So, O Best Beloveds, I won't lie to you: la vie is rather bleak chez nous at the moment. I'm in a slough.

So 2018 has gotten off to rather a pesky start, chez nous...

Although the celebrations worldwide now spread hither and yon across June and beyond, this weekend - if only because it is so celebrated in our two cultural homelands, New York and San Francisco - is somehow the Most Official Pride Weekend of them all.

Indulge me, darlings, in just a trace of sentimentality; perhaps I'm going soft in my old age.

Because I have a useless mind, one that retains bits and pieces from the distant past, but not, unfortunately, vital information put before it yesterday, I can tell you that today would have been my paternal grandparents' 95th wedding anniversary.  This happy couple, I should note, is not they, but it might as well have been, for isn't there something almost wholly interchangeable about most wedding pictures?

Yes, it's two cute boys singing a ukelele-based cover of the Monkees' immortal "Daydream Believer." Just in case you don't think we're up on all the hipster trends here at the Café.

A little tableau en style Warhol, in honor of yesterday's good news.  Café regulars are well aware of my longstanding amusement with American's vinyl sweetheart...

Well, it is, by all indications, a great day for the Irish, and who better to sing us in than St. Judy?

Perhaps it's just that I'm getting a little stir-crazy in this five-star gilded prison, but today I'm feeling literary.  Fortunately, there are not one but two significant moments of which to take note, and they have a certain unlikely symmetry.

Well, rather a surprise this morning, no?  Today's great news has made me think about these two, to whom we owe so much.  In honor of Mildred and Richard Loving - and what author of fiction would ever dare give them that name? - tonight we raised a glass to being fully legal in our home state.  To read Mildred's statement 40 years after her marriage became legal is to realize just how far we've come, and how we walk a path made easier by pioneers.

This week, a day-late salute to birthday boy Mr. Steve Lawrence, and (at 19:30) a very special Mystery Challenger.  It really is a lovely episode if your time allows you to take it all in, if only to appreciate both Arlene's fur shrug and Dorothy's wiglet (and at least one other Hair Hall of Fame potential entry).

They traveled separately from Vienna, she and her husband.  They left the children at home.

It's been a busy weekend Chez Muscato - just the most ordinary sorts of things, really.  The Mister is working weekends these days, and so I'm taking on a little of the weekend cooking (meatloaf, a house speciality, and a genuine success on this outing), as well as getting clothes to to the dry cleaners, giving the dogs a nice long weekend constitutional, grocery-getting, just the most quotidian of goings-on.

Well, I don't know about you, but I think this is an awfully encouraging glance, shared as it is between two people married these 66 years.

I was interested to see today that the UN has picked up on on one of my own little obsessions...

Oh, I know it seems like just yesterday that we were getting married, but Mr. Muscato and I woke up this morning to the remarkable realization that today is, in fact, our tenth anniversary.

So yesterday was really something.

Reader, I married him.

I don't know that I ever really imagined it, but I suppose if I did I would have thought about something impossibly romantic - over Champagne at Maxim's or La Grenouille, or at Luxor at dawn, the sun striking the inner sanctum of the temple of Deir al Bahri.  On top of the Burj Khalifa, or maybe in Central Park, in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue...