Just so you know, this is a little bit cheesy. But Mouse is in a lovey-dovey mood. So if you're not in this headspace right now, skip this and check out Heart of Light's excellent list. If you want to fantasize about Great Love, continue:

Great Love for West Wing nerds (like Mouse).

Great Love for everybody.

Happy Valentine's Day and weekend, everybody. From Mouse. xo.

(Image from Jolyn27 on Flickr, because Bad Mouse can't be bothered to walk four blocks over and take this photo herself. It's that sort of day.)

Whee! Package in the mail today from Thailand, from Mouse's freshman-year roommate. She had a modern sensibility even at eighteen, when the rest of us were wearing stretchy black pants. She sent me this gorgeous, gigantic scarf, part silk and part cashmere, and it's notable because of the color (which may not come through in the photo). It's exactly the color of scribbling really hard with a good graphite pencil. I'm on cloud nine or ten.

And now, your afternoon giggle: click here. Have fun. xo, Mouse

If Mouse had a lot of money, rather than no money, she would want to fly somewhere green and spend V-day in a tree house. I like the one above, and there are some more over at SeeSaw Designs. But my very favorite one won't let me capture its photo, so you'll have to do the heavy lifting of clicking the link to go see it: it's at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur (click "Room" and then "Tree"). You get to live in a tree house and come down only for things like having a massage or walking around in forests. Lovely, hm?

Image via SeeSaw and over here.

Tee hee hee! Mouse likes this Martha idea: it's like hostess cupcakes with a little note. I could not possibly pull this off due to a combination of ungraceful cursive and frosting retardation, but Country Mouse has lots of frosting practice. Maybe she will make them and send one to me? Hint hint hint?

Oooohhhh. Mouse wants to dress up like this and go to a summer wedding somewhere with waves crashing in the distance. We did that with our arms in yoga this morning, but it looks much more gentle and romantic in a dress, no?

(Lou Doillon photographed by Mark Borthwick for Vanessa Bruno, via Scout Holiday)

So yesterday Boyfriend turned to me with a typically perplexing: "Um. What am I supposed to do for Valentine's Day?"

You have to hand it to him for being direct. He's giving me the opportunity to drop all the hints I want (and this even after we have already bought each other the same thing, a thing for our house, for V-day [which I will show you next week]). On the other hand, on further investigation, it seems he has sort of muddled through his dating life, including several serious relationships, without having engaged with V-day at all. One girl hated it, another girl said it was anti-feminist, another girl didn't really care, somebody else liked to plan it all out for them. And since we were in different cities last V-day, this is our first one together.

Poor Boyfriend has nothing to worry about. Mouse's very very very best Valentine's Day, which was, like, three hundred years ago, involved being hit on repeatedly by creepy a waiter in front of my date and then sitting through a longish film festival in a scratchy vintage lace dress* and tights. And that was the very best one.

So I'm thinking: when I get to wake up and look at Boyfriend, it's already in the bag for the best V-day ever, even if we then watch a bunch of college basketball.** Sorry for the romantics, but 'tis the season.

(Photo from Flickr)

*Karma for wearing pink on V-day. I think there are colors better representative of love. Orange. Cerulean. Etc.

**The basketball counts as part of my gift to him, right?

P.S. Boyfriend wants me to point out that I am using some hyperbole here in describing his love life. Duly noted.

Here is your daily lighthouse: this one is on a deserted island in Croatia, where it would be just you, the lighthouse keepers, and occasionally a shepherd. You can swim, sit in the sun, or eat: the lighthouse keepers cook you whatever they catch that day, usually calamari or lobster. I know, right?

It is very dark in Chicago today. Mouse would prefer to be sitting on a sunny, deserted beach in Croatia, possibly with a good book but probably asleep under her wide-brimmed straw hat.*

You can pick out your own lighthouse here.

*Mouse holds the world record in Sunburning.

Gorgeous Michelle is in Vogue, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. You know, Mouse works at home. I should do all my writing while lounging gracefully on the couch in a killer tweed skirt. 

There's also a great article, in which she continues to be awesome. I heart her.

It would be difficult to overemphasize how effing excited Mouse is about The Show, wine with labels from Hatch Show Print. I love wine. And I love Hatch Show Print. If you're ever even vaguely near Nashville, it's worth making the trip to see it. Letterpress! Old posters for Elvis and Patsy Cline! Shop of total chaos with paint on the floor!

And now I get to look at the pretty pretty letters while getting tipsy. Wheee! How has this been around since 2005 without me having found it?

(More about The Show and cool pictures of Hatch Show Print here. Wine found via lovely All Stripes.)

Hold the phone, nice mice! Did you know you can rent a lighthouse keeper's cottage? This takes my tiny cottage fetish to a whole new level. Mouse has an eye for this one, on the Island of Hoy, which, as I have just learned, is over in the Orkney Islands on the very top of Great Britain. It comes with seclusion (an acre of walled grounds), dramatic scenery, birds and stuff, and, oh yeah, a lighthouse.

Oh yeah, um, V-day is coming and Mouse has yet to do anything lovey-dovey. Let's just say that this cottage would be a great place to pitch some woo.

Mouse loves these little mugs with their sweet little numerals. Nobody would get confused and drink up Mouse's tea instead of his own tea (ahem ahem, Boyfriend). Plus, although I generally hate numbers, aren't they sort of nice numbers?

They're also at Anthropologie.

Two more Anthropologie posts and then I'll get out of your hair: seriously, this is the greatest dress in all the land. There is literally no place I can think of that I could actually wear this, but it doesn't even matter. Just look at that purple sash!

Speaking of Anthropologie, let's all take a moment to yearn for these timers. They're magnetic, so they can live on your fridge rather than getting lost (I'm looking at you, tiny digital timer I had at some point that has now vanished in the Boyfriend cleaning-up-the-kitchen process). And you can never have too many timers. I might get them in all different colors to avoid timer math (this weekend, I caught myself doing, "okay, when that timer rings add six minutes for the strudel and then reset it ten more minutes for the tart..."). Or I might just get lots of yellow ones.

By the way, the yellow dishes in the background have some bright blue friends. Yearn, yearn, yearn.

Mouse and Boyfriend had a fun dinner party over the weekend, too. I cooked yummy things, including this, which turned my fingers purple. We also had Cornish hens, which is always really fun, and all sorts of veggies (including that amazing asparagus that costs a lot but is so fresh it hardly even has to be cooked*). We ate too much and drank too much, and it was grand.

* Mouse's mom taught her a lovely trick back in the day: leave the asparagus standing in a glass of water in the fridge, and it tastes like it's just been picked.

It got freakishly warm in Mouse land on Saturday, so I went walking around and shopping with some pals. As usual, I got carried away by the Anthropologie displays. Check this out, somebody cut out hundreds of paper birds and hung them in the windows. It made me want to fly away. Well, it made me want to buy sundresses and then fly away.