Black is always my go-to color for evening wear.  After all, it’s simple, it’s chic and everyone looks instantly 10 lbs thinner in a well fitting LBD.  Unbeknown to me, however, black is a no-go at weddings. I once managed to horrify Kai by admitting I routinely wear LBDs to weddings, and this has been a long standing argument between the two of us.  I say every dress is better in black!  She says black is whack.  Ok, maybe not in those exact words, but you get the gist.

Well, after a long, cold, dark winter, I may be coming around to Kai’s point-of-view.  The thought of slapping on another article of black clothing during these last dreary days before spring is leaving me feeling bored to tears.  I am CRAVING cheery, bright colors like never before.

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I love anything pig related.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about pictures of little piglets (extra points for cute-induced snark, like the brilliant/sociopathic soul behind Fuck You, Penguin), beauty breakthroughs (like Evolence, the new pig-derived collagen injectable) or scientific breakthroughs (like cloned pigs).

And who could forget about the most famous piglet ever?

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If  there is one thing I know in life, it’s lip gloss.  Call it a passion, an addiction, an obsession, a problem, but through the years, I’ve slicked my pucker in MAC, Nars, Lancome and beyond. I’m embarrassed to admit this is but a small preview of my collection:

Umm, Kai? Lily? Looking at this picture, I think I may need a color palette intervention soon…

Anyway, while these days I find myself more and more reluctant to drop $20 bucks + on another Sephora-carried label impulse purchase to fuel my gloss complusion, I have always made an exception for lip plumpers.  I have yet to find an affordable brand that can stand up to the bank-breaking gold standard: Lip Fusion.

Well, keep you fingers crossed, gals.  Hopefully that’s about to change!

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Nectar of the Gods

Ladies, I have a confession.  I have a sweet tooth.  I would take the stereotypical route and say that I have a sweet tooth the size of China, but really, I’m not sure that’s an adequate description for the magnitude of my sweet tooth.  If I am to be perfectly honest, my sweet tooth is more like Jupiter.  It hasn’t quite reached critical mass for fusion yet, but it ain’t that far either.  Before moving to New York, I satisfied the monster by baking a lot and having the occasional box of Godiva truffles, but while I still bake, New York has ruined me for lesser chocolate.  There are at least a dozen spectacular chocolate shops around here, and I have made it my mission to find and sample them all.

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In honor of today being National Pig Day (no, I’m not kidding, it really is National Pig Day), I’d like to pay homage to my childhood favorite, the Freddy the Pig book series by Walter R. Brooks.  Brooks, born in Rome, New York, in 1886, wrote the short story “Ed Takes the Pledge,” on which the Mr. Ed TV series was based, but is probably best known for the the 26 books of the Freddy series, which he wrote between 1927 and his death in 1958.

Freddy was one of my favorite parts of childhood — I loved the Oz books, the Chronicles of Narnia, but no one was ever quite like Freddy.  Freddy is a detective, a poet, a newspaper editor – there isn’t a thing to which Freddy won’t turn his hand to help a friend.  He and his friends are charming, full of common sense, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Home is a farm in upstate New York where somehow things always seem to stay busy, but that doesn’t stop Freddy from making voyages to other parts of the world when he needs to.

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