Fashion meme

I'm posting yet another meme from And-Old-Lace, who I know from over on LiveJournal. It just seemed like a lot of fun. One thing about me- I do love me some fashion. It's my current obsession and has been for a while.

A: What accessories do you wear everyday?
My watch. I've got a great fondness for watches of all types, but in particular I love my Invicta. It's a men's tank style chronograph, black face, silver case and trim, black band.

B: What is your beauty routine?

I wash my face with Cetaphil. Hair is conditioned most days with this all natural leave in conditioner, then thrown back in a headband most days, cause it's a funky length and growing back. I'm just not into the whole putting a face on thing.

C: What was the last item of clothing (for yourself) that you purchased?

Sadly, a very boring and practical cuddledud type long underwear shirt for layering. Hey, I was cold.

D: Do you use a dresser, closet, or both?

I have a small closet, 3/4 of a huge dresser and a big rubbermaid tub down in the storage room. The curse of my life is inadequate storage.

E: What type of earrings are in your ears right now?

None. I never wear them.

F: What type of figure do you have (measurements)?
pear. 46-41-51, so, slightly pear shaped, with a thicker middle.

G: Do you wear glasses?
yes

H: What type of handbag do you carry?

I've got several that I rotate, different styles. My current favorite is a shoulder bag completely covered in glass beads. That sucker weighs like 10 pounds, before I put even a lip balm into it, but it's so cool.

I: What is your ideal style?

I love an eclectic look. Right now I'm rocking a seventies secretary/rocker chick kind of look.

J: What is your favorite brand of jeans?

None. i have yet to find a brand or style of jeans that can do for my figure what even a rather mediocre dress can do.

K: Do you wear knee-hi stockings?

I wouldn't say never. I do own a pair, but I haven't put them on in a good two years.

L: Do you *have* to wear matching lingerie?

No. I understand the impulse, but given my larger bra size (40DD), I have to go with the bra that is supportive rather than pretty and I just can't make myself wear plain beige panties to match.

M: Do you wear makeup?

Almost never. It makes me break out.

N: Do you wear nightgowns?

Jammies only kind of girl. I can't stand the way nightgowns ride up while I sleep.

O: What outerwear do you put on when going out on a typical winters day?

That depends if I'm heading out on bike or not. If I'm going on on bike, I generally look like this. If I'm heading out on foot, I'll wear my new dress coat


P: What is your favorite perfume?

Guerlain Mitsouko

Q: Is your motto "quality over quantity" when it comes to clothing and accessories?

I like them both, but I guess a little bit more of the quantity. I get bored with clothes fairly easily.

R: Do you wear rain boots?

Never found a pair that didn't look bad on my calves of might.

S: Do you wear socks or slippers when your feet get cold?

Socks are more handy. I think I own a pair of slippers.

T: Do you have a set of travel luggage?

Does this imply a matching set? In this case, no. I've got a smaller size rolly suitcase. I travel with that and a large purse as carry on. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't go.

U: What is your daily uniform?

Summer- dress, cardigan if the dress is sleeveless and I'm going to work, matching shoes.
Winter- dress, such sweater or underlayers as the cold requires, tights, boots.

V: If you are married, did you wear a veil with your wedding dress? If not, how did you do your hair?

No. I hated the symbolism. I wore a fresh flower clip in my hair. Which I hated and still makes me cringe when I look at wedding pictures. I was going to just let it dry curly and my mom forced me to go to her hair dresser, who proceeded to blow dry, poof, shellack and generally ruin my hair.

W: Do you wear a watch?

Always. I collect them actually. I've got several and have my eye on a number more.

X: What item of clothing always makes you feel beautiful?

I'd rather be interesting than beautiful or pretty any day.

Y: What is your favorite type of yarn?

Koigu Painters palette premium merino

Z: Do you prefer zippers or buttons?

In theory, buttons, in practice, zippers.

What's your fashion style?

I don't think I could add anything more really

Five things I've been doing, other than blogging

Shopping: This is only one of the many fantastic vintage dresses I've bought on eBay lately. I love shopping vintage. Not only does it mean that I get a dress that nobody else has, it's good ecological sense. Re-use is the first and most important part of the three Rs. And I love how a vintage dress is cut to suit my, ahem, womanly figure without my junk being out all over the place for everyone to see. Most of the new dresses I find in my size are wrap dresses, or low cut V necks. The idea is to play up ones "assets", but too often, I feel like I'm flashing everyone when I'm wearing one of these dresses. Most vintage dresses are more modest while still giving a good look to my figure.

Oh, and oddly enough, it's cheaper than buying new. Most of the dresses I've bought lately are less than $30. Even the most expensive vintage dress I've bought is only about an average price for what I used to pay for a new dress.





Watching: Dexter- season 1. Actually, I was able to watch this as a download from Netflix, rather than having to wait for the physical discs. So very convenient. Almost like I actually had a television. Darn the internet for making the fact that I don't have a television increasingly irrelevant.

Also, oddly enough, I went to school with Michael C. Hall. We're both Earlham grads, class of '93

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_C_Hall

Of course, while he's been grabbing Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, I've been. Um, really, what have I been doing?




reading:
Death Comes for the Archbishop

I loved this book. Such an inspirational book, with gorgeous descriptions of a part of the country I've never been to but hope to visit some time. In the end, I thought this book was about the power of love.








Doing: Going to the gym, specifically, I've been taking Pilates twice a week. I love it. It makes me feel so strong, capable and graceful. I do both a one on one class and a group session during the week. I wish I could afford to do the one on one twice a week, because I feel I make so much more progress when I do this, but darn it's expensive.


Listening:


This video made me cry the first time I saw it, just after election night.

single word meme

Just a little meme from Posy Gets Cozy, one of my favorite blogs. Hope it gets me back into the habit of posting again. It's just so easy to be lazy and ignore the blog.

http://rosylittlethings.typepad.com/

Where is your mobile phone? charging
Where is your significant other? lazing
Your hair colour? blondish
Your mother? forgetful
Your father? cranky
Your favourite thing? books
Your dream last night? perturbing
Your dream goal? contentment
The room you're in? messy
Your hobby? knitting
Your fear? driving
Where do you want to be in 6 years? prosperous
Where were you last night? home
What you're not? thin
One of your wish-list items? balcony
Where you grew up? college
The last thing you did? laundry
What are you wearing? stripes
Your TV? non-existent
Your pets? hiding
Your computer? ripping
Your mood? doubtful
Missing someone? nephews
Your car? Car?
Something you're not wearing? bra
Favourite shop? eBay
Your summer? mourned
Love someone? persistantly
Your favourite colour? sunset
When is the last time you laughed? LOLcats
When is the last time you cried? today


So, there you have it, my life, in single word form. Do it. It was kind of fun.

And I promise to actually try and post to this blog now and then. It's been a lazy fall and I haven't actually done any crafting, knitting or the like. Plenty of reading, plenty of watching DVDs, not so much on the useful activity front though. More later today, perhaps.

for want of a nail...

The war (eventually) was lost, so says the old rhyme. It's funny how the little things can just cause total chaos to develop.

I'm generally fairly neat around the house. I like to keep things picked up and in their places. I can normally go from my normal state of the house to company ready in 20 or so minutes. Well, an hour if its my mother-in-law. But things are just gross at the Casa Campion tonight.

As an example, I buy a few more t-shirts and dresses. All of a sudden, my closet and the little canvas dresser I have to keep in my closet for t-shirts and the like go critical and clothes just explode out it, so it seems. I've been thinking about a real dresser for my bedroom anyway, so I buy one at the Howard Brown resale shop (an AIDS charity around here, with the best used furniture). Suddenly, I'm having to get rid of this glass door bookshelf where I kept my purses, my extra linens, the extra quilts, sweaters, etc. It's just too crowded in there for a ten drawer dresser and a six foot tall glass bookcase. Well, not everything that was in the bookcase and the closet overflow fits in the dresser. So I have to do what I probably should have done in the first place and thin out the deadwood among my clothing. Well, that's now in the living room, waiting to be taken to the thrift. And the extra quilts are stacked on top of the dresser still. I hate things in stacks on top of the dresser. Cannot abide them. At least the inside of the dresser is as organized as these things get with me. I like things neat and tidy, but have never been able to convince myself of the virtues of folding underwear or arranging my rolled socks by color.

Then the kitchen cabinet started to fall down. It must have been slow and gradual, but I didn't notice until the other day, when I realized I could fully shut the door on my crockpot. I've got this huge crockpot and even in my largest cabinet, I can't fully shut the door on it. I've got my eye open for a smaller one at the thrift, but until then, I've always just kept the door partly open.

Of course this meant immediate evacuation of every dish, wine glass, teapot and rubbermaid storage container we kept in that pair of cabinets. They're now all over m dining room. I'm going to use it as an opportunity to prune and weed out the deadwood there. There was a lot of weight in that cabinet, china dishes, crystal, and so forth. I'm going to get rid of quite a bit of it I think. But yes, for now, it's all over my dining room. Coffee cups are on every shelf of the dining room bookshelves. A stack of dishes on the dining room table.

I had a handyman out this afternoon and they've been repaired. It turned out that there weren't enough screws used and the ones that were used totally missed the studs and that we were lucking that it didn't come tearing down catastrophically in the middle of the night, taking all our dishes with it. I sometimes wonder where else in the conversion process did the developer of our condo cut corners and when I'll find that out the hard way.

The chaos from that has even spread into the living room. See, I left the phone book I used to find the handyman out on the coffee table and as everyone knows, the instant you leave something out like that, it just starts to collect clutter around it, kind of like how the planets coalesced out of bits of rock and dust gathering together by force of gravity. So now, in less than a day, my coffee table has gone from completely empty to "can just barely see that there's a coffee table". How does that happen so quickly?

Also, it's amazing how few things it can take to turn ones possessions from manageable into "I must declutter my life immediately, my things are taking over!" Things were fine, until I brought a few things home from my Grandfather's house that my family is cleaning out. All in all, I brought home less than a suitcase full of stuff and yet I feel overwhelmed. For instance, there's this hat box. I brought it home with three hats in it. How could three mere hats feel like too much? But the only place for the hat box to live is on top of the dresser and see above for my feelings on things kept on the dresser. There's also this glass pitcher with solid white spots on it. Does that replace the white ceramic pitcher? If not, where can they both live.

I'll stop whining about this soon and by tomorrow I'll be working at getting my house back together to its normal state. For now, though, the chaos seems overwhelming. I don't think well when my surroundings are in disarray. Still, I suppose this is one of those few disadvantages to living in small surroundings like we do now. Back when we lived in a house, I could have shoved all of this stuff into the basement until I was ready to deal with it. That's not an option now, so if I have more stuff than is liveable, I just have to live amongst it until I can get it resolved. No picture today though. Who would want to look at all this?

Ten things- the letter b

And_Old_Lace, who I know from over on LiveJournal was having a game. She assigned me a random letter, then I have to come up with ten things starting with that letter that I love. Then I write about it in my journal. Should be easy, right?

1) Obviously, books. All of them pretty much. I love the weight of them in my hand, the smell of the pages whether its a crisp new book just out of the carton from the publisher or a musty old book that has spent aeons in the back corners of the library. I love the serifs of the fonts and the feel of paper under my fingers. I sometimes see someone around who has one of those Amazon Kindles or the Sony Reader and I feel sad for them. See, they're not reading a real book. Oh, maybe they're reading a real novel or non-fiction work, but those electronic files in portable devices are not, nor ever will be real books. Rant over. Heh. I guess this sort of thing happens to you when you work in a bookstore for seven years.

Above picture by Austinevan and used under creative commons license. Isn't it beautiful.

2) Boho. I know. I should hang my head in shame because the boho thing is so over played, but I love it. Whether its the interiors of Wary Meyers or dresses like this I envy and covet them. By the way, if you've got any idea where I can get a dress like that one, but in my size, let me know.

3) Birds. It makes me happy beyond all reason to look up into the sky and see them flying. In particular, I find large flights of pigeons to be particularly moving. On the ground, they're these pudgy comedians, wobbling their head back and forth as they walk, puffing their feathers and chest out. In the air, they are so graceful and free. They're precision flyers too, as if some group mind is controlling them, and yet not, because while they move together, its not as if they are in formation.


4) Bandshell. Or in particular, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in downtown Chicago by Frank Gehry. It's like the waves of Lake Michigan frozen into a moment of eternity.

5) The Big Bang Theory. I don't have a TV, so I only get to see episodes when I visit my sister (and her Tivo!). I love this show though.

6) Bossa Nova. I love this album and this one. But this is my favorite song. I love the Bossa Nova for the joy of the sound. Even sad songs, no, especially the sad songs have it. Perhaps there's a little wallowing in how beautiful love lost is, but that's kind of the point.

7) Beans. Probably one of the most significant parts of my daily diet now that I've gone veg. I'm not a huge fan of soy beans or chickpeas, but just about any other kind is fine with me.



8) the BVM. In a bathtub. I grew up in a primarily Catholic town, so there were a lot of these around. Even though I'm no longer a Catholic myself, I still look at them fondly and with a bit of nostalgia. We didn't actually have one ourselves, but I always wanted one when growing up. My grandmother, who lived just down the street from us, had an inside statue of the BVM that was actually quite beautiful and over two feet tall. I think she brought it back from a Church trip to Italy.

9) Brasilia by Broyhill. I'm particularly enamored of the coffee table by them, based off the Cathedral by Oscar Niemeyer. I nearly bought one on eBay but determined that its really too big for the space. It made me really sad to not get it though.

10) Billy Collins

I know I've been m.i.a.

Do I have a good excuse. No, not really. I've been writing a novel in a month, supposedly. Just like NaNoWriMo except I've elected to do it without the support of everyone else doing it. I'm just sort of stupid and stubborn like that. Except I'm pretty sure I'm not going to make it. I've got like 20k words to write still to reach my goal and less than a week to do them in. Urgh. Some good vibes might be nice at this juncture.

I've also been working on a project with recycled materials, including a wool sweater from the thrift store. More about that later. I'm excited though. I think it looks pretty good for being one of the first things I've done with a felted sweater. It was already felted at the thrift store, so I didn't feel guilty about cutting it up.

In other news, we've gone more or less vegan sort of. I've been letting myself have a brownie which no doubt contains eggs and possibly milk when I go to the coffee house to write. It's really hard to write without a brownie for some reason. I'm rationalizing it because my favorite coffee house doesn't have any vegan treats. But every meal and treat made at home for the last three weeks has been vegan. Things I'd never thought would be in my fridge, like almond milk and soy yogurt are in my fridge. Oh, and this dreadful vegan cheese that Mr. Campion just had to try. Definitely better to give up the cheese completely than suffer that again.

In other other news, my back has been more or less out of order for two weeks. It keeps sending me messages about how it's sorry for the inconvenience and so forth. I've just started seeing a chiropractor and its been an improvement. She's so nice and most importantly, she hasn't blamed me for what's wrong with my back. So often when I've gone to a regular doctor, whatevers wrong with me has been blamed on me, either by implication or outright statement. Anyway, I go to a chiro that uses the activator method. You'll never go to a neck cracker again once you've had gentle treatment by the activator method.