Continuing our Santa Fean exploits, today's post is "Eye Candy by Day" (a follow up to my night-time window eye candy). All these photos were taken on our three day jaunt to Santa Fe to celebrate Silas's birthday. Do you get the feeling Santa Fe is just wrought with deliciousness? It is! And I'm saving the best for last, so rev up those juices!

Enjoy...

So I've had this fantasy for a while, and it has nothing with a chick walking into a bar with a summer sausage and a poodle. Instead, it goes like this: I'm with someone I love and we're strolling through a beautiful village at night. There are lights on in the shop windows, music spilling from the door of a blues bar, a few people ambling arm in arm around the town square. And in this fantasy, I'm taking in all the loveliness of the store displays and...I'm taking photos.

 I've always thought the best way to window shop is at night. You can see what's in the window and actually glimpse into the store in a way daylight does not allow. Everything is illuminated. Shiny things shine brighter, gauzy things look gauzier, green seems greener. Only one problem with making this fantasy a reality: while on vacation I'm often too tired from daytime sight seeing to muster the energy to shop at night. 

 Until now

For Silas's birthday, Mernie agreed to babysit our dogs, house, plants. It's been three entire years since Silas and I were out and about completely alone. (Confession: we weren't entirely alone. I took Houdini with us.) Knowing that Silas appreciates rare and strange beauties as much as I, we decided to head for Santa Fe, a perfect town to make my night shopping fantasy come true. We spent three glorious nights touring the town, taking photos. We paused for French pastries and espresso, but most of our evening hours were consumed with store display eye candy.  

The images were so scrumptious, I thought you might like to enjoy them here:

I'm sitting here at my desk. In front of me, a large picture window revealing the purple petunias, pink roses and orange marigolds growing in the back yard, and the dark mountains squatting at the horizon just beyond my fence. The sky is brilliant blue, while convoys of sticky white clouds parade across its chest. Nice distraction. Cuz I'm sitting here making a gigantuan list of all the items that need to be sorted, boxed, given away or sold on ebay before our Atlanta house can be readied for sale. The list is crazy-ass big, intimidating, so every few minutes I look up to watch the wind kick up a dust storm among the high desert sage. 

And I also see this.

And this.

Photos I keep on my wall to remind me of good times. Aimee is in the second picture, and she created both of these collage pieces after our trip to Victoria Island, Canada. 

Mountains. Flowers. Smiling faces. With friends like these, I might just be able to tackle ebay. 

I've always loved themes of Beauty and the Beast. Above is a sneak peek of a collage I'm working on. Lots more detail and hand-work to come before its finished. It took lots of twists and turns (and has already morphed into something else since this photo was taken) and has taught me much already about staying open. I feel really joyful when I look at it. Must be those radiant colors. I'm such a sucker for red, white and and turquoise.

When I drove up to the Kennesaw house, after traveling cross country for days on end, this is what greeted me. This. Cornucopia. Of a house.

One year ago, w hen I pulled from the driveway headed for ,Taos this is what the house looked like.

It's an old cedar home and the interior has always been cedar-lined, decorated in dark rusts, greens and umbers. In the last days of May 2008, having just completed a huge moving sale, (which included nine hundred and eleven auctions on ebay, which made a small dent in our personal and business inventory) we pulled out of the driveway eager for home. Silas and I had three greeting card lines to conceive, design and deliver and we couldn't wait to get back to the studio. Mernie was staying in Kennesaw, and to relieve her boredom and revive her sense of joy, she started remodeling the house.

It all started with a hail storm. One dark and stormy night, winds blew in from the North, and they blew hard. They huffed and puffed and blew our roof down. Or at least a few shingles. At any rate the roof had to be replaced which got a home repairman out to the house, which got Mernie's jaw to flap open when said repairman pronounced, "You're lucky this house hasn't fallen down around you! Half the wood's rotten!" Over a year later, the siding, decks and roof have been replaced, it's been painted, and half of the interior has been redesigned and updated. On top of it all? The explosion of joy that is the color. Mernie admits to going a little over the top with it all. But there'll be no apologies. Over the top is where she lives. (Can you imagine how popular this has made us with our Pine Tree Country Club neighbors? Oh yeah. It's that good. Think six o'clock news.)

Mernie says "don't look too close! The carpet still needs replacing, wood floors are going down and the painting has not been finished!" So there. 

My personal favorite--the washroom! Finally a cheery place to do laundry! I can't help but feel joyful every time I'm in it.