Time for a Change

After 8 years, it is time for a change. Traditions is remodeling its interior design showroom. Everything is on sale. We are closed Wednesday and the Remodel Sale starts Thursday, July 9th, 2015 at 10 a.m..

Come as you are

Come as you are, but come early for the best buys. 

There is a way to live a joy-filled and peaceful life, and the key is living not on the expectations of strangers, but on the simple joys of home, family, and friends.

Losing a neighbor and good cook, Tanya Tandoc

“It takes a good heart to make a good cup of soup.” 

Tanya Tandoc

Wichita lost Tanya Tandoc,  unique personality who loved to dance, play the cello, entertain her radio audience, and most of all, loved to cook. She described herself as “the owner and headmistress at Tanya’s Soup Kitchen, 1725 East Douglas, in lovely Wichita, Kansas. My job is to lead our team and create a fun environment to eat great food. I’m also a multimedia artist and a Fat Chance Bellydance Certified Instructor, teaching classes all over the area.” 

Tanya grew up in Newton, but after college moved to San Francisco Bay Area where she worked in radio, returning to Wichita in the mid-90s after getting bitten by the food bug. 

It was the birth of Tanya’s Soup Kitchen, always fresh, seasonably flavored, and original. Tanya's Soup Kitchen was right down the street from us. Tanya's Soup Kitchen was a part of the Douglas Design District, and a great place for a good cup of soup and a sandwich.

Tanya Tandoc will be missed.

[Original image from Tanya's Facebook]

Flight

Once you have felt what it feels to fly,
you will forever look skyward
for there you have been,
and there you will always long to return.
Leonardo Da Vinci

To fly

Wild Side

A fire burns in my soul, it colors my imagination with wild dreams and the hope that somehow life’s moments are meant to be savored like a rare steak on a round table and shared with friends and family.

Van Gogh colors with a modern round dining table

Happiness Therapy

Happiness Therapy in 20 seconds

Question: What to do with the stuff that can’t be controlled, with the junk that is gunking you up? How to get from angry and fed up to peace and happiness? 

Answer: Go to a happy place, remember a happy time, smile and peace and happiness will follow.

Serenity Lake, Anywhere, USA

Or, Listen to Paul Mauriat on Youtube

Wasted Time

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourself to any influence that will bring upon you any noble feeling. — John James Ruskin

The Kansas weather this past week has been overcast. Gloomy weather gives one pause. There is time to enjoy the simple pleasures of life -- to realize that walking the paths of nature with my two dogs is not a wasted moment but a noble task.

The red and gold of autumn

John Ruskin (February 8, 1819 – January 20, 1900) was the leading English art critic of Victorian England, also an art patron, painter, writer, philosopher and philanthropist, and finally social thinker.

In 1884, he gave a series of two lectures to the London Institution entitled, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century, an anecdotal account of the effects of industrialization on weather. In forty years of observation, from 1831 to 1871, Ruskin concluded, storm clouds were gradually gathering and staying over the skies of Europe.

In those old days, when weather was fine, it was luxuriously fine; when it was bad—it was often abominably bad, but it had its fit of temper and was done with it—it didn’t sulk for three months without letting you see the sun,—nor send you one cyclone inside out, every Saturday afternoon, and another outside in, every Monday morning.

In everything that Ruskin did and wrote about, he emphasized the relationship between nature, art, and society. Family remained for him the core unit around which society is developed.

John Ruskin was a contemporary of Scottish-American naturalist and environmentalist, John Muir. Ruskin’s writings and works influenced both William Morris and Gustav Stickley, and the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early twentieth century.

Celebrate Art

“Buy what you love” is a common piece of advice in the art world.

I love Paris even when it rains

One never knows if a budding artist will one day become celebrated - a Van Gogh or Picasso, an Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock. Are you familiar with artists the likes of Diane Arbus and Ida Applebroog, Nuno de Campos and Dan Christensen. They too are well known in the art circles, but they may not yet be household names. And if you are lucky enough to own an image by one of these artists, someday your children may be rich. But for now, enjoy.

Art takes away to new places

Art is perhaps more of a passion than a desire for perfection. We are passionate about the people we know, the places we have been, and the images that excite our minds. So too, the art that we display should reflect those places and images. They recall to mind pleasant reveries.

By celebrating art, we celebrate life.