builder's booksource

one of my favorite shops is builder's booksource. i could spend hours in there. and i have.

speaking of green stuff (a few posts back), they have piles and piles of books on building and designing eco-friendly homes. i only wish building or designing a home were something i were concerned with these days. but they have lots of books that have nothing to do with that, and seem to be made for lay people like me just to stare at for hours on end. art books, travel books, gifts, journals, calendars. so, so much. it all makes me want to be an architect.


here are some of my favorites from my most recent visit:
atlas schmatlas

heath ceramics: the complexity of simplicity

moroccan interiors

markets of paris

paris, restaurants and more

builder's booksource
1817 4th st.
berkeley, ca 94710

there's also a location in san francisco.

p.s. i once got an ant farm there. so cool!

a little linkage

if you live in london, or visit, check out violet cakes at the broadway market--taking the city by storm.

i definitely laughed out loud more than once when i read
this column by a striking comedy writer the other day. so funny.

i really liked what april wrote about hippies yesterday--it's so true. i have to stop myself from going to that place a lot. it's just so easy to judge people and be superior about things. ugh. one of my friends this week called me crunchy, and i suppose that compared to some people, i am, but really, i just want to take care of myself, and the earth, and the people i love. and i hope that others do, too.

i have mixed feelings about "going green." i guess it just seems like an oxymoron, buying a whole bunch of new stuff and throwing out all of your old stuff in an effort to be more environmentally friendly. there's "green fashion," which i find to be kind of ridiculous. i mean, if you were truly "green" then wouldn't you spend all of the time, money and energy on something like figuring out how to make ocean water potable or something, instead of clothes made out of haute couture scraps in some industrial factory with slave labor?

there's a new "green gift shop" in the elmwood, and it kind of freaks me out and intrigues me at the same time. it's beautifully curated, and a lot of the merchandise seems to be made out of something else that was at one point trash. it's just that cashing in on "saving the environment" seems so wrong to me (all of these quotation marks are making me think of that "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks).

i started to get the willies a while ago about all of my soaps and lotions and things, and i've been trying to switch over to more natural alternatives as i've been using up the old stuff. i've been having major difficulty letting go of the good old tide with bleach, though, since i manage to get all of my clothes so smelly and dirty at work. but i think i may have found an alternative: vaska. julia, the lady who came up with the formula, does some textile work for us at the restaurant. and, she's been partnering up with abc diaper service for the past year or two to test her detergent. i say, if it gets poop out, it can get my damage out. i bought vaska at monterey market, but you can also get it online.

i kind of also love the way dryer sheets make my clothes smell, but i have made a pact with myself to switch over to nellie's dryer balls when i use up the last of the bounce.

the other thing i use copious amounts of with my laundry is oxi-brite/oxi-clean. it's basically just hydrogen peroxide in powder form, but i am superstitious about it. i feel like everything just gets so much cleaner. and it is definitely a lot gentler than bleach, especially for my precious chef coats.

okay, enough preaching. and don't worry, i'm working my way through my thoughts and photos from sunday--i just want to do it all justice before i really write about it.