news from my mantle

The other day I was rearranging things on my mantle. You know how it goes, sometimes you look at something, and what seemed fine for so long all of a sudden just isn't quite right anymore. We put the speaker for my husband's ipod up there recently, so maybe that's what did it...it just disrupted the whole arrangement and made me think that we needed a change. So I took things down, moved them around a bit.

Then, when I found my slippers the other day, I also found this checkered vase. I thought it would be a nice complement to everything else going on around here. At 60% off, it was destined to be mine.

Yesterday my mother in-law was over and I showed her the dried flowers and twigs I bought for it. I hadn't yet taken them out of their plastic wrap. She liked what I chose. I said I liked them, but I hadn't had much time to scout around in case there was something else out there that would look better.

And do you know what she did? She drove over to a florist shop - in the opposite direction of her house - to look around for me before she went home. She said she didn't mind, that it's easier for her to get out of the house than me. When she got home she called and told me she liked what I had better than anything else she had seen. This is a lady whose home was featured on the cover of a decorating magazine. You can bet that I took her word for it, and got those flowers unwrapped pronto!