As nightmares go, the NYC bedbug epidemic is top on my list and now that New York Magazine has run this excellent article on the Upper East Side’s secret service exterminators, I love New Jersey suburbs more than ever before. Granted, I’m not so naive to think that we will remain bedbug free, they will come here with all the other migrating families. But for now I am glad to feel safe and unbitten in Montclair.

I have a friend who is so obsessed and fearful of her home in Dobbs Ferry being infested she has laid down some very strict rules that after reading the article now sound like common sense:

She won’t allow anyone who lives in NYC, SF or LA to spend the night at her home. These cities all have bedbug epidemics.

She won’t stay in a hotel in any of these cities.

She won’t ride the subway.

She won’t shop at estate sales, ever. Bedbugs can live in wood. They can burrow into your phone and you have to painstakingly steam clean, chuck or burn everything in order to get rid of them.

“Everything had to go. Margaret recalls a “special company wearing what looked like hazmat suits.” The men removed everything that couldn’t be dry-cleaned—rugs, books, luggage, paintings, shoes, toys, computers, even radios. Only simple, hard-surfaced items, like china and silverware (which even bedbugs can’t burrow into), remained in the apartment.”

Other things you should know but people don’t tell you or talk about:

Bed bugs have an odor (how freaked out are you now!)

Pest Away, a firm mentioned in the peice, receives between 50 and 75 calls about bedbugs from the Upper East Side every week—and that’s just one firm.

Bedbugs tend to bite in threes—either in a line or in a triangle. In the article is says, “In exterminator jargon, this pattern is known as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” They have been known to leave triangular shaped bites on victim’s foreheads.

And now for some service: The number one way to turn a problem into an infestation:

If you have them in your mattress get rid of your mattress. Don’t move to the couch. If you move to the couch, they will move to your couch and infest your whole apartment. According to my friend, “they just want to stay with the food source.”

The other day my neighbor told me that she was at the library with her two kids where she was struggling to read to her lovely and patient 3 year old son while trying to control and contain her 15 month old daughter. The librarian looked up from her desk, looked at the baby and said, “You know what she is? She’s a hot mess. You can see it in her eyes.”

And you know what? She is a hot mess—an expression I can’t get enough of. She is this petite, porcelain little thing with dazzling blue eyes and a sly smile that says,  maybe I did and maybe I did!

I would never be described as a hot mess. Now that I think about it,  I’m pretty sure I was a ‘lukewarm sloppy’ at a party I went to Saturday night and then I probably became a ‘drunk mess,’ but I was not a hot mess. I talk way to much to be a hot mess.

But apparently after looking at The Cut’s round up of red carpet looks from The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala last night there are all sorts of ways you can miss the hot mess target. What’s most surprising to me is that all these women have great taste at their disposal and they still can’t hit it, but I guess that’s what makes it all the more delicious.

The eyeshadow just makes her look crazy

The zipper on this jumpsuit has hot mess potential but she is wearing it with as much sex appeal as she would wear a velor sweatsuit.

I'm sure she is a hot mess but there's something about the lighting in this picture that makes her look like more like a scary mess.

Even though spring break is on the calendar for months ahead of time when the actual week comes it always feels like it sneaks up on us and we are surfing the web to find activities and friends who will be around while we are around to make the week off feel special. Our plan was going well…

Monday David and I took the boys to the Intrepid. We parked the car in Weehawken and rode the ferry over. It was fun even though the guard at the submarine told Dashiell he couldn’t go down below because he was too short, which resulted in a lot, and I mean a lot of tears and was very mean to do a little boy. David reported him to a manager and the Intrepid staff did was tell us that particular guard was a temp. Hopefully the incident will tarnish Dashiell’s infatuation with the military.

That evening David and I went to see the Flaming Lips at the Welmont. I was feeling very much 40-years-old before the concert, wondering how long the warm up band would play and how late we’d get home. I didn’t want to have a drink because I was afraid I’d fall asleep. David suggested we ride our bikes to the show and it turned the whole night around. We parked our bikes in front of the theater feeling very Earth Day friendly, saved on parking and looked rosy cheeked and awake. We overheard a guy scalping tickets say to the owner of a bodega on Bloomfield Ave, “Sold out show tonight, but its a real nerdy weird crowd.” We couldn’t disagree; I was wearing a bike helmet and a girl walked by us wearing a pink tutu. The show was an amazing strobe light, beach ball and streamers spectacle with negative-like images of a naked woman dancing on a video screen with a tattoo or jeweled necklace with the word “BROKEN” scrawled across her chest. There’s something about standing next to your husband of twelve years singing Vaseline that can rehab a marriage that feels distracted and just plain pooped out. But what really got me was when Wayne said, “You know I see a lot of people thinking about how their lives should be and they think and think but all your life is who you kiss and touch and what you taste and what you do.” By the finale of Do You Realize, I was crying. I felt like maybe I’m the only one crying because I’m old, until I saw a younger woman in front of me wiping away tears too. We rode our bikes home and did a few extra loops around the block because we had an extra 15 minutes. It was a breezy night and flower petals were swirling in the street.

Tuesday: My mom called just as we were about to take boys to Applegates for ice cream after dinner. My dad had heart attack and was in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital. (more…)

To report on the Do it Yourself! Natural Beauty that’s running in the May issue of Self, I had the pleasure of roadtesting about 36 homemade beauty recipes.

But it wasn’t just  baking soda face masks that were tested—I tested some friendships  too. I asked five friends to try out the recipes and they all took on the assignment with enthusiasm until one night when I got an email from a friend with the subject:  URGENT BANANA MASK EMERGENCY. I hadn’t even tried the hair recipe yet and I could only imagine her bald in her bathroom with a banana in her hand. She had slathered on the mask but then lost track of the time and left it on her hair for an hour. The mask also called for yogurt, honey, egg and lemon, she basically baked a loaf of banana bread on her head. I tried to talk her down with compassionate emails and suggested an apple rinse to dissolve the chunky mess stuck in her hair, but it was too late. She had Chiquita dreadlocks and she was not happy. Six shampoos and I don’t even know how much conditioner later she got it all out. On the bright side, her hair did have a lot of extra body. The takeaway: always whip bananas and even though these recipes seem homespun the directions are precise for a reason.

Naoko Yamazaki

The Cut reported that four female astronauts traveled into space on Monday with the space shuttle Discovery. Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki mentioned that the women all bring makeup on their voyages, because they want to look good when they communicate on television, which is fairly often. Eye shadow is allowed, while loose powder is not. Apparently Nasa has a list of makeup that is a approved for space travel and it’s a list I’d love to get my hands on. It also got me thinking about what a lost marketing opportunity this space mission was for beauty companies. If I were I were a beauty company I would be showering these astronauts with my top line long-lasting mascaras and super moisturizing products.

I know there’s a feminism issue here too. Bellasugar first reported that Yamazaki made news when she mentioned what makeup she was bringing, and felt the press was putting too much emphasis on her choice of concealer and not her credentials but the article they cited spent at least four paragraphs explaining her mission and why she is so well suited for the job. The makeup is not the focus, it’s more of an interesting aside that came from the astronaut herself. Frankly, when you become an astronaut I think even having to talk about feminism seems beside the point too.

So back to the makeup, beyond La Mer which was actually developed by a engineer at Nasa accidentally, at least that’s the legend, I really want to know what products they would bring to a six-month indoor mission with zero-gravity. And my other question: is living in zero gravity good for your skin? Is it like a six-month face lift where your skin is allowed to float weightless so it won’t develop any wrinkles during that time? This story feels very much under reported, I’m ready to investigate.

I took this photo of the dogs the other day and it immediately reminded me of one of my favorite David Hockney paintings, Mr. and Mrs Clark and Percy. Hockney painted the designer Ossie Clark with his wife, Celia Birtwell, she’s pregnant and wearing one of his dresses. Ossie Clark was a seminal fashion designer in the 60s and 70s, Yves St. Laurent was inspired by Clark, not the other way around and he’s talked about when people talk about the retro designs of Mary Quant and Biba. What I like is that the painting is filled with light, just like the photograph of the dogs–and I’m well aware that the similarities stop there. But to my credit when I showed Conrad the two images he burst out laughing and said, “Chewie is the one with the cat on his lap.”

Apparently, the painting is loaded with symbolism, the lilies next to Celia represent purity and her pregnancy while the cat on Ossie’s lap is a symbol of infidelity. Their marriage was rocky, Clark was bisexual and unfaithful and they eventually divorced in 1974. Oh and the cat’s actual name is not Percy, its Blanche, but Hockney though Percy sounded better in the title.

Maybe it’s winter. Maybe it’s that I spend most of my day alone with dogs and I miss human co-workers, but I’ve been noticing some similarities between my dogs and celebrities.  Maybe you agree?

Since I’ve been blogging for W I’ve been thrown back into the world of high fashion which is really fun, except when you forget how seriously everything is taken (case in point, Armani has been asked to push his couture show back a whoe 90 minutes because Dior requested a time change and he has refused with a strongly worded letter accusing Dior of being insensitive to other people’s time and labor. Really? I mean 90 minutes is how long you can wait for a show to start). Anyway… so while writing about that I also got a huge kick out of  The Cut’s post on The Cat Version of the Sartorialist, an addictive fashion portrait blog. Here’s their post:

Cats are in for spring, so there’s no better time to study the fashions of the most stylish felines walking this earth today in our new favorite thing, the Catorialist blog. Don’t miss “The Catorialist for Purberry’s Art of the Trench.” Or these musings on “A Gentleman’s Style“: “To this day I am impressed with the way he carries himself; he is from an age where cats learned to wear their fur instead of letting their fur wear them.” [Catorialist]

Now if only their were a canine version.

While pointing for W’s Reading List I came across this chic tidbit:

What does Marc Jacobs bring to the beach in St. Barths?

A Birkin, naturally. Via huffpo

Livejournal celebrated Sesame Street’s 40th Birthday with a Muppet doppelganger photo collage. Here are some of my favorite pairings. They are uncanny!