Second To Last Post About Shoes This Week

I promise.  If I have anything else to say about shoes this week (after tomorrow) I'll say it next week. It's just that Irregular Choice is completely blowing me away right now.  The joy and imagination on display here is unlike any I've seen.  This is a universe that I'd like to live in.

Okay, these are a little scary:

So amazingly red:

 Pink pompom fringe!

 These are described as metallic blue embossed leather boots

Almost all of these shoes (and the ones from my earlier post) come in at least one other color.  Many come in three other colors.  Some are on sale.

Today's shoes are all on the U.S. website.  The U.K. website has even more complete madness going on.  I'll posts a selection of those tomorrow.

Plus One

Whoops!  There were four cakes for my birthday:

I forgot about the caramel cake (the nearest one in the photo)

EMERGENCY SHOE BLOG!!!!!

Goodbye bank account...

I just stumbled on the Irregular Choice website.  These are the tip of the iceberg.

Birthday 2011

2010 was a difficult year.  For the first half I was pretty proud of myself for being able to compartmentalize the bad and the good and still find ways to enjoy myself.  Actually, I've been patting myself on the back about that ability for the last three years.  Unfortunately that particular emotional resource ran out a little after my dad died.  Since then I've had a hard time enjoying anything.  That's normal - it happens.  As long as I take care of myself I'll get that ability back.  I'm not worried, just waiting.

I did enjoy my birthday though, in a low-key way.  To celebrate we went to Hotel Del Coronado for New Years Day brunch in the Crown Room.  Here's what I wore:

Mom gave me the bag and the shoes for Christmas.  You'd have to feel at least a little bit uplifted by that combo, huh?  You might recognize the shoes from this post.

Here I am towards the end of the meal.  Notice that I have a tiramisu, three chocolate drinks, three little piles of chocolate mousse and a meringue.  The food at the brunch is stellar but my absolute favorite thing is that chocolate drink.  Maybe next time I'll get five!

After brunch we all walked on the beach.  Usually there's a chilly wind blowing on that beach but this day it was just warm and pleasant.  They have disco sand there: it glitters with golden mica.  So fancy!

Then Pete and I took Fay in her doggie stroller to smell the smellicans (pelican roosts really stink) at the La Jolla Cove.

Fay loves to sniff all the smells.  I kept waiting for someone to look into our stroller and say "What a hideous child!" Everybody just thought she was so cute. Well, she is.

When we got back to Mom's house the sun was setting.  It was an incredible sunset.  Pete and I stayed out on the lawn for about an hour watching it.

It was even beautiful to the east.  I had trouble deciding where to look.

I chose to see a phoenix in these clouds because I could use a rebirth.

After the sunset we all had dinner together.  Mom delegated the ordering of the cakes to my brother this year.  For some reason he ordered three birthday cakes for me. There have to be photos of them somewhere but I don't have them.  There was coconut, chocolate with white icing and a fruit tiramisu.  Against the odds, the fruit tiramisu was my hands down favorite.  I wish I had some right now.

So all in all a very pleasant birthday.  Ideal.  Comfortable, delicious and spent with my favorite people.  Way to start the new year.

Letting The Cat Out

Pete and I have a number of things that we like to do when we go to La Jolla to visit my family.

The first place we have to go is Mr. Taco. Everybody in the family knows that.

The second place we have to go is Tokyo House in Pacific Beach.  Everybody knows this too.  What they don't know is that Pete and I have begun to indulge in the beer and sake special: if you order a big beer (22oz. bottle) you get an order of sake with it for a penny. At lunch time.  Yes, this is what we like to do.

I looked at a couple of the yelp reviews and some of the unflattering ones do have a point.  This place is a little scuzzy. Pete and I like scuzzy (I'm looking at you, Peppermill)  The people who work there are really nice and the food is great.  The music is unreliable, which is always entertaining.  Tokyo House is also a refreshing change of pace from the mostly fancypants stuff we do in California.

After our beers, sakes and makimono we like to go to the fifteen dollar store two doors down.  Everything there is fifteen dollars or less.  Like these rings.  They're all for sale at three dollars apiece.

 I went home with the one with red eyes on my middle finger.  I probably should have just bought them all so I could wear them all at once, as shown.  However, my beer-and-sake-addled head remained cool and I didn't.

Birthday photos tomorrow.

Today's Surliness Brought To You By The Learning Curve

It took me all day to figure out how to resize this image so I could save it for the web and post it here.  A simple photo of a revolting bowl of Count Chocula.  Yes, the process was extremely aggravating.  It's six PM and I've just figured out how to do it.

This is continuing fallout from the destruction of my laptop (I had to use the word "fallout" - my laptop fell) Yes, I lost some software and some work I'd done with it but nothing very expensive or truly irreplaceable.  I lost so many photos that I don't even know how many I lost.  Of course most of them were worthless.  I can live with those things.  They're gone and I can barely remember them.  

I have yet to figure out how to get my address book up and running using the backups I made.  I may never manage it.  There's always Facebook and waiting for people to e-mail me so I can save their contact info again but still it's frustrating.  The same is true for my Safari bookmarks - not the most devastating loss either.  It's just that I used to have a comfortable system.  I had passwords and receipts saved in my old mailboxes.  Now I have to hit the "forgot password" link when I want to sign into something unusual.  Big deal.  Once everything worked smoothly, now it doesn't.  Oh well, suck it up and rebuild.

What has probably annoyed me most though is not having Photoshop.  I have photos to post up here!  Today I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop Elements.  Adobe makes everything so much more confusing than necessary.  I'm sure I'll spend additional hours searching through the maze of tutorials to find out about stuff I don't want to do and stuff it hasn't occurred to me to do.  For today though, I can finally bring you a simple, reasonably-sized photo of a bowl of Count Chocula.

If only I could just be cool about all of this.  I know it's going to take a while for me to get back up to speed.  I chose to try to learn a new thing (Photoshop Elements)  It's computer software - of course it's confusing.  I just need to be patient.  What happened to all the reading about Zen I just did?  Things are new and different and you have to adjust.  C'est la vie...

Perhaps tomorrow I can post the photos from my birthday and begin to put this laptop incident behind me.

Now the reason I wanted to post this image in the first place is that today for the first time I found the taste of Count Chocula to be disgusting.  I believe this makes me officially mature.  It is no longer fun to eat Count Chocula.  I hope that the same cannot be said for Lucky Charms.

What Not To Wear Plus

The other day I watched something like three episodes of "What Not To Wear."  I mean, who doesn't love a good makeover?

The next day I got sucked in to shopbop.com.  Like a train wreck, I couldn't look away.  Everything was on sale: mostly leggings, wrap sweaters and eight inch stiletto open-toe boots.  Not practical for my lifestyle.

I think Stacey and Clinton would say NO to these:

Caterpillar legs

 Simply ick

 I have never understood the appeal of the droopy drawers look

 This is pretty I guess but flatters no one

 Uh...

 These would go well with the sack of denim above

 She looks good in this but nobody else would.  Also, for hardcore clubbers only.

 Very fancy, expensive garbage bag. Hefty Hefty Hefty!

 I can't despise this look enough.  I can't tell if there's camel toe going on there or if the shorts are just distressed to look like there is.  Also, your pockets belong inside your pants.

 Just no.  Okay, maybe if you're eight years old and you made it yourself.

Here's the "Plus" part I mentioned in the title.  This look I like.  I'd wear that.

These crack me up.  They're the kind of thing that I think is so ridiculous that I try it on and then decide I love them.  They're so "Barbarella."  

I had a hair stylist once in the late nineties, early aughts who had never seen "Barbarella."  I think that's a crime for someone in a style profession.  If you haven't seen it either, head over to Netflix immediately.  It's very entertaining and it won't hurt your head.

Fay is really bored.  She's walking around the apartment looking for things to knock over and scratch at.  She wants me to get my attention so I'll give her food.

I think I might have to start bringing bribes on our walks again.  The last two times I've taken her out she just wants to come right back in again. At least she has to walk from the back door to the front door of the apartment building.  We go out the back door and it doesn't have a keyhole so we can't get back in that way.

I'm feeling slightly better today.  I'm beginning to be able to think a tiny bit.  I can't do math yet though.

This is the time of year when people tend to look back at the past and try to take a survey of what's happened.  I just turned 45 so I took a glance back over the last five years.

It seems like something happens to people in their forties and they can no longer evade the issues they were able to sidestep or ignore in their younger days.  All the shit hits the fan in your forties.

For example the alcoholics go hardcore and really wreak havoc in their lives and the lives of people who love them.  Long term couples split up, people start getting serious illnesses.  If you have demons you haven't done something about yet they will come and sit on your shoulders and bite you in the face.

Say you're twenty-something and you know you have some kind of problem.  You don't know what to do about it and there's a lot going on in your life so you think, "well I'll just look away and maybe it will get better on its own."  That's reasonable enough I guess.  What else can you do when you don't know what to do?

As you get older the problem persists and through life experience you begin to find out about ways you could address it.  You don't want to address it though.  It would be a big pain in the ass to address it.  You've gone on this long not having to acknowledge the problem.  Your life's manageable and you're having a good enough time.  Why shake things up?

Well here's why: now you're forty and you realize the damned problem hasn't gone away and it's not going to just go away and it's starting to creep into your daily life and kick the legs right out from under you.  It's starting to influence your closest relationships and it's interfering with even your most casual interactions with people.  It's standing in front of you and it won't get out of the way.  It's in the middle of your kitchen, screaming it's head off and threatening to set fire to your house.  If you don't do something it will set fire to your house and you'll be left with nothing.

It's so hard to make changes in life.  Hardly anybody can change without absolutely being forced to.  I can't.  Old habits die really hard.  Chances are that whatever you're dealing with you can still get some enjoyment out of your life, there is some comfort.  It's scary to even think about making a simple change that seems like it could blow everything up and make everything unfamiliar.  Then you'd have no bearings (at first) and where would you be?

Well maybe your kitchen wouldn't be on fire.  Or maybe you will have grabbed the matches and burned the place down yourself since you found out it was condemned.  At least you wouldn't have some lunatic screaming at you and threatening you anymore.

If you have some kind of issues - and of course everybody does - and you find out something you can do about them try to do it.  Read a book on the subject, see a professional, get regular exercise, take up yoga, talk to your friends.  Just accepting that you have difficulty with some things is a start.

If there's an alcoholic in your life it really helps to go to Al Anon.  Going to an Al Anon meeting isn't really that revolutionary.  You can just go and listen.  You don't have to change your life at all.  Afterwards you will not be required to go home and make demands of your alcoholic significant other.  If anyone sees you there well then, you see them too.  It's kind of nice to know that you have something in common with that lady you see at the market all the time.  Best of all, you find out all the stuff that you don't have to do and you find out that you're not alone.  It's really quite a load off.

If you possibly can, it's better to deal with things when you're young and flexible and when it doesn't involve your kids.  I you wait till you're forty everything is much harder and more complicated.

Not As Bad As It Sounds (A.k.a, I Surrender!)

Ugh. I have the flu. I got over my 24-hour virus and flew back from California just fine. The night we got back Pete and I even went out for dinner. The next morning I woke up feeling achy and exhausted. I've been in bed pretty much ever since. Bad news!

I thought it was just that I was tapped out from a grueling holiday season. So much travel and the grieving process. The demise of my computer was a tough blow. I also got dragged in to some drama with a neighbor about something that doesn't involve me at all which was really hard to take. Her timing was putrid.

I've been too tired to think - even to daydream. I sure as hell haven't had any desire to interact with people. I feel pretty burnt. I'm not facebooking or even tweeting. I'm kind of avoiding e-mail too, although nowadays the only e-mail I get is either from Neiman Marcus or about Viagra.

I did want to go to my friend Jill's surprise party last night but I felt too lousy and didn't want to be the Typhoid Mary of the evening. I thought I might be feeling better last night but I woke up feeling crappy again this morning.

I have a very low threshold for bad news and problems these days. I don't want to hear gossip or bad-mouthing. I don't have the patience. So I guess it's just as well that I haven't left the apartment in five days except to walk the dog.

I'd planned to get a lot of my own work done this month. It turns out that "my own work" is recovering from last year. I think I can let go of my hopes to be "productive" because I feel so crappy that I don't have a choice.

So now I'm reading about Zen and therapeutic yoga and playing "Bakery Story" and "City Story" on the iPad. Hell - I'm blogging from the iPad. I hope it works okay since the interface is a little balky.

We're still in California. We were supposed to go back to Boston yesterday but I came down with a 24 hour bug so we're leaving today instead.

I have to admit that California is growing on me. It used to be that I thought CA was weird and Califonians were nuts.* Now I'm getting used to it. Also, the thought of leaving this incredible weather is daunting. I drifted off to sleep last night thinking abut long underwear and down jackets.

My birthday was a few days ago. I had a really nice day and I'll blog about it once I have Photoshop re-installed on my new hand-me-down computer (I have my dad's old laptop - to go with his iPad)

Good luck to all of us in the new year!

*Not anyone I know personally of course.