10 Things to Do in December

As I look back on 2010, it was filled with all sorts of highs and lows, but it's certainly helped me focus on the important things. Hence, my list of things I want to do in December:

1. Celebrate.
2. Spend some quality time with my sisters and friends.
3. Sing Christmas carols with Pink Martini.
4. Wrap my gifts with Pantone's Color of the Year 2011.
5. Wander aimlessly. With my camera.
6. Shoot for the 102310 Holidays in B&W project.
7. Give more to the Kidney Foundation.
8. Finish Proust's Swann's Way.
9. Look into that ballet class I promised myself when I finished with classes.
10. Gear up for mysterious developments in 2011.

What are you doing this month?

Sensual Living

Another of my favorite home décor books that really isn't even a home décor book is Sensual Living by Claire Lloyd. Much like The Sensual Home, she outlines her own subjective and earthly pleasures with stunning photography and literary references.

These pages, from the Smell chapter, are accompanied by some lines from Proust. In A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, he makes the observation; ‘when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are all dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.’
I have such scent-memories from my own childhood, more enduring than my memories of sights and sounds. What are yours?