"At Least It's Modest"

To give my blog a little life, a little verve, a little . . .well, basically some pics . . . I'm going to do a new series called "At Least It's Modest." This will feature outfits/dresses/clothing I consider horrible and unfit for human wearing (or at least that don't look good on the humans who happen to be wearing them), but AT LEAST they don't show too much skin!! You aren't going to see all the many, many wretched, horrible AND skanky outfits that are being worn on this blog. No sir, wouldn't be caught dead in that!

So without further ado, here's our first specimen:



It's the actress Leelee Sobieski, and yes I did steal it from this blog.

Comments

I admit it, sometimes I like to see "1 Comment" underneath my blog post, even when it is my own comment! I don't really know why. I mean, it's not like I can fool myself into thinking the comment is from someone else . . . is it?

Shopping List

CHEESE
fresh fruit
lettuce
veggie burgers
Bailey's
ironing board
white apron
one other thing I can't remember . . .

Cutting My Own Bangs

The other day (well, night, actually) I created a fringe on myself. So now I have bangs! Even my coworkers were impressed when I said I cut my own hair, and they are guys. Oh, the other thing that's funny is that night I put an oblique and mysterious status update on Facebook, to make people wonder what I was up to. Kathleen guessed right away, since she was the one to whom I was chatting when the bangs idea came to me. In fact, this was the exact exchange on Tuesday:

me: should I get bangs???
Kathleen: sure
me: I should
whoa
Kathleen: why not?
me: I don't know
it's probably just what I need!

So, of course, after work I stopped at K-Mart and bought a pair of hair-cutting scissors (which, by the way, cost way more than I thought--$10!--but I will no doubt make use of them again) and then after I got home from my choir practice I Googled "how to cut your own bangs" and, at around 12 a.m., I started snipping away. Scariest thing I've ever done. I mean, other things are scary, because you think, "Ahhh, I could DIE!" but this was scary because OMG, I could be ugly. Yeah. But the bangs turned out just fine, in the end.

A Friend's Blog

To the one person who may be reading this, I have been asked to share the link to a very dear friend's blog. She is a much better writer than I am, and certainly deserves the shoutout, so take a look and pass the link along yourself if you like what you see!

Can I Skip It?

I have never felt more like skipping my birthday for a year than I do now. I simply have no idea what to do for it, whether to have a party for myself, to go off on some wild adventure, to stay at home and do nothing . . . ? I don't even want cake and ice cream! It is odd. What do you do when the prospect of a birthday no longer seems exciting and fun?

Redesign

One good reason to put off redesigning your blog is that they come up with better and better new free templates you can use. So that is what I have done. And now, magically, you can see the full picture of me in the Cotswalds, which before was just a segment of the beautiful hills and sheep. Let it be noted, however, that I no longer wear my glasses, because they are broken. I am either sight-ful, with contacts, or battily blind without them.

Climbing Is Cheery

Recently, I've been in the process of taking up climbing (as in, rock climbing, only right now it's in the form of bouldering at the gym, because I have no partner yet), and there are two main things I've picked up so far. First, climbing is cheery! Yesterday at the gym, as I was scratching my head at the boulder wall, and putting together one or two moves, mostly the wrong ones, this kid came in, strapped on his shoes, and began climbing each wall in turn. Every time he got off, whether he had sent it (that is, completed the wall by grabbing the top) or not, he'd jump off and land with a big smile on his face. That, I think, is what climbing is all about. And, coincidentally, that is when I decided I could do the wall that I had been staring at, after he nimbly walked up it. So I sent it too. :)

Second, climbers are smart. If it comes to a thing you do for the love of it, you try to do it the best way possible. So it seems to me that a lot of climbing involves thinking yourself through the process--thinking confidently and quietly, the same way you are going to climb it. And this is precisely where I fall down. I am used to taking the mental shortcut, if I can find it. There are no shortcuts in climbing. You think through all of it or none of it. Even if you don't realize you are thinking, you have to be thinking. Because it's the muscle-memory and the spatial reasoning working together--that is what the great climbers can do.

A third thing I could mention, which doesn't even bear mentioning, is conditioning. You have to be very strong, physically. This is something that pertains to the malleability of our bodies, though, so I don't find it to be a big issue. If I keep doing it, I'll be conditioned for it, right? The attitude and the thought process are the more valuable lessons.