586 Piero Fornasetti plates

As my husband got ready to leave the house for exercise class (with 50 women), he had a stack of magazines with him. He gives them to one of the moms of a high school boy who wants to be an architect some day, and it helps clear the clutter from his office. "I haven't seen that November Home yet," I said. "Nothing in it." "Well, even so, I want to look at it."

So I was leafing through it at lunch (I'm still eating Laura Bush's prize winning, election predicting cookies I baked two weeks ago), and on p. 28 I found an article about Piero Fornasetti porcelain dishes, which apparently appeared on NBC's "The Apprentice 2."

We have two Fornasetti plates given to us by Bill and Alice Adelman in 1965 as house warming gifts in Champaign, IL. To tell the truth, I was a bit put off by the odd face of "Julia" the 19th century woman who appears in various states of dress, hair and body parts. We have the one with a clock through her nose, and the one where her face is the moon (or maybe the sun). At 25, I just wasn't too appreciative. Julia's face moved around to various cabinets, and I think once I even put her into a garage sale. She was just too wild for Columbus, Ohio in the 70s. When we moved here, the plates were put in a lighted, glass door cabinet, and now her haunting face looks out at me every day. After 40 years, she's kind of grown on me.