Mersydotes

Hello, my dear sweet peeps!  If you ever need a bit of a visual break and would like to explore some lovely ideas filled with color, I invite you to come along and check out Mersydotes on Pinterest: There's plenty of DIY and crochet and tasty recipes.  Perfect for a chilly, rainy day, no?  Just click on the new button you can find over to the left- it'll whisk you away to Pinterest land! Lots of love, ~Mersydotes  

Our walls are cream, covered in dozens of layers of families moving in and moving out since the thirties.  Somewhere under all that paint are hand prints and nail holes for long-ago pictures, furniture scrapes and scraps of old-fashioned wallpaper.  Since we moved in, I've been treating the cream walls as my own personal canvas, and Mr. Mersy has been very tolerant. I've been embroidering a series of New York postcards and adding them to the wall as I go.   (The Guggenheim Museum) (Brooklyn Bridge)   (Grand Central Station)   (Picasso's "The Kitchen" at MOMA)   (Chrysler Building Cupola with a bit of silver thread)   (The Guggenheim Rotunda)   (Another Googly-heim Museum view with French-knot leaves)   (The Empire State Building- can you spot the embroidered lines?  They're subtle.) (The Globe at Trump Tower.)   And, just for fun: (Walkin' in the rain...)    (...and soakin' up the sun.)

All is calm and muffled.  This is the great in-breath of the earth before it exhales the warmth of Spring.   Color has fled the landscape, leaving only light and mist.  I can feel the pull as the Sun slowly reels our hemisphere back toward its warmth. I hope these days are treating you well, ~Mersydotes

Thank God for books! 'Nuff said!   Between having to rest recently to heal my creaky bones and setting out on long car trips, I've been extremely grateful for good reads.  Mostly non-fiction, mostly about psychology, spirituality, and food, but also some good, atmospheric adventure stories. But it needn't be a solitary pursuit, all this reading.  Of an evening, Mr. Mersy and I take turns reading  aloud to each other, working our way through mysteries and thrillers.  When we were first married, we read all the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes together, and more recently we've read aloud Dan Brown's Inferno , Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk , and now we're getting tucked into Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian .  I love our evenings spent reading aloud.  While Mr. Mersy reads, I'll knit or crochet, and while I read, he plays with Penny or rests his head on my lap.   And even though I'm not against dog-earing a page here and there, I felt

Imagine Christmas Day, three or four years ago.  Imagine a father and daughter running through the rain toward a ferry boat docked in the Straights of Gibraltar.  Imagine them caught in stormy waters and finally dropped at dusk in a Moroccan harbor filled with puddles and taxis.  Can you smell the spices of the marketplace?  Can you hear the sounds of the umbrella sellers?  Can you taste the salads and breads and couscous and tagines?  Can you sway to the drums and lutes?  It seems just yesterday that Papi Mersy and I set out for Morocco, on a whim, and had the adventure of a lifetime! We caused panic in a tea shop, befriended a sweets seller, escaped a taxi driver, bartered for gold, and ended up onstage with musicians.  Can you imagine a more daring and fascinating Christmas Day?! Ever since then, the smells and tasted of Morocco have fascinated me.  I've wanted to recreate them in my own kitchen.  And this Christmas, Mr. Mersy's wonderful sister and brother-in-law gave us

Hello folks!  It has been brought to my attention that I might be biased when it comes to tallying the votes for this year's Rat Terrier of the Year (see previous post for full details ;) ).  So, just like the United Nations monitors elections in unstable nations, I've decided to turn the vote tallying over to an impartial third party.  The lovely Miss Lexie will be this year's protector of the democratic voting process: She will be overseeing the 2014 contest from her home in North Carolina.  Should there be a tie, Lexie is willing to step up and cast the deciding vote, and should there be any funny business amongst the contestants (Spanky, this means you!!!), she is willing to swiftly and firmly dispense justice. Thank you Lexie!  May the best puppy win! ~Mersydotes