And before I know it I'm back home and again and I had so much fun over the weekend with the South Jersey Bead Society that I forgot to take a single photo (not even of all the amazing pizza I ate!).

But I did manage to bring home something even more precious to me - a bowl with a house in it.

Well over 25 years ago I was walking down a street in London when I passed a shop that was full of delights, and in the window was a white ceramic bowl with a little house on a hill in the middle of it.
I loved it.

Sadly it was out of my price range, and I was still living with my parents, and so had no use for it, need for it or even a place to put such a thing.

But I swore to myself that when I was an adult, and had my own home, I would buy one, no matter how impractical it was.
I didn't care that it would be too fragile to eat out of, or that even just one would be impossible to stack and so it would always insist on taking up more space than any other bowl.
This little bowl seemed such a peaceful and beautiful thing with its own demands on its owner that I yearned for one.
It also seemed such an adult thing to own. Surely if you owned a beautiful bowl like this you'd be living a very adult, fancy life which had the room, physically & metaphorically, for such a bowl?

Then, 20 years ago when I got a home of my own, I began searching for one to no avail.
Not a year went by that I didn't search at least once for a bowl with a little house sitting in the middle of it but I never found one. Finding this little bowl seemed an impossible task and it became my white whale.

Then, last Thursday, as I visited MOMA and popped into the gift shop for a quick look I spotted a white bowl with a house in it.

It wasn't my bowl, but I knew it was as close as I would ever get to it and I had to buy one.
But then I was stumped, the shop had them in different sizes and different colours.
It had never occurred to me that if I tracked one down there would be options!
It had seemed such an impossible thing to find just one, and now here I was, after 25 years of thinking about this, faced with making a split decision on which one to get.

And then, after 25 years of wanting to own a white ceramic bowl with a little house in it... I went and bought a green one.

I'm sure there's a lot of lessons in there about going for what the heart desires when you see it, the thoughts of something maybe not being as good as the reality so allowing yourself to change your mind etc but I don't care.
I've got my little bowl sitting on the sideboard and it looks very cute and it makes me smile whenever I see it.