"That's the best that building's ever looked," said my son who lives there.
Still hanging in Dallas until at least tomorrow, when possibly I might begin picking my way back east. I kind of hope so –– as lovely as it is to see people, we all have lives to get on with, and digging my clothes from the low-visibility depths of a backpack is starting to stress me out just a little. I'm a good packer for travel, but I'm not actually that great a traveler.
Last night I spoke to my husband, who assured me that the power is on and that he and Dora are having a fine old time. They've had a good bit of ice, though I imagine a lot of it will melt off high-traffic roads by this afternoon, when temperatures are supposed to reach the high 30s Farenheit. I'm watching reports from Alabama and Georgia, because I think my route home is going to be that way, to avoid the mountains. Ordinarily the mountains are what make all this driving worthwhile, but just now I don't fancy hitting black ice in them after nightfall.
Today my daughter has a work meeting, and my son-in-law is coming home from a long weekend with friends in Oklahoma. My plan is to hang out in the house, maybe make breakfast and then do some dishes for them, then head over to campus to offload whatever last college-student possessions are still knocking around the back of my car. I might sit in the coffee bar and write a bit, just for a change of scenery. By now I can just about navigate from this house to the UD campus and back without needing the GPS, which is quite something. My daughter also wants to show me her work warehouse, which she says that one of her sisters-in-law has described as "a giant T.J. Maxx." It's an entire warehouse of generic-looking home furnishings, large and small, that go into houses to make them look more plausibly like something somebody would want to buy and live in. So I guess we'll do that, and it will be interesting, though we probably won't linger. It is not a heated workspace. She told me she'd recently informed her boss that she was buying a Keurig machine on the company dime for the warehouse, because winter morale.
Anyway. For some reason I had a hard time getting dressed today –– not because I didn't want to get dressed, but because I couldn't get too excited about anything in my backpack. I tried on the ponte skinny trousers I'd brought, but as I had predicted, I really didn't want to wear them. After a few tweaks, I wound up back in my Sierra, with another secondhand wool base-layer tee and my green J. Crew thrifted cotton cardigan:
The light in the home office where I'm sleeping is pretty poor, but here we are. Repeating my merino tights, which seem fine after a day to air out.
I don't feel that I look all that great, but I'll do. I am warm, anyway. And I'm much more comfortable in a dress that skims my silhouette than in trousers that accentuate it, for better or worse. Sometimes I'm up for that kind of thing, but not today. And those trousers aren't nearly as warm as what I'm wearing now.
Finnegan also is warm.
UPDATE:
We all went to Texas Thrift for 50% Off Day. I bought two belts, for a total of $3 –– I had given myself permission to buy belts at the start of the no-buy, because one favorite broke sometime last fall, and at least one more standby is on its way out. So I bought a thin white faux-leather belt and a braided real-leather belt, plus two nice cotton pillowcases, because we always seem to need pillowcases.
I mostly resisted looking at clothes, though I did browse the scarves a little, thinking that that might potentially be a bit of a flex area: an accessory, not a clothing item per se. But nothing grabbed me enough for me to buy it, even at 50% off. Even cruising through the clothes –– pants, skirts, dresses –– I literally saw nothing that even tempted me. I think this was partly due to my being spoiled by better-quality clothing in natural fibers. Nothing I saw was remotely as nice as what I already own. AND the fact that I'd told myself I wasn't buying clothes meant that something had better be REALLY REALLY good, for me to break the no-buy rule less than three weeks in. Nothing I saw even came close.
If I hadn't had a no-buy rule, I would undoubtedly have bought some clothing item just to feel that I hadn't made this journey in vain. It would have been clothes; I probably wouldn't have made it over to linens and housewares, or thought to examine the belt selection. I would have talked myself into buying some dress, some pair of pants, some sweater –– some thing I didn't really want, and would have classified as a thing I didn't know I wanted until I saw it. But this time I had filters. The main filter, of course, was knowing that I didn't strictly need anything. Then of course I had my clearly defined exceptions, chiefly belts, but I wouldn't just buy a belt and justify it to myself. I would have to be a belt I knew I'd wear (because you don't generally go, Aw, I LOVE that BELT. I'll figure out a way to wear it!). Meanwhile, there's no embargo on things like housewares and linens, but even so, there wasn't much calling my name.
These guys did kind of perplex me, though.
I mean, the Wise Men but one got lost? A Martyrdom-of-Thomas-Becket play set? So very many questions. I almost regret not getting them.
My daughters bought lots of things. I'm not even sure what. The younger had restricted herself to three items, which was a good move, and one of those three things wound up being a strapless pink tulle . . . prom dress? I guess? . . . with a sequined bodice. It was unanimously agreed that her three-year-old self would have killed for that dress. Her brother dared her to wear it to classes, and to be honest, with Doc Martens and the plastic-baby-doll-head dangly earrings she was wearing today, it would be a look. As one of the siblings, I forget which one, said: if you're gonna be an art major, you gotta look like an art major. And: truth.