Have a Relaxing Weekend. | Cup of Jo

What are you up to this weekend? I’m having dinner with my friend Alison, and she told me I could put her baby to bed. I cannot wait for a heavy head on my shoulder, squeee. Thank you also for the kind and lovely comments on our house tour. I felt surprisingly vulnerable posting it — I’m not sure why — but you always make everything feel like a soft landing. Thank you. Hope you have a good one, and here are a few links from around the web…

Tonight’s no-brainer dinner.

How do people find time to read so much? “Because there are so many other things I DON’T do,” explains Pandora Sykes.

What a pretty dress for a night out.

The Crown’s hot Prince William just dropped. (NYMag)

How Melissa McCarthy travels. “I hate when everybody glares at the baby… It’s a baby! I’m always the creepy one who says, ‘If you need me to hold the baby, I will.’ And they’re like, ‘We don’t know you, lady.’”

Have you tried this famous chopped salad?

Now THAT’S a bed.

What makes me happy is my very old dog, says Gabrielle Zevin. “Our wonderful vet offered the following diagnosis: ‘What you’ve got is a good pug.’ Nothing Frank has is fatal. He is old. That’s all. And old is not an ailment. Old is old.”

Would you do your own wedding makeup? I liked this tutorial.

21 great Oscar looks, including Angela Bassett and Paul Mescal. (NYTimes gift link)

Plus, three reader comments:

Says Jessica on the best book to put in a guest bedroom: “I offer The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America. It seems silly, but I gave it to my mom one year, and now EVERYONE who visits her ends up buying their own copy. People laugh so hard they cry; this book is a delight.”

Says Mary on the best book to put in a guest bedroom: “The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (mini essays that are just lovely! I can’t shut up about this book!). Plus, a surprise choice: a really good dessert cookbook, or any cookbook with good photos and chatty intros. A very pleasant thing to wander through before falling asleep!”

Says Lauren O. on my relationship with birthdays: “I felt like a slacker at 21, when I wasn’t completing a draft of my first novel, like Jane Austen. Then I turned 42, as she never did. In a piece I’ve been writing about robot cats (long story), I stumbled into Spinoza’s concept of conatus, or the striving of each animate thing to become itself; a good/ethical life is the one that is lived according to one’s nature. With each birthday I’m coming into myself, and I now see that for the great good fortune that it is.” Replies Sarah: “Another banger from Lauren O. Something I’ve thought about many times but never had the words for.”

(Photo by Meaghan Curry/Stocksy.)

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