I am a mess.

I love to cook, and get the whole house messy when I do it. My favorite part of cooking is combining stuff, mixing it all up. Watching it all mush together and putting some muscle into stirring are so satisfying. I've taken to wearing an apron lately because otherwise I would have to do the dishes AND the laundry.

I had friends over this week to make the wedding truffles for some neighbors and churchy folks, and Hilary brought the stuff to make Peppermint Bark. This is one of those most excellent of recipes in which there is only nuking and mixing (One package candy canes, one package white chocolate bark. Plus you get to hit the canes with a hammer, which is always fun.

The truffles turned out nicely and I made one batch with mint Oreos, then drizzled them with a little of the white bark and dipped them in some green sugar I had lying around. Yum!

Anyway, making those recipes, having nothing to post about and talking to my print-making friend got me thinking about inspiration.

The best stuff I come up with usually comes from something I've had nearby for a while. My dream house is full of repurposed stuff, not because it's envirocool but because it turns me on. I get excited seeing a night stand made from a fire hydrant, or what have you. Incidentally, this summer's discovery that those suckers are way too heavy was seriously depressing to me. I know where to buy old ones by the pound but who can lift them, let alone add trusses to her home in order to put one next to the guest bed?

Anyway, there is something about having an eclectic melange of junk in your daily environment. I need it. It would be nice if some small corner of my home might fit in one of those Simple Living on $7,000,000,000 a Year magazines, but that is unlikely to happen outside of the desperate make-over edition. We aren't cluttered, exactly, but we have a hard time containing our verve, so to speak. Take, for example, the Christmas wrapping area:





















Tobias clearly benefits from this hippified atmosphere. Look what he did with his fridge letters, and he's not even 11 months old:















Here's some stuff sitting at the bottom of our stairs:








At first glance, you might say, "Why Miriam! What has happened to your housekeeping skill? Your spartan, monk-like approach to the things of this world?" To which I would of course reply, "I'm sorry- you must have the wrong house. Have a truffle." And then I'd go outside to spray paint something and plant some herbs while worrying about how much I'm not practicing the viola. You could go home and read all about it on my blog later.