You wear what you wear

Winter is upon us, and you know what that means: it's time to go shopping!

I don't know about you, but going out shopping more often than not fills me with dread. Now and then I'll make a trip out to the Sears clearance section, but by and large when I get the urge to consume, I hit the internet.

When I'm in the market for some new duds, I have a lot of requirements. Most importantly: they must be cheap. Ideally, I avoid bold prints in favor of solids, 100% cotton is the only way to go, and if I gotta have a waistband it ought to be elastic. Can anyone say "gray cotton knits"?

I don't think this is too much to ask, but the more affordable clothing purveyors out there don't seem to agree. Even if all these criteria are met, they'll try to pawn off some t-shirts on you that are so thin you have to buy two and wear them at the same time. What, do they think we're chumps?

That's why a place like hanes.com keeps me coming back for more. I don't typically rave about any particular product or company but I've been very satisfied with my Hanes purchases. They even have some schnazzy and comfortable dresses! Of course it goes without saying that they're the only company I trust when it comes to underwears.

I've got this gray classic sweatsuit waiting in my shopping cart, and I know when I finally pull the trigger on that extravagant purchase I'll just be giddy with anticipation waiting for the day I can dress up in my cozy sweatmobile. My only complaint is that it's nearly impossible to reach the free shipping threshold of $70. That's a lot of underwear! So if any the big shots at Hanes.com are reading this, take note. Or you could help a gal out with some nice discounts, I will gladly turn this blog into one big Hanes ad.

Happy shopping!

P.S.- From what I understand, all of my adoring fans out there can get email updates so that when it takes me weeks to update you will be kept abreast of all my hanes.com purchases. I guess all you have to do is put your email address into that box on the upper right-hand corner of the page. I make no promises that doing so will not also add you to some sort of more sinister list. But by all means "subscribe"!

A word on "coating"

If you have ever heard me go off on one of my rants, there’s probably a 50% chance I was ranting about the coating on French fries. French fries really are a perfect food, but there is a plague that is destroying the virtue of the classic fry, and that plague is what I would call “coating”. I remember my first encounter with French fry coating like it was yesterday. We would often stop at Burger King on the way home from school and buy a couple orders of fries with the change we could scrounge up from the floor of the car. They were no McDonald’s fries but they were pretty good. Then one day, everything changed. That once magically simple crispy saltiness was now tainted with some sort of mysterious, more soggy than crunchy, oddly seasoned coating. Since that fateful day I have learned that ordering fries at a restaurant is like playing Russian roulette, and odds are by the time the evening is through you will have regretfully eaten too many unsatisfying fries.

Tonight I took yet another French fry bullet. The culprit was a neighborhood family pizza joint called “Chuckles”. These fries were the worst of the coated worst. The meatball sub was better than a sharp stick in the eye, but they could stand to use a crustier roll. All in all, they are on my fry blacklist and I am unlikely to go back for more.

Stay tuned for many more French fry opinions. Don’t fall off the edge of your seat!

It begins

A few weeks ago, I went for a nice Saturday morning walk in my favorite park. It was a beautiful day and it felt great just being alive. I stopped for a few minutes to take in a particularly beautiful view of a meadow. The week before, the field was filled with bright purple flowers. Now they were replaced with yellow wildflowers, but a few purple ones remained and I thought it was remarkable how the colors were perfectly complementary. The sun reflected off the blades of grass so that the whole meadow seemed to glow. There was a gentle breeze blowing through the grass and I could hear the soft rustling as I stood there soaking it all in.

In that moment as the beauty of that meadow washed over me, for just a second, I wished I had a smart phone. I could take a picture of that meadow and post it on Facebook with a cute comment. “My Saturday morning walk!” Then I could check and see who had “liked” it and know for sure just how nice a day it really was. Sure, my flip phone has a camera, but it wouldn’t do that meadow any justice and I hadn’t brought it with me anyway.

No sooner had I felt that urge to capture and broadcast the moment than I was chastising myself for being so distracted.  I said to myself, “can’t you just be present in the moment?!” Wasn’t it enough to just let myself contemplate that meadow and what it meant to me at that place and time? I laughed to myself and carried on my walk.  I hadn’t walked ten feet before I saw a guy crouched down on the ground with his iPhone out taking a picture of a caterpillar.

He introduced himself, his name was Artie if I recall correctly, and we had a short and pleasant conversation about how we thought the park was becoming overdeveloped before he took back off on his jog.

My initial response after this experience was to launch into an internal rant about how smart phones are eating away at our collective ability to “live in the moment” and I let myself revel in that righteous indignation. But now that this story has marinated in my head for a while I have changed my tune. Artie seems like a guy who really lives in the moment. He saw that caterpillar and was so enraptured by it that he just had to capture that moment digitally. I imagine Artie joyfully taking out that phone and sharing that picture surrounded by adoring friends and family. Perhaps more likely he just posted it on Facebook where his children, coworkers, and old high school classmates could see it and say to themselves “That’s so Artie to share a picture of a caterpillar from his morning jog.” Maybe he never even looked at that picture again, but the very act of documenting that fuzzy little caterpillar somehow brought the joy of seeing such a cute creature up just one more notch.

And so, I have now decided to set my inner Artie free. I’ll be posting about my latest obsessions, rants, raves, the profound and the mundane. I hope sharing these experiences will heighten my appreciation of them, but I’m not about to get a smart phone any time soon. Won’t you join me on this journey?