A friend of mine is having a dinner party for the last episode of Downton Abbey series two, which airs in America a week from today. Yay! Delightful!

But.

Period costume is strongly encouraged. With only one (busy) week in which to find something, on a miniscule budget, what on earth can I wear?

Congratulations to sonaig, whose first novel The Revenant is for sale in stores and online today! Sonia, you rock!

And even if you're like me and have to wait for it to come in the stupid mail because the only bookstore in a thirty mile radius went out of business, you can enjoy the super-cool book trailer:

Click to view

My roommates and I are having a cocktail party tonight!

I'm so excited. The event was essentially designed as an excuse for me to wear the unbelievably kickass Christmas present I received from my friend Liz, but it's also a sort of belated birthday party for Roommate Christina and a general excuse for getting dressed up and not writing papers ( Read more... )

I am drawing a blank on Recommendations today, so in lieu of that I am going to do this somewhat related meme instead:

Ask me my Top Five (Whatevers). Any top fives. And I will answer them all... eventually... in a new post.

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steve_mollmann's delightful fiance is visiting so he invited several of us out last night for Chinese food and bowling. It was a ( Read more... )

Yesterday was my new roomie Danielle's birthday, so we thought it appropriate to combine a celebration of that event with a yay-the-new-kids-finished-their-first-teaching-week shindig. Not a lot of people were around, because of the holiday weekend, and of course the day we chose to show off our lake house ("Bring your swimsuit!") was the one ( Read more... )

Yesterday I met lunamystic for a tasty lunch in Old Town and we went back to her abode afterward for costume drama goodness. Despite the fact that we both had copies of Under the Greenwood Tree on hand, we ended up watching the first few parts of Bleak House, which she'd never seen. We thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Guppy, who really is the highlight of that film ( Read more... )

This weekend I got a call from my dear old roomie Kate (the one who lives in England near the town of Snape) saying she had come to the states for a wedding and did I want to drive down to meet her at her parents' summer house in Rhode Island one day this week? Naturally, I said YES with great excitement ( Read more... )

So many things to post about and so little time. I ought to be vacuuming right now.

Last Saturday my sis, her kids, saralinda and her baby & I went to a local orchard to pick our own strawberries. It was great fun, with cuteness aplenty. ( Pictures. )

Last night was fun! I've never much cared for the holiday since I got too old to trick-or-treat, because no kids come to our house so the replacement pleasure of becoming candy-giver wasn't an option for me. And also, it's a holiday like New Years where plans seem to fall through more often than they work out. But last night I got to give out ( Read more... )

On Thursday night we had a Girl Movie Party. It was awesome. My sister and I have been longing to introduce North & South to our tea-drinking, costume-drama-loving, Alan-Rickman-worshipping girlfriends, it on Thursday night it happened, at least for sophiaisabella, meganquinlan, and thismightbejess (if sillyg and saralinda could have been there it would have been perfect). It was an evening of ( Read more... )