Archive for the ‘ Fashion ’ Category

Stain Magnate

Author: Erika

Sep 9

Wesley’s parents gifted him with a most timely and necessary birthday gift this year: new clothes. They voyaged with him to the outlet mall yesterday and bought him some much-needed new t-shirts, sweaters, and pants.

The reason these new clothes were so needed and thusly so appreciated is that my husband has an inexorable relationship with stains. Try as he might, his body exerts an unseen magnetic-like attractive force that invites every crumb, splatter, and splotch to land squarely somewhere on his personage. I can honestly say that he tries to avoid staining his clothes but it’s like trying to butter a piece of untoasted bread with cold butter: completely hopeless.

He showed me his new acquisitions last night and we began the delightful task of removing the tags from the clothes (clothes really feel like they’re yours when you get to remove the tags, don’t they?). As I was reviewing the care instructions on all his new clothes, I realized that when you bring a new item of clothing into your wardrobe, you have to form a kind of relationship with it.

You have to learn which of your other clothing items it looks sharp with and which it looks schlumpy with. You have to learn how to care for it (Would you like to be tumbled dry on low heat or laid flat to dry? Can I interest you in some fabric softener? How about a nice steam ironing? Care to take a trip to the dry cleaner?) and make room for it amongst your other clothes. You have to deal with the ensuing emotions that come from introducing new clothes to your old ones (personally, I always like my existing clothes a little less when I see how frayed/faded/dated they are in comparison to my shiny new clothes.)

Therein lies the danger in buying new clothes: they severely decrease the chance that you will wear your older clothes again. This is partially the reason we never buy new clothes. We figure that as long as the clothes cover our bodies and are decent to wear in public, they’re probably fine and don’t need to be replaced.

Luckily, our annual trip to Goodwill with unwearable clothes is coming up. This means room in the closets for new clothes and more than one pair of pants for me to wear! I’ll be sure to fill you in on my sticker shock as I confront the prospect of spending money on something as stainable and transient as clothing. It’s sure to be a hoot!

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Filed under: Fashion, Just plain nonsense

Clothed in Good Sense

Author: Erika

Jul 30

At the behest of a friend of mine, I checked out a blog today that offers advice for women about how to dress at work. I thought it would be a site with some advice about how to dress your figure and when you should or shouldn’t wear open-toed shoes. What I didn’t count on was it being filled to the brim with adorable dresses, coats, and shoes so cute that I considered going out and finding a high-paying job just so I would have an excuse to wear them.

As I’ve said many times, working in sweatpants is fantastic. I love that I can take breaks to fold laundry, cook dinner, and play with my puppy if I so desire (and I frequently do.) I wouldn’t trade that freedom for anything.

However, cute shoes will not be ignored.

There, now that I’ve just spewed girliness all over your monitor, here comes the pragmatic side that Wes loves so well. Some of these dresses cost upwards of $300.

Wait, that figure needs more emphasis…$300

When I first saw that price-tag, I wondered if the dress came with a personal valet who would handle its care and mending. I mean, wow, that’s just a lot of money for clothes.

The way I feel about clothes is pretty conflicted. I love clothes, I love shoes, and I have been known to squeal when confronted with cute purses, but I think there could not possibly be a worse use for money than expensive clothes.

Think about it: One wrong turn o’the wrist with some red wine, one unfortunate sharp edge on an open drawer, one ice cream too many and your $300 dress is now useless. It’s too much of a gamble to have nice clothes because there’s no guarantee you’ll get your money’s worth before the garment becomes unusable.

Shirts in particular bedevil me because shirts seem to incur the most damage of all, don’t they? They catch all your crumbs, they absorb most of your sweat, and they are usually the first to tell you that perhaps you should consider switching to sorbet. I love cute blouses but I just can’t, in good rationale, justify spending loads of money on the untrustworthy shirt.

Pants are a bit different, because a good pair of jeans is worth its weight in gold, but not by much. I’ll never, ever, spend hundreds of dollars on jeans because, really, what is the point? I can get jeans from Old Navy for $30 that cover my bits just as well and no one but maybe .005% of the population can tell the difference. No, no, will not spend loads of money on pants, which at a moment’s notice can rip at the knee and leave you debating whether anyone can possibly pull off cut-offs in this present age.

Don’t even get me started on expensive jewelry. I have trouble seeing the point here as well because there’s no guarantee your umpteen thousand dollar jewel isn’t going to fall off after your ring/earring/necklace catches on an unfortunate piece of cashmere. I’d much rather fly to Paris for the weekend than have a diamond necklace.

How about you, are you a clothes-horse or do you consider an expedition to Ross the ultimate big-game hunting?

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Filed under: Fashion, Lifestyle

Shoes, Booze, and Chocolate

Author: Erika

Feb 13

I am very pleased to announce that I had nary a nightmare last night. I was pretty tense when I came home though because, quite frankly, quitting suddenly is a stressful situation. It was the right decision but it’s hard to say goodbye to the people I’ve worked with for the last eight months. Wes, in his typical sweetheart fashion, offered to do the dishes so I could go upstairs and take a bubble bath.

He made me a cosmo and sent me away to relax. While I was waiting for the bath tub to fill up I told Wes that when our sons are older and ask us how to be good husbands I’m going to tell them to give their ladies booze when they’re feeling stressed (because apparently I’m grooming my future daughters-in-law to be alcoholics and my sons to be enablers). Wes offered that shoes also make women happy, then later appended that chocolate really must be entered in for consideration as well.

Before we knew it, we had discovered the perfect trifecta guaranteed to make almost every woman smile: shoes, booze, and chocolate. I could probably get away with writing a doctoral thesis on that alone.

Completely unrelated to anything, here’s a picture of Doc. He was having a tea party with Professors Quacks and Waddles and the Bobs when I broke the news to him that I’d quit my job. At first he was shocked:

When he realized that this meant I wouldn’t be so stressed and anxious anymore he was really happy for me:

Imagine that, a supportive husband and a supportive puppy. I really do have it all, don’t I?

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Filed under: Doc Holliday, Fashion, Food

6th Grade Trend-Setter

Author: Erika

Feb 11

As much as we deeply adore it, Wes and I may have to stop watching CSI: Anything for a while. I’ve been having the most grotesque nightmares the past couple of weeks and a lot of my gruesome inspiration comes from the show. It’s amazing how your brain can become a repository for everything you fill it with.

I know stress is a large part of the reason for these recent nightmares. I have a long history with bad dreams and they always seem to get more frequent when I’m stressed or anxious. Some of the nightmares are silly (I once woke up panicky and gasping because I’d dreamed that Wes and I had had a baby and people were coming over to see the baby and our house was a mess) and some are too disturbing to write about.

My very first nightmare was about the Terminator. I dreamed I was bowling with a group of people and then the Terminator came in, killed my friends, and chased me into the parking lot. I hid under a car and the Terminator plucked off his head, bowled it under the car I was hiding beneath, and the head detonated and I exploded.

That was when I learned about lucid dreaming and starting waking myself up during bad dreams. Unfortunately, I’ve been having so many of these lately that I find myself awake more often than not during the night. Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to alleviate some of this stress and anxiety and then the nightmares will stop. One can only hope.

I had a funny thought while plotting out this post, though. I was thinking about how my mind has always been tuned to the macabre side of things. For example, up until I was about 14 years old my favorite author was Edgar Allen Poe. When my mother took me shopping for back to school clothes for the 6th grade everything I picked out was black. I saw “The Nightmare Before Christmas” when it first came out in theatres (I was 8 years old) and I thought it was hilarious. The song about kidnapping Santa Claus was my favorite and I ran around the house singing it until my Dad asked that I stop because it was disturbing him (imagine an 8 year old running around gleefully singing “kidnap the sandy claws, throw him in a box. Bury him for ninety years, then see if he talks”).

This was before it was cool for the edgy kids to like Jack Skellington and it was certainly before wearing all black made you “goth”. Now that I think of it, Angelina Jolie is totally aping my 6th grade style with her all-black-all-the-time ensembles. The only thing I was missing back then were the gigantic sunglasses and that, my friends, is because when you’re anyone other than a famous person wearing humongous sunglasses only makes you look like an insect.

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Filed under: Fashion

I’ve Got Dorothy Beat By A Mile

Author: Erika

Dec 10

Oooooh my goodness. We’re leaving on Saturday and I’m so excited that I’m practically dancing in my seat. I will officially be the least productive person in the building this week, fo sho. Even if I weren’t already in Mexico (mentally, that is) there wouldn’t be much to do anyway so there’s no harm done. My manager is out town for the next month and my other manager decided to assign me some busy work that he will never a) be truly satisfied with and b) be able to rationally justify anyway so I’m just going to sit here and imagine the warm sun on my face.

Another reason I’m so wired is that we had a good weekend too. I’m practically glowing from the inside I’m so happiness-hung-over from the weekend. On Saturday we (meaning me, Wes, Wes’ mother, and Wes’ grandfather) took a voyage to CarToys and got Wesley his Christmas present from his parents and me: a CD player for his car and new speakers! His old speakers sounded a lot like when you try to make a telephone as kid, using two soup cans and some string, and then you and your brother/sister/invisible friend stand far enough apart that the string gets taut but instead of getting taut the knot you tied at the end of the string to hold it inside the soup can pulls right through and you get so frustrated because the hole you cut is too big and no way could you tie a knot big enough to keep the string inside so instead you throw the whole stupid contraption away and use the walkie talkies your grandparents gave you for your birthday instead even though they’re so much less like a cool handmade phone (screw you, Bill Nye!). Yeah, you know, like that?

The new speakers sound wonderful and the CD player is a vast improvement over the radio/cassette tape player that was there before (the radio display was broken so Wes just had to kind of guess which station he was on. He never mentioned that sad fact and I never knew until one day I had to borrow his car. Such a trooper!). I watched Wes drive Skippy (his car) away after everything was installed and he was bouncing and singing away. I love giving gifts that make people joyful, it makes me tingle to my toes!

Then, on Sunday, Wes and I had a lot of fun in very different ways. Wes went to the Seahawks game with his brother and sister-in-law and the Seahawks totally kicked butt. Wes had a lot of fun watching the game and came home in a great mood.

While Wes was watching football, I got to go shopping. I am not known for my spectacular spending abilities (I’m really more known for my post-money-spending anxiety attacks) but the stars must have aligned perfectly because I bought a lot of stuff. Like a super-cute skirt to wear in Mexico and a bathing suit that doesn’t look like I borrowed it from my grandmother. I also bought some makeup essentials (like foundation, lipstick, and lip-liner) that I’ve always been too frightened to buy for fear of making the wrong selection. I was in the drug store and I decided that I’m a grown woman now and I’m not afraid of cosmetics! So I bought them and, let me just say, Wes is going to be very surprised and happy to see me all prettied up for dinner on our anniversary. Mee-yeow!

The coup d’etat of the weekend was, however, the shoes. The decadent, impractical, glorious shoes I found at Ross. Oh. My. Goodness. They are 4” tall (yep, with those puppies on I am a staggering {literally} 6’ 2”), red, and so pleasing to look at. They do beautiful things to my calves and make my feet look like sculptures. Honestly, even if I could never wear them it would please me just to look at them. When I do wear them I just have to walk very slowly. Wes found it very funny how over the moon I was about the shoes but he told me, “Honey, if they make you this happy get ‘em in black, too!”. *Sigh*, such a husband have I! It was a busy weekend and it’s going to be a busy week (except at work, of course) but when it’s all said in done we shall be in Mexico with make-up and SHOES and it’s going to be awesome. I’ve posted a picture of them below so that you, too, can revel in the glory that is 4” heels. For my part, I’ll just be here trying not to combust in the office.