocean diamond photographs for our walls (my favorite, when the sun makes the water sparkle). When I finished processing the first photo above I announced to Ace that I was going to blow that one up, his response? “That one? It’s not even in focus.” Sigh, so much for artistic license.