Self Indulgent Inventory

This morning I picked up something and realized it was from Ikea. Then I realized I’ve got a lot of stuff from Ikea. Then I realized I have a lot of stuff from a few places. Then I realized I also have a few things from a lot of places.

A lot of my home furnishings are from Ikea, furniture, pots and pans, cereal bowls, etc. Quite a bit of the remaining, older stuff is from Pier I. But there’s also the framed photos of the sailboat at sundown on the barrier reefs, the two sisters rock formation in the Blue Mountains, the green pond with the little statue Tania showed me at the Melbourne botanical gardens.

There’s the boomerang bought at The Rocks in Sydney, the framed butterfly bought at that cool “natural history shop” in Soho, the port bottle I got in Portugal aging next to the empty bottle of white from the Yarra valley and the bottle of red from St-Emilion. There’s also the 5 photos in one frame showing the 13 month span where I walked in the water on both sides of the Pacific, both sides of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. And then there’s the small “soviet era” frame a friend brought back from a year in St-Petersburgh.

Somewhere at the bottom of a cupboard there’s a messenger bag I used in eastern europe and the one I bought in Madrid to bring back the bottles from Portugal. Next to the door there’s also the umbrella I got in Krakow with Leslie, Courtney and Wayne when it was raining cats and dogs.

A lot (too many) of my clothes are from Gap, more than a few are from Simons. But there’s also the grand prix tshirt I got in Melbourne, the fleece also bought in Soho, the other tshirt with the bull found in Seville with Quincy and the two sisters from DC, the shirt on special at LLBean in Bar Harbour that smelled of the fireplace for a while after, the sandals bought to walk the beaches in Oz. In a drawer somewhere there’s the fake native canadian thunderbird necklace I got in Vancouver, the ring found in Aix with Daria and Swarty and the one purchased with Sandra, Janey and Chris.

The majority of my books come from Indigo, Chapters and Renaud Bray but there’s also the Tipping Point copy I bought and read in St-Kilda at the same time as my first Moleskine and the one for Julie. There’s the Perez-Reverte I found near the hotel below boulevard St-Germain, the copy of Neuromancer I finished at Café Hugo on the corner of place des Vosges, the architecture book I got in Barcelona, the design one I took back from San-Francisco when visiting Anita and Eric, the Pif Gadget in mint condition I dug out in the Marais, the Bouche à bouche I got cheap from a bouquiniste.

There’s a bunch more but that’s enough. Not sure if it’s of any interest, I had fun thinking about that stuff so I wrote it down. Done.