Looking back at photos taken years ago, the mind defaults to nostalgia. Times look easier, faces look younger, challenges are just out of frame. There it comes now--the pang of melancholy, that empty aching for time passed. In retrospect, it all manages to come off looking somehow rosier, doesn't it? That must be why we smile when we're posing, so that our future selves will look back and see the evidence of what fun we ...

After almost seven years (seven! years! In December 'twil be!) of writing this blog, past posts have begun to get a tad hazy in memory. For instance, as I drafted today's designer spotlight, a large part of me was certain I've already posted about Sir Olsen in the past. But as a backend search turned up no results, and as a designer's portfolio necessarily evolves and grows over time, I resolved that now was as ...

I don't know about you, but I find that the more clocks there are around, the better. Call it the oppositional by-product of being raised in a house where time is governed not chiefly by the traditional clock, but by an unofficial, self-determined (yet still completely unpredictable) daily rhythm, but I do better when a time-keeping device is in direct sight-line. I am routinely the beneficiary of my bathroom clock, always convincing me to lather ...

"How about this guy?" I asked, holding up a white and grey-speckled stuffed owl. "Oh, I got it when we went to the Harry Potter Museum in London." She sighed, reaching for the squat-headed soft bird. For a stuffed animal, its anatomical accuracy was impressive. Its head rotated 180° via a stick inside it. It also had a button that apparently produced a hooting sound, though the "press here!" sticker had since fallen off, the ...

As if the time of sunset, growing increasingly earlier by the day, and return of The Rains in Seattle weren't indication enough, yesterday, while in the midst of a closet edit, my nose started bleeding. I clutched the blood-soaked tissue to my nostril as I parted the red designer-shoe-sea. Standing in front of the bathroom sink, in that old, familiar, wait-the-clot-out posture I've held so many times before throughout my life, it hit me: winter ...