Tweezerman

The Arrivals

Kiwi Co

Jeni's Ice Creams

Magic Spoon

Purple Carrot

Muji

Cozy Earth

Dyson

Hero

Purple carrot has been my favorite meal kit delivery service.  The veggies are fresh and well-packaged. The recipes are inventive and delicious and most come together quickly. Because they are vegan, every once in a while there will be a recipe that tries too hard to be something that it is not. It will call for multiple steps to produce something a little disappointing.  You can usually tell ahead of time and I chose the recipes that just let the vegetables be themselves.  Like no to the  Peking Duq using Garbanzo beans and a turnip.  I'm up for the challenge and I like to cook, but sometimes they got a little science experiment and a bit too elaborate.  This was totally avoidable by curating which dishes I was getting ahead of time. (But TBH the "crab" (no crab) cakes made with hearts of palm were a huge surprise. Great. I now make those on my own.)   I ordered meals for 2 and found that it was plenty of food and there would even be leftovers for lunch the next day.  I did every week for about 6 mos and it was all great.  Now I order a about once a month to boost the diversity of my veggie habits. I recommend this for vegan and non-vegans. It is easy to add a protein if that's a thing for you but even if you don't you really won't miss it. It will boaden your plant-based horizons no matter where you fall on the omnivore to vegan spectrum. 

I ordered this as a gift for a friend who has twin boys.  1. If you do this, you will have to tell the recipient about the gift yourself.  Kiwi Co. will get the goods out but they don't have a good structure or process for gifting. A couple of months of mystery boxes arrived.  2. The boys absolutely loved it.  Raves from the kids and the parents.  It was a gift so of course the parents are going to say nice things once they knew who to say those things to, but kids that age (3's) not yet fully trained in social graces and the kids were even more enthusiastic than the parents.  If you have kids in your life, do it.  They grow up SO FAST. You will relish everything that takes you out of your routine and gives you experiences together when the TV is off and the phones are too. 

I love love love this brand.  The clean, modern lines give the outerwear real versatility.  The style is foundation. You can build a solid winter wardrobe on the back of a few key pieces.  The function is unrivaled.  I have a double layer coat that is my goto when the temp drops below freezing.  It makes me absolutely fearless about the weather it is so warm.  There is a Norwegian saying: there is no such thing as bad weather, there are only bad clothes.  These are the puffer pants you are looking for, so great. I live in them. I have about 6 items and winter would be dreadful without them.  Strooong Buy.

I love to vacuum.  There are few sounds as satisfying as the click clack sound of debris you could not even see getting sucked up by the vacuum. I love the futuristic look of these vacuums.  I love the thoughtful details like the color coded parts: moveable parts one color, levers and buttons another, parts you can clean or replace another. It seems so well-thought out.  And yet....there are some major annoyances.  1. Expensive.  This would not be such a big deal if they were more durable. They are not. 2. Not durable. The shell plastic is brittle.  Four (4!) prior Dyson I have owned have succumb to the same fate: Broken body plastic. 3. Not actually that well-thought out.  For the purpose of creating suction: 7/10. For daily uses as a tool for cleaning your home 4/10. The stick vacuum has no position of stable equilibrium other than in its wall-mounted charging bracket.  Do not put it down, rest it, or try to lean it anywhere. It will topple, roll, slide, tip, fall and... break. "Oh I'm really careful, especially with an $800 device I uses every day while trying to clean."  No I'm not.  And I shouldn't have to be *that* careful.  3. The Detect is incredible. (major annoyance #3) I think this used to be a standard thing on vacuums back in the day.  At some point it went away.  And now it is back and has a name other than "vacuum light." It really works, but if you are at all OCD, save yourself the psychological frustration of being able to see your dirt better than ever and only ever being able to vacuum up 80% of it. What you do not know, what you cannot see, in this case, will not hurt you.  After you have been over the same patch of floor twenty times before you grabbed a wet rag you will wonder what the vacuum is even for.  4. Which is likely how we ended up with the V15 Submarine Absolute with Detect (i.e. with light).  So the dust is gone, but I can still see the beads and streaks of water. So now I have to grab a dry cloth and what am I even doing on my hands and knees again.  I just spent $1450 (in aggregate) and I still need to wipe the floors. ? Something is wrong with this picture.  And I am fully on board with the idea that I am the problem.  But I can't be the only mildly OCD person who wants to buy an expensive vacuum to address it.  That seems like the Dyson target market right there.  And for us.... for me.. they come up short.  I gifted my two recent Dyson purchases to friends who seemed like they would not obsess about their defects as much as I seemed to.  I still have four other  vacuums (this sounds just as crazy to me as it does to you):  Miele Boost CX1 (love it), Festool CTC SYS (super love), Nilfisk GD5 (get out of my way, I am vacuuming all day), Fein Turbo 1 (meh, now I have a bag of dirt).  Two of these are shop vacs so fine, normal.   The perfect stick vacuum does not exist. Maybe it will be a Dyson when it does, for now, I am putting my mental health in the hands of other vacuums.  Oh PS I have also owned air purifier (skip it) humidifier (very good, plants love) hair dryer (gentle, loud) and hand dryer (in a restaurant, fine, also loud.) 6/10 is my bottom line, an average. 

It started out small.  Lounge pants with pockets.  No big whoop.  Pillowcases. What could go wrong? Duvet.  Uh oh.  Duvet cover.  Sheets.  Towels.  Matress Pad.  Um, I think we have an issue over hear in the finance department. Matress Pad. Pillows. Bath Robe. Hoody.  Sheets again. Pillow cases.... again!  I am powerless and my life has become unmanageable.  Do not buy a single thing unless you have a trust fund or stock options that are not underwater.  Oh ok phew.  I have both.  Cozy Earth is one addiction I'm happy I have.  Literally improves my level of happiness, well-being and sense of self-care every. single. day.  They say you have to love yourself.  They do not tell you how that is done.  All of that will be explained over at cozyearth.com.  

This is the one. If aliens came to earth and said “hey aileron (they would consistently mispronounce my name) what’s some E-arth food thing we should try to really get the E-arth food experience? Pizza. (Good Brooklyn pizza.) Dom. One of those absurd $trawberries from Japan. Fresh Parisian  /kʁwa.sɑ̃/  And Jeni’s Ice Cream. 5 flavors. Because there is a five pint minimum order. Brambleberry Crisp. Gooey Butter Cake. Blackout Chocolate Cake. Brandied Banana Brûlée. Coffee with Cream and Sugar. That would totally suffice. That would also be my ask for my last meal if I was ever convicted of a capital crime that I did not commit. Or stranded on a ‘dessert-ed’ island with nothing else but reliable refrigeration and a volleyball. The creamy density is off the charts. They seem to be aggressively working to keep air out of the mix when others put it in.  Each flavor combination exists in a perfectly harmonious balance which is not cloying not too sweet when it seems on paper like it will be a sugar bomb. (It absolutely is a sugar bomb, but deceptively concealed within a careful architecture of complementary flavors. Yes, flavor architecture. It’s not magic. It is complicated science. Refrigerator. Perfect ice cream. Order. Eat. Share. (Share! Do. not. eat. Five. Pints. By yourself in one day. You will regret that. Trust.) The memory of it will be incandescent. 

I love cereal. I really wanted to love this brand. The concept is sharp and compelling. High marks for the packaging which is almost good enough to leave out in plain sight.  In a kitchen with open shelves, I would style a breakfast station with three boxes of Magic Spoon, a stack of simple ceramic bowls, spoons upright jutting out of small wooden box or a pitcher, banana bunch on a banana hook.  The aesthetics dialed in just so to pinch the nostalgia nerve in the spine of a modernist minimal kitchen mise en scene.  Wow. Super specific.  So 3 stars?  The cereals are not delicious. I wouldn’t expect a perfect replica of some other cereal. I would however expect a reasonable simulacrum, which stood above its familiar compare mates due to superior ingredients, elevated process, and bougie AF packaging.  Unfortunately for the breakfast station fever dream of my imaginings, magicspoon cereal‘s are decidedly inferior in both taste, texture and milk saturation moment so as to disappoint on the way to the bank to deposit that experience check. Not good enough; not worth it.  And I would definitely buy again… to style a photo shoot or installed work.  I might replace the contents with Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms.  I have no shame.

What Muji is and what Muji stands for seems so obvious and essential that I imagine it simply always existing like the elements: air, fire, water, earth…Japanese minimal home goods.  In the pantheon of stuff, Muji stuff is the flat-design icon set for all the other stuff. In the impossible task of organizing everything Muji is your bossy ally telling you that there is a better way which you stubbornly resist because you are totally wedded to your own idiosyncrasies.  Stop it.  Put that sack of hammers down. Buy the Muji stuff. Take it home. Use it as intended or use it for some other purpose. That purpose will be hoisted above the heads of the other purposes to crowd surf their silly fanboy ardor for your purpose. The best of the goods: men’s blazer, a lightweight, stretchy, single-breasted sweatshirt comfy enough to sleep in around the house and sharp enough to sleep in at the office. Aluminum boxes, all right angles and a soft-touch skin pressed from fog that has billowed among successful tech ventures. Wooden trays, buy them so your other belongings can be stars of long running shows on tiny stages of refined wood and perfect proportion. No item should ever sit on any other surface without the benefit of an elegant intermediate muji tray.  Walk past the seductive pull of the stationery island. You write things down with such increasing infrequency. And using metric sizes of paper is, today, practically a political speech act. Is that your hill to climb? The impulse-buy foods are also missable. Unless you like your marshmallows to have the wrong texture, let them stay at muji. The bedding does not fit your bed unless you ordered it from a dotjaypee. Who knows maybe you did. Respect. The borosilicate teapots are the perfect (only?) vessel to showcase a Japanese “performance tea” which, as you know, is like a chrysanthemum lava lamp you can drink. In closing, a mephor of summation: Muji is a relevant and constructive comment without any errors of spelling, grammar or fact left by a responsible and respectful person on the internet with both insight and good intentions. 

When this thing worked it was really helpful, but now it is broken it is a nightmare.  The monthly expense is seemingly unstoppable. The device says log in to the app.  Can’t login because the device is disconnected. Can’t connect without logging in.  You get the drift.  It is as if Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller collaborated on a medical device. If this is a need you think you have, look at other options first.  (PS. Takes up a lot of space. It is a hexagon with a cord sticking straight out the back. So the depth stated plus 2” if this is an issue. Tuck in a corner.)

These are the only tweezers that really work.  They are expensive. Don’t drop them. Don’t lose them. If damaged you can get them sharpened like a good kitchen knife. Don’t try this with lesser tweezers.

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