Happy weekend!

My dears, what's on tap for you this weekend? Any big plans? We're planning a long bike ride, a trip to the new Houston Trader Joe's, and maybe a movie night (we want to see this). It's lovely to be home.

Some linky goodness for you:


We made these for cocktail hour at our dinner party last weekend. Delicious.

I had new headshots taken this week, and I realized the night before that I had nothing to wear. One quick sweep through Anthropologie and I walked out with this in blue, which turned out to be the perfect thing for the photos. I also couldn't resist taking this beauty home with me. I'm craving new fall clothes with a vengeance!

LOVED this book. Somehow managed to read it in a day. Cried at some point in every chapter. Don't judge.

My life is full.

This is on my to-make list.


Here's Lola being cute, which is apparently her full-time job. My hand is there for scale, obvs.

Hope your weekend is full of date nights, fall foliage, and purry kittens! xoxo LMB

Bossy List remix

My birthday is coming up next week, and as ever I'm taking stock and making plans for the year ahead. I took this opportunity to revisit my somewhat neglected Bossy List, and I'm making a few changes.

Coming off the list:

4. Own a Vespa. Start a scooter gang.
It's not that I don't want to do this. I REALLY do. We know 2 people who were in recent scooter accidents in Houston, though, and general consensus in the Bossy-Melear household seems to be that scooting in this city is just too dangerous. So I'm taking it off the list (and tabling it for when we retire to Italy a few decades from now.)


65. Walk a red carpet.
In April we flew up to New York for one night to see opening night of Evita on Broadway. We were guests of the director, which sounds impossibly glamorous, and honestly, it pretty much was (not least because we randomly got upgraded to the penthouse suite at the Royalton, but I digress). There was a red carpet, and we got to flash our tickets and breeze past the dozens of fans lined up behind a barrier. We didn't walk the red carpet ourselves (because we're not celebrities), but we were red carpet adjacent, standing right next to the photographers and watching honest-to-goodness famous people arriving and posing. And you know what? That's as close as I ever need to get to walking a red carpet. Off the list!


81. Learn to schmooze for real.
While this remains a goal of course, it's one of those hard to quantify items I'll probably never be able to cross off with confidence. Tangible list items only, I think.


85. Ride a mechanical bull.
Off the list. Why? Because I'm over 30, that's why.


97. Eat a meal at the French Laundry.
So many great restaurants in the world, some of them actually in cities where I spend time. I'm making this goal more achievable.



Replaced by:


4. Complete a year-long Happiness Project.

I'm contemplating starting it on my birthday. We shall see....

65. Fly International Business Class. Preferably on an airline with flatbed seats.

That's the dream.

81. Christmas in Vienna

I missed the Christmas markets entirely the year we lived there. No one does Christmas better than Vienna. Let's go back and do it properly!


85. Spend at least 250 days with CM in a calendar year.
At LEAST.


97. Tasting menu with wine pairings somewhere schmancy.
Per Se, perhaps?



How's your list?

Kontakt!

We threw a little dinner party on Sunday night, and I tried out the toasting tradition I stole from my friend. Before dessert we poured prosecco and everyone made a toast. After the first couple toasts, we were getting tired of clinking everyone's glass each time (8 people x 8 toasts = too many glass clinks).

Our German friend Simon told us that where he's from, there's a toasting shortcut! Here's how it works. Instead of touching every other glass with yours, everybody touches their glass to the table edge. We quickly switched to that method. Simon says that in Germany if you forget to touch your glass to the table, someone will invariably yell "KONTAKT!" to remind you.

On Sunday we toasted to friendships new and old, and to second chances, and to the luxury of all being in the same place, if only for the briefest of moments.

What are you toasting to these days?

KONTAKT!

Finding my balance

I can already tell this month at home is going to go by in a flash. I'm keeping very busy. No magazine reading, yoga class attending housewife I, no sir, not this time. I have an honest-to-goodness JOB, as drama coach to the young artists in the HGO Studio. I realized today that I haven't had a job in the city I live in since Tosca at Miller. That was in May 2010!! Crazy.

Being home is great (obvs), and I can already tell the job is going to be satisfying and varied and fun. I can also tell, however, that I'll be forced to confront issues of the elusive “work-life balance” in ways I haven't had to in a long time (and not only because we're now parents of a newborn). Generally the main question of balance I deal with is how to get the right ratio of time spent at home to time spent elsewhere. It's far from simple, but I'm mostly used to it.

This month I have the happy task of figuring out how to get all the restorative nourishment I need from being in my home with my husband, going to work every day, studying for upcoming projects, and still fitting in all that other stuff that keeps me sane: blogging, running, cooking, reading, seeing friends, kitten-nuzzling, etc. There are a finite number of hours in the day.

This is not a revelation for anyone but me, of course. This is how people live. And I am dying (DYING) to live this way myself. I dream and scheme constantly how to live and work in the same place. Now is the time to figure out the day-to-day of how it's done.

So I'm signing off now to go do some more kitten-nuzzling (and husband-cuddling—also very important).

Introducing... the Bossy Kitten!

Yesterday morning we were lazing around in bed chatting and checking our phones when CM said, “You do not want to know what I’m looking at right now.” Obviously I knew it was kittens. I've been campaigning for a kitten for the better part of, oh I don't know, our ENTIRE relationship, and he always has a lot of very practical reasons why it's not a great idea.

I guess he changed his mind.

Friends, I’d like to introduce you to Lola. By the vet’s estimate she’s about 3 or 4 weeks old, and as the runt of her litter she weighs a whopping 10 ounces. A friend of a friend of ours found her and her 5 brothers and sisters under a bush in his backyard Sunday morning. She’s quick to purr and quick to squeak, and she's already figured out how to lap up formula from a dish, though that doesn’t stop her from rooting around trying to find a drink when she’s sleepy. She has already charmed us and everyone who has met her, including our dinner party guests last night (the key to a successful dinner party is obviously a tiny kitten navigating the obstacle course of glasses and dishes on the table at the end of the meal—so entertaining) and every single person we encountered at the vet’s office today.

The Bossy Cat doesn’t know quite what’s happening yet, and we’d like to keep it that way for a while, as she gets used to the smells and sounds of a kitten in the house. We’re trying to pay her lots of attention and give her treats whenever she asks for them, lest there be any doubt that we still love her.

It’s crazy that when we woke up yesterday we didn’t know we were getting a kitten, and now I can’t imagine not having her here. Did you do anything unexpected this weekend?

Photos by CameraMan