Oh Decorno, I covet your vacation

Speaking of vacations, the Lady Elaine, who writes the terrifically funny blog Decorno is a week into a three-week trip to Italy. She's filing the occasional dispatch and her offering from this morning sums up everything I love about Italy. Elaine's currently in one of the five villages that make up The Cinque Terre where she's rented an apartment.

I leave for 6 days and you guys let Henry Louis Gates, Jr get arrested at his OWN HOUSE? Seriously, guys. WTF?

Because I am paying like 80 billion euros a minute to be on this computer, I could only skim the details, but jesus h christ.

Anyway - that makes me angry just thinking about it, so I need to move on. Let's talk about me.

I was supposed to go to Lucca today, but the woman who rents her apartment to me, Louisa, shook her head disapprovingly at me and said in mostly Italian with enough hand gestures and serious looks for me to translate exactly what she meant to say, which was approximately, "Oh, but it's molto caldo (so hot!). The Lucca people, they come here now, to the sea. Too hot in Lucca. You go in May." And like the 3 nights before, I humbly ask if I can stay again and she smiles broadly as I produce my euros and she says, "Ah, si, va bene." And that is how Louisa gets me.

Louisa is living high on the hog now. MY HOG, I may add. The day I arrived tough winds blew apart a few of her potted plants. The next day she came to my (her) white-washed apartment and showed me a new cactus she bought to replace one of the old. She was beaming. And then the next night I saw her walking with her old friend, going to dinner. To dinner! With my fat euros in her pocket. And then yesterday she warned me that today she would be gone mezzo giorno and that she was getting her throat checked. After a long mutual mime-attempt at understanding one another, we managed to act out that she has lesions on her throat and would be heading to La Spezia to have it checked out. She would be getting "exams" and doing "exclusions" (ruling things out, I think she meant). Look at her. Flush with American money, she's splurging on exploratory surgery. The nerve.

Every time she comes to see me, she looks out the window with me, at the tower, and the pink and yellow and pastel green buildings with the laundry fluttering underneath windows and she beams, saying to me, "It's special here," like she needs to make sure that I understand just how great it is to be here, in this town, in this house.

I do.

If you've never spent any time soaking up the wit and wisdom of Decorno, waste no more time and head over there. The woman sets the standard.

Vacation time's coming and I need some guest bloggers

I am going on vacation in a couple of weeks. A proper, week-long vacation where I'll be completely unplugged and unreachable by any body's who's not within shouting distance. I cannot wait. In the meantime, I have a weeks' worth of slots open for guest posts. Anybody interested in taking this baby for a test drive?

I'd like for a post to appear every day that I'm gone, but no single guest blogger needs to write any more than he or she wants to. This is all casual and low-key, all I ask is that you stay on topic more or less, steer clear of religion and politics and not be too obvious if you're plugging a commercial interest. Usable, interesting and amusing are the key words here.

If you're interested, drop me a note and let me know which days you're interested in covering. I don't even want to know what you want to write about, just when. The days I'll be gone are from the eighth through the 16th of August. C'mon, you can do this!

Please don't try this at home

So yesterday I went onto Apartment Therapy for the first time in a while. That website drives me crazy with their endless fawning and insipid use of the second person plural when they mean to use the singular. Read a couple of entries on that site and you'll know what I mean. "We think that our bunny rabbit's smart!" "We think that orange throw pillows can be a neutral in the right room!" "We feel guilty for using a Swiffer!" "We paid $125 a piece for embossed photo albums and this weekend we're getting organized!" Argh! Enough already.

Anyhow, just as a blind pig can find an acorn from time to time, sometimes Apartment Therapy can uncover something useful. It's rare, but it does happen. More often than not though, I stumble upon something that reminds me why I don't frequent that site.

Yesterday however, they were fawning over some one's foolish idea and I have to speak on it. To wit:

Another one for the "worth the effort" DIY files... Cathy and her husband wanted a chlorine-free pool big enough for the whole family to splash around in during the hot Santa Rosa summer. Hoping for something more attractive than a big vinyl tub, they finally decided on a galvanized steel stock tank. All it took was some clever DIY plumbing, and for about $500 they were living the good life. Learn how they did it after the jump...

The stock tank pool is eight feet in diameter and about two feet deep. Cathy's husband used plumber's putty and some gaskets to pipe in a pool filter and pump. After using the pool for about a month, so far they haven't had to add any chemicals to keep the water clean. All it takes is some regular swipes with a pool net, and of course regular changing of the filter, which collects algae and other miscellaneous debris. Cathy says the pump keeps the water moving enough to discourage mosquitoes, too.

This is an idea so dangerously naive I have a hard time believing it. I don't doubt that the use of a pool filter is keeping that water clear. But the problem with pools is not the stuff you can see, the actual danger from pools is the stuff you can't see. The very same things that chlorinated water kills.

These people are no doubt motivated by an attempt to keep their kids safe, but what they've done instead is provide them with a steaming bowl of E. coli soup. The contaminated water in that pool represents a far larger threat than the minuscule amount of chlorine used to keep pool water safe. You cannot recirculate water people swim in without sterilizing it. If you have an ill-informed problem with chlorine then for the love of God put in an ozone or UV filter.

That harmless-looking backyard pool is an Amoebiasis, Cryptosporidiosis or Giardiasis outbreak waiting to happen. If not that rogue's gallery of water borne diseases, how about the staphylococcus aureus I can guarantee you is already in that water? People will get sick from swimming in this pool. It's not a matter of maybe either, it's a matter of when.

I'm all for taking a look at the way I live my life and for rooting out things that do more harm than good. However, chlorinated water is not one of them. The safe water supplies those of us in the developed world enjoy and take for granted are one of humanity's crowning achievements. Imagine, I can drink from the tap in my kitchen and not get cholera. That verges on the miraculous frankly.

The headlines were screaming this week about the amazing and unprecedented increase in the number of people in the US and the rest of the developed world who are living past 100. That did not happen because those centenarians swam in unchlorinated pools. In fact, it happened precisely because they swam in chlorinated pools.

Human beings' increased life spans and the fact that we're healthier today than we were a hundred years ago is due to advances in public health. Period. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water, no pun intended. Please do not swim in untreated swimming pools or hot tubs. You will get sick. Chlorine is your friend folks, really.

Damn! Amazon just bought Zappos

I'm going to believe that this is somehow a good thing until I'm proved wrong. I will. Really.

Read about it here.

More modern baths

I'm turning into the busy designer guy all of the sudden. Believe me when I tell you that this is a most welcome development. I don't want to put a hex on anything I have going on now, but I'm coming out of the worst two quarters of my career. Go figure, I did the least amount of business I can remember but the business I did do was the best I've ever produced. There's a lesson there somewhere and some day, not today, I'll go back and figure out what that lesson is.

But in the meantime, I have a lot of work to do. Woo hoo!

I presented another lavatory design as part of a much larger project the other day and I like the direction it's headed in. This is yet another modern design for a small-ish powder room. There's a separate water closet so the primary part of the room is a rectangle that's only three feet wide and six-and-a-half feet deep. Since it's a powder room there's no real need to store anything in there so I want to keep it as open as I can.

Here's the actual lavatory I'm specifying. It's the Block from LaCava. This lavatory will hang on the wall directly with a mirror right above it. I'm looking for an oval mirror about 30" wide and 18" tall. Anybody have a source? I've drawn the shape I want, now I just need to find one.

The wall behind the lavatory will be covered from floor to ceiling with either this glass mosaic,

or this one. Both patterns are from Mirage Glass Tiles in New York.

I know I want a translucent glass tile because I want to make this powder room feel larger than it is. Between the seriously pared down lavatory and the translucent glass on the wall, this room's going to feel like it's ten feet deep instead of six-and-a-half. The floors are going to be wide plank, clear maple. Again, my goal here is to be expansive and light while staying true to a contemporary aesthetic. I say I'm well on my way. Boy oh boy is it good to be busy.