The Michelle Obama Dress

Just one more reason to like Michelle Obama. ^__^

(Also I have a fashion idol to emulate who is not Dora the Explorer.)

I have the pink one, and I want the blue one too. Unfortch the blue one was all sold out at the ATL, as was the green one (the green one's even sold out online, except for size 18). There's also a white one, but.the one I tried on was already stained with someone else's makeup even before I got a chance to slip it over my head. So... yeah.

The unfortunate side of all this is my going back through the ATL advertisements to see if my suspicion is right, which it is: all the models wearing these Michelle Obama dresses are white. The dress itself comes in four colors, but the models only come in one.

(Meanwhile, the internet, no doubt sensing my dissatisfaction at ATL's shortsightedness, provides an interesting solution: no doubt picking up the keywords "Michelle Obama" and "fashion," all of my gmail sidebar ads are now suggesting I shop at J. Crew.)

Let's Go Exploring!

I was re-organizing my closet yesterday, taking out the winter dresses (like my pretty black-and-white mandala dress that I bought for the office holiday party) and putting in the warm-weather dresses that I bought last summer (and the ones that I bought last week).

I made three interesting discoveries.

First: ATL has been “price-fixing” its dress sizes. Last summer when I started buying clothing at the ATL I wore a size 2 petite, and now I wear a 4 regular, and I was all “zomg I have to lay off the Hello Cupcakes” but when I tried on my size 2 petite dresses I found out that they all fit just fine. So ATL has been messing with my head for no good reason.

Secondly: I own seventeen warm-weather dresses, all of which I love wearing. This is important because it means I’m very close to a critical number.

See, once back when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was on the air, I heard Carson Kressley say that a person’s goal should be to have a unified style but to not repeat the same outfit more than once a month.

It was a big deal for me back in August when I was able to go two weeks without repeating an outfit. (I don’t think I’d ever been able to do that, ever, in my life.)

Now I have seventeen dresses. Add in Jeans Fridays and I can go for four weeks without repeating an outfit and still have a dress left over. This is phenomenal.

Third: So… um… the New Dora. That is to say, they’ve given Dora the Explorer a new look, from this:



To this:
And say what you like about the change (Jezebel says plenty), but the first thing I thought of when I saw the New Dora was “oh crap, that’s what I look like every day.”


Cute dress (like the one pictured above), leggings, ballet flats, long hair worn straight down my back, pretty jewelry.

My professional look is the same as a cartoon character who hangs around with a talking backpack and a monkey.

Crap crap crap crap crap.

I suppose the plus side is that, with the advent of spring, leggings season is nearly over. And maybe enough people will complain about the New Dora that she’ll get retired before next fall. ^__^

The Money's Under My Hat

Anyone who knows me knows that I am inveterately frugal; so much so that, when I actually do go and buy something I've needed for a while (after using it up, wearing it out, making it do and doing without--in that order), I often get a feeling that can only be summed up as follows:

Having one of these is SO AWESOME.

In short, I have a hat. Which I bought particularly because I was going to be going to NYC this weekend for TMBG; the seats are general admission and I plan to be queuing for a while, and it's going to be cold.

Now, my frugal mindset says "so do what you do on other days when it is cold; pull your pashmina over your head." But then the "I want TMBG to think I'm cute" mindset popped up and said "when you do that, people tease you about looking like an old lady."

So I did a little online research and found out that in late February, stores are practically giving hats away, and I got this little $50 number marked down to $16.

And now I have a hat.

Having a hat is so awesome. It keeps my ears so much warmer than my pashmina did. Plus it is undeniably cute. ^__^

I guess, in the end, one of the benefits of being otherwise frugal is that it makes small things, like buying a hat or buying a mixing bowl, much more enjoyable than they have any right to be. 'Cause I am loving this hat, just like I love my bowl, my toaster, my annotated Pride and Prejudice, my Ira Glass-signed Kings of Nonfiction, and--of course--my laptop camera.

And I'm going to see TMBG this weekend wearing an awesome hat!!!!!

MBT FTW

So... my feet.

I like to think that I walk a marathon every week, which, considering that I log at least 17.5 miles just walking back and forth to work, seems plausible. I probably don't hit the full 26 miles every week, but I come close.

On August 5, I bought a pair of Champion brand "maryjane sneakers" from Payless for $12.

Sometime in mid-September, the velcro holding down the straps came loose, so I sewed it back on.

And about two weeks ago, I started having foot pain.

I think it actually started a bit earlier than that, but I didn't understand what it was; it was taking longer than the usual 1/2 hour for me to walk to work, and my legs were feeling heavier. (This I chalked up to a side effect of what I was reading on the scale.)

Then I started having heel pain in my left foot. Then in both feet. I decided it was time for a new pair of shoes.

First I went to Ecco, mostly because I knew that the Googlers wear Eccos, and Google is pretty much the smartest game going right now. (I wonder what shoes Barack Obama wears?)

I went over my lunch break, which was in retrospect a mistake. I also got a salesguy, who, when I asked if he had any Kriyas in stock, had no idea. "What's a Kriya?" he asked. Then he tried to sell me a pair of Ecco-brand high heels.

I ended up snagging a pair of Ecco Jumps. Not as sexy as the Kriya, but the salesguy couldn't find any. (Note to shoestores: I hate it when you hide your shoes in the back and make us ask for them. I also hate it when your salespeople put the shoes on me. I can do it myself, and better, and six times as fast.)

The first day, the Jumps felt fine. Then the next day I woke up and my feet were in can-barely-walk pain. I limped around for the next three days, trying to break the Jumps in, and only got more and more miserable.

So I went to the other shoe store on my block, a Comfort One outlet. There I got my feet "professionally" analyzed by a fancy machine that told me that my weekly marathon in the Payless Champions had caused problems in both my gait and my heels. (I got to see my feet on a giant screen with the heels lit up in red, and the salesguy asked me "are you having some pain there?")

Long story short, I spent almost two hours at Comfort One talking to the staff (who seem to know more about shoes and feet than Mr. "What's a Kriya?"), and tried on many different pairs of shoes and orthodic insoles in the name of relieving my heel pain, fixing my gait, and avoiding screwing up my "I had foot surgery in January" right big toe. (Boy-oh-boy, spending all that time in those Payless shoes is sounding stupider by the moment.)

And then I tried on the MBTs. I've actually blogged about these shoes before, without realizing it. To quote myself:

[I] wandered into stores and looked at these weird shoes that have soles like rocking-chair balances and claim to add "+9 Resistance To Your Abs, Thighs, And Butt!" (I wanted to take out my pen and add "And Ogres!" to the sign... but resisted. +9 resisted.)

Well, now I am wearing a brand-new pair of MBTs and I too have +9 resistance against thighs, butts, and ogres.

Seriously, team: putting these shoes on was like stepping into a little piece of awesome. All my foot pain instantly disappeared. My posture re-aligned. I can once again clear 2 miles in under 1/2 hour. And every step is... well, the shoes are supposed to simulate walking barefoot on sand, and it's been a long time since I've done that, but it feels right.

The best part, of course, was that I managed to get my pair for half price (current retail price is $260). What I did: I didn't buy any shoes after my two-hour stint in the Comfort One store. First I had to make sure I could return the Eccos, and secondly I had to do some research to make sure the MBTs weren't the foot equivalent of the Master Cleanse. Upon doing my research, I found out something very interesting: this year's MBTs were $260, but last year's models, if they could be found, generally retailed around $120.

So the next day I walked back into that Comfort One and said "I want a pair of MBT Boost Blues in a 38. Do you have that in the back?"

This time, the salesguy knew exactly what I was talking about.

And I am the happiest little walker on the planet.

So I Promised You A Picture...

In an earlier post, I sent out a challenge to my mom: send me a picture of me-as-a-little-girl wearing a dress made out of the same fabric as a shirt I recently found at ATL.

She called me and said "I don't think we have any pictures of you wearing that dress."

I thought about it, and she was right. I don't think we have any pictures of me wearing that dress. Never mind that I have a romanticized memory of wearing it for what seems like an entire summer, visiting my cousins at my grandparents' house in Portland, OR and eating fresh blueberries off of a bush in their backyard.

It was probably the same summer where my grandmother bought me an entire Charleston Chew bar at a grocery store and then kept it in the freezer for me, doling it out piece by piece.

It may have been the same summer in which I ran around with another set of cousins at their home in Washington, re-enacting Grimms' Fairy Tales because we were dorks like that.

It was likely it was the same summer in which another uncle in Idaho (we were taking the extended-relatives tour) promised my sister and I that if we climbed to the top of Moscow Mountain we would find a McDonalds at its peak and he would buy us ice-cream cones. (We didn't believe him; we knew it was just an excuse to drag kids along on an extremely boring all-day nature walk, and no, he didn't buy us any ice cream at the end.)

But I know it was the summer in which, at the end of the vacation, my mom told me it was so good to see me running around and acting like a little girl instead of a like a miniature adult. ^__^

Here's the ATL shirt, again:



And here's the dress.


(Which my mother MADE. By HAND. Just so you know.)

Everything Old Is Still New Again

A fall shirt, from ATL.

Original price $40, but I got it for $8 thanks to savvy coupon-handling.

The whole time I had it on I kept thinking "I've worn this before."

The smocking, the burgundy... and something was very familiar about those little roses.

Then I remembered. When I was nine or ten my mother made me a dress out of very similar material. The same little rose pattern, nearly the same color. It even had rows of smocking across the front, all hand-sewn.

Mom, if you scan/send me a picture of me wearing that dress I'll post it on the blog, along with a current pic of me in the shirt. ^__^

Seriously, ATL, I Would Totally Let You Photograph Me Wearing Your Clothes

So today I was in the Ann Taylor Loft, pricing things. I go in about twice a week to check the price tags on a few items I particularly like, to see if they've been discounted; currently I'm sitting on four "50% off" coupons, and I want to get the most out of them.

They've been redoing the store for fall; last week they painted the entire thing "Autumn brown," and today there was a woman bustling around the place with a clipboard. Clearly "from corporate," this woman was busy telling all of the sales assistants where to set up the yet-to-be-revealed fall displays.

Then she saw me and stared at me for a very long moment. I was wearing ATL, which is no surprise because I buy most of my clothes there now. Today I was wearing this dress:


and I was wearing it over a pair of jeans because it's starting to get a little cold outside.

Anyway. The woman "from corporate" looked me up and down. Then she said "I've never seen anyone wear our dresses over jeans before. I like it."

It was my brush with greatness.




(Pic taken from eBay 'cause ATL's not currently advertising that dress on its site.)

The Hundred Dresses Project

The Hundred Dresses, for those of you who don't remember your children's literature, is a short "chapter book" by Eleanor Estes about a small American town and the new student who swears she has a hundred dresses, even though she only wears the same faded dress to school. At the end of the book she moves away (Katherine Paterson would have killed her off), and the other students discover that she has 100 drawings of dresses, all hanging up in rows in her former bedroom.

I don't think that I will ever own one hundred dresses; not at the same time, anyway. Still, I can't help referring to my "work clothes accumulation" endeavor as the hundred dresses project.

Why dresses? A few reasons. I've always liked dresses, ever since I was two years old and told my mother that I was going to wear only dresses, every day, for the rest of my life. (I actually managed to wear dresses, nearly exclusively, for most of my toddler/early childhood years. My parents had to trick me into wearing pants by doing things like asking my kindergarten teacher to tell me I was required to wear jeans to school.)

"Wear-to-work" dresses are also far less expensive than putting together work outfits involving slacks/skirts and blouses. If a dress costs the same as a skirt, it's idiotic (in my still-budget-obsessed mind) to buy both the skirt and the blouse when one can get just the dress and have the entire outfit done with.

Oh, and I can never find dress pants that fit me properly. Always too big in the waist, too snug in the hips, and too long in the legs.

Thus, dresses. ^__^

I don't have a hundred. Not even close. Right now I have fourteen. Nearly all of them are from Ann Taylor Loft, which has become my favorite go-to clothing store. (It is a testament to my provincial and/or shopping-deprived former lifestyle that, when I first went into ATL and they wrapped the clothes up in tissue paper before putting them in a fancy bag, it just about blew my mind. They never did that at Target.)

Four of these pretty dresses were bought this afternoon, and now I will show you pictures, because everyone likes pictures!


My favorite of the lot. So cute!

This one actually looks much better on me than it does on the model. Sometimes it helps to have actual curves.

Ditto for this one. I would happily model for ATL for free, if they would ever ask. (Since their clothes are designed for petite women, it would be nice if they actually had a photograph of a petite model in their stores. I volunteer myself.)

And there's the blue one. I always look good in blue. ^__^

No, I don't think I will ever have a hundred dresses. But it might be fun to cap out at 25. What's a little surprising to think about is that I'm more than halfway there. Forget 100 -- I've never even had fourteen dresses in my closet at any one time.

I love dressing for work. ^__^ And I can hardly wait to have all my dresses hung in my closet, organized by color, in my almost-there apartment.

"We're Not All Stick Figures..."

Now that I'm earning "real" money, I find myself absolutely delighted when I see something like this XKCD skirt. It would be perfect to wear to work and I can afford to buy it! (And, at $35, it's cheaper than what I might find in a department store.)


I was all ready to place my order and then realized I was missing several valuable pieces of information. Thus, the email I am sending to Randall Munroe (who, according to his website, manages his own online store):

Dear Mr. Munroe,

I really-really-really want to place an order for your new Regex Cheat Skirt, but I don't want to pick the wrong size. Would it be possible for you to post two pieces of information to the store description:

1. What kind of fabric the skirt is made out of,

and

2. A picture of just the skirt (not on a model), so I can see how the waistline is cut in proportion to the hip width?

I know this sounds like a huge dork request, but it's important to all the women out there who have a large hip-to-waist ratio. We never know whether we need to buy the next size up.

Many thanks,

etc.

I wonder if he'll respond?

What If I Don't Look Good In "August?"

I love Ann Taylor Loft. Mostly because, like Old Navy when I was in high school, everything in the store is sized to fit my body.

I went in last weekend specifically to buy this dress:


I also ended up buying this one, simply because it fit so well:


When I took the dresses up to the register, the person working the checkout told me that the purple on the second dress was "the color for August." She then added "so you'll be able to wear the brown dress for a few more weeks, and then everyone is going to switch over to purple and green -- you just watch!"

So my pretty brown dress is going to expire sooner than a gallon of milk???

The worst thing is that I don't think I actually look all that great in purple. I bought the purple-and-black dress because it fit perfectly and the price was right, but I -- for serious -- never wear purple. Why can't August's color be blue? I can totally rock blue!

Today I wore the purple-and-black dress into the office. I went into a meeting, and three other women were wearing the exact same shade of purple.

And it's still only July.

Blue's Blouse

I bought a new blouse today, since I have some more interviews scheduled for next week and the blouse I had been wearing with my suit was starting to look like it had been washed too many times.

I had to buy on credit, unfortunately, because I'm still technically broke; but I was pretty lucky and found a silk blouse on the clearance rack at Ann Taylor for only $20.

The last time I went to Ann Taylor (almost a year ago exactly), I discovered that their particular system of vanity sizing insisted I was a size 2 petite, although in every other store I'm generally around a size 4 or 6.

This time, according to my new blouse, I'm a size 0 petite.

I suppose shopping there is good for my ego, if nothing else. ^__^

If The Shoe Fits..

About a month ago, my mom and I went shoe-shopping.

We both noticed something weird. We each bought a couple of pairs of shoes (to be specific, Mom bought me a couple of pairs of shoes), but all the shoes we bought were a half-size smaller than the shoes we usually wore.

We decided that vanity sizing must have finally trickled down to the shoe industry. Why else would a person who usually wore a 7 1/2 wide suddenly only fit into a 7 regular?

I packed away the new shoes (since they were "office shoes") and only pulled them out again when I started my temporary receptionist job.

They didn't fit.

I was able to squeeze my feet into both pairs, but they were ridiculously uncomfortable. I've worn both pairs to work, and both days have ended up, around lunchtime, slipping the shoes off and hiding barefoot behind my desk. (No one can see my feet, and I slip back into the shoes if I ever have to stand up and go anywhere.)

So what's this all about? Why would both my mother and I "shrink" half a shoe size and then grow it back? Is it cyclic or something? (If so, wouldn't I have noticed my size-shifting feet before?)

Or was it just a weird day in the shoe store?

The Dress

I have a dress.
From Express.
In two shades, too:
Red and blue.

I thought the dress fit well
Until -- what the hell??? --
I saw it repeated in D.C.
With everyone's hem way above the knee.

Seriously, I see this exact dress at least once a day
On the street or coming out of the subway
No one ever wears the red one, they all wear the blue
And it clings so tight I can see their hoo-hoos.

I bought a size 6, straight off the rack
But compared to these women, I'm wearing a sack.
Do they all wear these dresses, that snug, to the office?
That's what I thought the dress was for, but since I can't think of a rhyme for office, I'm going to have to stop the poem here and let you all make your own judgments. Here's a picture of the dress (in red) from eBay:




Now imagine that worn skin-tight. Is that -- for serious -- the way the dress is supposed to fit?

I'm As Big As A Small Man!

I don't have enough summer shirts (read: t-shirts) to last an entire week.

Before, I would cheat by (gasp!) wearing a shirt more than once w/o washing.

Turns out DC weather makes that impossible, if not unfeasible. Even walking to put a thank-you note in a mailbox causes my clothes to stick to my skin.

So what's a frugal recent graduate to do?

Buy a five-pack of men's undershirts, of course. Size small. 5 shirts for $6.95 is the best deal going.

(And white goes with everything.)

It does make me sad, a little bit, to be going around in a white undershirt during the Year of the Summer Dress, but I console myself with the idea that, by the end of the summer, I might be earning enough money to buy a dress or two of my own.

Until then, I'll girl up my manly shirt with strings of junk jewelry and toenail polish.

On The Side, On The Front, But NEVER On The Back

My sister requested I put this on the blog, because she really, really, really wants to know the answer:

Earlier today we were at the National Portrait Gallery (my favorite of the Smithsonians, by far). Sis was wearing a backpack. The guard stopped her and told her she could wear her backpack either on her side, or on her front, but she could not wear it on her back.

Sis said "okay," and started walking around the museum with the backpack slung over one shoulder, like we all used to do in 1997. On the side, right? But one room later, another guard stopped her and said that too much of her backpack was on her back.

"On your side or on your front," he said again.

Sis carried the backpack in her arms for the rest of our visit.

Sure, rules are rules, but there were all kinds of women walking around the museum with those giant tote-purses worn over one shoulder and resting against their back. Why weren't they being stopped?

And what's the big deal about wearing something on your back anyway? Our best guess was that maybe if you wore something on your back, someone could sneak something in, like... a portrait.

Anyone know why they came up with this rule? (And why totes are exempt?)

CafePress FTW!

A few weeks ago, I received a t-shirt from Threadless as a present.

I also bought four t-shirts from J. C. Penney.

And then I went and got a single t-shirt from CafePress.

The Threadless shirt lasted two washes before it started looking dismal and worn. The J. C. Penney shirts shrank in the washing machine, which is strange, because I didn't dry them.

And the CafePress shirt looks exactly like it did when I bought it. It's sturdy, durable, and doesn't wreck itself in the washing machine.

I think I need to buy all my novelty t-shirts from CafePress from now on. ^__^

I Stopped Being "Forever 21" A Long Time Ago

I have a conundrum.

1. Thanks to all the yoga and inserted calisthenics (sit-ups, etc.), I'm finally toned up enough that I might be able to pull off a pair of really short shorts and a crop top.

2. I have a nagging fear that, since hitting the other side of 25, I am now too old to pull off a pair of really short shorts and a crop top.

What to do?