Welcome to Pleasantville

Good morning girls,
Rose, congratulations on your raise!  Fantastique!  The birthday dinner was amazing!  Everything came together so beautifully.  My actual birthday is tomorrow, but the dinner was definitely a perfect way to celebrate!  Flora, your (imaginary) travels to Morocco have given me the urge to travel again!  I think I'll plan a little weekend getaway... perhaps a belated birthday trip!

While preparing for my birthday dinner, I started to realize just how much time I have on my hands!  A working woman would not have time to dedicate 3 days (oui, trois jours!) to a traditional coq au vin.  Yes, the results were impressive, but I started to feel like a 1950s housewife!  Straight out of Pleasantville!  Everything was perfect, the pressed napkins and table cloth (I rented extra tables to be able to seat 10 comfortably), the printed menus and customized place cards, the homemade three-tier birthday cake!  Perfection!  And while I enjoyed every minute of it, I couldn't help but think about just how much time I was putting into a single dinner.  As you know, I am quite old school when it comes to this sort of things, I love sending out invitations, handwritten letters, thank you notes (I received three already! Bravo friends!).  I am sure there are girls out there who would ask themselves who has time to visit the florist three times in search of the perfect peonies and how can someone play sommelier when she has a full time job?  Well, I am fun-employed and therefore I have time to frost a cake, to caramelize onions, to mix cocktails!

That said, I have started looking for a new job and... brace yourself dear interns, I am ignoring all internship offers!  It is hard, they are so enticing AND they have end dates, but at 2X years old, I need to move beyond internships and add at least one job to my resume!  The problem?  There are no jobs!  Why hire when you can pay an intern pennies a day to do the same job!?   I thank my lucky stars that internships in Paris do actually pay!   Well, now that the time-consuming birthday dinner has passed (sniff! sniff!), what's an unemployed intern to do?  I will rededicate myself to my job search, of course!   As much as I loved "homemaking" and party preparations,  it's a slippery slope into the world of the SUV-driving, yoga pant-wearing grocery mom!

Bisous x x x Ophelia