This is the kind of day 8GB memory cards were built for. I spent hours and hours prowling around the historic Art Deco district, then a long splashing walk on the beach. Miami is a great city!

Back to Toronto and the realities that await there tomorrow.

Happy New Year, kiddos!

It only took 7 days in Miami to seal the deal on my full blown obsession with Art Deco. I was always a little iffy about it, the colours too pastel, the wood veneers too crummy looking, or something. But I've changed! And now I'm obsessed and have spent most of the evening ferreting out Art Deco poster art on the web prompted by the exhibit I saw at the extraordinarily hype Wolfsonian Museum today.

I think I need a coffee table book on the subject, no?

Contraband museum photo: $0, a worthy souvenir to prompt a new obsession

I didn't buy this . . . but I kinda wanted to. Hilarious and ugly, but oh so sweet in some special way. Love the flamingo especially. Maybe my mom can find me one at a yardsale for $.50.

Souvenir not to be had: $9.95 US

I'm not so big on many of the things that usually go along with Christmas - noise, fuss, commotion, consumerism, parties, crowds, gluttony, secular carols, awful popular theology, seasonal merchandise. I'm a total Grinch.

So this kid was very, very happy to spend the day on a mini-non-Christmas-themed-adventure with her mommy. We slept late, checked out a swank, historic Florida hotel, hit up a weirdo coral castle, a seaside National Park, had cheeseburgers for supper, drank disturbingly cheap beer and went for a late night swim in her outdoor pool. It was great!

In all of this, maybe my favourite thing was seeing palm tree nurseries for the first time. It had never occurred to me that Florida requires cultivated palms to meet their various and sundry landscaping needs. It is so strange . . . are there even any palm trees in Canada?

Today was pretty cool because I saw a Man o' War for the first time in my life. Not too many of these critters kicking around the waters of Lake Ontario or the Bay of Chaleur.

I still went swimming. Three times.

Occasionally the Fatster does some quintessentially cute kitten things. Two years ago we busted her batting around some ribbon and ornaments under the tree. She's still embarrassed by the scene.

My mother had me fix her computer, so I thought a snazzy homemade Christmas themed LOL Fattie would make an excellent new desktop image for her.

Merry Christmas, Momma!

I'm quite enjoying my jaunt to Miami so far. It's a really groovy place. I'm most excited about a whole sunny day of prowling around downtown taking pictures of the historic Art Deco buildings and some time at the beaches. Very delicious.

I'm also using the headspace that being on vacation affords to weigh options for New Year's resolutions. I've settled on a few, and when final I'll announce what I feel like sharing. Overall I sense that 2012 is going to be a year for finishing, wrapping up, simplifying, purging, and making do with what I've got. Taking cues from Emily & Andrea and their pre-move weekly destash resolutions, I may commit to doing one thing a week to simplify my life.

As a bit of a head start, I've done quite a bit of purging & destashing in November-December. I've also shut down my LinkedIn, my Google +, purged almost all blogs from my reader (who needs 74 blogs in their reader that haven't been updated since 2009?), unfollowed a heap of people on Twitter. I've also settled on a plan of attack that will allow for scheduled posting on another blog I author that should streamline things. I'm also considering shutting down my Etsy, my Flickr, and my Twitter, but there's no rush on any of those I suppose. Regardless, it's time to wrap some things up and streamline, eh?

My cute kitten has a special blog post for you tomorrow. Stay tuned.

I'm within arms reach of a glass of extraordinarily cheap, but surprisingly and adequately tasty, white wine. The doors to my momma's balcony are wide open. It's 20 something odd degrees, afterall. And this East Coaster is once again bathed in salt air.

God Bless America. Kinda. Right?

Wine: $7 per gallon
Plane ticket to said wine: somewhat more than $7
Christmas in South Beach: I could do far, far worse

I sure hope people judge me by the company I keep, because my friends are so delightfully weird it's sometimes really hard to believe.

This is Fattie enjoying her new car that Morgain bought for her. Morgain thought it was unfair that I get to go on all these big trips and Fattie's just stuck at home sleeping.

Car: $0, present from Morgain
Morgain: $0, worth her weight in gold

If I was Oprah and had a Favourite Things episode, Terrie Mangat fabric would be maybe 12% of it right now. At least.

My ever-in-progress masterpiece of a quilt features a block built around her teal Our Lady of Guadalupe print, which is totally stunning! Lady is over one foot tall!

Then, in a typical frenzy of 11pm Googling I found (and have since ordered a yard of) THIS: 

Lookit lookt. It is amazing. The print is called "Temple Pieces" and is fabric based on Wat Arun in Bangkok, which is absolutely without a question one of my all-time favourite travel discoveries in my whole life. I was there in July and nearly wept at how wild and wonderful the place is. It's decorated with all the broken China and porcelain used as ballast in ships coming through Bangkok in days of yore. Checkit out: 

I was having one of those mega-crap death days from the 19th circle of hell. You know, the kind that make you want to just give up and go drink . . . on a beach in Thailand . . . forever?

And then I came home to this. Two of my favourite best friends in the world had timed their mail sending love perfectly. All of a sudden my cranky-assed, horrible self was standing on the stairs with a bottle of red in one hand and two packages containing a picture of a beautiful child, handwritten thoughtful & loving notes, and the glorious treat of this tote bag* & chocolate**. I just melted.

For all the jerks and evil in this world, there's gotta be at least the same number of brilliant, courageous, loving women who make it all so worthwhile.

Thank-you Ann & Andrea!

*I almost stole this tote bag from Andrea when I visited a few weeks ago. The fabric possessed me! I drooled and fawned. So the crafty sneaky thing made one for me! I love it so much.

**This lasted 4 minutes.

I was scouring the internet for fun resources to help me & my friends along in our efforts to learn Icelandic and found this amazing video, "How to knit like an Icelandic man." It was so cute and funny. I posted it to my Facebook and my friends just lit up around it. At this time, I had just joined Twitter and thought I'd see if this one Þórgnýr Thoroddsen was part of the Twitterverse and give him a shout out for being so clearly hype.

He was. And this is where it gets weird.

His Twitter profile listed him as "Founder of the Free Stöff Wall, Reykjavík" . . . which is exactly where I got these dishes in August of 2010.

Dishes: $0, courtesy of the Free Stöff Wall

Small world story: $0, courtesy of the internet

I'm having the wanderlusts really bad over here. Well, I always do, but it seems especially spikey these last few weeks. I would love to hop on a plane to Iceland tomorrow, keep on going to Norway, Finland, Russia and perhaps check out this thing they call the Trans-Siberian railway . . . and end it all with a good snack in Ulan Bator.

Photo: Bead store in Tokyo. This is probably one of my top 5 all time favourite bead stores.