List 43

Love: Old-school animal masks. They were a staple in every store leading up to Halloween when I was a kid, and are part of a wonderful sequence in Breakfast at Tiffany's. The buyer for Oakland's Rockridge Kids seeks out vintage-y things and found some recently. I put them up on the wall of Stella's room - a kid's version of a line of trophy animal heads.

Like: Pink is not my color by a long shot, but I was able to find one pink paint I like when Stella begged for a pink bedroom: Serena & Lily's Punch, which looks a lot like the pink in the Tennenbaum house, as you can see if you compare the mask picture above with Richie's gallery below.

Discovery: The New York Review Children's Collection - a small imprint that reissues classic books that never should have fallen out of print. The books look beautiful (hardcovers with red spines) and the stories are wonderful. Take, for example, the 1940s Jenny Linsky series, about a black cat with a red scarf who lives with her retired Sea Captain master in Greenwich Village and joins The Cat Club, whose members include Mr. President and Concertina.

Obsession: "Yay! Breakfast dinner!" is the marketing spin we put on nights when we get home from work with too little time or energy to cook a proper dinner. But when this means an egg sandwich, there's no shame in the game. Acme bread, a fried egg, some proscuitto, a few shavings of parmesan, arugula and a dollop of pesto and voila.

Complaint: Why have Legos gotten so complicated? You should just start with a box of different sized and colored blocks and build whatever you imagine. I don't mind the character figures, but all these new sets, with their detailed instructions to create a particular model, seem to suck the joy out of it. (Although I will admit that the Architecture series is kind of cool.)