Week-in-review from Souris Mariage:

Really cute robot-themed engagement photos.

We chose our wedding venue!

Amazing Printable Press giveaway (you can still enter...)

We decided to have do-nuts instead of wedding cake.

A gorgeous Monique Lhuillier lace gown I cannot afford, but yearn for...

A preview of a cute wedding with exceptionally awesome shoes.

Here in Chicago, we had a regular bitter-cold winter followed by a long, rainy, weirdly cool summer (only two or three days hotter than 85 degrees). But now we get this incredible, gorgeous fall--the leaves have stayed on the trees for some six weeks now, red and golden and brown. The catalpa leaves are starting to come down, large as dinner plates, and they make delicious crunching noises underfoot. The days are sunny and clear. This is why Chicagoans don't move somewhere else. Please remind me about this in January.

Mouse had fine eyesight until just recently, when the doc decided it's an astigmatism. Apparently, this means I have funny-shaped eyeballs.* Anyway, I just got my first glasses for this astigmatism thingy and it is a trip, man. It's like being in a fishbowl. Last night I adjusted to them after a few hours, but this morning it's all bendy again. Will this go away, wearers of glasses? I hope so. Because it IS nice to be able to see things. My old glasses were for distance correction, so they just made everything big and fuzzy, rather than small and fuzzy. These ones are bendy but clear as a bell.**

* He-Mouse says: "They probably got squished into a funny shape from being stuffed in your tiny peanut head."***
** Or clear as a more appropriate visual analogy I can't think of right now.
*** This is not an insult, just a statement of fact. He-Mouse has a gigantic head, and I have a little one. He wears extra large hats, and I wear child-size. In photos, I've learned that I need to be slightly closer to the camera than he is in order to get our faces close enough to the same size not to look weird.

It is my birthday today! I'm going to go find a plaster ham and smoosh it.* That will be fun. xoxo

(Two Bad Mice are, as always, from Beatrix Potter.)
* He-Mouse is reading over my shoulder: "Why do they smash the ham?"
Mouse: "They break into a dollhouse and take all the stuff and try to eat the food but they find out it's plaster and so they smash it."
He-Mouse: "Oh."
Mouse: "But then Hunca-Munca feels bad later and goes back and sweeps it up."

I wanted to take a moment to infrom you of the importance of making English are offical lanaguage.*

(Photos from an e-mail that's been going around. Says He-Mouse: "It's Photoshopped, right? Please tell me it's Photoshopped." I really hope so.)

* No, this is not my spelling. It is their spelling. I just took it from the signs in the photos. xoxo, grammar police-Mouse.

I really neeeeed one of these delicious gray ruffly dresses to wear to the engagement party Mama Mouse is throwing for us over Thanksgiving weekend. Don't you think?
Sigh. Yearn, yearn.

(Both from Anthropologie.)

Yeah, my face actually hurts right now from laughing so hard. Go over here right now and look at Regretsy, which features horrible terrible Etsy finds. Soooo funny.

I have wanted to visit Newfoundland a long time; I like the sound of it. This little cottage on its patch of tended grass would be the opposite of my life in Chicago: instead of me, small, surrounded by people, it would be me, small surrounded by vast empty space. In the winter, the upper floor of the house would sway a little in the wind and I would find truth in solitude. "Tuckamore. Cracked cliffs in volcanic glazes. On a ledge above the sea a murre laid her single eggs. Harbors still locked in ce. Tombstone houses jutting from raw granite, the coast black, glinting like lumps of silver ore," writes Annie Proulx in The Shipping News. Such a place could rub away all the bits of excess until what remained was my truest self.

(This tiny cottage--called the Yellow House, Tors Cove--for rent here.)