IT WAS ONE OF THOSE sipping drinks at sunset kind of weekends, the clouds tinged pink at the edges and a hazy light falling on the countryside and hills in the distance, causing P to remark that you could mistake it for Tuscany. I have been melancholic, of course, because I always feel this way when the days get shorter and the leaves begin to fall, but it's also kind of cosy and very romantic, our late nights now spent by the fireplace ...
THIS WEEKEND WE were glued to the news, trying to find more information about the missing van-life blogger Gabby Petito and the generally strange circumstances surrounding the entire case. Coincidentally, we had been talking about the whole #vanlife phenomenon which has swept social media the past few years, because P had been watching videos of tiny homes and the algorithm began throwing converted vans across his path ...
I READ SOMETHING recently that stated that the sales of colour cosmetics dropped 33% in 2020, and that sales of cosmetics overall dropped by 15%. While I did buy a few new eyeshadow palettes during that time despite not having anywhere to go (perhaps it was for the odd Instagram selfie), I did actually reduce spending on these items ...
THE FIRST CHRISTIAN DIOR perfume ad that ever caught our attention was the 2008 Sofia Coppola-directed Miss Dior Cherie television commercial starring model Maryna Linchuk frolicking around Paris, bounding through boulevards, trying on sunglasses, and riding her bike to the strains of Brigitte Bardot’s “Moi, Je Joue”. Coppola has worked for a range of brands including Gap, Marc Jacobs and H&M, brands who were all looking to inject some of Coppola’s visually stunning, sensual style to their products. The director applied many of her signature filmmaking techniques to these commercials, including plenty of pastel colours, hip soundtracks and languid camera movements.
A CLOSE FRIEND recently remarked that she was low on energy, inspiration, everything. I brought it up to P who wondered, Do you think that maybe it's late-stage pandemic? He said that he was reading an article about how when we were in the height of lockdown, we accepted it and could mentally cope, but now that vaccines have been rolled out and it feels like we're nearing the end of lockdown life, we're remembering what life used to be like and it seems so very nearly within reach ...
Throughout the eighties and nineties, even as he helped with the HeartMate and AbioCor, Frazier argued that engineers should shift from pulsatile pump designs to ones based on the more mechanically straightforward principle of “continuous flow”—the strategy that Bivacor later adopted. Some researchers argued that the circulatory system might benefit from the pulse; there’s evidence that blood-vessel walls expand in response to a quickening beat ...
THERE SEEMS TO be a strange matchstick shortage in England, almost as if everyone here has succumbed to a winter of lockdown by lighting fires all day long in our stone cottages, keeping cosy and making the best of it. That is definitely what we are doing, and I couldn't find any boxes of matches anywhere and had to order mine from Lithuania ...
Valentine's weekend was cosy fires and late-night conversations, glasses of wine in fluted glasses; music and films, and chocolate. P made an extra special dinner on Sunday and while other years may have been spent at dinner reservations at fancy restaurants, and despite the lockdown conditions, it didn't feel like anything was missing.
IT'S A RARE WINTER wonderland here in the English countryside, so Aaron and Lauren Paul's snowy 5-bedroom cabin getaway in Idaho seemed appropriate. The Idaho-raised actor's recently-built home was featured in the March issue of Architectural Digest. Located on a 5-acre lot, the Pauls' rustic-chic getaway is filled with reclaimed barnwood and Montana moss rock ...
AT THIS MOMENT, Mark, our internet service provider engineer, is upstairs installing our new service, replacing Alexa and a year and a half of a very slow and spotty connection once and for all, we hope. We are meeting this new year head-on and have decided to be a little more proactive with things, and so far it seems to be working. This week's links are late, late because have been wrapped in mundane administrative tasks that have piled up until they were no longer avoidable ...