Something a little happier and lighter today. Oh, what it would be to live with such gloriously patterned floors! Alice Bernardo is the proprietress of the very lovely and engaging Portuguese blog: Noussnouss. She is also the brains and brawn behind Saber Fazer, a multidimensional project that seeks to create a narrative for time-honored Portuguese methods of fabrication, on both an artisanal and a semi-industrial scale. She highlights such things as basket making, shoe making, weaving, spinning, needlework, etc. The bicycle baskets are my personal favorites. Alice says she “likes beautiful things and wants to know how stuff is made.” Don’t want to argue with that. These photos are hers.

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In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and last week’s tragic shooting, unsurprisingly, I have found myself online. More than would be considered healthy. Through some weird roundabout search I ended up on a whole host of sites “promoting” (this is a gentle word for the methods they employ) the purchase of long term food survival kits. The kits provide nutritional needs for as short as a few days, or for as long as a year or more. The buyer can choose enough provisions for a single person, and up to a family of 6. The food itself has a guaranteed shelf life of 25 years, but doesn’t come cheap. In addition to meals, there are other dimensions to these sites: there are survival kits that include shelter, water and weaponry. And there are medical supplies and navigation equipment to boot. In a more paranoid and despairing moment, I can easily see how one could succumb to the marketing of such preparedness. And then I consider the lives of those affected by disaster, and how, in hindsight, an investment in one of these packages might not have been such a horrible idea. If you really want to see more, go here, here and here.

Chalkboard paint started it all. I think Martha Stewart popularized it. And then Dana Tanamachi took it to new and exciting heights. I speak of chalkboard lettering. An earlier post about Dana here. The nicely packaged Chalk is available here.

Always a good idea to have some emergency first aid knowledge in one’s back pocket. From, of course, the NYPL archive.