Author Archives: Tamara Dalton

New Year, New Mantras

These are my favorite Christmas gifts this year.  Double great advice for the New Year, wouldn’t you say?  Calm in the face of a storm, and grace under pressure, with my tongue firmly in-cheek.  Just good British design, old and new (and I love all things British).
Here’s to 2011!  Great beginnings and lots of hot [...]

Tree vs. Treadmill

We decided to set up our Christmas tree a couple days before Thanksgiving this year, and our usual conversations about where to put it started.  The few viable spots for a Christmas tree in our house have been reduced over the years with the location of my office in the Living Room, and since having [...]

Wordsmithery and My Love of Metaphor

The time dilation in effect for most of this year is now over.  Time has headed over a cliff and is now falling toward December faster than I can hang on to my safety ropes.
Time dilation allowed me to do all sorts of things this year: gardening, complain about the heat, start a compost bin, [...]

That’s just good humor

“Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.”
So says Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (by the late, brilliantly funny Douglas Adams).
I love science fiction, and well, wickedly funny science fiction is just about my vision of nirvana.  I would like to give you more quotes from this funniest series of stories ever [...]

Happy Halloween

Passing the Test

This week’s Blog Off topic is “Is there a reason to be optimistic?”  My take on this is highly personal, as usual.  Be sure to visit the other blog participant’s posts.  You can find a list of them here: www.letsblogoff.com
Something wonderful happened to me recently.  After a long, downtrodden, worrisome year full of angst, [...]

Designers Hate Shopping

Shocking, isn’t it?  Yes, I know, it is a generalization.  There are plenty of designers out there that love shopping, especially with their Jackie O sunglasses, cream linen suits, and their little dogs in tow.  I’m just not one of them.  Strange as it may seem, since sourcing out product is an integral part of [...]

The Grand Daydream

I dream of living in a house on a hill.  A barn, actually.  A repurposed space that was once one thing and is now another.  A place with lovely bones.  A large, loft-like space with high ceilings, rafters, clerestory windows, big sliding doors with heavy, industrial, exposed hardware, and wood floors. 
   Barn Conversion by Shed
   [...]

Don’t be Afraid of Color

In this age of nesting, home as sanctuary, aging in place, and all the other –isms of “staying-putted-ness” people are looking for ways to repurpose their belongings, update their homes without spending gobs of money, and achieve a change of scenery without leaving the scene.  One of the best ways to do this is with [...]

Are College Grads Ready for the Working World?

Blog off! 
What’s that, you say?  Is that some new curse de jour for cranky blog readers and writers to hurl at passersby by?  No friends, it’s a term coined by and an activity engaged in by some of my Twitter friends.  Since entering the strange universe that is Twitter, I have met a slew [...]