Friday! Again!

Hey! It's Friday again! And time for some unrelated updates and opinions. First of all, the (probably, but maybe not) final update to my critter saga of the past week:

I reached into our mailbox Monday to find a surprise--a padded envelope containing this tiny box with its darling bow. It had been sent from an Etsy shop but there was no gift card and certainly I had not ordered anything. Still, slid off the ribbon and inside was...

This!

I contacted the lovely Sarah from Saout and asked if she had sent the silver pendant to me by mistake, a coincidence of cosmic proportion given my run-in with an actual armadillo last week. She replied that it was not a mistake, and that I have the best readers and friends in the entire world and one of them is a superstar friend/reader.

She was absolutely correct, and to the anonymous superstar who sent me an armadillo necklace in order to indicate my solidarity and clanship with New World placental mammals with leathery armor shells, thank you so much! Today I am wearing it proudly and randomly leaping straight into the air to frighten predators.

On the Wedding Planning Front (part the first)
Also arriving on the front porch this week was my mother-of-the-groom outfit! It is not beige. In fact, it is pretty spectacularly bling-y, especially for me. I tend toward the ankle-length homespun and Birkenstock school of fashion, but Much Older Sister found an outfit online and ordered it for me. When I texted her a photo and squeeeed that it was "PERFECT AND I LOVE IT!", she replied "Now about that 'keeping your mouth shut' thing..."

On the Wedding Planning Front (part the second)
Lest you think being engaged is all sweetness and light and hat-bedecked showers, Boy#1 and Lovely Girl hit a snag in their plans this week (nothing major, cancelled tasting, all-will-be-well-but-this-is-completely-irritating type stuff) and it reminded me of the advice I give every newly-engaged person I know--the engagement and wedding have very little to do with the success of the actual marriage. I loved dating not-yet-Husband (for the five minutes we dated), I have loved being married to him (for almost 30 years--egads), but the six months we were engaged were torturous. His idea of a wedding and my idea of a wedding were not a Venn diagram, they were two freestanding circles with no intersection whatsoever. However, being married has been really, really, really to the nth degree fun.

Lovely Girl and One are more or less taking the logistical setbacks in stride (at least much more than I did 30 years ago). "At the end of the day, we'll be married," they say when the caterer messes up for the fourth time. Oooh, good attitude, guys!

Blurb of the Week

Guys, are you watching Breaking Pointe? No? Oh, my. You should be. It turns out that ballet dancers are not only lovely and limber and jointless, they're also DRAMATIC. As in reality show dramatic, as this dramatic reality show on The CW network proves.

In addition to watching ballet dancers defy gravity as they flit across the floor, you'll marvel at the heartbreak involved with casting, you'll cringe at the truly disgusting toes (yes, they're worse than yours), and you'll fall in love with the regal prima ballerina. You'll love ALL the dancers.

Except for Zach. Zach is a weasel and you will hate him.