Archive for the ‘ Fashion ’ Category

Bedraggled, Flowbee-Loving Hippie

Author: Erika

Jul 20

I’d just like to take this opportunity to break away from ALL PREGNANCY ALL THE TIME around here and talk about something that does not concern my uterus.  Something like…My hair.  Yes, this is ground-breaking stuff.  Hard hitting!  Substantial and meaty!  Like a good steak!  Mmmmmm, steak…

Wes and I had the pleasure of a lot of spare time this weekend, which we put to good use by investigating.  First, we went to our local Farmer’s Market to discern whether it would be less expensive to buy our produce there or to continue patronizing Safeway’s produce section.  We strolled around and sampled nectarines (which were amazing) ice cream (which was over-priced), and fresh cheese (which was precisely as incredible as it sounds).

As it turns out, the prices for produce at the Farmer’s Market were  much better than the prices at Safeway, and the produce looked yummier.  The only problem was availability.  Not all veggies are available every week at the Market, so we’ll probably just stick to buying a few things there.  The onions sure as heck looked better, and I’m betting that farmers don’t often get confused about whether their onions are yellow or white.

After that journey, we headed to Costco.  Oodles of people keep telling us that Costco will save us so much money, so we decided to see for ourselves.  I gotta say, strolling Costco is a cheap way to get some lunch.  I scarfed so many random samples that I wasn’t even hungry for a real meal afterward.  The prices were better on some items, worse on others.  We’ll probably hold off on purchasing a membership until we have to buy diapers in bulk someday.

But neither of those has to do with my hair.  After our journey, we got haircuts.  At SuperCuts.  Now, you may remember that I used to get my hair cut by a very talented lady at a very lovely salon who served me wine while I waited and let me read as many trashy celebrity magazines as I wanted to.  It was awesome.  Wes also had his hair cut by her, though I doubt he enjoyed the magazines quite so much.

Well, as y’all know, times are a little lean over here at Casa de Mitchell.  I’m hardly in a position to justify spending $200 on my hair right now, especially considering I wear my hair in a ponytail except when I’m sleeping.  I actually hadn’t gotten my hair done since January, so by the time we stumbled into SuperCuts I looked like a bedraggled Flowbie-loving  hippie.  My hair was so long it was actually giving me headaches, so I knew it time to take care of business.

I watched as my head was not lovingly shampooed but rather unceremoniously sprayed with water from a spray bottle until I was shivering a little.  I shuddered as my layers were hacked to roughly the same length, and died a little on the inside when I left the salon with my hair still dripping wet.  Yes, it was a cheap haircut, and yes, it looks just fine all pulled up into a ponytail.  But man, is there ever a disparity between our life a year ago and our life now.

Wes and I left the salon holding hands and smiling.  Not because we loved our haircuts so very much, but because at least we still have enough money to go to SuperCuts and we’re not so vain that we can’t think the other looks broke but hot.  This recession’s done a lot of things, but it hasn’t taken away our ability to laugh where necessary, and appreciate free lunches.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

4 Comments
Filed under: Fashion, Lifestyle

Rebel Gone Wrong

Author: Erika

May 12

Piercings.  I love them, I have them, I can’t keep them.  Not many people know this, but at one point in my life I had seven piercings on my person.  There were three in each ear and one over my belly-button.  I’ve never been particularly skinny, so not many people ever saw the belly-button piercing, but it was there and I loved it.

I think piercings, when done artfully, are beautiful.  I’m not saying I want my ears gauged large enough to stick a fist through or anything, but I’ve seen some people do beautiful things with their piercings.  I once met a girl who’d woven silver wire through a bunch of holes in her ear and it was gorgeous.  It can be a real art, in my opinion.

My parents consented to let me pierce my ears for the first time when I was 12, and I did my darndest to keep the piercings clean.  I was plagued by miserable infections, but still I doggedly kept them in and cleaned them twice a day like I was supposed to.  Eventually (as in four years later) they stopped hurting so dang much so I figured the time was ripe for another set of piercings.  My best friend and I went in and got a second set of holes put in right above the ones we already had.

Those seemed to heal quicker, so I got a third set of earrings, these ones high up in my cartilege.  I’ll never forget how they crunched when they were put in!  I thought I was looking pretty cool with my piercings, and had always wanted to try a belly-button ring, so right after high school graduation I laid down on a table and watched as some random piercing person put a huge freaking needle through my stomach.  Very weird, I must admit.

Now I was looking pretty cool, though not nearly hard-core.  I merely looked like a girl who liked earrings.  I loved my new look, and thought it was decidedly at ease with the person I thought I was my freshmen year of college.

Then the honeymoon ended.  I started having a hard time sleeping, and I realized that it was because my cartilage piercings were painful to sleep on at night.  I tried taking them out one night but, when I woke the next morning, found I couldn’t get them back in my ears.  Trying to re-pierce cartilage at 6AM is so not worth the effort so I shambled off to work and bid a solemn farewell to one set of piercings.

Next to go was my belly-button ring.  It started hurting.  A lot.  About five months after I got it I started feeling this terrible burning pain all the time, and I was never able to change the piercing without problems.  It simply wasn’t healing, and to add weirdness to it, it also started migrating out.  The reason, it turns out, is that my skin was rejecting it.  My skin literally pushed my belly-button ring out, and I now have a fantastic scar there from the two months it took me to get what was going on.  So, goodbye to that one as well.

I removed my second set of earrings for my wedding and forgot to put them in again after the honeymoon.  When I finally remembered, the holes were long gone.  Four years of healing, gone just like that after one week.  I’m left with one measly set of piercings.  How very tame.

The reason I bring all this up is that I tried to put earrings into my ears for church on Sunday.  And couldn’t get them in.  I had to re-pierce my ears for the millionth time, and it occurred to me that I will never have problem-free piercings.  Ever.  Do you know why?  Because I’ve had these piercings since I was 12, which, in two weeks, will officially be half my life.  If half my lifetime is not enough time for my ears to heal properly, they’re never going to do it until I’m 100 years old and my earlobes are situated somewhere around my ankles and the holes are large enough to use as football goalposts.

Do you have any idea what would have happened if I’d liked tattoos instead?  I’d probably have started off with a pretty butterfly or something and ended up with some ugly sailor flipping me the bird.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

10 Comments
Filed under: Fashion

TTDNST: Shoes

Author: Erika

Apr 16

For today’s Things That Do Not Suck Thursday, I’m going to give in to my girlier side and wax a bit poetic all at the same time.  I’m not going to assault you with a haiku or anything, but I do want to talk about shoes for a brief moment.  In my opinion, there are very few other things a modern woman can rhapsodize about other than shoes.

You see, I can look at shoes for hours without feeling bad about my life or my finances.  Clothes?  Not so much.  I was tempted into browsing Old Navy’s site the other day and looking at all the reasonably priced clothing made me despair.  Jeans for $10!  Shirts for $7!  The cuuuutest summer dresses for a pittance!  All around me these affordable clothes swirled, enrapturing me with their so-close-and-yet-so-far accessibility.

You see, I buy clothes once per year.  I spend the first six months enjoying my new clothes, loving them, giving them preferential treatment over the other clothes.  As they fade or fray, I start the grim cycle that is my decision to buy new clothes.  I’ll set benchmarks for myself: I’ll buy new clothes if I see a good sale in October.  Sales will drift by and a new benchmark will be set, met, and overrun.

On and on until my clothes are in tatters a year later and I force myself to set aside a tiny amount of money to buy the essentials: a new pair of jeans to replace the one with the holes, three new pairs of shirts to take the place of the ones that are either too frayed or too faded to wear in public anymore, maybe a package of socks so that I’ll own socks that don’t have holes in them.

Then, because I only buy enough clothes to last me for half the week, I end up wearing my new clothes twice a week and they’re all worn to bits come one year later.  Every year I tell myself I’ll buy more clothes for myself next year, and every year I’m proven a liar.  Browsing through clothes is like a thousand tiny reminders that my wardrobe is less than half as adequate as I’d like it to be.

Shoes, though.  Shoes are different.  I can browse through shoes without feeling avarice because looking at shoes feels more like admiring art than shopping.  Shoes, in all their myriad styles, heights, colors, fabrics, and decorations are beautiful to me.  I like them on my feet obviously, but I like them nearly as well just about anywhere.

I ran into these shoes the other day and knew I had to share them, if for no other reason than they match the daffodils from yesterday:

Oh yum.

Oh yum. Yes please, and thank you.

They’re Christian Louboutin.  I love Christian’s shoes but I could pay a mortgage payment with two pairs of these beauties.  He has a way of crafting shoes that do the same thing everyone else has been doing for centuries, just better.  Some girls have a thing for Manolo Blahnik (thanks, Sex and the City), other ladies prefer Franco Sarto or Prada or Nine West.  For me, it’s Christian Louboutin.  His shoes, and these shoes in particular, are this week’s Thing That Does Not Suck because you don’t have to be able to afford them to admire them.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

10 Comments
Filed under: Fashion, Lifestyle, Things That Do Not Suck

Erika Mitchell and the Case of the Vanishing Weekend

Author: Erika

Jan 12

Can you help me find something? I swear, I just had it around here a second ago, and then I turned around and poof! It was gone.

It had two days, I didn’t have to work during it at all, I was supposed to spend it relaxing…I’m pretty sure it’s called a “weekend” but darn it, I seem to have mis-placed it! I suppose I’ll just have to wait for the next go-around in four days.

We made it through the (mysteriously missing) weekend, but only barely. After the rehearsal on Friday evening, the wedding all day on Saturday, and church on Sunday, we barely even had time to switch outfits before we were bustling out the door again. The next time Wes and I are in a wedding, we’re taking a day off work to recuperate because man, is that exhausting.

So fatigued was I, in fact, that when I tried to style my hair this morning it totally flipped me the bird and told me to go do something unmentionable to myself. I had to bobby-pin my bangs back and call it a day because there was no coaxing those suckers out of entropy. Not with any amount of hairspray and profanity.

As tired and disheveled as we are, though, we at least made it through. Wes ushered people into the church with aplomb, and I managed not to faint while reading Scripture during the ceremony. It was certainly not for lack of trying, though.

I have a wee bit of stage fright that manifests in the usual way: increased blood pressure, freezing cold hands, desperate desire to run screaming from the building.

My stage fright this time, though, was momentous. My blood pressure was so high that I got white spots in my vision and afterward had to sit down for two hours in order to feel right again. What a wreck!

Supposedly, I read my passage of Scripture well enough, but I don’t remember it. For all I know, I could have read the copyright information at the beginning of the Bible and everyone is just telling me I did well so that I don’t bolt before they can book me a room in the “Special Needs” motel.

Through it all, though, Wes and I made it out the other side just fine and even managed to spend some quality time together yesterday. One afternoon with my husband isn’t enough to redeem an entire weekend bursting with people/places/faces, but it is enough to keep me going until the next time I can hole up in my house for a weekend of recharging.

For two exhausted people, we manage to clean up pretty nicely. If I do say so myself.

Please note the amazing little black dress, courtesy of my mother-in-law, that prompted no less than four little old ladies from church to tell me I looked hot.
Wes even took it a step further by telling me I looked “movie-star pretty”. If it were possible, I’d marry him again.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

4 Comments
Filed under: Fashion

Starting the New Year Off With a Bang

Author: Erika

Jan 3

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never vacation too long:

You start getting all kinds of strange, crazy ideas in your noggin that can segue to life-altering consequences. This photo that I’m sharing with you here is the first in some shocking evidence I just received: I have bangs.
For the first time since I was 10 years old, I am sporting little tiny hairs at the apex of my browline.
It all started with a fabulous Christmas present from my in-laws. An innocuous little cut/color appointment to start my New Year off right.
The appointment weighed heavily on my mind all week, daunting me (I obviously need more important things to worry about). Should I go long? Short? Dark? Light? Bangs or no bangs.
I ran the bangs idea by my stylist and she took it from there. An hour later, my hair was cut, colored, and I had no idea who the person in the mirror was. I thought she looked sassy, but she didn’t look like me at all.
Now, I’m home and the realization that I have bangs is slowly dawning on me. What have I done?! My hair is really cute, but this look is so different I’m having cognitive dissonance just from looking at my face (This is, needless to say, why I will probably never do plastic surgery. Think of the therapy bills!)
Regardless of how unfamiliar I now look, I am very pleased with the results. It’s something I’ve mulled over for a long time and I’m glad I took the plunge. I don’t want to die without any scars, so to speak.
Wes is a big fan as well. He enjoys the fringe benefit (Ha! You see what I just did there? So terribly punny) of having a wife who gets her kicks from changing up her hair, which is that it’s kind of pleasant to look at the person you see every day with fresh eyes. It certaily doesn’t hurt that my stylist is a maven with coloring and cutting my hair, either.
Whichever way you want to slice it, my hair is bangin’ now (Yet again with the bad pun. You can stop reading if you feel nauseous) and I get to live with it until it grows out again. As far as brash style choices go, this one turned out alright. It could have been worse, I could have embraced Hammer pants or, even worse, leggings as pants.

Post to Twitter Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

6 Comments
Filed under: Fashion
« Go Back — View more posts »