Denim, Deciphered

Posted on May 14, 2016 by KatieComeBack

It really wasn’t fair of me to write about a multi-day shopping spree without posting pictures of the hoard.

So, without further ado…the haul.

To start our adventure in spending, I took my sister to this really cool tchotchke shop called General Store. If you lean quirky, you really need to go here. They have everything from bath and body to cooking supplies to home decor to local delicacies and treats. And, of course, clothes and jewelry.

One of the things I love about this place is that there’s a gift at every price point – whether you have $5 or $500, you can pick up some seriously cool shiz. (I’m filling my coworkers’ Christmas stockings from here. I usually give ’em alcohol, too, because I am an amazing boss who knows what people want. Or because they have to put up with my quirks and periodically remind me to eat.)

I started our basket with this phone holder for my bike. (So I can use my GPS. Not attempting selfies or texting while the wheels are rollin’. Although that would likely make for some most excellent viral-quality YouTubes. But I have a high deductible, so no.)

I’m hoping that if I can SEE the map while I ride, I can avoid an accidental extra five miles like what happened last fall. (I mean, it was a great ride, but…well, I’d rather not revisit that whole scenario in general.)

I also picked up a candle (sage and citrus – I only buy candles that smell like food) and some shower aromatherapy fizzies:

From Spa Girl – available at Amazon

I love these things. They’re basically “bath bombs,” but don’t have to soak in order to activate. You just get ’em a bit wet and they fizz yummy smells all over your shower. (Plus, who has time to sit around soaking in skin soup, anyway?) I got grapefruit and lavender/vanilla, and WOULD have picked up Pumpkin Pie, but can you believe NO ONE HAS INVENTED A PUMPKIN PIE SHOWER FIZZIE YET? Come on America, step it up already. Can we AT LEAST get a coffee one? Or bacon?

I also treated myself to a few pairs of super cute socks. (Which do not smell like food. Or anything else, thankyouverymuch. Even though I totally see the appeal in bacon-scented socks, especially if you have a dog.)

Later, we moved on to our local mega-mall. I ended up with three great blouses for work (two here, third was in my last post):

Left: Forever 21. Right: H&M

Incidentally, the blouse on the left was $8 on the clearance rack…which was all “buy one, get one free” – so I HAD to pick out something else, right? Because every time you leave free clothing on the table, an angel has to eat a beet. And beet stains are forEVER, especially on white feathers and harp strings, so I snagged a groovy pair of leggings:

They’re so thick, I could almost call them “pants.” In fact, I think I shall. And did I mention they were FREE? Best. Free. Pants. Ever.

For pants like these, you need this mid-calf length cardigan in dark green. (You’ll have to use your imagination a bit, because I suck at taking pictures.)

Clearly, I could use a camera upgrade. But it (the sweater, not my camera) really is dark green, not black, and is pretty much this one but not blue:

Long, fine-knit cardigan with pockets at front, high slits at sides, and no buttons.:

Available at H&M

And now for the obligatory bling segment.

I found two new pairs of earrings:

Left: Van Heusen. Right: The Limited

And a necklace:

The above came from a store called GreaterGood – you can read about their mission here. TL; DR: when you buy their stuff, the proceeds go towards fighting hunger, curing breast cancer, and saving animals. Unfortunately, I only spent $4 on this, so you need to go to their site right now and buy more stuff. Because THINK OF THE CHILDREN. And the kittens. <cue sappy melodramatic Sarah McLachlan tune>

As you can see, this was a very successful shopping journey. But there was still a Moby Dick on my horizon.

I still needed a new pair of jeans.

And ladies? We need to talk about denim for a sec.

Despite the many distractions documented above, the primary focus of my shopping mission was to find a pair of jeans that I LOVE. And by “love,” I mean “keeps you from doing that nose-scrunching thing whenever you pass a mirror.” Women everywhere know how challenging this can be. First of all, we represent a huge variety of shapes: Some of us have a big difference between hip and waist measurements; in other women, it’s less pronounced. Some of us pack extra padding in the trunk, while others don’t carry any luggage at all. And legs are not just long or short – our gams model all animals from chicken to elephant to turkey drumstick.

The array of denim options available reflects this diversity somewhat in that they all fit differently. Despite the variety, however, jeans are the universal equalizer in that pretty much none of us can find that “perfect” fit.

If that weren’t challenging enough, denim manufactures have created a mysterious sizing matrix that is confusing and largely illogical. Allow me to give you a peek through the secret decoder lens as we review the “system”:

Misses sizes: Even numbers, 0 – 20 or so. The theory here is that these are meant for “women,” so they’re cut a little more generously in the hip to accommodate a post-pubescent figure.

Junior sizes: Odd numbers from 1 – 17. Sometimes, though, you get a 0 or a 00 in there on the smaller end. (Seriously. 00? What even is that, and why are two 0s smaller than one?) Generally, these are narrower in the hip than Misses – so a Junior 7 could be tighter than a Misses 6, even though 7 is generally understood to be bigger than 6.

UK sizing: Even numbers, but not the same as US Misses. They tend to run a size or two smaller – so a UK 12 is closer to a US 8.

H&M: They list all the sizes on the tag, but…plot twist! Everything is a size smaller than you’re used to. Sometimes, two sizes. So if you wear a US 8/UK 12, count on needing a US 10/UK 14.

Keeping up? Wait…it gets better.

Waist sizing: Ah, finally. Something straightforward. HAHAHAHAHAHA no. In the US, this is in inches. 24-36, or thereabouts. Of course, this doesn’t take into account whether you have Junior hips or Misses hips or a Kardashian caboose, so whether something matching your waist size actually fits you will depend on the designer’s interpretation of shape and/or your forearm strength as you hike ’em north of your buttcrack. (For the record, clearing the cleft counts as “fits”.)

Chico’s: Last I checked, they had their own numbering system of 1 -4, with half sizes in between. Since most of their tops fit like a scaled-down circus tent, I have no idea how that actually correlates to anything. I think a Chico’s 1 is somewhere in the ballpark of a Misses 8? Juniors 11? Camp flagpole?

And if THAT doesn’t mentally waterboard you, you can visit Manifesta, They don’t sell jeans – but neither do they stock conventional sizes. Everyone’s a flower. Check it out:

We don’t want there to be an inherent order to the sizes, with women striving to fit into the smallest number possible. And we don’t want women to feel bad for ordering a size that society has deemed “unacceptable.” We just want you to get what fits. So to find your size, use your measurements, not society’s idea of what you should be.

(Thanks to Ragen at Dances with Fat for alerting me to this one.)

I do appreciate the spirit of their system – beauty at every size – but in my mental garden, the dandelions are choking out the daisies.

Anyway. The point here is that trying to find jeans that fit YOU will drive you straight to the donut box. Partner that with a lifelong battle with food and body image, and you have the ultimate exercise in frustration. (Well, maybe secondmost-ultimate. I haven’t forgotten about swimsuits, even though I’m trying to.)

To further complicate the matter, I really wanted a different style of jeans. (Because learning the second language of size isn’t enough – you need to now take art classes to speak intelligently about the style):

https://i0.wp.com/highstreetfitfinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/jeans-styles.jpg

Image: High Street Fit Finder

I’ve tried flare and boot-cut before, but invariably, they make the tops of my thighs look really wide – like each leg is an hourglass. (A great look for an overall shape, notsomuch for each individual leg. Especially when you’ve invested most of your life trying to camouflage your thighs behind flowerpots, purses, random pieces of furniture, and your children.)

I usually gravitate toward a skinny cut, which tapers at the ankle…but the problem with this shape is that the contrast of the narrow ankle with flatter shoes makes you look like you’re wearing swim flippers.

Not the look I typically aim for.

So I thought I’d try a few brands with a straight leg. BUT DO YOU THINK ANYONE ACTUALLY SELLS THIS CUT ANYMORE? What the heck – as soon as I decide I MUST have these, the entire style goes underground.

But I persevered. I searched high and low, trying on every brand in every store, no matter how high the price tag <coughcoughNordstromcoughcough> or how loud the bass (True Religion, I’m looking at you, and covering my ears while I do.) And I did finally score one pair at Nordstrom’s Rack (I had them on in my last post) and two additional pairs at 7 for all Mankind Outlet, where not only did they have a wide variety of straight-leg styles to choose from, they were also on sale*. Score!

*Which prolly means I will never, ever find them again. Ah well.

And they don’t look bad, really. <deep breath as Kate practices this picture posting thing>

My Bubba Keg and my new denim.

I realize that my sweater is all cattywampus, and clashes horribly with my super-awesome coffee mug, but you will pry that sucker out of my cold, dead hands after I am done clobbering you with it. AND THIS IS ABOUT THE JEANS. FOCUS, PEOPLE.

And, true to denim anti-logic, the pair I nabbed at Nordie’s is actually a size BIGGER than the ones I found at the outlet – but they’re TIGHTER. Common Core has infiltrated fashion, folks.

But they fit. And I don’t hate them.

That’s progress. Real progress.

This Ahab slayed her denim Moby Dick. For now.

Until we meet again, whale.

P.S. My sister ALSO found an amazing pair of jeans…as well as the very last pair of these in the entire state:

Good luck finding a pair of your own.

Best walking shoes out there. I know because I have them in blue glitter.

It’s like we’re related or something. 🙂

The Clarity of the Crystal Ball

Posted on May 7, 2016 by KatieComeBack

In my last post, I mentioned that my sister and I had tarot card and palm readings while she was out to visit.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had various readings done from time to time. I don’t use them as the final word in setting my life’s course or anything. They’re more like those endless Facebook quizzes – entertaining (and fun to see how all your friends score), and they often validate your own insight into yourself. When you get feedback that resonates, it feels a bit like you have permission to be exactly who you’re meant to be.

And with my issues, I’ll take all the permission I can get.

But sometimes, what they tell you is so spot-on accurate, it’s jarring. That was my prior experience with Jeff Tyler:

This is Jeff. Read more about him here.

When I met him before, he solidly nailed some things:

* He asked about my career. When I told him that I work in HR, he said, “Yes, but not the way most people are in HR. It’s different, and I like you there, because you can do HR the way you want to do it.” This is actually really accurate. I’m not the stereotypical HR person; I like creating sense from the chaos at small companies, where I can roll up my sleeves and put in place just enough structure to function. In contrast, I find large, well-organized companies completely suffocating. (Plus, my company is privately owned…by a family – which adds a flavor of…uniqueness. More on that brand of crazy later.)

* He asked if we had been doing construction or remodeling. Again, spot on. At the time, we’d spent much of the last two years fixing up the short sale property we’d purchased – in addition to remodeling the kitchen, we’d repainted nearly every room, redone two bathrooms, and put an addition on the back. So yeah, I was all spackle-and-drywalled out by this point. He suggested that I take a break from that particular chaos, and “take time to just enjoy what you’ve built.” Although there was a bit more to be done, for now it was time to just be in our house – at least for a while.

* He then talked about creative energies. He said he saw me active in “some kind of art – music, words, something….that’s the only time you’re all there and real. That’s where you can BE.”

At that time, my blog was six months old, and I was finding it to be quite therapeutic. And I’m also a musician – I sing in a band, and while I’m no Sandi Patty, I don’t completely suck:

And he was right, again. I’m totally absorbed in the moment when I’m singing. Gone are the little gnats that cloud my happiness and nip at my joy and buzz distractions at me about my weight. It’s just the music and me.

And when I write, I drop the cloak that shields my soul from the social crows who might otherwise pick at it. I expose my jugular. OK, yeah, sort of anonymously, but still. Emotional vampires aren’t picky eaters; it’s still a risk, and feels a bit like I’m dabbing steak sauce on my pulse points…but when writing, I throw caution to the wind, and get real.

So it was a great reading, and I really dug this guy’s direct, no-dancing-delicately-around-the-tulips approach – and I thought my sister would, as well. She was receptive to give it a go, so off we went.

And once again, I got some solid insight. Some of my highlights from this round:

* Your workplace is kind of a mess. Yep….as I mentioned before, it’s a privately-held, family-owned company. And we have a new CEO, who is NOT family, so the resulting change in diet has given the drama llama more than a little intestinal distress…which alternates between noxious stink and hilarity.

* You’ve been working on spiritual growth, and you’re outgrowing who you were. But when you’re challenged, you revert back to who you used to be…and you don’t like that person very much. This was interesting to think about. Over the last year, I’ve been working on personal and spiritual healing, and trying to quiet the mental voices around my food issues. But prior to that, I worked myself out of a relationship that was mentally abusive. It took considerable strength to do that – leaving a marriage is hard, hard work; it’s even tougher if you’ve been mentally whittled down to nothing.

He had a point, though – in the struggles I’ve found in my current marriage, do I face them head-on? Not initially, no. I tend to revert to the same person I was in my prior marriage – timid, hesitant, reluctant to start conflict.

And he was correct in saying that I don’t like being that person. It isn’t me. It’s like jamming your feet into shoes that don’t fit. You feel pinched and uncomfortable and can’t WAIT to kick them off, and they don’t really go with your whole spiritual outfit, anyway.

* You have some toxic older friends that you need to move away from to preserve your energy.

I scratched my head on that one for a bit. I don’t really have close friends…sure, there are my Facebook connections, and my many “virtual” online buddies….but none of them are toxic energy leeches.

I shrugged it off as a “miss” in the reading.

My sister also got some interesting tidbits:

* You work really hard to hide your emotions. But you shouldn’t. You have really strong emotions, and you are a good person BECAUSE of those strong emotions – not because you hide them.

My sister’s always been a “feeler.” When we were kids, she was convinced that inanimate objects, like stuffed animals, had feelings.

Which reminds me of the Cabbage Patch story:

Anyone else remember Cabbage Patch dolls? My sister really, really wanted one. She didn’t get one for Christmas, because Cabbage Patch Kids were the It Toy of the year, and since people were generally losing their collective minds in their efforts to get one, Mom wisely opted out of the public stampedes and fistfights. So sis saved up her own money, until FINALLY she had enough stashed away. Off to the mall we went, making a beeline for the toy store. (This was a few months after the holiday rush, so the shelves were sufficiently stocked at this point. No taser required.)

My sister had her eye on a redheaded doll. She spotted one in the second row, behind a blond, curly-haired one. She moved the first doll to the side…

…and I said something to the effect of “aw, that doll’s going to be sad that you didn’t choose her.”

Looks heartbroken, doesn’t she.

My sister felt so bad about hurting the toy’s feelings that she LITERALLY BOUGHT THE BLOND DOLL INSTEAD.

And my brother spent the next several years torturing her with it. He gave her a voice, and whenever the doll wasn’t sitting next to my sister, he’d make it call out, “MOMMA! MOMMA! COME GET ME! I’M LONELY! She was prone to mischief, frequently body-slamming teddy bears and pinning dolls belonging to overnight guests too. (And sometimes our cousins, if they dared nap at our house. They’d wake up underneath a Cabbage Patch kid who you’d swear had a smug look on her face….)

“Antonia Larina”clearly had self-control issues. (Ah, siblings. Ain’t they great?)

Anyway. One of the reasons I wanted to have my sister see this guy was because of this stressful life situation she’s dealing with. Interestingly, he had some insight into that:

* You’re struggling with making a big decision. Perhaps you need to make a decision NOT to make a decision right away. Take this time to heal and fix YOU instead.

(For the record, this is EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD HER. Validation for my spiritual gift right there, folks. But wisdom is wiser when it comes from a third party. That’s why consultants are so expensive, right?)

* You need to stop beating yourself up. You’re hearing your mother’s voice of disapproval in your head…you need to stop listening to that and do what’s right for YOU.

Hmm. That didn’t feel quite right. Mom was never one to be overbearing with an opinion. Apparently (I found this out later) HER mother was pretty up front with how she felt about things, and was none too shy about making sure her offspring knew her stance. On EVERYTHING. And don’t we always swear to do EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what our parents did?

So we grew up with a lot of this:

Me: Mom, what do you think of my current boyfriend?

Mom: It doesn’t matter. I’m not the one dating him.

Sis: Mom, do you think I should cut my hair?

Mom: It’s your hair. Do what you want with it.

Afterwards, my sister and I debriefed about our readings a bit (yes, while we were shopping – at the outlet mall this time to mix it up a bit.)

And as we were searching for the best slip-on walking shoes and the perfect jeans, we realized something.

The damaging influences he had referenced – the toxic relationships, the disapproving parents – these weren’t playbacks of external experiences.

They were internal.

In my sister’s case, Mom never really frowned on her life choices. But my sister is so adept at self-flagellation, she was creating her own voice of disapproval. RIGHT INSIDE HER HEAD.

It wasn’t Mom’s voice she was hearing – it was her own.

And with me – the “toxic relationship” is, in reality, with…myself. It’s with the person who has food issues. It’s the condescending voice hissing insults at me while I walk around with a BMI of about 18, telling me I’m too fat to eat back the precious few calories I burned on my morning run. It’s that internal judge that hands out the verdict of “unacceptable” every time I look in the mirror and catch sight of my thighs.

The challenge? It’s really, really hard to divorce your brain. It’s awfully tough to break old thought patterns – to jackhammer out the long-ago-set concrete and haul the heavy chunks to the garbage dump.

It’s exhausting.

But if I move one piece at a time, and keep at it, eventually I’ll get there.

I had a small taste of what that might look like just this week. I was sporting some of my new stuff – a new top, and what I thought were decent jeans (I can never be sure – I get myself thinking they look OK in the dressing room, but once I get home and look at them in MY mirror…well, ugh. Thighs again.)

And you know what? I thought I actually looked pretty good.

Throughout the day, I reminded myself that I looked just fine.

(Even now, I’m hesitating to post this picture, because I’m still second-guessing those damn thighs.)

But some of the time? I think, maybe, I’m starting to believe it.

I’m OK.

I hereby give myself permission to BE. Just the way I am. A work in progress.

I hope my sister does, too.

Stay-cation Rejuvenation

Posted on April 29, 2016 by KatieComeBack

A couple of weeks ago, my sister came to visit.

I know for most families, this sort of thing happens all the time – on weekends, holidays, or any random day of the week ending in the letter “Y.” But I don’t live anywhere near my family, so this is more of an event. My parents are halfway across the country, and they’ve only come to visit once in the ten years I’ve lived here – they really don’t care for the hassles of travel (can ya blame ’em?) The only thing that enticed them to visit was my wedding. Barring any additional marriages, and factoring in my dad’s health, I don’t think it’s likely they’ll visit again.

My brother’s never visited, either. His wife…well, she likes to be near her parents. I’m told she dropped out of college (twice, if I’m not mistaken) because being away from Mom and Dad all week was asking a bit too much. (I don’t mean to be unkind with that statement. It’s just fact. And my brother literally lives across the street from my parents, so there’s a lid for every pot, I suppose.) Also, she’s kind of a germaphobe, despite having three boys, so hotels and gas station rest rooms really stress her out. (Also not being cruel. Being grossed out by public bathrooms is totally legit. With the amount of travel I do, I have to ignore the reports on how nasty these places are, lest I contract into an immobile, inconsolable twitch ball.

My sister is the more adventurous one. She and her spouse have actually been out to visit twice – once for my aforementioned wedding, and once for our annual State Fair, where you can see top-billing performers like Weird Al and REO Speedwagon* perform, AND you can get pretty much any food deep-fried and served on a stick.

*Side note: I didn’t get tickets to REO Speedwagon. To date, this is my life’s biggest regret.

This time, though, it was just my sister making the trip. She’s been going through some life-decision personal-type stuff, so she needed a break from reality. Plus, she had some vacation time to burn, so out she came.

I should mention that I actually haven’t had a bona-fide vacation in years. I use all of my paid time off for my kids’ stuff, and to visit family. Sure, I take time off – the week between Christmas and New Years is sacred rest-and-recharge-at-home time – but the last time I had a stay-overnight-in-a-non-family-member-town was our brief two-night honeymoon in 2007.

Suffice it to say I’m long overdue.

So when I heard my sister was coming, I decided to make it as close to a vacation as possible. I scheduled a day and a half off, and started making plans.

During the six days she was here, we:

Worked a volunteer shift at Feed My Starving Children, packing food for hungry people. This is a really cool organization; they’re tremendously well-organized and they help groups do a lot of good in a short time. If you’re looking for an opportunity to chuck some positive energy into the world, check them out. They make it stupid easy to make a huge impact: They set groups up assembly-line style, allowing you to pack hundreds of meals in just under two hours. You can volunteer at one of their facilities, or with a MobilePack event where the work comes to you!

(The food they pack tastes kind of like Rice-a-Roni, in case you’re wondering. They’ll usually let you sample it when you’re done. Incidentally, it’s vegetarian, and they beef** it up with some proprietary superfood vitamin-enhanced nutrient powder. Here’s the science.)

** Haha. See what I did there…

And speaking of food….

Tried a couple new restaurants. Well, new to ME, anyway. When you have food issues, you tend to stick with the tried-and-true…or at least the places where you have some hope of accurately tracking the calories in what you’re eating. But while my sister was here, I was able to give myself a break. I enjoyed pizza, a diner omelet, a MetaBoost Bowl***, AND a concrete mixer from our local Culver’s. (Because there is no Culver’s where she lives. Tragic. Simply tragic.) And I ate all of these things without beating myself up with the empty dish afterwards. (OK, I beat myself up a little, especially after Culver’s. But I did my best to forgive myself – and that alone is progress.)

***Kale, edamame, and unicorn sweat or something. It was really good, but I still can’t leap tall buildings or see through people, so I kinda feel like I should get a refund. #falseadvertising

Got coordinating tattoos. LOOK HOW CUTE THEY ARE:

It kills me dead how horrified poor Cookie Monster looks.

I mentioned a while back that my sis and I have grown pretty close, after basically not speaking for several years. So when she suggested we get tattoos, I was all over the idea. Once she found the basic design, I put our fates in the hands of an artist named…wait for it… Bleach Methane. (I mean…with a name like that, he has GOT to know what he is doing. Right? And check out his work – the dude’s got wicked talent.)

If you look closely, you’ll see that the tattoos are slightly different. We each got an eighth note – hers is an A#; mine’s a Bb. If you know anything about music, you know they’re the same pitch, written differently. How freaking poetic for sisters is THAT? We are geniuses, both of us.

Shopped like it was our job, yo. I live dangerously close to one of the biggest shopping malls in the country. I can’t quite hit it with a rock (because my aim is atrocious, and throwing rocks at buildings will generally get you arrested, even if you miss) but if I go for a run outside, I can literally SEE the mall from some of my paths. It’s a huge tourist attraction, and we spent the better part of three days there.

You read that right. THREE FULL DAYS. When they finally recognize shopping as an Olympic sport, you NEED us on your team. We’ll make the US proud. Feel free to contact me directly for the endorsement deals.

Took a yoga class. Because ice cream. And pizza. And because it feels good to stretch and bend. I really need to remember how much I like yoga – not the getting up early and sweating part (duh. Have we met?) but how accomplished, energized, and centered I feel when it’s done. I’m more serene, more confident in my ability to…well, to adult. It helps me shift my overactive, anxious brain from marathon-sprint speed to engaged stroll mode. And afterwards, I’m a little bit kinder to my physical self, having a refreshed appreciation for all the cool stuff my body can actually DO.

So yeah, I need to get that shiz on the agenda more than twice a year.

Visited a tarot card reader. I’ve mentioned that I’ve dabbled in the occasional psychic reading/aura photo dealio before. To be clear, I’m not one of those people who needs to IM a mystic in order to determine what side dishes to serve at dinner or anything. I understand that it’s more like reading a horoscope – if you WANT it to apply, your brain will find a way to make it appear so.

That said, my experiences have been really positive. I’ve received fairly consistent messages with my readings – specifically, I need to take better care of myself mentally and not be so hard on myself. Since I’m fairly self-aware, none of this is exactly talk-show-interrupting news.

But these readings often give me validation for things I’m feeling or experiencing. They motivate me to challenge myself, to make changes…or, at the very least, think over some of the things I need to think about. (Like promising myself to spend more time writing, and when I fail to do that, not beating myself up quite so much.)

Ultimately, after a “good” reading, I almost feel like the universe has granted me permission to be exactly who I am. And if that helps me be a better ME, that’s not a bad thing at all.

Everyone has a different view on this sort of thing, and I wasn’t exactly sure where my sister sat on this spectrum. But, at the very least, it’d be entertaining, right? And maybe she’d get some direction for what she was trying to work through.

I made appointments for us to see Jeff Tyler. I’d seen him a few months earlier at some kind of holistic enlightenment fair, and had a mini-reading with him. At the time, I was pretty impressed. I totally dug his approach – he’s direct, doesn’t BS you, and drops the F-bomb a lot.

PERFECT.

So we had our readings, and we each heard a lot of things…

…which I’ll share in a future post. 🙂

My sister flew back on a Wednesday evening. Her suitcase, packed with some of her new treasures, was just one pound shy of the weight limit. (Skillz, we haz ’em.) I’m hoping she was able to leave behind some of the soul-sucking stress she was carrying.

I know you can’t fill the pit of anxiety and depression with material things. New clothes and good food only give you a temporary feel-good boost; they do nothing to actually clean out the pre-existing clutter in your head.

But the exercise of unplugging from the daily thought patterns can help you disconnect from the stress that surrounds you. It’s a ray of light breaking through the fog to give you a view of the mountains you’d forgotten were just outside the window.

I had no idea how badly I needed the break until I took one.

Aaaaahhhhhhh.

Hey, sis? Same time next year?

100 Ways to Heave Your Blubber

Posted on April 22, 2016 by KatieComeBack

(My apologies for the inflammatory title. Just sharing the earworm, because I’m giving like that.)

Losing weight is hard.

Oh, sure, we’ve all given it a go. Whether it’s a New Years Resolution, a 30-day Bikini Challenge, or Every Freaking Monday of Your Entire Life, most of us have tried our hand at weight loss.

But most of us don’t make it to the finish line. Because losing weight is ongoing, tedious, exhausting work.

For a lot of us, it’s not unlike attempting a kitchen remodel. Witness the “before” shot of our kitchen when we purchased our short-sale house:

There were people LIVING HERE just a day earlier. Eew.

The appliances were older than me, the cabinets were practically wearing bell bottoms, and THE GREASE. <shudder>

That isn’t rust. IT’S GREASE YO

The microwave was originally black, and not supposed to be…furry.

Mmm. Who wants some squalor popcorn?

With a project like this, we look at the mess and decide we Must. Do. Something. Big.

RIGHTNOWRIGHTNOWRIGHTNOW!

So we start a complete overhaul, attempting to renovate our eating habits overnight. We tear out the chips and ice cream from the cupboards. We throw out our roomy, stretchy Thanksgiving Dinner/Chinese Buffet Pants. We plan out an exercise routine that would make Jack LaLanne (or Jane Fonda or Jillian Michaels – pick your generation; I’m old) proud.

But that’s the demolition part. The fun part. WHAM! BANG! CRASH! You rip out cabinets, you smash countertops. Big things are falling, huge changes are happenin’, you’re absolutely TRUCKING.

You got this!

And then, fatigue hits. You’re surrounded by debris and EXHAUSTED. You have twenty-seven cabinets to scrub, strip, and refinish. Each door has 6 holes to patch, because of COURSE new hardware doesn’t fit into old holes….and you don’t even have a place to wash a dish or nuke a bag of ~~popcorn~~ veggies.

What started as robust, vigorous progress has come to a standstill. You work all day – diligently – and see next-to-zero progress. Or worse, you find problems you didn’t know you had (mold? leaky pipe?) – and, even though you’ve been working your tail off, you lose ground and have more to do than you did when you started this whole mess.

Frustrated, you burn down the house and move.

Okay, no. Not really. (Although in the aforementioned kitchen, I won’t say I wasn’t tempted to invoke my inner arsonist.)

When it’s your kitchen, you can’t just give up working on it. You HAVE to get it to a place where you can at least open your fridge without a HAZMAT suit on.

So you keep going.

You can’t look at the project as four coats of paint on 27 doors each with six holes to fill and re-drill, because between math and paint fumes, you’ll lose your ever-loving mind. But you CAN fill one hole at a time, and repeat that until all the holes are done. (Which is – for the record – 162 times. But if you had told me that up front, I’d have whipped out the flamethrower.)

So, when we’re looking to make changes within ourselves – when we decide we’re gonna “get healthy” – maybe we need to use the same approach.

Instead of trying to bike ten miles tomorrow, maybe we should start with a walk.

Instead of twice-a-day workouts, maybe we shoot for a few times a week.

Instead of swearing off ice cream, wine, and pizza, maybe we could find ways to incorporate tastes of them into our diets, and/or discover healthier alternatives that we enjoy.

Instead of starving ourselves to death, perhaps we could just roll back the nachos and feed our bodies more actual fuel. (And chocolate is fuel for the soul, so don’t put it in permanent time-out.)

Image Source: SumAdvice.com

For some of us, the way to make permanent changes is to make small ones, tackling one step at a time.

Going back to the kitchen remodel here…In addition to the 162 holes on twenty-seven doors that needed refinishing, this particular kitchen was a nightmare of grease and grime. It took HOURS of scrubbing to get it clean. HOURS. HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS.

But I discovered that I had a decent floor under the uck. How’d I find it? One square at a time.

Tell me you can see the difference….

So how can we do this with our health journeys?

Well, we’re told “eat less and move more.” And we can take that in baby steps. Let’s look at “move more” for a sec.

Moving more doesn’t necessarily mean we have to set the elliptical to run as long as Gone with the Wind does. (Three hours and fifty-eight minutes. You’re welcome.)

But we do have the opportunity to pepper our days with microbursts of exercise. So instead of setting out to burn 500 calories….maybe shoot to burn 100. You have to burn off 3500 calories in order to lose a pound – so let’s do the math:

2 times a day X 100 calories X 5 days X 52 weeks = 52,000 calories.

52,000/3500 = 14.857 pounds

In other words, if you burned 100 calories twice a day for 5 days a week, you’d burn off nearly fifteen pounds in a year. That’s at least a dress size, yo. Time to go shopping!

And speaking of shopping…burning 100 calories isn’t terribly hard to do. I got this neat poster from the folks at Chobani. Have a look:

Source: www.chobani.com

Full disclosure: The number of calories burned depends on a lot of things – your metabolism, size, age, gender, etc. I’m female, over 40, and not six feet tall, so I have to do these activities a bit longer to burn 100 calories. But that said, I can shop forEVER, so with THAT activity, I’m probably burning a McDonald’s Value Meal when I go long.

Anyway. The point here is that with exercise, the important thing is to DO it. Take small bites if you don’t think you can swallow it whole. Baby steps are still steps in the right direction.

Today, I had an appointment at the airport. Now, our local airport is freakin’ HUGE. I know it always seems like a long walk to get from security to my gate – so today I tried to measure it. I skipped the moving walkways and escalators and moved along, bobbing tourists and dodging families with small children as I hoofed it to my meeting.

Unfortunately, the GPS doesn’t work so well in the airport. (I swear I was not drunk….)

MapMyFitness is apparently weirded out by fast food.

OK, I tried. I probably can’t trust the mileage on this jaunt. But I did learn that my hike took about 10 minutes each way – so by walking to this appointment, I got 20 minutes of brisk walking in. Not bad!

So – how about “eat less”?

Again, we don’t have to marry ourselves off to a diet of green leafy disappointment and broiled protein heartache. You and celery CAN see other people. You just have to use some discretion, obvs.

I’ve been watching my weight for 34 (yowza!) years now, and I use a few guidelines:

1. Don’t eat food you don’t like. If you’re cutting back, you don’t get too many calories to play with – why spend them torturing yourself? If you can’t stomach beets, QUIT BUYING THEM. For me, it’s cantaloupe. Probably one of the healthiest fruits out there, but it tastes like feet and swamp algae, so it is NOT going in my mouth, no way no how, even if eating it would save a kitten. Nope.

2. Don’t cut out foods you love. And don’t be shouting “BUT I LOVE ALL FOOD!” Nice try. Of course you do. But you probably have 3-4 favorites, right? If so, keep those in your diet. Not at every meal, or even every day….but you gotta have ’em, or you’re far more likely to abandon ship on your renovation. My list includes cheese, pizza, ice cream, and chocolate. And wine on occasion. And once or twice a year, a good hibachi meal. Forever is a long time, after all. It’s even longer if there’s no chocolate in it.

3. Decide where you can adjust. Here are my tweaks, corrections, and shifts:

* I generally don’t drink anything with calories. I’ve found I’d rather eat my calories than drink them. Years ago, I switched from regular soda to diet; since then, I’ve switched to herbal tea and water. I have coffee in the morning – but that’s medicinal. (Vitamin P for Personality!) And wine maybe once or twice a month – for dessert.

* I use low-calorie condiments. Mustard, balsamic vinegar, hot sauce, and salsa are among my favorites. I don’t use any type of mayo or butter. (I actually find butter kind of terrifying.) Mayo was a little tougher – I mean, how does one make tuna salad without it? But about a year ago, I came up with an alternative:

1/4 c fat-free Greek yogurt (shout out to Chobani, since I stole your graphic) 🙂
1 tsp grainy brown mustard
3 good splashes of hot sauce
Liberal sprinkle of sea salt

Mix it up and stir it into a can of drained solid white tuna (yes, buy the solid white. You deserve better than the greyish mystery chunks in Chunk Light. Trust me.) Mine also gets a healthy dollop of minced onion and pickle relish. It doesn’t taste like mayo, but it’s darn good, I promise!

* I try to cut back on added fat. OK, I know this is a no-brainer, but fat has nine calories per gram, so cutting back even a little bit helps. If a recipe calls for veggies cooked in 2T of oil, I know I can probably get away with halving that. With salads that call for olive oil, I can very often sub in fat-free Greek yogurt for the olive oil for a creamy version of the dressing.

And let me share a little experiment I did a few years ago. Have you ever seen people blot off the tops of their pizza slices with a napkin? Did you wonder if it could possibly make any difference?

I decided to find out. I own a food scale (I have this one):

Purchased from Amazon in 2010 and still works great, by the way.

So, I weighed a clean napkin, blotted my pizza slice, and then weighed it again.

The difference was 3 grams. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But at the time, I was eating four slices of pizza a week (half a large pizza that I’d split with the hubs). Math time!

3 grams X 9 calories per gram = 27 calories, X 4 slices = 108 calories.

108 calories X 52 weeks = 5616 calories, / 3500 = 1.6 pounds

Yes, folks, I saved myself 1.6 POUNDS over the course of a year JUST BY BLOTTING MY PIZZA.

If that doesn’t sell you on baby steps, I don’t know what will. Maybe new shoes? Or just the knowledge that if you keep plugging the small holes and scrubbing the small squares, eventually you’ll have a new kitchen:

We like a lot of color, obviously.

As I write this, I realize that I need to use the same approach on my marriage. I don’t need to swing a sledgehammer or set off an emotional M80 to see progress.

Instead, I need to focus on the fact that while I might want new appliances, the cabinets are pretty solid and might just need a coat of paint. And I can continue to patch the doors, one hole at a time.

Special thanks to Chobani for inspiring this post!

Stressing About…Stuff. Part II of II

Posted on January 26, 2016 by KatieComeBack

In my last post, I pretty much threw my ex under the proverbial clutter bus and mocked his collection of endless lotion, empty plastic containers, and pianos.

But if I’m being completely honest with myself, I’m not immune to the desire to hang on to stuff I don’t need, either.

Case in point: Shoes.

Last weekend, I was traveling (again) and my flight was booked through Erie, PA. My return flight was cancelled when the sky started hemorrhaging snow.

(Yeah, I know better than to book through Erie during winter. And for the unschooled, “winter” in Erie runs from October through April – if spring comes early. But I was suckered in by a less expensive fare – can’t pass up a bargain, ya know. Sigh. Some bargain when you have an extra hotel night and a bonus day of car rental.)

So I got rebooked the next day, leaving me away from home for an extra 24 hours. And how did I kill time? Guess.

airportshoes

OK, so before you judge me, know that I was REPLACING my “airport shoes” – the shoes that are comfortable enough to get me from gate A2 to Z164 with an 11-minute layover, are easy to slip off for security, and work with both jeans AND yoga pants (because travel is sooooo glam.) On my last trip, I noticed that my current pair was making parts of my feet fall asleep the longer I wore them, so I NEEDED new ones. It’s a health thing. And COME ON, MAN! Not only were they 50% off the CLEARANCE price, they SPARKLE! My feet are WORTH $24 glitter pillows. (Thank you, DSW, for feeding my addiction in an economically responsible way. Happiness at $12 a foot.)

And yet…I’ve been home since Monday night, and I haven’t quite moved the trusty black clogs to the donation pile yet. I’m not sure why, exactly. Blue sparkle SHOULD go with everything, but I’m holding back on the slim chance that flat black might be a better option at some point. If I ever have to attend a funeral in the middle of an airport, I suppose I’m set.

And then there’s this shirt. I got it as a thin layer to wear under sweaters and stuff, because it was ONLY $8 at Aeropostle Outlet. But the last time I put it on, I noticed this:

Just a flesh wound…

The suspected culprit:

Nothing about THAT face says “guilty.”

Anyway, the point here is that it was only $8, I’ve worn it a kajillion times, AND thanks to the aforementioned Kohl’s addiction, I have an entire drawer full of Cuddl Duds that I bought SPECIFICALLY FOR THE SAME PURPOSE.

But…this is the only one with THIS pattern, ya know? The OTHER black-and-white one has flowers, so it’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT. And maybe I could sew it back up. You wouldn’t see the hole because it’d be under a sweater….

IT’S A RAG.

YET I WON’T THROW IT AWAY.

Sigh.

This behavior’s got to be at least partially hereditary. My ex clearly gets his from his parents; there’s certainly a family resemblance in the way they cram their closets. In my case, my guilty relative was my dad’s mom.

To be fair, Grandma was a Child of the Depression – so she learned to use up and reuse. However, her spouse did quite well for himself with some Ford stock back in the day, and she clung to those behaviors long after she was more than “financially comfortable.”

When she passed, she left a four-bedroom house chock full of “treasures” that needed to be sorted. And we had to actually look through everything, too, because Grandma left the plot twist of hiding cash in random locations. I had her bedroom dresser for YEARS before I discovered a $5 bill from 1963 tucked under the shelf paper. Oh, and remember those squeeze coin purses that banks used to give out?

Photo from eBay

In one of those, we found one of these:

Indian head gold coin $5:

That sucker’s about the size of a nickel, and was worth about – wait for it – $400 at the time.

FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS. Dayum. So yeah, we looked through EVERYTHING.

Of course, we ended up pitching a lot of stuff. The canned food in the basement, now a furry gray, was a culinary adventure none of us were willing to take. And there was an entire bedroom of her house filled with just two things: shopping bags and clothespins.

Yes, clothespins.

THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF THEM.

clothespins:

Much like the rest of us, Grandma didn’t just hang on to the old things. She liked new stuff too. Especially shoes. I clearly inherited my love of shoes from Grandma. She was on a life quest for the Perfect White Sandal – one with a chunky 1″ heel and straps that didn’t pinch her little toe. (Nowadays, you’d just have that inconvenient appendage cut off.) Unfortunately, she never found them – by the time she passed, she had well over one hundred pairs of sandals in near-mint condition. More unfortunately, Grandma wore a size 5 1/2, which I probably haven’t worn since I WAS 5 1/2, so sadly, they all had to be donated.

Grandpa passed away a few years before I was born, leaving Grandma fairly well-off. She spent much of her time traveling the globe, bringing back dolls and spoons from every country she visited.

Why dolls and spoons? I HAVE NO IDEA.

But she clearly loved them. She had several spoon racks lining the walls, and boxes and boxes of dolls. A little girl’s dream, right? Well, not exactly. See, these dolls weren’t toys – they were collector’s items. And therefore, each doll was required to remain sealed in its individual hyperbolic chamber, feet firmly affixed to the plastic base.

We didn’t care. My sister and I played with them anyway. While they were still in the cases. Hey, we didn’t have cable then; you had to use your IMAGINATION. Our star-crossed lovers could never actually kiss, or hold hands. <raises wrist to forehead> Tragic. But they were each encased in these cool little pods that we pretended were flying transportation devices, like on The Jetsons.

Photo from Places of Fancy

While the collector’s items* were to be handled with care, ironically, we were allowed to play with these fellas as much and as hard as we wanted.

antique metal soldier toys:

(Well, except chucking them down the dumbwaiter. That was only allowed to happen once.) Of course, these dudes have some actual street value now. Ah well.

Anyway. It’s clear that Grandma didn’t NEED all this stuff. She didn’t NEED to keep grocery bags and ill-fitting shoes; she could afford multiple globe-spannning trips and fancy-schmancy look-but-don’t-touch dolls* each year.

*Clearly, still somewhat bitter.

But she kept all that clutter anyway.

Most of us do.

And, you know what? Once in a while, something you’ve saved actually comes in handy. Witness this latest conversation I had over text with my daughter while she was at her dad’s:

DDConvo1

Management dad = management FAD. My phone hates me, remember?

Seriously, didn’t EVERYONE get one of these at one time or another? Along with Good to Great and The Seven Highly Annoying Habits or Whatever?

stupedmgmtbook

I knew I’d find this quickly at a used bookshop…but since I’m cheap, and want to save my dinero for important things, like shoes – and I was CERTAIN her dad MUST have a copy, because he has a ton of crap, and like I said, EVERYONE had one of these – I decided to do this:

dsconvo1

dsconvo2

dsconvo3

(It’s cool. We flip each other the bird as tokens of affection. We’re classy like that.)

So, as much as I’ve complained about my ex’s clutter, it did come in handy today.

And, from my grandmother’s house? Well, my folks kept some of the pricier collectibles, of course. (Which didn’t include any of the dolls. GO FIGURE.) And deep in my grandmother’s closet, I discovered three shoe boxes filled with…

Go on, guess.

Travel soap.

Yep. Three boxes of those little tiny bars of soap. This one from an Alaskan cruise, that one from a hotel in Australia, one from each country in Europe.

My mom was going to throw it away – let’s face it, soap is cheap, and those doll-sized bars are stupid annoying.

But I decided to take the soap. And you know what? I USED the soap. For nearly three years, I dipped into the box to unwrap another memory with every bar. Ivory from Germany. Dial from Alaska. Irish Spring from Australia.

Generally, I think we could all use with a little less clutter in our lives, and a more diligent tossing of things we don’t need to cling to. It makes you feel lighter, somehow, to come home to an uncluttered entryway and a well-organized coat closet. It’s refreshing, relaxing…and helps us stay focused on what’s truly important instead of staying mired in things that weigh us down.

But sometimes, it’s good for the soul to relive a fond memory – perhaps one that you’d have forgotten if not for the ancient shopping bag with the long-gone local-five-and-dime logo printed on the front.

I couldn’t fill Grandma’s shoes, but I used every scrap of soap she saved. I used it up, reviving each memory one more time, and then I threw the wrapper away. At that point, the soap was just soap – it did exactly what it was intended to do, and gradually washed away.

I think Grandma would have been OK with that.

Stressing About…Stuff. Part I of II

Posted on January 23, 2016 by KatieComeBack

Today’s post was inspired by Fatty McCupcakes’s recent article on Shopper Lottie: When You Are An Expensive Taste Cheapskate.

Katie is brilliantly funny, and the article’s a quick read. (So go read it now. I’ll wait.) She got me thinking about…well, stuff. Things. Clutter. The junk in our trunks, closets, and attics.

Whether we admit it or not, we’re largely a species of collectors, aren’t we?

The bottom line is, we like stuff. Specifically, we like new stuff and we like more stuff. Katie mentioned the irresistible draw of the Bath & Body Works sales – no matter how much lotion you have, it never hurts to buy MORE, especially when it’s 3/$5. Right? RIGHT?!?! Walking away is basically like leaving cash on the ground here, people!

While I don’t stock up on lotion (I’ll tell you why in a bit*), I will confess that I cannot resist the siren song of…Kohl’s Cash. Or, as it SHOULD be called, Kohl’s Crack.

Here’s how this malicious marketing method sucks you in:

First, you should know that everything at Kohl’s is always going to be on sale at some point. And by “at some point,” I mean “on the day of the week ending in Y.” Next, coupons. Roughly 100% of the time there’s a coupon somewhere for at least 15% off – in either a mailing, online, or via the store’s app. (Pro tip: Get your spouse, your kid, and/or your cat on their mailing list, too. Come coupon time, odds are good that at least one will be for 20% off, and more than half the time you’ll score the Golden Ticket of 30% off. BOOYAH.)

Golden Ticket 1971 movie:

In the famous words of Billy Mays, “BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!” Periodically (read: pretty much every other week), when you hit the register, AFTER you get your sale price and AFTER your coupon is applied, you get…Kohl’s Cash. For every $50 you’ve spent, they give you a voucher for $10…to use like cash, starting NEXT WEEK.

So next week you come back, scouting sale prices, your 20% off coupon AND your Kohl’s Cash in tow, because you can’t just leave $10 worth of Kohl’s merchandise IN THE STORE, right? That’s $10 of FREE STUFF you are GIVING AWAY TO THE EVIL CORPORATE EMPIRE AND THEIR PROFITS OF LUCIFER AND DAMMIT, THAT’S LETTING THE TERRORISTS WIN. So you pore over the merchandise for HOURS, calculating and re-calculating to see how much you can get for basically nothing. I mean, you can ALWAYS use a candle, right? Or a pair of tights? Especially when it’s FREE?

Smugly, you walk out of the store with your new Vera Wang sweater THAT YOU ONLY PAID $4 for. $4!! You’ve won. Suck it, Economic Slowdown.

And three days later, they mail you a flyer announcing that there’s a Cuddl Duds sale…and include a 30% off coupon.

It’s quicksand, I tell ya. QUICKSAND. DANGER. DANGER!!! One foot in and you’re stuck. (And now need new shoes.)

Is there a Kohl’s Anonymous? Perhaps there should be.

So yeah, we like new stuff, especially at bargain prices. But, oddly, we also seem to be quite attached to the stuff we already HAVE. Even if it’s no more than future landfill fodder – in other words, GARBAGE – we aren’t very good at getting RID of stuff that no longer has value. Whether it’s clothes that no longer fit, broken clocks, or “intimate delicates” that will surely disintegrate when faced with the challenge of the rambunctious digestion of your next overly-ambitiously-spicy meal…for some reason, we’re hesitant to part with this stuff.

I’ve mentioned before that I have an aversion to clutter, largely because my ex – and his parents – collected things. They frequented yard sales, antique malls, and flea markets, and came home with all sorts of things: Cake plates. Tools. Clocks and watches. Printers. Diabetes. (Hey, the Amish can bake a mean Whoopie Pie.)

And pianos. (Yes. PIANOS. My kids have informed me that their Dad recently brought home his fifth. FIFTH. What on EARTH does one do with five pianos when you only have two hands? That’s a rather cumbersome paperweight, friends.)

But in addition to this, they also saved EVERYTHING. Plastic bags, shoe boxes, newspapers, magazines, clothes that hadn’t been worn in decades (thankfully!) but were “perfectly serviceable,” and plastic containers.

Which brings me to The Great Plastic Throwdown.

We all have at least one relative who saves plastic tubs, right? Whether it held Cool Whip, Chinese food, or cottage cheese, these tubs with the locking lids are awesome for freezing soup, storing paint, and sending leftover holiday food home with your guests.

So I get the appeal of saving some of these.

SOME.

My ex saved them all.

Every. Single. One.

He stashed them in not one, but TWO, of our small kitchen’s cupboards. Stacks of bowls and lids were crammed, shoved, and jammed in there in an attempt to fit more and more into the space. And you know what happens when you make something FIT without looking at the space’s FUNCTION, right?

Here’s a chart to illustrate:

OrgEffChart

One day, I wandered over to the cupboard to pull out something to put soup in.

You know what’s coming, don’t you? It’s the cat jumping on the table during Round 16 of Jenga.

I opened the door.

And this happened:

Avalanche. When you have too much crap in your closet

TupperWars. IT’S ON.

Working at a heated frenzy that should have fused most of the offending objects together, I began to sort. Stained bowls, out. Lids warped from the microwave were Frisbeed into the trash. I declared that every bowl needed a matching lid, or it was being evicted. But the eclectic collection mocked me, much like the laundry nightmare of black, dark brown, and navy socks. NOTHING matched. NOTHING.

After about 45 minutes of ranting, cursing, and organizing, I finally had a small collection of bowls and matching lids. I stacked them neatly in the cupboard. It CLOSED! I had EXTRA SPACE! All was well. Until…

My ex confiscated the rest of it – ALL of the mismatched, stained, twisted-beyond-recognition pieces – and moved them to the basement. Because, of course, “he might need them someday.” Because OBVIOUSLY the lid that held the hot and sour soup you bought in 1998 is irreplaceable. The bends, twists, and dents in the lid from repeated reheating? Custom, one-of-a-kind ART, yo.

When we separated, I didn’t take a single one.

Thankfully, the current hubs isn’t like that. Other than a mild predisposition to hoard cardboard and food, we’re largely in the clear.

However, I have to admit that I’m not immune, either. While I routinely declutter, and take bags of excess to Goodwill, I do hang on to some things entirely too long.

But we’ll save that for the next post. 🙂

* Oh yeah, the lotion. In addition to the clocks and watches and pianos, my ex couldn’t resist the semi-annual Bath & Body Works Stock-Up Sale, either. He kept every “free sample” of lotion he got since probably college, AND hung on to those little bottles of lotion from hotels, too. We didn’t travel a ton, but after ten years of marriage, I had probably three dozen of those little bottles, PLUS myriad samples AND all the stuff he’d bought over the years (or received as gifts, because “obviously you like Bath & Body Works.”)

Suffice it to say we had an ocean of lotion.

The kicker? HE WOULDN’T USE ANY OF IT. He only liked Vaseline Intensive Care. But of course, we couldn’t discard or donate “perfectly good lotion.” Because (sing along, you know the chorus) “we might use it someday.”

Finally, I had had ENOUGH. I made a plan. And I waited.

One Saturday morning, he was out with a friend, undoubtedly at yet another auction to buy more stupid watches. Perfect. It was time.

I gathered my supplies. The miniature army of lotion bottles stood staring at me, waiting for battle. I reached for the nearly empty warehouse-club-sized bottle of Vaseline. I unscrewed the lid, setting it gently on the sink. And, one by one, I poured in every little hotel bottle, free sample, and mostly-used-but-not-enough-to-throw-out container of lotion we had in the house.

Nearly an hour later, I replaced the lid on the “Vaseline,” gave it a good shake, and discreetly disposed of the evidence.

Heh.

And to answer the question you haven’t asked: Nope. He never noticed.

The Purse of a Person

Posted on January 13, 2016 by KatieComeBack

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had something kicking the sides of my cranium trying to work its way out. It’s done quite a bit to try and capture my attention, distracting me from intense post-season NFL matchups and Sunday morning sermons. Impressive for an intangible product of my imagination. Even more impressive, it’s not about food.

What’s been festering in my frontal lobe?

Purses.

Yes, purses. Pocketbooks. Handbags. Cross-body messenger bags.

(Well, it beats staring at my thighs trying in vain, yet again, to suck them in.)

(Side note: That doesn’t work. If you find a way to do it, hit me up. K?)

Everybody loves a good purse, right? Well, women, anyway. And some dudes. NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT and I DO NOT JUDGE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqQj4loAgg

I’m not sure exactly at what age I started carrying a purse. I’m guessing it coincided somewhat with puberty – the age where you suddenly NEED to have, at all times, concealer, frosted eye shadow and neon-blue mascara (hey, it was the 80s, and I bet if I looked at YOUR yearbook, your regrettable decisions would be documented, too), and <whispers> Certain Feminine Hygiene Products We All Carry But No One Must Suspect You Have Because You Would, Like, Die.

Oh, and lip gloss. I think that was the official sign of Becoming a Woman – you graduated from either Cherry Chapstick, or this (which came in a tin and you kept in the pocket of your Lee jeans):

To Maybelline’s Kissing Potion:

Scandalous.

In retrospect, these were actually pretty horrible. Essentially, you were putting corn syrup on your lips. Sure, it was delicious, but I can’t say I’d be puckering up to that sticky, smeary mess. Especially with an inexperienced kisser. Then again, I’m not a dude. Curious, I asked the hubs how he felt about smooching on someone with gloopy, shiny lip gloss. He shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t slow me down.” (I will never understand men. And, speaking of men…if this stuff is supposed to ATTRACT men, why doesn’t it taste like bacon instead of bubble gum?)

Because I don’t really do anything halfway*, once I started carrying a purse, I used a really BIG purse. Something like a hobo bag – big enough to carry all the things I absolutely, positively COULD NOT be without for an hour (read: a wallet and a ton of useless crapola), but NOT big enough to be called a tote bag (or suitcase. Although I suppose that’s just semantics, really.)

*Except stuff like cleaning the bathroom. Because sometimes, a C+ effort is plenty, and because eeeewwww.

Funny thing about space – we fill it almost as soon as we acquire it. (Quick quiz to prove my point: Do you have any empty cupboards in your kitchen? Unoccupied drawers in your desk? Unfilled shelves in your pantry or linen closet? If you do, you’re in the minority, and basically probably not even a true American, because along with our fast food, we like our useless piles of stuff.)

The same was true for my purse. It became a catchall for various items: gum, mints, extra hose, Scotch tape, receipts, Happy Meal toys, a goat, old makeup, new makeup, Scrunchies, keys to a bunch of unidentified passages to Narnia, earring backs, bobby pins, and approximately 23948324032 pens.

Rifling through my purse, looking for the latest misplaced item, my brother would lean over, look inside, and joke, “Oh, there’s my ski!” He affectionately called it “The Abyss” and threatened to hide my sister in there, where she’d clearly never be seen again.

I kept using storage-closet-sized purses well into adulthood. Once I had kids, I had to add entertainment to the variety show in my handbag. So crayons, stickers, antibacterial wipes, sunscreen, fruit snacks, and Cheerios got added to the portable flea market.

It was nice to carry a convenience store on my shoulder – but I still hadn’t mastered the challenge of organization. All of my “essentials” were in a jumbled heap in the bottom of the Pocketbook Black Hole. After grocery shopping, I’d stand on my front doorstep, impatiently shaking my purse, listening for the metal clink of what would (hopefully) be the keys to my house, attempting to locate them before Ben and Jerry melted into a depressing puddle of ooze. Other times, I’d carelessly toss my phone in there before leaving the house; later, walking around the mall, a small voice beside me would pipe up, “Mommy? Your purse is ringing.” I’d frantically rifle through the contents, ineffectively calling out to it, “Hold on, I’m coming! I can HEAR you, I just can’t FIND you!” (Ah well. I can always call them back.)

I have several friends who collect purses. Coach, Dooney & Bourke, Vera Bradley, Kate Spade, and Louis Vuitton. Since I spend most of my money on shoes, I’m more of a “what’s on sale at Kohl’s” kinda gal.

And I’ll let you in on a secret: I actually only own one purse at a time.

One.

One purse.

(Yeah, I know, if it weren’t for my shoe collection, you’d be banging my door down trying to get me to relinquish my Girl Card.)

Don’t get me wrong – I truly can appreciate a really nice handbag. But, frankly? I’m lazy. Remember, I’m schlepping around a boatload of miscellaneous (yet ESSENTIAL) items – the thought of transferring all that rando shiz from one bag to another just so it’ll match my shoes is EXHAUSTING.

So I buy one bag, use it until it falls apart, and then begin the arduous task of relocating all of the contents to their new home. It’s not unlike moving a two-bedroom apartment, really. I just don’t have to repaint.

Recently, the piping started to peel off my current bag. Reluctantly, I started the search for its replacement. This was a GREAT bag. Well under $50 at Kohl’s, BEFORE the coupons and discounts. And bonus: it had a bajillion pockets, so I could actually organize things. (Hubs: “Or have more places to lose things.” WHATEVER. <eyeroll>)

<sniff> It was a good soldier. I wanted to post pictures, in reverence, but as you can see, I was mercilessly photobombed by an attention-whore tabby:

What the – oh, hi kitteh.

Aw, I love you too. Now move, asshole.

GAAAH Really???

Uncle. UNCLE. Close enough.

See all the pockets? (They’re behind the cat.) And to help me further organize, I bought a giant wallet – an organizer WITHIN an organizer! (Heloise should be sending me an award shortly.)

Also a superbargain at Kohl’s.

The smart thing about this clutch is that it has a detachable strap, which, since I travel a lot, I keep in my airport carryon. So, when I’m gonna be out of town, this goes in my backpack, along with my laptop, sewing kit, sunglasses, headphones, gluten-free snacks, gum, Advil, and bottled water.

Wait a sec….

That makes my backpack just another purse, doesn’t it.

Anyway, I just bought a new purse. Well, I bought it about a month ago, but procrastination + lazy + funk meant I was going to haul around a beat-up, falling-apart purse for awhile, while the bright, pretty new one hung in anticipation by the door.

While I’m still feeling pretty blahbulous, I did manage the purse transfer. Here’s my new companion:

newbag

Isn’t it cute? I bought this one** at the World Jubilee Fair – it’s a market where they sell crafts from around the world; the funds go to support…um…oppressed women or something.

(I probably should have been paying better attention. But it sounded sort of like this: blah blah blah in the country of blah blah women blah blah self-sufficient blah blah blah OOH LOOK SCARVES AND PURSES AND JEWELRYYYYYYY. And yes, I binge-bought, but at least it helped the planet or something. Right?)

**It didn’t come with the little state*** key fob. Or the pepper spray. Those were after-market upgrades.

*** yes, it’s stupid cold here.

The beauty of this bag is that, in addition to being ergonomic, it has TONS OF POCKETS. Score!

So there’s room for EVERYTHING. All the essentials listed above, AND a mini first aid kit, generic Advil, a taser, my work badge, a tape measure, and my grown-up lip balm of choice:

burtsbalm

I even have room for these guys:

trollguys

Although why they’ve taken up residence in my purse remains a mystery.

So what’s your bag? What do you carry? What’s the oddest thing – and the best weapon – in there right now?

Sharing the Joy Bauble

Posted on December 25, 2015 by KatieComeBack

In my last post, I made a promise to myself – that I’d find myself a good, solid, abdominal-muscle-exhausting belly-laugh before Christmas was over.

I am proud to report that I got one…courtesy of my cat.

So, in case Santa didn’t bring you a big bucket o’happy this holiday, I’ll share mine. Laughter isn’t like cookies – if you share, there’s MORE, not fewer that you fight over.

Side note: I would totally cut a bish for a good gluten-free cookie. AND I MAY AS WELL ASK FOR A UNICORN TOO I GUESS SINCE THIS SHIZ DOESN’T EXIST.

Thankfully, THIS does – AND it’s gluten-free:

helladrink

I did share. A little. *hic* After about a third of it, I had lost my ability to tie the cherry stems into knots with my tongue. Which I can TOTALLY do, sober. (So can my daughter, because I taught her, because I’m Mother of the Year here. Besides, HOW WILL THE CHILDREN LEARN if we don’t teach them?!) Obviously, I didn’t care at that point…because delicious. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ME YO.

Okay. Before I get to my cat, here’s a car I parked behind the other day:

sexypony2

Do you see it? On the dashboard?

sexypony

That is one sexy pny.

So yesterday, I was getting in the car to go to work. This is usually a bit of an ordeal, because I’m juggling a couple of things:

Laptop bag
Gigundic purse with all the day’s essentials (most of which I haven’t used since I put them in there when I bought said purse….)
Lunch (pistachios, an apple, and a cheese stick, because I have to at least PRETEND to diet at work, even if my heart hasn’t been in it lately)
Bag with work shoes in it (I wear my snow boots to work, because we have a big, dark, parking lot with large ice patches and several surveillance cameras. I don’t want to fall. I especially don’t want to fall on video. So the fun shoes go in a bag until I’m safely at my desk.)
My morning smoothie
a 32oz cup of coffee

Today, I also have three gift bags for my team. (They got chocolate and alcohol, because I am an awesome boss. Don’t you wish you worked for me?) Suffice it to say my hands are full.

I perform my circus act of getting myself to my car, hauling all my stuff down the steps, out the front door, and into the garage. Once I wedge myself through the car door, I start to arrange all my crap so that I don’t break the wine (a tragedy!) or spill my coffee (at which point I’d have to turn around and go back to bed.)

And suddenly….I hear….something.

whirr

whirr whirrrrrr

whirrwhirrwhirrrrrrrr THUD THUD THUD THUD

Whu??

Out of the corner of my eye, some motion catches my attention. I’m alone in my garage…

and…

SOMETHING IS MOVING.

It’s…my passenger-side mirror.

IT’S TOTALLY FLIPPING OUT YO.

It’s flopping and turning like a freaking salmon trying to leap to its homeland to spawn.

WHAT THE ACTUAL EFF.

After several long minutes of vacillating between complete bewilderment and terror that AAAAAAHHHHHHH MY CAR IS HAUNTED…I figure it out. Apparently, when you try to carry the equivalent of the contents of your hall closet out to the car, you should be careful NOT to set the ENTIRE load RIGHT ON TOP of the little doohickey in the center console that adjusts the power mirrors.

<snort>

Oh yeah, the cat. I’ve written about my cats before. Like all good cat people, I find them fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

But I wasn’t prepared for Oliver’s…beauty pose. Which completely killed me dead:

toosexy

Sing it with me:

I’M

TOO SEXY FOR THIS RUG

TOO SEXYYYY YEAAAAHHHHHH

To close the holiday out, allow me to share a Christmas Miracle:

On Wednesday, I was almost DONE with Christmas. I had ONE more present to wrap – a donation in my in-laws’ name to Heifer.org. You might have heard of this organization – you make a donation and they use it to buy sheep and chickens and bees and stuff for folks in third-world countries. It’s a really cool idea, especially if you have relatives who “don’t want anything.” Because my mother-in-law is a wonderful woman with a generous spirit (unlike me, who asked for Etsy gift cards so I can buy handmade jewelry) this organization is where we get all her Christmas gifts – this year, she and her spouse are getting two goats.

Being the Christmas stickler that I am, though, I really feel like she should have something to unwrap. So I printed out a certificate:

goatcert

And, to commemorate the event, we ordered a Christmas goat for them to hang on their tree:

White Goat Christmas Ornament Red Gift Box

You can find this beauty on amazon.com.

Yes, a legit goat Christmas ornament. Don’t ever say I don’t make things memorable. I mean, you don’t just HAVE something like this – there HAS to be a story behind such a thing. Right?

So I’m wrapping this – the LAST present, and then Christmas is DONE! and I can have WINE!

And I ran out of paper. @#$(*#@($@*!!!!

I had ALMOST enough, but, dernit, the paper, much like last season’s skinny jeans, was just not gonna close around the box. I did the best I could, defying generally accepted rules of geometry and physics, but try as I might, I had a small space on the top and bottom, about 1″ square, of cardboard-colored Christmas failure peeking through the hole and mocking me.

But then I found a sheet of old address labels (why were these in with the wrapping paper, anyway?) – oddly, from Heifer.org. (You know how that works – once you make a donation somewhere, they thank you by sending address labels. I have about ninety six gazillion of these, and it’s not because I’m especially philanthropic. I have so many that one year I actually used them instead of cellophane to tape presents shut. Because I’m all resourceful and shiz like that. Especially when it’s totally tacky.)

But this sheet of address labels HAD CHRISTMAS STICKERS ON THEM.

And they fit PERFECTLY on the Square of Shame on my meager offering.

miraclestamp

CHRISTMAS IS SAVED! HALLELUJAH!

May you all have a delightful holiday, filled with sparkles, sprinkles, and new shoes. Thank you for being part of my joy this year!

Procrastination Station: Seven Rando Factoids

Posted on December 6, 2015 by KatieComeBack

So I have some stuff I need to get out of my head and write about, but I’m procrastinating, because it’s kind of painful and therefore feels like work. Which I have no interest in starting, contemplating, or completing today. BECAUSE WEEKEND. Plus, I’m really, really good at procrastination. It’s the zippy convertible I use to drive through life – tight corners on two wheels, slamming into the last available parking space thirty seconds before the show begins. WHAT. A. RUSH.

(And yes, I recognize that life would PROBABLY be a lot less stressful if I actually planned out things and allowed ample time to complete them, and this last-minute-Charlie thing I’m sporting feeds my anxiety like fertilizer on corn in July. But dat’s how I roll, yo. It’s as much a part of me as curly hair and birthmarks, and I’m not sure I could change it if I tried.)

Today I’m putting off stuff by buying shoes. Here’s what’s coming to my house later this month:

http://www.springstepshoes.com

Merry Christmas to me, yo.

So, since I’ve spent my shoe allowance for December (and probably most of 2016), and have to clean out some old shoes to make room for these, I’ll clean out my blog awards closet, too, and post one of the awards that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for a bit.

So, without further ado…

versatile-blogger1

whereishappy was kind enough to nominate me for the Versatile Blogger Award. (Over a month ago. But again, why do TODAY what can be done after the mall closes?) You can find the rules on her post. And you should check out her blog anyway, so go click on it.

Since I dropped my grocery money on shoes this morning, I’m not feeling too rules-y today. But, as the award commands, I will post Seven Meaningful (and Potentially Creepy) Facts about Myself.

1. My tree has been up since October 24. We put it up specifically because the hubs is a cardboard hoarder.

Makes sense, right? Let me explain:

I may have mentioned in the past that I have an aversion to ~~hoarding~~ clutter. Thankfully, the hubs is pretty good about not collecting useless crapola that belongs on the Goodwill truck; if he DOES hang on to something, at least it’s only ONE of the thing, not seventy thousand million of the thing.

(Well, wait. That’s not entirely true. He kind of hoards food. Meaning, if one of the kids mentions that he likes a specific Luna bar, for example, he’ll buy ten boxes of said Luna bar. But, the hubs is 6’4″, so frankly, he eats a lot of what he buys. And he DOES toss it if it gets old or expires, so we’re not going to be featured in a TLC documentary anytime soon. But currently, Target started stocking his favorite frozen pizza again, and there are now SEVEN of them in my freezer, despite the fact that there are THREE Super Target locations within spitting distance of my front door.)

Yet… the one thing that the hubs cannot seem to part with? Cardboard boxes. Whenever you buy a new computer monitor, video game, vacuum cleaner, etc., the rule is that you keep the box just in case the new item goes kaput and you have to send it back. OK, I get that, but you don’t have to keep EVERY BOX FOREVER AND EVER UNTIL DEATH DO US PART.

So, since he’s been in and out of the doghouse these last few months, I announced one Saturday that we were cleaning out the shed AND the garage. We have been blessed with a shizton of storage – we have a four-car garage AND an external shed. Plenty of room for storing bikes, your mower, rakes, extra furniture, a helicopter, a few horses, and probably a national monument or two.

What we had? Two cars, a workbench, an armoire, 4 bikes, a Christmas tree, and FOUR HUNDRED EIGHTY MILLION CARDBOARD BOXES.

So we excavated Mt. Cardboardicus. Our township recycles cardboard IF you tie it neatly in 2′ X 3′ squares no more than 12″ tall. That day, after cutting and stacking boxes and boxes from old appliances we no longer had and furniture we bought over a year ago (seriously – who is gonna mail a couch? !!??!!) I ended up with two cardboard towers each about 4′ high. A veritable…wait for it… skyscrapper. <rim shot>

But the good news? I got to use a saw to cut the cardboard down. Power tools are such a rush. Even if you’re only using them to terrorize glorified paper, saws are awesome for channeling your inner Dexter.

Plus, I found my old rollerblades that I hadn’t been able to locate for two years, AND we unearthed the Christmas tree. So, since we spent all that time digging it out…why not bring it inside? Going ALL THE WAY to the backyard AGAIN to get it in a month or so? Super inefficient. I mean, you’re halfway to Target by that point.

Also, that night, the neighbors were having a Halloween party, and their yard was THOROUGHLY decorated. I mean – Frankenstein automatons, fog, cobwebs….I have nothing against National Beg for Candy and Dress Like a Ho day, but for some reason, the juxtaposition of a lit tree beaming down on the graveyard zombie scene cracked me up.

Hey, someone’s gotta be first, right? And this gave free license to our other neighbors putting their lights up, as well. Including this one. Although, if anyone actually has any clue what it’s supposed to be, you get mad props because I’m stumped.

xmaswut

Christmas kangaroo, anyone? Kids, let this be a lesson: Lights first, cider second.

2. This is our tree topper:

treetopper

Angels watchin’ over me, my Lord….

3. Last year, our tree didn’t come down until April. Because again, PROCRASTINATION. I had to finish our taxes first, ya know. Hey, if there’s snow on the ground SOMEWHERE, the tree can stay. MY HOUSE, MY RULES.

4. Speaking of houses…Last year the kiddos and I made a gingerbread house. Since we suck at all things art, we made it a crack house complete with a murder scene:

crackhouse2

See the rats? And the blood gushing from the head? And the door blocked off? Parent of the year, right here, folks, molding tomorrow’s youth.

5. More “I can’t art”: Super-glue HAAATES me.

Every. Single. Time.

I come by it honestly, though. I have fond memories of my aunt gluing herself to a hairbrush when I was a kid. Who needs a DNA test to prove blood relation when you’re bonded by your lack of adhesive skills?

6. My son isn’t good at art, either. When he was in kindergarten, his class made a recipe book. He needed to illustrate a favorite recipe from home. I present to you “Ice Cream Pie.”

pieno

Brings tears to my eyes, it does. TEARS. Someday, when he’s the lead burrito assembler at Chipotle (yes, this is his current career aspiration,) we’ll be able to say “we knew him when….”

By the way? I have never, EVER, made Ice Cream Pie. Ever. I asked him later why he chose this recipe. “Mom. It’s pie. Anyone can draw a circle.” Well, kiddo, clearly not EVERYONE. Love you.

7. I made my own pens. This is a Big Deal because I suck at all things art (see above) AND because I very nearly failed shop class in middle school. Apparently, I can’t smooth out a solder bead smaller than buckshot – my “lines” probably spell out something obscene in Braille – and when it comes to wood, straight lines and right angles are for non-creative types, in my humble opinion. <turns nose upward>

The ONLY reason I passed Industrial Arts was because half of our grade was a written test to identify tools. I got 100% on the test, but my projects are likely either polluting our planet in a landfill, or they’re a horrible joke circulating through a local club’s annual White Elephant Swap. If you come across one of them, they’re SUPPOSED to be a metal pencil box and a wooden Tic-Tac-Toe board. No, really. Quit laughing.

But recently, I tried my hand at turning, through the help of a friend at work, and I MAKED THESE PENS ALL BY MYSELF (practically) AND I AM SO PROUD.

The red and the purple are fountain pens, because I so fancee. And the purple pen has purple ink. BECAUSE PURPLE.

Here’s a shot of Pen #2 in progress so you can sort of see how it’s done.

pen2a

Essentially, you start with a “blank”, which is a rectangle of wood or acrylic or whatever. (The orange is all acrylic; the red and purple are actual wood with added colored resins – kind of a hybrid of wood/plastic, which you probably guessed as purple trees currently only exist in The Lorax.) Then you cut it, drill out the barrel, and turn it to get the shape. I got to use saws and drills and lathes and polishers and I STILL HAVE ALL MY FINGERS YO.

Plus, I have three very elegant pens. I sign benefits contracts and written warnings with just a little more flourish. It’s like using the good china for a grilled cheese sandwich. Why not? You’re worth it.

Next up will be turning a bowl. Fingers crossed (while they’re still attached, that is….)

Happy Sunday!

Soul Shopping: Walking the Marketplace

Posted on November 8, 2015 by KatieComeBack

So yesterday I was looking for something different* to do, and I stumbled upon a local Holistic Expo.

*Different than raking the massive amount of leaves in the yard. Seriously, I do not live in a freaking forest – where did they all COME from?! And I didn’t PUT them there, why on EARTH should I have to pick them up? Whoever spilled them should be vacuuming that shiz up, yo. PICK UP YOUR OWN TOYS. Gaaaah.

The Expo description:

“an inspired event focused on sharing the finest holistic approaches available in the Upper Midwest. It is an emporium of gifts, products and information to support holistic life — including health, ecology, community and a balance of mind, body and spirit.”

Hmm. Sounds interesting. Finding my balance is part of why I’m here. And if I can find it for $9, that’s pretty awesome. If I don’t, I’m only out the cost of a pizza, and I certainly do NOT need* pizza. Plus, gifts = jewelry, and what girl can’t use a little more bling, right?

*Yeah, as soon as we left the expo, we immediately went out for pizza. It was delicious.

I’ll admit I’ve always been curious about psychics and have toyed with the idea of getting an “official” reading done. The closest I’ve come was a tarot card mini-reading done virtually by a friend of a friend, who said that the card indicated money was coming my way surrounding my career. What she didn’t know was that a few weeks earlier I’d chucked my resume out to the universe after a couple of rough days at work. Subsequently, I’d been interviewing at a company and was dangerously close to an offer. Turns out I got that offer…but decided I didn’t really want to leave my current gig. I talked to my boss, and he not only matched the offer, but he also gave me a compressed work week. BAZINGA. So it could have been entirely coincidental, but I can’t deny that the reading was accurate.

So. Expo. With the hubs.

Yeah…the hubs decided to come along. I’ve mentioned before that our relationship’s had a bit of a shakeup recently. But…we’re working on things. And by “working on things,” I mean he’s groveling and being SuperHubs, and I’m selfishly soaking it all in. And we’re talking things out. A lot. And he desperately wants to be here, and wants to be with me, and when I reflect on the entire relationship, I wonder if it really makes sense to let one blowout on the highway ruin the entire road trip, and if we keep making progress, we just might be okay.

When we got there, we discovered that the tickets were not $9…but 2/$10. Score! Now I’m only out the cost of a a pint of ice cream* if this whole thing is a bust.

*You guessed it. I ate this last night, too. Technically, I didn’t finish it, though. Well, not until this morning, because, well, it was still THERE. Man, I suck.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl

The Expo had over 80 vendors who provided a huge variety of services that fall under the spiritual umbrella. And apparently, that umbrella could shade Rhode Island, because it was awfully broad. Sure, there were a lot of psychic mediums, spiritual counselors and healers, aura photos/readings (I had one done a while ago), Reiki/energy healers, and tarot card readers, like you’d expect.

There were also several jewelry vendors. OK, technically, this was relevant because the jewelry was crystals and minerals and stuff. But when you put it in wearable form I forget a lot of that. Because PRETTY.

(My poor hubs. He thought he was attending a vendor show where he’d have the opportunity to flex his skeptical muscles, but instead was surreptitiously suckered into looking at MILES AND MILES OF JEWELRY instead. HAHAHA #vindicationbling #allthatglittersisrevenge)

And yes, OF COURSE I bought something. Because ~~I am weak~~ I deserve it. And I love this:

The stone is Ruby in Fuchsite. The description of its powers: “Perfect heart stone. Enhances connection to spiritual realm. Promotes contentment and peace.” OK, I bought it because it looks cool, but I can appreciate the message all the same. 🙂

Most of the vendors seemed to be in line with the expo’s description – but there were a few head-scratchers:

Health & Beauty items. Beauty? I sort of thought the point of this inner peace and tranquility scene was to not focus so much on the outer shell of your soul. But there were a few vendors who wanted to fix your skin and cellulite all the same. Maybe that near-death bright light is brutal on your complexion, having the same effect that dressing-room fluorescent bulbs have on thigh ripples during swimsuit season.

Of course, there were the ubiquitous home-based businesses for essential oils, and a couple places offered herbal lotions. One dude insisted on demonstrating his cleanser on the back of my hand. (Ooh, that sounded dirty.) Normally, I’m pretty good at dodging aggressive vendors, but there were pretty, sparkly crystals EVERYWHERE and he caught me completely off-guard while I was literally distracted by something shiny. Fortunately, being surrounded by crystals and all, I was too Zen peaceful to punch him in the face as he touted the benefits of this cleanser while massaging it into my hand.

(To be fair, the cleanser was super moisturizing…but it had an odd smell that for a while, I couldn’t place. Then it hit me. Cumin. Cumin?? Was he…basting me? Is this how a turkey feels before it goes into the four-hour sauna?)

Diet aids. Sure enough, one vendor was peddling some sort of 10-day Power Green “cleanse.” Yes, even at a spiritual expo, the pressure’s on to lose weight. <grumble> Dude, I can barely stick to a FREE diet for ten days. Unless it contains hallucinogens, or adhesives to glue my lips together, I GUARANTEE you I can outsmart it. (Despite the free samples, I kept walking.)

Another vendor was selling something called “Living Water.” Uh…living? I don’t know about YOU, but once I see Living + Water, that’s a hearty helping of NOPE in my glass. Water is supposed to be…well, not dead, really, but certainly NOT “living.” And once you start using descriptors like “plasma” there is no way in freaking HELL you are getting that shiz anywhere near my gyro hole. Nope nope nopity nope NO. The eerily-smiling vendor offered Dixie cups of what I’m certain was zombie afterbirth. Startled, I darted into a chiropractic booth to keep the water from catching the smell of fear and chasing me.

A toe reader. Toe reader. !!! This person was legit doing life readings by LOOKING AT PEOPLE’S NASTY SWEATY BARE MAN HOOVES. Seriously. <shudder>

I declined, because let’s face it, feet are gross. That said, I REALLY wanted the hubs to do this. Why? Suffice it to say he does NOT have pretty feet. I mean – three words: hairy, crooked toes. (I’ll spare you the picture. YOU’RE WELCOME.) But it’d have been worth the cost just for the sheer entertainment value of horrifying the vendor. Plus, I’m sort of dying to know what on EARTH disfigured fuzzy hobbit flippers say about a person. But sadly, I spent my cash on pizza and ice cream (see above.) Ah well.

A custom home remodeling company. It escapes me how this is relevant, but these people are EVERYWHERE, so while their attendance was illogical, it wasn’t surprising.

We spent several hours milling about the different displays and perusing their wares. And I dove right in to my knapsack of adventure and took the opportunity to have not one, but four different readings. (Apparently, I will not miss the opportunity to binge, even at a psychic fair.)

My readings:

Two psychics – one focusing on past lives
Palm and tarot card reading
A tattoo reading (Did you even know there WAS such a thing? Me neither. Apparently, they read scars and interpret dreams, too. Well huh.)

I’m still mulling over the details of what I heard. My mental jury’s still out on things like past lives, and I know this is only for entertainment purposes, yada yada yada.

But regardless, the experience was fascinating, interesting, insightful, and inspiring. It was much like a cerebral fortune cookie – most of what’s inside probably applies to a lot of folks, but if I can use that little slip of paper to give myself a push in the direction of healing and peace, AND get a little something sweet out of it, it was well worth the price of admission.

Speaking of fortune cookies…Interestingly, much like the hallmark of Chinese food, about an hour after the expo, I was hungry for more.

So, in the meantime….I’d love to hear YOUR stories. Have you had your cards or palm read? Been to a psychic? Share your experiences – feed my need until I can go back for more without looking like a spiritual glutton! 😀

Carrots in My Carryon

My emotional baggage is packed with food

Tag Archives: beauty

Denim, Deciphered

The Clarity of the Crystal Ball

Stay-cation Rejuvenation

100 Ways to Heave Your Blubber

Stressing About…Stuff. Part II of II

Stressing About…Stuff. Part I of II

The Purse of a Person

Sharing the Joy Bauble

Procrastination Station: Seven Rando Factoids

Soul Shopping: Walking the Marketplace

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