I was happy to take a much-needed break from New York and spend the past weekend in Oklahoma visiting family. October is a great month for Oklahoma, bringing below-90s temperatures and adorable hay bales everywhere.

The glorious view from my parents’ backyard in Owasso

When we weren’t staring at hay bales, my family and I did a lot of eating last weekend. Tulsa, Oklahoma, has a more cosmopolitan restaurant scene than you might expect. A new addition is Sushi Train, a cute variation on the conveyor belt “kaiten” sushi restaurants in Japan.

Instead of scooting around on a strip of rubber, the sushi at Sushi Train rolls around the bar on a toy train. Mysteriously, the train’s speed seemed to switch back and forth between moderate and superfast every couple of minutes, which added to the adventure of grabbing your sushi as it chugged by.

Speaking of meals on wheels, I also experienced my first-ever drive-thru liquor store in Stillwater, OK. What a thrill.

You roll up, trying not to block traffic if the line extends into the two-lane street…

… check out the inventory from your car window…

… and score your booze without leaving the vehicle! Who needs Burger King when you can have Bud Light, right?

I thought I was in love with the $10,000 bug lamp that I spotted at Moss a few months ago, but I have just found a new black and white impractical piece of furniture to covet.

I require a panda chair.

This limited edition seat was made exclusively for Moss by the Brazilian designers Fernando and Humberto Campana, and it’s so expensive that the price is only available on request. Notice in the photo above that it was placed next to my beloved bug lamp in the store window. It must be a sign.

If pandas aren’t your thing, the Campana brothers have made chairs out of several other cuddly animals.

There’s the teddy bear chair:

The alligator chair:

And the miscellaneous stuffed animal chair:

I’m still partial to sitting on pandas myself. But only if I can have my bug lamp to coordinate.

My friend Makiko Sasanuma, as I mentioned before, is the amazing photographer who took excellent shots of my Woodins for Knitty. Her product photography is obviously fantastic, but her personal work is what really blows me away—she works with light and natural elements to create images that make you look at the world from a completely different perspective.

Makiko shared some images from one of her projects with me today.

The project, “lost in gaze,” is a series of photographs that Makiko took of the space between two frosted glass panels. You can see just the faintest hint of what is on the other side of the glass; it’s this momentary act of seeing that she wanted to capture with these images.

When Makiko exhibited these photographs, she tried to recreate the atmosphere in which they were originally taken by covering the space’s glass windows with scrim and leaving a gap to see through.

I absolutely love the simple (but not simple) beauty and depth of this work. You can see more of Makiko’s photographs at her Flickr page.