Pink with black or grey.

Photo: Debi Treloar

I love this image by photographer Debi Treloar--especially the way the light reflects off the glass. Light reflecting on glass gives a room (and a photo) energy. I'd like to have this blown up huge and hang it above my sofa.

Photo: Debbie Treloar

But I also love this image--it's so bright and peaceful. There's no shortage of chairs around my house, but I'm still looking for something to go around the dining room table. I want something comfy and upholstered so the space feels more like a sitting room since there's not alot of fine dining going on at my house.

Elle Decor. I subscribe for the articles. Really.

Photo: Simon Upton for Elle Decor

With online magazines like Lonny offering so much free decorating porn, my expectations of traditional print publications are changing. I still want the tactile experience of curling up on the sofa with paper pages, but I want to be awed. That's why it was great to see Elle Decor deliver such an inspirational, focused issue this month.

The issue was both world-class and a truly fresh take, just as the cover promised, filled with amazing international design. The featured homes were all very aspirational-- most of us don't live like this--yet there was so much that could be interpreted in our own homes. And there were pages and pages of it--truly immersive, just like the online pubs.

Sid Bergamin's Trancosa, Brazil, vacation home, shown on the cover, was stunning--casual and relaxed. It felt very ethnic with all it's Suzani-draped chairs, and yet with its navy and white stripes, somewhat American and preppy. I love how he pulled two Barcelona stools up to the sofa without using the chairs. I dream of vacationing here.

Photo: Simon Upton for Elle Decor via My Favorite and My Best

This room in Nabil Nahas' apartment in Beirut was beautiful. I love the contrast between the ornate Syrian mirror and chest and the more modest crocheted bedcovering. The expanse of white kept the room from being too overwhelming, while the texture of the spread tied it all together.

Photo: Simon Upton for Elle Decor

Antonello Radi's 16th century palazzo in Umbria was a bit harder to relate to, but I did like this room with its Chesterfield sofa and mix of fur and ethnic pillows. I'm sure they were all "very costly, very important and highly sought after," the owner's own words to describe not these but some Umbrian pieces in another room. No dreams of vacationing here. In fact, I feel like I need a shower.

What did you think of Elle Decor's April issue? Are there any other print shelter pubs you're loving or hating this month? What do you think print pubs need to do to retain an audience and set themselves apart from online pubs?

What would Karen Walker do?

Decorate by Holly Becker of Decor8 with publishing veteran Joanna Copestick, author of The Family Home, among many other titles. Photography is by another veteran, Debi Treloar, who shot the images for some of stylist Emily Chalmers' books. Available to pre-order on Amazon for only $20.11. I can hardly wait to curl up with this on my sofa and get inspired.

Undecorate by Christiane Lemieux, founder and creative director of DwellStudio, with Rumaan Alam, already in bookstores and available on Amazon as well. It's definitely on my wish list.

Decorate. Undecorate. This is where Karen Walker would say, "You say tomato. I say vodka," then buy them both and drink herself into a stupor. I tend to agree. The sheer volume of great new decorating books and the resultant design ADD is enough to drive anyone to drink.

What's on your reading list?

Kathy Griffin and a consolation prize

Since Manuel Canovas and I are clearly not destined to be together any time soon, I bought four yards of this vintage seventies upholstery fabric from Thoroughbred Threads on Etsy as a consolation prize. I know it's crazy, but I can't decide if is it's crazy-genius or crazy-weird-and-sad- like-Kathy-Griffin.

So, my question is, if this were your living room...

Would you use this fabric to reupholster this chair? With black piping?

Or perhaps make seat cushions for a couple of these chairs?

Your thoughts, please!

I'm in love and I want the whole world to know.

It's true what they say-- that when you aren't looking for love, it finds you. And my friends, I am in love. That's right. I've been turned upside down, knocked off my feet and spanked on the ass by love-sweet-love.

The object of my affections? Manuel Canovas' Misia in multicolore, a fabric so breathtakingly beautiful that I want to mate it with a side chair in my living room and spawn more throw pillows than Nadya Suleman has children that she has to make fetish porn to feed.

But alas, it is an unrequited love. At $400 a yard, it does not love me back. And even if I had $1,600 to buy the four yards necessary for chair-mating purposes, and I assure you, I do not, I don't think I could go through with it. Not while Nadya Suleman's children are going hungry, anyway. As my cousin Mikey would say, "Jesus would slap the shit out of me." (But what does he know? He's a 25 year old man named Mikey.)

So for now, I will continue to stalk it. I'll obsessively check eBay for remnants. I'll laciviously peer through cyber-windows at the homes of tasteful rich people who can afford $400 a yard fabric. I'll privately nurse a growing resentment that will grow larger and more unmanageable than Nadya Suleman's breasts did when nursing her octo-brood.

And in my haste to save photos found on other blogs to my secret stash, I will forget to properly credit the images, but I will re-post them anyway.

Because this is a love so big that it cannot be contained.

Not even by Nadya Suleman's uterus.

Brother, can you spare a kidney?

Over the years since college – don’t ask how many – my dear friend Laurel and I lost touch with another dear friend, Robert. It was much more easily done in the days before updating your Facebook status to “changed my underwear” was part of the morning routine. As I remember it, it was a friendship characterized by joy and an obscene amount of laughter and the sense of well being that comes from being exactly who you are and knowing that is exactly why you are so loved. So the loss was felt deeply by both Laurel and me, and we often wondered what had become of our friend.

How we were reacquainted, through the most ridiculous series of coincidences, is a story in itself.

I was in my coworker’s office and happened to glance at his computer when a name jumped out at me from his email inbox – the name of my long-lost college friend. I insisted my coworker email him asking if he knew me. He was reluctant – he barely knew Robert. They had been in a wedding together some 15 years earlier and had only seen each other once since then. It was at a dinner party a few nights earlier, and the host, the friend whose wedding they’d both been in, had sent an email to all his guests apologizing for his drunkenness.

Eventually my insistence overcame my coworker’s reticence and concern that he was abetting a stalker, he emailed the fellow party-goer, who was my missing friend after all, and we were all reunited. And while it wasn’t exactly as though no time had passed, I think we all had the sense that things were the way they were supposed to be – that we had been put in each other’s path for a reason, that our friendship had meant something, would continue to mean something, and that the ever-impetuous universe had seen fit to put things right.

So when Robert went awol just a few months later, I was a little pissed at him.

Robert, who, in childhood, had lost a brother to Wilson disease, a hereditary condition in which copper builds up in your tissue, had been living with the disease himself all those years. We knew this in college – he was on a low copper diet and couldn’t chocolate or nuts or shellfish, along with some other things. But at the time, it seemed like an abstraction to me. I didn’t really get that if the disease was not closely managed, and sometimes even if it was, Robert’s life could be at risk

Long story short, Robert had gone awol because his liver failed, and just like a scene out of Grey’s Anatomy, one arrived via helicopter at the eleventh hour, and was transplanted—presumably between verbal banter and broom closet sex— and Robert was saved.

But while Robert’s liver was born again, his kidneys were passed out in the gutter. Salvation was fleeting and the threat of damnation continued to loom undeservedly large. And, because getting out of the organ line is like getting out of line at the DMV– you have to start all over again at the back– Robert put his name at the bottom of a very long list of potential kidney recipients and started going to dialysis. Four days a week.

Seriously.

Laurel, being both big-hearted and practical, thought this was complete nonsense, and she resolved to do something about it. And that something was to give Robert a kidney.

It seemed fated—that there was so much chance involved in their reconnection—but really, they probably would have reconnected in some more mundane way, like through Facebook, by now anyway. And I know it wasn’t a cavalier decision on Laurel’s part. She weighed the risks vs. rewards. She talked to her doctor, to her husband. But in the end she knew in her heart that it was the choice for her.

A date was set. Friday, January 7th. Laurel flew out to LA for some pre-op bloodwork on Monday and went back home to Las Vegas for a couple of days to wrap up loose ends at work and spend a quiet evening or two at home with her trying-very-hard-not-to-be-freaked-out husband before Friday’s surgery.

Wednesday afternoon the call came. The pre-op bloodwork showed Robert’s antibodies were up. Way up. And because the antibodies couldn’t keep it in their pants, the transplant was postponed, with just two days to go.

Can you imagine the disappointment? For both Robert and Laurel? For the many people who love Robert—his family and friends? And the relief for the many people who love Laurel and don’t know Robert? And for those of us who love them both? Disappointment, relief, guilt at feeling relieved.

So here’s the deal, here’s why I’m so disappointed in the universe right now— Robert needs a kidney and Laurel is actually willing to give him one, and as their friend, I want for them what they want for them. And I’ll just say it— I want it for me, too. So, in the name of Dionne Warwick and all the saints at the Psychic Friends Network, could the stars puhleaze just align on this already?

This story doesn’t have an end. The final chapter of Robert and Laurel and the little kidney that could, if the only the antibodies would, is yet to be written. The next installment is due in five weeks, after Robert undergoes some antibody therapy. Whatever happens, I hope it’s what they’ve imagined for themselves. And what I’ve imagined for them. Because the world could really use a healthy Robert in it. And more Laurels. The world needs them both.

And so do I.

Say goodnight, Bunny.

Bunny came into the picture thirteen or so years ago, shortly after the loss of Big Kitty and Little Kitty, a couple of orangies who spent their whole lives so intertwined that only I could tell them apart by their slight variation in size.

But she wasn't Bunny yet - I'll get to that in a minute. The Humane Society was calling her Midget, an ugly and inappropriate name for what was by all accounts an unusually striking - and averaged sized - cat. Besides, everyone knows they like to be called "little cats."

My sister and niece came over to meet her, as much to let me know they cared about my life as to ensure this kitty would not end up with a name as ridiculous as her predescessors', Big and Little, had been. And Colleen refused to leave until the name was officially bestowed.

Suddenly at a loss for conversation, an event that thirteen years later has yet to re-occur, we sat awkwardly, silently, waiting for inspiration to strike. Emma asked to go home. Bunny, for her part, leapt about the tiny apartment, easily clearing the living room in one or two jumps.

At long last, Colleen broke the silence. "She hops like a Bunny," and we all agreed that she did, indeed. So henceforth she was Bunny. Bunnycat. And sometimes even Bunbun, although she would kill me for admiting that.

And what a Bunnycat she was! She ripped holes in the neighbors' screen doors, let herself in and made herself at home. She had cat parties while I was out - I would come home from work to a living room full of her feline friends. A couple of them crashed at my pad for so long, I eventually let them move in.

Several months ago, Bunny became quite ill. Nothing specific was ever identified - maybe just age. And although she made it through the initial episode, she was never quite the same.

She quit climbing the stairs and took up residence on the sofa. She let the other cats cuddle her. When my sister came to visit, she reluctantly settled in beside her and allowed herself to be petted.

Always a neat cat, Bunny stopped grooming. She lost her appetite and although I coaxed her to eat bits of chicken and cheese, she lost weight, and I began to wonder just how much she was suffering.

Like all pet owners facing a big decision, I wondered what the right thing to do was, when the right time was. And just when I'd decide that the time had come, Bunny, in her contrary way, would do something that surprised me, and my resolve would weaken.

The holidays came and before the tree had been up a day, the scent of Noble Fir was draped in the scent of something else - something rank and earthy. I checked the litter box. Nothing there, so I began to look around. And there it was, behind the tree, evenly spaced between the curtain panels because Bunny was nothing if not detail-oriented. She got that from me.

I think it was more an act of resignation - as if she supposed the tree would do since it was inside anyway - than a commentary on seasonal festivities. But I can't be sure. She was a very opinionated cat.

And as I lay on the floor, wedged underneath the tree, Clorox wipes in hand, dry heaving because I forgot to breathe through my mouth, I realized that no amount of hand wringing was going to restore Bunny's health and quality of life.

So a date was set. An appointment was made. A loss was scheduled for 3:45 pm, Saturday afternoon. I spent the better part of the day petting her and she repaid the kindness by not making too much of a fuss when I put her in the carrier.

In the waiting room, she sat quietly, nuzzling my fingers through the carrier door, until Dr. Nagell and Ninah, the very people who first examined her when I brought her home from the Humane Society, called us in.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. And while there were a few tears on my end, Bunny took it like a champ. Dr. Nagell walked me out to my car, sparing me the indignity of toting the empty carrier, hugs were dispensed, and it was done.

Did I do right by Bunny? Was it the right time? I don't really know. I don't even know that there's an answer to those questions. And you know what? It's okay. Because we had a great run, Bunny and me, a good thirteen years of friendship. And I can't ask for anything more than that.

P.S. Sorry if there's cat pee on your Christmas present. As usual, Bunny had the last word.