ANTIQUE OAK PARLOR TABLE

Baxton Studio Simi Modern Glass Bistro Table

When you are trying to achieve a minimal look for your decor or highlight other areas of a space, clear furnishings are ideal to accomplish your goals. The simi modern bistro table works perfectly in a small breakfast nook, art-focused gallery or restaurant space, or anywhere you want your furniture to be stylish but barely there. The table is made with a round clear tempered glass top, clear acrylic lucite center support, and a steel base with chrome finish on top and foam pads on bottom. Assembly is required. Overall dimensions: rd 27-1/2 by 28-1/2 h.

Las Princessas al Palacio do Bussaco, Portugal

As we headed toward Coimbra Carmen said we must visit Bussaco as it was very close. 'What is Bussaco?' I wondered.

Passing small towns, and vineyards we drove up and up into a large remote wooded area. Through the trees I could see ponds and fountains and flower lined paths. Rounding one last curve an opening appears and around the corner a palace! Yes, a fairy tale style palace with formal gardens and ponds with white swans.

Ornate and elaborate, my eyes still popping open, Carmen mentions we can stay here. 'Oh sure pull the other one' I say. She looks confused as she tries to figure out that idiom.

They would not let us explore the interior as it is a hotel for guests only but they do have a restaurant which is open to the public. We lunch there, a typical Portugese 4 course lunch, complete with a small bottle of wine sitting in a floor standing ice bucket next to our table. The interior of the restaurant is just as ornate as the exterior, more so with wood carved ceilings, hand painted murals, and large arching glass doorways.

I am impressed, and the lunch is prix-fixe at 39Euros, which I thought was pretty cheap. I wondered the cost of the rooms. $170 for a suite, which was the same price I paid in Hawaii for a regular hotel room. 'We're staying here' I said to Carmen and now her eyes are popping...

not my words, and I wish I recalled the person that deserves the credit...
...yet they seem like words to describe the first few chapters of my life.


An old photo revisited with photoshop.

Thanks to micky mb for sending me the poem...and interestingly, the very subject I did not recall is so accurate for those first chapters of my life.

Little Things
by Sharon Olds

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.