Sometimes we take time from our busy, fast-paced city life to ease into the slow lane, where the neighbors are quiet and polite (or best of all, nonexistent), the food takes its sweet time coming to the table, and everything is lovely. Yes, even if it’s storming out. Most recently, it took us to the Russian River Valley in the wine country. Specifically, to Guerneville. More specifically, to Korbel Champagne Cellars for a tour of the grounds and gardens, and a champagne tasting.  Don’t we look snug? That’s because the rain stopped long enough for us to enjoy the visit.

Look at all that stuff! We did not realize how old Korbel was, nor about the trio of brothers from Bohemia, with their Bohemian brides, and all the scandal and intrigue and Wasp-y newsletters, etc. It’s a pretty interesting history, and while Korbel isn’t edging out cava or champagne from France anytime soon, their organic Brut and Blanc de Noir reserve aren’t half bad! They certainly came in handy back at our rustic cabin, pairing nicely with the fancy cheese plates from Boon’s.

Sometimes we eat. Sometimes we eat A LOT:

I’m getting ahead of myself! The gardens! They were really very pretty, with some varieties of roses over 200 years old or something incredulous like that. Take a little stroll with us, won’t you? Try not to pick up random things on the ground and eat them, like the tomboy does. It worries me.

Sometimes we cuddle and sometimes the tomboy just looks too bloody adorable and NOM-worthy for her own good, don’t you think? I’m surprised I don’t need a new stick every week just to beat all the ladies (and the odd gay) off, honestly. I guess the choke hold down there helps. I guess this is a good place to tell you where she got the scratchy wool coat at, it was the military surplus store in San Jose, which has rock bottom prices. The jeans are Sevens and the shoes are the same Marc Ecko ones you’ve seen before.

Y’all? We expected sunshine and LOTS of it this weekend (this being Mother’s Day weekend, which is where all these photos are from), but we had a single day of light and then the storm came. My Oleg Cassini weekender bag and I were beside ourselves, considering the fact that I’d packed 84,000 sundresses and little else. Good thing I was able to assemble this backup outfit for inclement weather.

PANTS: Silence + Noise (I think officially these are “jeggings”, which might make my page views plummet wildly. I apologize.)
COTTON LEOPARD PRINT TANK IN NUDE: Elie Tahari
CARDIGAN: Kersh Essentials (Costco, basically.)
SHOES: Madden Girl
BAG: Emilie M.
NECKLACE: Betsey Johnson

This concludes your getaway weekend with Skinny + M! We hope y’all have fantastical Memorial Day weekend plans. Tonight is our Friday, so we have a lovely four-day weekend planned in which there will be Ethiopian food, a great deal of bloodshed and hopefully heart at UFC 114, the world premiere of Beautiful Child, a musical set to the staggeringly gorgeous music of Rufus Wainwright (there will be OUTFITS), homemade strawberry sangria, and who knows what else?! Perhaps there will even be some sun.

This rain is SUPER messing with my nudie girl and / or bright coral Spring steez, yo. SERIOUSLY. It angers me. There’s a silk Kensie dress just hanging all limp and sad in my closet, UNWORN and longing for sunshine. (Like this, but so much better.) Today it poured and poured like my tears during the Lost finale on Sunday night, but I decided the following:

SUCK IT, MAN, I’M WEARING A TINY COTTON DRESS.

Also? Suede boots. And then whenever I had to go outside, I threw a raincoat on and jabbed the sky with my nautical H&M umbrella. So there.

Thursday: Hot.
Friday: I don’t remember.
Saturday: Sunny, cold.
Sunday: Sunny, windy, cold.
Monday: Shitty, overcast.
Tuesday: Rain, BS, delayed flights.
Wednesday: Isla Mujeres, please?

In case you’re wondering why it’s been six long days since my last post (which came, I might add, in a bit of a blog post blitzkrieg as inexplicable as Jupiter’s missing belt), we’ve been entertaining a lovely houseguest since Friday night. We’ve been very fancy. Flitting from this open house to that apartment showing, signing leases and dancing at lesbian MEGAparties like Mango and Les Beaux, discovering delightful new bourbons and making new friends, visiting cemeteries and attending dance recitals and good heavens, there might be more but I’m exhausted just typing it out. Plus, my neck hurts and it’s the tomboy’s fault. (Insert telling lesbian smirk here.) Bygones.

THERE IS SOME SERIOUS HAIR TOSSING BELOW. I WARNED YOU!

Last, but not least, one of my most beloved PJ Harvey numbers, which feels good on today:

PS. The morning after hair, per the comments section:

Saturday began innocently enough. We woke up, put a batch of cinnamon rolls into the oven for breakfast, watched a bit of BBC’s Pride & Prejudice and set out for the East Bay to find M some skater shoes. While I found an excellent new jacket and an adorable ski cap with hearts on it, M ran into one dead end after another with the shoes. To add insult to injury, Buffalo Exchange sent her into a homo panic and some persnickety baby dyke with no manners and a lot of attitude looked me up and down obscenely (and repeatedly) enough to solicit M’s wrath. It wasn’t pretty, but no blows were exchanged. Having had it with Oakland, we returned to SF and freshened up for our date.

Contigo Kitchen + Cava, a cozy tapas restaurant in Noe Valley with a strangely appealing lime green and firewood motif, didn’t open until 5:30PM, so we popped into a few shops and grabbed a warm-up round of pleasant enough cocktails at Bliss bar. DINNER WAS AMAZING. We had the pork belly, lamb shoulder and patatas bravas, and M & I both tried hazelnuts for the first time. They were delicious, as well as the cheese plate and prosciutto (the sheep’s milk was my favorite). It began to rain and as we wrapped up dinner, a few friends invited us out for drinks at a lesbian party at a gay club in the Castro. Much debauchery ensued, and I almost immediately stripped off the cardigan, leggings and coat when we walked in, it was that hot.

Strangely, we seemed to know everyone there. It was like one big, unending jovial reunion of sorts, and boozy texts to have even more friends join us were successful, making everything that much more epic. We woke up in relatively little pain this morning, but were USELESS in our attempt to gather coffee and other supplies, and yet managed to procure M some skater shoes. FINALLY. They are Vox (and from an awesome skate shop called Cruz on Mission) and she is pleased, so I am pleased. As promised, after lunch (desert fries, yum) she took me to see Nine at the Castro Theater. Neither of us had ever been there before, so it was extra-dreamy and romantical. (I wish I could say the same for the movie!)

The storms kept us from a spontaneous trip to the snow, but hopefully y’all have had equally exciting holiday weekends. One more day to go! Whee!

CONFESSION: Today was a day for the bank. I attended a private tasting of Dalmore’s 12, 15, Gran Reserva and King Alexander III single malt scotch whiskys, plus a very special bonus tasting, at the methodically handsome Laszlo in the Mission. The dear Scottish man who led the tasting said that I reminded him of a lovely, elegant Lowlands single malt scotch whisky, when he wasn’t spitting onto the floor at any mention of the French. (You can eventually read more about all that here, at my “other” blog. I don’t want to spoil it.) They were kind enough to let me pop upstairs before and after the tasting to take some super awesome FFAF photos, hurrah. Just a moment ago the UPS guy arrived with a very important package, and I was so excited that M said I made a big old ruckus of “kitten noises,” whatever those are. It contained a new dress (not-so-LBD) and super badass new shoes. I can’t wait to show y’all! M is well enough to drink a bottle of cava with me (finally!) and lasagna is baking in the oven with some fluffy garlic bread in hot pursuit. DREAMY.

SCENT: Tom Ford’s Black Orchid. I must confess something. I broke up with Tom awhile ago, but after reading about his directorial debut starring Colin Firth (and Julianne Moore) in A Single Man, I’ve realized something very, very important: My love for Colin is greater than my hate for Tom. Does that make sense? Of course it does. (He’s Mark-bloody-Darcy, after all.) I digress. Black Orchid is a hot, heady, stunning mess. The jury is out on whether or not that’s a good or bad thing. The opening is almost like scorched black licorice drizzled over jasmine and sundry florals, like in Absinthe or Drambuie. It does kind of smolder, all bared teeth, glossed lips and super dangerous bedroom eyes. This smells like the kind of woman you should stay away from – you know better, of course – but you can’t help yourself. I’m going to have to come back to this, because it’s too complex!

Here are some notes, FYI: Black Truffle, Ylang, Bergamot, Black Currant. Then the black orchid, dark florals, rich fruit, Lotus Wood. At last, there’s Patchouli, Incense, Vetiver and Vanilla Tears, Balsam and Sandalwood.

Watch this and tell me you don’t find it completely gorgeous. Seriously.

And since it was one of the most beautiful stills:

Confession: Welcome to my Mother’s Day outfit. It was so gorgeous yesterday! The shoes and shorts came from the Rockridge Crossroads on a very rainy day, when my lust for sunshine and summer kicked in and gave me the vision for this little outfit. I have no terribly exciting news otherwise, so I’ll just share a nice springtime romance video with you, courtesy of youtube.com and the terribly hip Rojo and, of course, Camera Obscura! Enjoy!

PS. I spilled cava on these shoes! Oops! But aren’t they sweet?!

When: Friday, Feb. 27th, 2009.

What: Ivory dress by M by Madonna for H&M, vintage fur coat. Bra and panty set by Elle Macpherson. (I am in love with her website. The photographs with all the goosebumps and dimples and realness of yes, very trim women, but still more real women than we are used to seeing in ads, especially in lingerie ads, delights me.) Watch, Guess. Earrings from Juniper Tree. Rings, vintage and Laundry by Shelli Segal.

Scent: The very elegant Tubéreuse Criminelle by Serge Lutens, with notes of tuberose, jasmine, orange blossom, hyacinth, nutmeg, clove, styrax, musk and vanilla, from the exclusive range. Let me say this first: When M & I were married at San Francisco City Hall, it was in a cloud of giddy-yet-somber love reverberating through the rotunda and gently raining down tuberose, from my bouquet. I can’t help but sink fondly into this fragrance, even it comes howling like the devil out of the decant. Within moments it stops shrieking like a newborn from the womb and just nestles in, and if angels existed the soft folding of their wings to kneel down and gaze into the eyes of some broken creature with love so abstractly vast it melted your brain to even contemplate it, well, the sound of them would smell like this.

People love or hate this. They are so put off by its vulgar beginnings that they abandon it, or some version of tuberose so watered down it scarcely resembles the real thing has blinded them to the beauty of Criminelle. Some people think it’s mysterious, they marvel at its depth, its can’t-put-my-finger-on-it-ness. Some think it packs sexual power.

I love Criminelle because it tells the truth. Perfect. In every way.

Confession: I promised assorted FFAF readers that I’d post a blog with this dress and the fur, albeit not necessarily together. With the recent days of still chilly air veiled with clear blue skies and the faint stirrings of Spring, I knew my days were numbered where the fur is concerned. (Not that we really ever have fur-worthy days out here, I know you East Coast kittens are rolling your eyes at me so hard they’re loud as eight balls cracking against corner pockets.) So I paired the two, experimented with some trickery in Picasa and Voila!