Now starts the march into holiday season.  Now I'm no Grinch, but I do wish retailers would wait at least a few days after Halloween to break out the holiday advertising – I swear it starts earlier every year.  Anyway, here are some cool things for the week.

– Jezebel discusses why women runners are punk rock.  Hell yeah we are! 

– Along those lines, I discovered that there is a pedicure just for runners.

– A sneak peek at OPI's Holland collection. 

– Excited for this new series on feminism and art over at Bitch Magazine.

– Finally, you may remember my bathroom was undergoing a renovation back in late August/early September.  So it's been finished for a while now but the accessories took FOREVER to get here and I'm just now getting around to taking pictures.  Without further ado, here are some pics. 

Yup, it's marble.  Pretty sweet!

My Philosophy 3 in 1 obsession is well-documented:

How cool is the nightlight?

I'm so in love with my little spa oasis!  🙂

Happy almost  Halloween!  Are you excited for candy?  I am enjoying a nice quiet weekend in, my favorite kind of weekend.  Here are some links from the week.

– The Beheld has a truly great post on MAC and what they're selling (besides makeup).

– Just in time for Halloween, a Tumblr that discusses the age-old question – Halloween or Williamsburg?

– Phyrra welcomes a guest post on some very frightening historic beauty techniques. 

– Instead of working on the Museum's fall 2011 exhibition today, which was my original plan, I decided to have a pumpkin dessert extravaganza (warming up for Thanksgiving).  I made pumpkin cupcakes with caramel filling and salted caramel buttercream, pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing, and pumpkin ice cream.   All turned out excellently if I do say so myself, although I did manage to burn my arm pretty badly on a cookie sheet.   In lieu of a picture of my charred skin (or the delectable treats, as the light was crappy and I was too tired to take pics)  I give you this instead:

Pretty apt for me.

What are your Halloween weekend plans, if any?

It's finally starting to feel like fall here, despite 3 straight days of rain this week.  I don't know about you, but around this time of year I get obsessed with baking anything with pumpkin in it.  Along with, of course, drinking Starbucks Pumpkin Spice lattes.  Here are some links from this mid-autumn week. 

– My only fall decoration involves small pumpkins and gourds, so naturally I found this post on decorating with them hilarious. 

– Some other funny things – two new-to-me blogs:  Anthroparodie and ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS.  Go check 'em out when you want to laugh.

– In the beauty world, Beautifulwithbrains reveals the deadly beauty secret of King of France Henry II's mistress, while Everydaybeauty covers the new makeup book by Besame founder Gabriela Hernandez.  While I'm a little chagrined that it provides a history of makeup, I am mostly okay with it because my makeup book will have a slightly different focus. 

– I'm a little down and bitter today as the Baltimore Running Festival is taking place.  I was supposed to be running the marathon.  :(  Instead, I'm sitting here still upset by the fact that late last year, literally 3 days after I decided I would start training for it, I developed a nasty injury that prevented me from running AT ALL for nearly 9 months.  I'm only just now getting back into running, and thus, I have to completely start from scratch in terms of training.  Come hell or high water, I'll be running the 2012 Baltimore marathon!  Fingers crossed my body cooperates and the injury doesn't flare up too badly again (it's still not even completely healed), and that something else doesn't start hurting.

– What makes me feel better is looking at pictures of Babos or other cute creatures.  And this is possibly the cutest thing I've seen all week, via Pinterest:

Nope, it's not a glass miniature but a real live teeny tiny octopus!!

What have you been up to this week?

For this week's installment of the Curator's Corner, I am going to bore you regale you with tales from my trip to London.  I'm glad to be back on this side of the pond, but it was awesome!!  I love London because you get the feel of a really cool European city but there's no language barrier.  Anywho, here are some highlights.

I'll start with why we ended up there in the first place – the conference.  Here I am on the way there.

Here's the Graduate Centre:

Here I am with the very nice panel moderator who was helping me set up my presentation.  I have to say, the only reason I posted this pic was so you could see my shoes (Nine West Abalene – I thought these high heeled loafers went well with my J.Crew Professor blazer from a couple seasons ago…was trying to look my most professorial!)

Here I am, doin' my thang.  I had no idea that my husband was surreptitiously taking pictures!  He said he wanted to capture me presenting but didn't want to distract me, so he was quite sneaky with that iPhone of his.

Here's the title slide my husband made (he layed out the whole presentation and it looked fantastic!):

Now onto the fun stuff – shopping and FOOD!!  Later that night we went to Yo! Sushi at the top of Harvey Nic's.  It's a super cute conveyer belt sushi place.

Then we celebrated the conference with champagne at the bar at Harvey Nic's (I had the pink champagne):

This is where our hotel was, on Sloane Street – quite nice.

One day we ventured out into Notting Hill, mostly because I wanted to see the biggest London location of my favorite store.

On our last day we visited this private park.  Our hotel supplied the key so we were able to get in and enjoy.

We also visited the V & A museum.  I will not be recapping that because it was honestly the worst museum experience of my life.  Blah. 

Anyway, our last activity of the trip was having tea at the Chesterfield Mayfair hotel:

I got some weird flowering tea – it almost looked like a spider!

A couple other things that may or may not be of interest: 

1.  In addition to the chocolates I got at Harrod's, we also visited the Ladurée there no less than 4 times to get macarons.  I think the reason we went back so many times is that we were trying to stick to small quantities, but we would devour them so quickly we'd end up going back for another fix! I do hope we take a trip to NYC soon so I can check out the first U.S. location of this highly addictive store.

2.  We visited another great chocolate shop, L'Artisan du Chocolat.  I think they and Melt made my favorite chocolates out of all the ones I tried, although William Curley also had some interesting flavors.

3.  A note to London souvenir stores:  please start selling soccer jerseys for kids younger than 10 years old.  I went into at least 5 of these shops and none had a small enough size for my little nephew.  🙁

4.  We ate quite a few times at both Pret a Manger and Wagamama, neither of which is readily available in the U.S. for reasons that I cannot fathom.  Both have very tasty inexpensive food but Pret is mainly relegated to NYC at the moment (with only a handful of locations in DC and Chicago) and Wagamama's only 3 U.S. locations are in Boston (rumors of one opening in DC have been going on for years.) In my opinion, these delicious chains should be as ubiquitous as Starbucks.

So that about sums it up.  I want to go back already!

Have you ever visited London?  If so, did you like it and what were your favorite things about it?  And if not, do you want to visit?

What a week.  I don't think I've ever seen so much rain in my life.  I think rain is almost as bad as winter.  But the sun should be out again soon.  In the meantime, here's the weekly roundup.

– These elaborate fake eyelashes are so cool!

– The "living in" features at Design Sponge are always great, but I really loved this Clueless one.

– Given my love of anything even vaguely resembling punk, I fell in love with these tea cups, presented by Domestic Sluttery.

– Lastly, I wanted to mention that I will not be posting this coming week on account of a fairly unexpected trip to London.  I have to admit I'm kinda proud of my little self – I submitted my Masters thesis to a symposium, and it got accepted, so I will be presenting on a panel!  I wasn't expecting it, since a few weeks prior to the acceptance email I received a message stating that it was taking longer than usual to decide who would be accepted as the conference committee was "inundated" with proposals, but mine made it!  :D  Finally, some recognition for my work and my very first academic conference…I certainly hope it's not my last.  I'm off to get some notes together for my presentation, but I will be back blogging again the week of the 19th. 

For now, enjoy this video by Wild Flag.  (Can't wait to see them in October!)

Although I haven't been blogging the past couple of weeks,  I still feel like I never have enough time for my to-do list.   I seriously don't know where the time goes!  I'm a little sad this weekend even though it's a holiday because 1. last year at this time I was honeymooning in Paris, and 2. it's the last weekend of summer.  That means horrible cold dark winter is just around the corner.  :(  But I will try to stay positive so in that spirit, here are some good things from this week (and maybe last, I can't remember) that were catching my eye.

– How cute are these lip balms posted by Beautiful with Brains?  The little creatures remind me of Museum staff. 

– I love anything miniature, so I really want to see this exhibition at NYC's Museum of Arts and Design.

– New perfume by L'Artisan – I'm pretty sure their Ananas Fizz is my all-time favorite perfume (maybe tied with Creed Virgin Island Water), but I'm very intrigued by this, as the notes include "lemon, coconut, caipirinha accord (lime and sugar cane), mint…"  Sounds like something I'd love.  Plus the name is awesome – who wouldn't want to wear something called Batucada?

– Glossed Over completed her 5th live blogging of September Vogue last week – as with years past, it's a must-read.  Go NOW and read it.  I'll wait.

– DessertBuzz has the scoop on the Laduree opening in NYC.  How I wish I had been there!  Fortunately there is a local bakery, Bonjour Bakery and Cafe, that makes scrumptious macarons.  My very thoughtful husband picked some up for me:

Of course, I managed to devour one whole bag in a matter of minutes. 

Happy Labor Day!

This was another relatively quiet week, which I am thankful for.  Here is a batch of links – lots of great stuff this week!

– OMG, Laduree is coming to the states!  In NYC, of course.   Next time I visit I will be eating my weight in rose macorons the way I did in Paris.

– As someone who considers her plushies to be like her children, I was relieved to see this story had a happy ending.

– Good god, I am addicted to Pinterest.

– Collecting Vintage Compacts digs deeper into the story behind a compact rumored to have been designed by Dali. 

– I've been wanting to check out yoga classes for a while now but was too chicken, so my very good friend Valerie kindly offered to take me to a beginner class near her to help ease me into it.  I really liked it and now am not too scared to check out Charm City Yoga.  😀  

– Great post on why Larry David is a feminist hero.

– Finally, my bathroom renovation has begun!  I was not in the least sad to see it destroyed.  Good riddance!   Here it is completely gutted:

I will be sure to post before and after pics when it's all done. 

Note:  I will be taking a blogging break for next couple weeks, enjoying the last few weeks of summer and getting preparations underway for the fall exhibition(s).  😉