Saymama's Favorite Things - The July/August Edition

Tae Dress [pronounced Ta-yay with an apostrophe on the 'e']- One of my favorite recent purchases from one of many budding Nigerian designers using the very popular Ankara fabric. The label Tae, is run by Bisola Edun and I got this from a new collection show she had a couple months back at Terraculture. It's a perfect dress-up or down dress, with flats or heels, out with the girls or off to dinner with tha' man. And sorry I must say, very unabashedly, that it looked gorgeous on me:--). I love the ruffle detailing at the bodice. Check out the website here for more info and gorgeous numbers.

Cool Restaurants Istanbul - I discovered this book while sipping capuccino's at Salamader Cafe in Abuja a few weeks back. There's an entire collection of books in these series for different cities around the world. It feeds into my cafe and restaurant design obsession right now and gives quite a lot of ideas in terms of themes and the like. I'm on a mission to own all 15 in the collection. So far I have 2: Istanbul and Capetown. They make great coffee table reads too.

The Chloe Cyndi Tote - love it, must covet it and it's only $2,000. *Smirk*. Nuff Said. Here.

Love Quotes Scarves - These are sooo gorgeous. Must get these in every color. And regardless of the weather or country, a nice pashmina throw classes up any look - whether you're going for jeans casual chic, or a knee length tunic or if like me you're at work and your neck is always cold. These are particularly lovely. Plus they make great gift ideas for that special chica-sister-lover-friend. It's all in the wrapping :-)

The New Mack Book. I salivate. Not only is the packaging it comes in beyond sexy, it also lists what comes in the box upon delivery (or purchase): a display cleaning cloth to boot! Imagine, isn't this accessory obvious? But as all notebook lovers know, this never comes with a computer. And to be totally frivolous, the packaging alone just makes me...happy. Now to the computer itself. I currently use (and am about to dump) a Sony Viao. A pretty computer, but has been a most heart-breaking experience to put it mildly. Within the first 6 months of ownership, it crashed on me twice. I lost all important documents and unfortunately for me I hadn't backed up. Their customer service is awful, I got transfered to India and conversed with a totally clueless and barely intelligible unhelpful rep. Aside from that my Viao overheats because apparently, the Intel processor used for my laptop is of the cheap Chinese kind (Celeron). I've heard that some from this model had been known to catch fire. Go figure. The battery life sucks beyond measure. My Viao (from which I type)'s battery life after less than 2 years old is less than 20 minutes from full life. My friend's Macbook is 'over' 2 years old and the battery life on his still exceeds 3 hours!! Then lets not go into all the virus attacks and issues I have had nearly from day one. And lastly, for this entry, but certainly not the least, it took Sony almost 2 months to get the bloody thing to me from the day I placed my order. Macbooks ship in 24 hours. Of this alone I am ecsatic. I have, my whole computer literate-adult life, shied away from Macs, because I thought they were so cumbersome to use and incompatible with everything. In addition, I didn't like their previous keyboard arrangement and that just turned me off. They've since changed all that and Saymama's loving the prospect of a future of virus-slow processing-overheating-free life. They come in 2 colors: black and white. I'm loving the white. So off I go to the nearest Apple store..through the Atlantic, across the Sahara, over the hills and whatever else it would take to get me there. Steve Jobs, you rock.