random thoughts – Day 1,642 – (Sunday) – panic shopping

It was another weekend of multiple competing events clamoring for attention. Saturday, in addition to the Field Day event where Troupe Salaamati performed, on my radar were the Lowell Irish Festival, the Greek Festival in Fitchburg, a belly dance workshop outside Boston with Issam Houshan, the famous Middle Eastern drummer, and Johnny Appleseed Festival in Leominster. I ended up grocery shopping and running errands.

Today’s calendar competition included a tour at Lowell Cemetery, the final StART on the Street event in Worcester, and the Finnish Market in Fitchburg. None of those were attended by me, either. I was sidetracked on a shopping excursion for vacation wear, necessary after trying on my swimwear on Friday.

Most of my swim suits are circa 2017, bought before I went to Jamaica, or, egads, even earlier. Surprise, surprise, they don’t fit. I haven’t taken a summer trip to any beaches in several years so this nugget of info was crammed into a storage bag under the bed. The one-piece suits bought from Aldi were a gamble that didn’t pay off.

Swimwear.

Panic shopping took place at Kohl’s where there are still a few swimsuits, including some on a clearance rack. It was brutal and I was in there for what felt like forever, partly due to the extra peppy disco-era music piped through the store. And I really was in there for a couple hours, trapped in the clothing department, obsessively circling racks in the hope that items I needed would magically appear. 

Some swim bottoms that fit were found, but finding tops to go with them was another story. Of course, the mission strayed and additional items including a dress and sweater were added to the cart with the justification “I could wear this to work.” 

At least Kohl’s has fitting rooms and everything actually fits, at least for the sliver of time during the try-on. There have been numerous documented cases of clothes shrinking on the drive home and suddenly not fitting me once I got home. There was none of the “Well, if I lost a couple pounds this would look great” aspirational (delusional) shopping that has frequently befallen the wallet and closet. 

Kiki!

Kiki, who seems unbothered by wardrobe issues, seems to be relaxing more. Lately, when I pass through a room, instead of snapping to attention in a state of high alert, sometimes she continues napping. This afternoon, she let me brush her silky coat for several minutes. She leaned into the brush and even let me brush her belly a bit. 

I still carry the hope that someday she will do the stereotypical cat antics like sitting in bags and boxes and laps. Her antics are limited to watching me from under a dining room chair and randomly meowing for no discernible reason. For as long as she lets me, I'll enjoy the moments of stroking her face and brushing her coat and feeding Temptations Treats to her from my hand.

random thoughts – Day 1,641 – (Saturday) – big day, big hair

Dance performance day at the Hubbardston Lion’s Club Field Day dawned with a forecast of sunny and 80+ degrees by noon. Last year when we danced at this event it was cloudy, chilly, extra breezy, and I wore several layers. Today, my strategy was definitely fewer layers than last year – no leggings under the giant skirt and just a cropped top underneath the top with the big paillettes. 

Zills = portable music makers.

My hair is usually worn down, but there was no way I wanted to deal with hair stuck to my sweaty neck, and it was put up in a bun. It was an architectural feat guided by two online instruction videos and requiring smoke, mirrors, magic, a couple prayers, and purple and black fabric flowers. It looked good and didn’t fall out, so that was a big success on the big hairdo. I was out the door by 9:50 a.m.

We met in a building next to the event to get ready. We took some pictures. When it was close to our noon scheduled time, we made our way to the field. After our introduction, we made our entrance and set our formation. The first number started and not too far into it, the music stopped. The same thing happened during the same dance at the same event last year. Last year, we kept going and the music came back after a pause. Today, that music didn’t come back on. We did the dance with no music, and just our zills (finger cymbals) to keep the beat. Thank goodness we are our own percussion section on that dance.

Big hair updo.

It turned out the power to the amplifier had blown. After a few minutes of technical work, a solution was found and we were able to dance our next three dances with the music. Thank goodness, because we can roll though the first one with no music, but we can’t do the rest of the show without music.

After the dancing, we changed back to our street clothes and scattered to the winds. My winds took me to the shopping highlights of Gardner. First, it was the magical Timpany Plaza with Tractor Supply, Five Below, Gardner Cinema, Aldi, Big Lots and more. That shopping plaza is enough to make me want to move to Gardner.

It was Aldi for groceries including this summer’s addiction, green grapes. Then it was a quick stop at Big Lots to check out the half-off summer shoes there. Not only were the sandals different than in the Fitchburg store, the furniture selection is significantly better. In Fitchburg practically everything was gray, but Gardner had a gorgeous pale pink love seat and a cool mustard side chair and everything seemed fresher.

The next stop was Ocean State Job Lot on the quest for the 2025 date book with the flap with a magnet. I’ve been buying these for eight or nine years after it became impossible to find the spiral bound books I used for a bunch of years. There were none to be found in Leominster yesterday, but the Gardner store had it in the full range of colors – orange, red, green, and blue. I bought the last blue one, because this year’s is orange, last year’s is red, and, well, it was the last blue one so it felt more valued than the green.  Sometimes that is how I roll.

Unwinding.

It was 3:30 when I finally landed back home and all I’d eaten all day was a granola bar before I left. Groceries were put away and things rolled pretty quickly into food prep. Rice was started. Onions and broccoli were sauteed and then simmered with the rice in the Tikka Masala sauce bought yesterday. So yummy. 

The day wound down with a glass of wine and the bag of Milano cookies. Yes, the whole bag, but that wasn't the intent, just the result of taking the whole bag into the living room. 

random thoughts – Day 1,640 – (Friday) – full day

The vacation day had a sort of a plan for a change. The dance troupe is performing at Hubbardston Field Day on Saturday, and we had a dress rehearsal scheduled for 6:30 in Townsend tonight, which is close enough to Fitchburg and Leominster to deal with some errands.

Before leaving Lowell, the plan was to stop at St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop then Market Basket, return home to drop off the groceries at the house, then hit the road. Planned destinations were Ocean State Job Lot, the gas station on Route 12, the car wash, Big Lots, then rehearsal.

The bag of clothes for the donation and my weekend purse were grabbed. Of course, no donation trip to St. V’s has ever happened without a stop inside the shop. Treasures were found in the half-off tags and I stood in the checkout line with a pair of Ralph Lauren striped pajamas, a pair of Jones New York blue linen pants that will be perfect for an upcoming trip to Mexico, and a gray shirt with a hood because gray seems to have replaced black as my go-to color. As I approached the checkout, I discovered my wallet was absent from my purse and asked the cashier if she could hold my items while I went home for it.

Sitting in traffic and at lengthy red lights on the way back to the house provided plenty of time to debate returning to St V’s. At the house, the wallet was retrieved from Thursday's dance bag and a lemon Italian ice and a granola bar were consumed for sustenance, then it was back into the traffic. Market Basket was bumped for the afternoon, knowing it would be possible to go after rehearsal. Or Saturday. Or Sunday. The items were bought at St. V’s and then it was off to the direction of The ‘Burg.

Ocean State Job Lot was uncrowded and I browsed the entire store like a lady of leisure on a Friday afternoon. The grocery department, which always fascinates, yielded Tikka Masala sauce, Milano cookies and smoked paprika. 

In the car wash.

The gas station was oddly empty and it was a quick in and out with a full tank of $2.97/gallon gas, then next door for the car wash with the free vacuums. While vacuuming, I was mindful of the peridot and gold earring dropped in the car a month or two or three ago. And there it was, nestled in the nubs of the driver’s side floor mat, where I have looked for that earring at least a dozen times since dropping it. Eureka! Now I can stop sitting in the driveway looking through the car, and relax in the parking garage where I would look for a glint in the cracks and crevices of the concrete which yielded a dime and a work logo lapel pin but no earring.

The traffic was heavy all through Leominster and Fitchburg, but Big Lots was quiet and pleasant. The main objective was makeup remover wipes, but the summer shoes were half off, so sparkly thong sandals were chosen after going through the entire display. While casually wandering the store without a care, I checked my watch and was shocked that it was already 6:00 and rehearsal was at 6:30.

It was a hot-footed trot to the register where the sandals rang up wrong but I didn’t notice until I was nearly at the door and reviewing the receipt. The clerk verified the price with another worker and refunded the amount of the overcharge to my debit card. Then it was onto John Fitch Highway where the traffic crawled when it wasn’t fully stopped but the minutes kept moving along.

I arrived at rehearsal barely on time which hurt because I usually arrive at the studio ten or fifteen minutes early for class or rehearsals because I hate being late. It was a rush to get into costume and everyone else was dressed and chatting.

 We danced great and finished quickly. Afterwards, I stopped at Family Dollar in Townsend where the store is always tidy and the shelf tags are correct, unlike the Dracut store which always looks like a cyclone just visited and the prices posted on the shelves are almost never correct. The mission was caramel macchiato coffee creamers which were not found at the other stores. The added bonus was coffee on sale.  

Ritzy dinner.

At home, it was time for the latest episodes of Emily in Paris. There hadn’t been any supper, so it was a snack of Ritz crackers and sliced American cheese. Not exactly gourmet, and the only thing ritzy was the brand of cracker, but it was after 8:00 and there was zero interest in cooking or eating anything heavy at that hour. It was quite a full day, even if my belly ended on a light note.

random thoughts – Day 1,639 – (Thursday) – shake-ups and footwork

It’s been a self-inflicted schedule shakeup this week. On Wednesday, after scrutinizing my calendar and verifying there were no meetings, I decided to take Friday as a vacation day. That bumped the second day in the office to today. There was morning closet heartache and angst while trying to find some pants that fit. On the Friday office day, jeans are allowed, but Thursday is a different story. Three pairs of pants hit the reject pile before I found a pair that could be zipped. Ugh.

After work, there was a traffic-inflicted headache on the ride home. So many drivers being rude and aggressive and cutting people off! all I wanted to do was get home and change for ballet class and give Kiki some pats and love, before heading back out the door. 

Waze guided me on a different route than last week’s jaunt down I-95. Tonight, it was all winding back roads past beautiful homes and for a solid half-hour I had absolutely no clue what towns I was passing through. Nothing was familiar until the junction of Route 2 near Walden Pond, and even that was more of a brief flash than a full memory. But shortly thereafter, I arrived in Wayland at the ballet studio.

There were four students in class tonight. I had new ballet slippers freshly arrived on Wednesday from the shopping jungle of the Amaz*n. They are a stretchy canvas instead of leather, and I like the way they hug the arches of my feet. It felt like magic dancing off the dust of the day, practicing at the barre and traversing the floor diagonally with various steps. So familiar, and it felt so good.

Treasures from the Amaz*n.

The new ballet slippers, along with ten lace headbands for belly dance and yoga/water shoes for vacation, were bought with credit card rewards points, making them practically free. The kicker is, the set of headbands was bought primarily for the purple one, to go with my dance skirt, but the color is darker than I thought it would be, and more of a dark eggplant color. Errr…. Oh well. 

After class, Kiki was adorably seeking head rubs. Then I freaked her out by showing her a stuffed fish toy. She hauled butt out of the living room like something was chasing her. In my fantasy life with Keeks, some day she will have a favorite toy and she will curl up in my lap with it and we will be a picture of domestic tranquility worthy of a painting. It’s important to have life goals. Or delusions. 

random thoughts – Day 1,638 – (Wednesday) – food, dramas, fashion

Wednesday means downtown to the office day, and today was our quarterly group lunch. The idea is, the whole team eats lunch together, either at a restaurant or with takeout/delivery. So far, we’ve had deli food from Lou’s Deli and eaten Greek food at Athenian Corner. Today, we ordered food from Mandarin Asian Bistro and ate at the office.

The menu there has a Chinese food section and a Japanese food section and it’s huge. Large menus stress me out in much the same way as the cereal aisle at Market Basket, which gives me anxiety. There are too many options screaming for attention and it becomes overwhelming. When I’m hungry, like I was today when scrolling through the seemingly endless online menu, it’s worse. The headache that started pounding may have been from hunger, but it might also have been from the magnitude of the menu.

Teriyaki salmon bento box lunch.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had Chinese or Japanese food, or even what I used to like. There were combos and bento boxes and sushi and all manner of dishes. I finally narrowed it down to tofu pad Thai or a teriyaki salmon bento box. In the end, the variety offered by the bento box with its miso soup and salad won out. It was delicious. And filling. 

The volume of food was much more than I usually eat for lunch and I was uncomfortably full for the rest of the day, so much so that I skipped supper. 

Tonight's K-drama   fashion item.

Back at home, it was a dive back into Love Next Door, the Korean drama I recently started watching on Netflix. This one is set in current times and I am once again sucked into the fashions and the home furnishings. This one features food, and now I’ll be dying for bibimbap and scallion pancake and all the side dishes, and searching online for the hot pink bomber jacket and the oversized gray sweatshirt with studded swirls on the sleeves photographed off the TV after pausing the show. 

A potentially excessive number of photos in my phone are shots grabbed from K-dramas with clothing, food, artwork, and even doors seen in a show that I decided I need some day. Of course, some day isn’t actually a day of the week, so I should probably get busy on figuring out specifics. The food might be the easiest. Time to make a plan.

random thoughts – Day 1,637 – (Tuesday) – seasonal shifts

The summer seems to have picked up its toys and left the playground in the past few days, ready to give it all up for autumn. That viewpoint could be skewed by my not spending much time outside recently, or for most of the summer. And the tips of the tree limbs exhibiting red-leafed tips.

I'm unfortunately less tapped in to the outside temperature in digital readout since the home screen display on my phone has decided to change things up and no longer display the time and temperature. It happened last week around the same time I finally got the car dashboard cluster changed from Italian back to English, which required changing the radio panel setting from English to French and then back to English. Go figure. And thanks to whoever posted that trick on the Jeep Renegade Online Forum. Now I need the same for the phone. 

Much to the joy of my wallet, the house has been running comfortably without the A/C on and with windows open for a couple weeks. It’s been great sleeping with a bedroom window open a few inches and I haven’t woken up 100 times overnight like I did all summer. For the past two or three days, it’s even felt chilly when I got up. The thermostat read 67 degrees this morning with all downstairs windows closed. It might be a false start, but it seems like the seasons are changing over.

Glass cruet on a September morning.

It's dark earlier in the evening, and the light is different in the mornings, too. It’s darker when I get up, and the blinds need to be opened when I work in my little home office. 

This morning around 8:00 or a bit later, as I refilled my coffee mug while the computer did whatever it is that takes it forever to be operational each day, the angle of the sun was low and shining on the pressed glass salad dressing cruet that currently sits on the kitchen windowsill. It was kind of pretty, and I was glad to have noticed it. Sometimes I forget to pay attention and just charge through the days with blinders on. Other times, I am mindful enough to pause and admire the sun illuminating a cheap piece of glass that came with a salad dressing mix.

random thoughts – Day 1,636 – (Monday) – shoe quest

Originally posted September 24, 2011 and repeated today, just because. All these years later, some things haven't changed. I'm still not keen on shopping, and still default to thrift shops, they are just different shops in a different state.

One seemingly ordinary weekend afternoon, I went shopping, which was actually a bit out of the ordinary for me.  My girly-girl card may be confiscated and cut to pieces for this, but I generally don’t enjoy shopping. In fact, the word “detest” comes to mind. This may be shocking news to any who remember me from my recreational shopping days when I shopped three or four times a week. Back then, I was trying to get out of the house and away from a husband. I thought buying things would fill the emptiness in me. I know better now. 

For one thing, I know I already have far too much stuff. I could probably hang a banner outside my house and have enough clothing and housewares to run a little shop for a month or two. For another, beyond the quarterly pest treatments at the house and two random visits by the cute guy who used to live next door, I rarely have people over. This means there is no sense of needing to impress anyone. No need for the latest and greatest kitchen gadget, toothbrush holder, scented candle or hostess outfit. In the nearly four years I have lived in my house, I’ve had exactly two parties, so it’s not like I am competing for the Martha Stewart home entertainment award. Fact: New Year’s Eve 2011 will be the fourth anniversary of the same bottle of champagne living in the lower right bin of the refrigerator.

Given my absence of house guests, already excessive wardrobe, and lack of need concerning basic living accoutrements, why would I invest my precious time and risk the potential of being hypnotized by some retailer’s music system lulling me into the appropriate level stupor to shell out money I don’t have for things I don’t need?

Like I was saying, it was unusual that I was shopping. The place I was shopping, however, was completely usual for me -- Goodwill. People think I am kidding when I say it, but Goodwill is my first choice for shopping in Clarksville. Yes, the mall here is THAT pathetic and overstocked with disposable clothes clearly intended for one wearing as evidenced by their propensity to disintegrate in the washer the first time through. The TJ Maxx in Clarksville is the smallest I’ve seen in the five American cities resided in during my adult life. Since the flood of May 2010 there has been no Opry Mills with my beloved Gap and Nine West Outlet stores, so yes, shopping here stinks and I am almost exclusively a Goodwill gal.

This one particular day, I must have had a lot of time on my hands, because I was wandering all over the place, way beyond the usual skirts and tops for work section, and the “I don’t really need more jeans but these are cute and only $8” rack, and and even paid attention to the shoes, a category I tend to ignore because I already have some decent hookups for inexpensive shoes.

If you know me, you might have guessed that there is a tiny chance I have too many pairs of shoes to count. I have not figured out how to make the abacus go that high,  or maybe I just don’t want to know. The last time I took an inventory (many residential moves ago), I had 150 pairs of footwear (including specialty footwear like snow boots and hiking boots, but not counting super specialty footwear like ski boots). Family members vowed to never again help me move my household due to my excessive holdings of books, clothing and footwear. Ignorance may be bliss on this one, unless I can convert the unworn footwear to cold cash.

But there I was, cruising the shoe racks, when I spotted them. Amazing blue croc-textured shoes with squared toes, bearing a garish orange price tag proclaiming the price to be $5. It was a plunge into instant adoration. With me and retail, the lower the price, the deeper the love.  A wistful sigh escaped my lips. Or maybe it was a gasp. I stroked the uppers and examined the soles which were barely sullied by asphalt or gravel and still seemed perilously slippery. The pale gray, pristine insoles still had cushiony cushions. The black heels bore hardly a nick nor a scuff. I was swooning. Somehow, I tore myself away and walked halfway to the checkout to clear my head. Even from half a store away, I heard the shoes whisper my name.

And suddenly, a vision of a tall, handsome, muscular man in nicely fitting dark-dyed jeans and vintage-styled, hipster shirt burst into my head. This stunner of a man, worthy of a magazine cover and as yet unknown to me, was the perfect accessory for these shoes. I returned to the shoe rack. I snatched up the shoes.  As I walked to the checkout, clutching the shoes to my bosom, I imagined the dates I would go on with the the beautiful shoes and the handsome man I didn’t happen to know yet.  And I bought them.

Here’s the good part -- they are men’s shoes. Size 10. In my date fantasy, the handsome and charming imaginary prince is wearing the shoes. It will take a special guy to pull off wearing these shoes, and that is the guy I want.

So now I have a pair of shoes, but there is no man in my real life (yet) who can fill them. But I have an idea ... a quest!  A reverse Cinderella type thing. I will find the man who fits the shoes. Granted, it will be kind of weird asking men I only recently met what size shoe they wear, and they might get a little creeped out when I pull out my pair of blue men's shoes and ask them to put them on and walk around for me. Sure, some might think I am a total whack job. But think of the stories! I can chronicle my journey for the man to fill the shoes, they can tell their buddies about the nutcase running around with the blue shoes. Everybody wins! Especially me, when I find the right man to fill the shoes.