They tell you marriage is hard. They tell you it involves sacrifice and compromise. And this weekend, Internet, I found out just how true that all is. I agreed to arrive at the Denver airport five hours early so that my husband could watch the Superbowl.

Did you hear me? Five hours early? At the airport? So I could sit in a mediocre sports bar and nurse a watery beer over my Oprah magazine while barrel-chested men bumped fists around me? I'll take that medal engraved with my full name, thank you.

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I turned 32 on Wednesday and it was charmingly low-key. I worked from home to mark the occasion—well, it was coincidence, really; my new company has a fairly benevolent policy towards Work From Home Wednesdays, and I figured, given the choice, that it would be more fun to wear my slippers on the day of my birth than not wear my slippers—and man, I do not know how I did that for six months. It was lovely and quiet and I was highly productive, of course, but I was also dying to talk to someone by about hour three.

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I don't know if you've heard this, but it's a cover of Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know," as sung by Evan Dando. I didn't really ever listen to her music much—unless you count that period in late 1992 when The Bodyguard soundtrack was on every teenage stereo in the south of England—but listening to this still feels like I'm paying my respects.

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This is the second part of my super duper Nobel-prize winning Important Mascara Research, which is the kind of thing that makes people question whether you have anything better to do with your time. Part One of The Mascara Championships is here.

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I am recapping, excruciatingly slowly, the two-week trip we took to South Africa last year. Here is part one, about our layover in Paris; here is part two, about Cape Town; and here is part three, about Cape Point and the penguins of Boulders Beach. Expect me to be finished with this sometime in 2014.  

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One of the things I've wanted for a really, really, really long time is a red front door. Pretend each of those "reallys" is a decade and you get the idea—alright, maybe not a decade, maybe five years. Door years are like dog years, perhaps: each human year you want yours to be a different color feels like five times as many when it isn't. 

But guess what? The thing about a red front door is that it's not actually all that hard to achieve. You just kind of buy some red paint and go to town. 

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Oh, I've been meaning to ask you: how was your Presidents' Day? It has not, hitherto, been a day I've ever had off work, and so when Sean and I both realized we had a holiday, we swiftly decided to throw an impromptu brunch, to which Emily Post would be aghast to hear we invited people via text, DM, and Facebook Chat. I know! If a party happens but no-one is around to make custom letterpress invitations, does it really happen? The scandal! 

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