love is blonde

Well, I think it’s safe to assume I still have readers! Phew! As of right now, nearly 50 of you commented on my last post, and ALL OF YOU said I simply had to get a new dress.

Admittedly, I kind of thought most of you would side with New Dress but I thought at least one or two might speak up for Old Dress.

I’m happy to report that you can kiss Old Dress goodbye (I might wear in to a different Inaugural event, not Black Tie) because I found myself a new dress at Filene’s Basement tonight. Actually, I found two that I mostly liked, purchased one with a 20% off coupon, put the other one on hold, and tomorrow I’ll go back to buy it with another 20% off coupon. Then this weekend I’ll go dress shopping again (just because I’m not 110% satisfied yet) and then I’ll show you all the dresses, and let you have a say in picking which one. What do you think about that?

It will be like we are ALL going to the Inaugural Ball! Woo Hoo! If they let me bring in my cell phone, I’ll even twitter the event.

All of your comments made me feel really grateful that I get to go and helped me focus on the positive. So, thank you. It’s quite possible that I will be completely sleep deprived for the event and have to do my own leftover hair in a hotel lobby bathroom, but whatever, I WILL HAVE A FLOOR LENGTH GOWN BY GOLLY.

Special shoutouts go to Laurie, who offered me her closet of dresses, and Jen, who offered to LET ME WEAR HER WEDDING JEWELRY SHE HASN’T EVEN WORN YET. Now that is serious love.

My readers are the bomb diggity best. Love y’all.

I got just what the doctor ordred to help me get out of my blogging funk — love in the form of snail mail from two blog friends!

Yesterday I arrived home to a stack of mail, mostly bills and junk mail for the previous owner, plus one terribly cute and thoughtful card from RA congratulating me on my new job. How freaking nice is that? I know!

And then — just when I had totally forgotten about it, I received a package at work today from my fellow blonde blogger pal, heidikins, with my prize for winning her Name That Car contest. Heidi got in a crummy car accident a few months back and we had to say goodbye to her sweet yellow beetle, Miss Daisy. The good news is that Miss Daisy was replaced by her sassy red cousin. The GREAT news is that I helped name her: Red Roxy. And just for that Heidi sent me this splendid Ruthie Pearl bag (with polka dots on the inside, people!) AND (it gets better) a mini-Roxy replica, new car scent deodorizer, and sassy red nail polish.

Thanks, Heidi! I can’t wait to take my new bag to the market on the weekends and watch people swoon.

(You know who else needs a shout out? Kim, who recently sent me a copy of the KT Tunstall CD I was digging. I love my blog friends!)

And now, my lovelies, I need your help.

For the past month, I’ve been documenting my work outfits over at the Mission: Put Together Pool on flickr. Us bloggers banded together to try to look a little nicer and more, well, put together, during the month of May. It was a total success, and a major self esteem booster.

Little did I know when I started playing along that the last day of M:PT would also be my Very. Last. Day. at my job. (I can hardly believe it.) What I want to know is, which outfit should I wear on my very last day?

I want to look fab, because there is a party in my honor that night and more than 30 people have already RSVP’d. I also need to be comfortable, because OMG there will be 30 people staring at my while I probably tear up and/or get blubbery.

I’ve narrowed down the choices. Won’t you please vote below?

Option 1: Cropped black jacket, polka dot tank, black suit pants. But with sassy red shoes, of course.

Option 2: Jackie O style cropped jacket, colorful shirt underneath, black suit pants, colorful shoes

Option 3: Fuschia wrap shirt, charcoal gray pants, funky pink shoes

Option 4: New dark denim jeans (as a pro-jeans statement), never-before-seen new pink elbow length v-neck, sassy shoes

Option 5: Something else. You’ve pretty much seen my whole work wardrobe by now, so choose any combo and tell me in the comments.

Option 6: What?!? None of these outfits include cherry shoes. The cherry shoes trump everything else!

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Update, Friday morning: Want to see what outfit I chose? Just click here. Thanks for all your opinions and comments!

I’ve always said the saddest part about our wedding is that we only got to do it once. As my loyal readers know, I was perhaps a bit insane and loved wedding planning. When word got to the internets that the lovely Jen from Operation Pink Herring was engaged, I was so excited for her. I’m happy to help host today’s Virtual Engagement Party just so that the lie she told to her jeweler doesn’t have to be a lie after all.

(Jen’s not the only girl sporting some new – or new-ish – bling lately either. Congrats to you all!)

In honor of your engagement, Jen, I wanted to pass along some words of wisdom about the time-honored tradition of registering for wedding gifts. But Google found someone else to do the work for me: the nice lady in charge of registries at (say it with your best hoity-toity voice, please) Bergdorf Goodman.

I mean, really, she answered so many questions I was already prepared to answer for you. Such as:

Is it a good idea to bring along my interior decorator to help me register?

“[Your decorator] can be a wonderful guide, but it’s just too soon.”

Gosh, I’m so glad that issue is cleared up! I know you’ve been frantically making Pro and Con lists about whether or not to include your decorator in this fun activity.

Here she answers another very important question: What are some things I should register for?

“A copper double boiler with a porcelain base or a marble-topped cheese board with accompanying knives.”

What great ideas! I really don’t know what I was thinking leaving a marble topped cheese board off of my own registry. Maybe I’ll ask for that for my birthday this year.

Here’s another great question. What’s the new hot item couples are registering for these days?

“Last year, we had some terrific French shovels—literally, for digging a ditch—everybody wanted to register for them.”

Interesting, eh? I wonder if these couples planned on killing each other post-honeymoon and wanted to make sure they had haute couture tools for hiding the bodies? We may never know…

In all seriousness, she does give one lovely piece of advice at the end.

“You can always buy the toaster, but you will never buy that beautiful vase or a set of china that makes your heart sing. It sounds corny, but when you take out those champagne glasses in twenty years and say, ‘We got these for our wedding,’ it’s special.”

For our wedding we received a set of goblets that was different from our nice wine glasses. Every time we share a bottle of champagne we drink from them and remember our wedding. I hope we still do that in twenty years.

In case the advice above wasn’t quite practical enough for you, I offer you my top six favorite registry items that you really, truly cannot live without. (European ditch-digging shovels would have been #7, I swear.)

• Fabulous, white everyday dishes. I’m partial to these.
• Fabulous sterling silver flatware. We absolutely love our set of these.
• A great set of mixing bowls, like these.
• A very handy hand mixer, which I use all. the. time.
• Luxurious and oversized bath towels, like these.
• A KitchenAid mixer, because even when it’s not in use, it serves as a piece of art for your kitchen.

Cheers to a very long and happy life together and may it be filled with lots of love and lots of cats.

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In other news, Julie is making me pay her back for the time she allowed the whole world to laugh at with her for dressing up like a medieval wench for a wedding. (The horrors! I still haven’t completely recovered and I wasn’t even there!). She’s hosting a contest to celebrate her new blog design. We’re all supposed to post entries with thought bubbles and wtf?! statements. Here’s my entry, and all I’m saying is this: Girlfriend, I sent you a Coach purse, so I better win!

I swear I have a whole post (maybe two! do you want to know how I feel about the presidential race?) brewing in my head, but it requires embedding a YouTube video and I spent the whole evening tonight just configuring the blog to even play a video. No time for writing anymore, its 1:00 am!

But hey, now that I can play video, do you want to see a tiny little snippet of my wedding? (Yes, I linked to this once years ago, but now I can embed. Obviously so different, duh!) If you ask really nicely maybe one day I’ll actually post part of the wedding itself and not just the group photo we did afterward. Oh, how I wish I could go back to Cabo…

Edited to add: Okay, I really don’t know what this means, because I am not pregnant and I do not even have a baby registry, but Amazon just sent me this email. Is the universe trying to tell me something?!?! I’m still stuck on the wedding! I’m not ready for a baby!

Click on out of your feed readers and come visit my gorgeous new blog design, courtesy of the nicest, prettiest, smartest ever web design goddess, Jen. Let’s all give her a standing ovation!

So seriously, I love the new site, and it was way overdue. Forgive me if I am a little obsessed with it for awhile. The cherries, I love the cherries! The widgets! The widgets and I are BFFs already.

Some things are still under construction for now, such as all of my permalinks and my blogroll, but I’ll be fixing them over the next week or so. Just have yourself another glass of wine and try again later. And in the meantime, go get yourself a gravatar so that every time you leave a comment your pretty face shows up too.

That’s all for now, I’m off to drool over the CSS code some more.