Yesterday afternoon's sunny walk in the neighborhood.
Today: autumn drizzle at the dog park.
It's not cold, but it is cool and damp. It's been a nice day for eating soup (sweet potato/chick pea/coconut milk/chicken bone broth, in a puree seasoned with onion, a lot of ginger, a dash of clove, salt and pepper, and a little squidge of habanero pepper paste for heat), and I'll probably be making some tea shortly. Written one Sun essay for next week, and about done with the second. I'm also up today with a little fun Lewis Carroll.
We're almost to Day 300 of this putative no-buy year, and I have once again bought a dress. I won't say which dress yet! But it's what I've settled on for my birthday gift-to-me, and I hope it's going to be as good as . . . I hope it's going to be. Stay tuned. I won't give her identity away until she's here.
Anyway, I'm kind of ready to stop pretending that I'm not buying anything, even if I am buying smarter instead of just buying more.
Meanwhile, here's what I'm wearing today:
Dog-park version first, with old L.L. Bean rain slicker. I don't know whether you can see very well the rest of what I'm wearing, so here's a boring bathroom selfie:
Thrifted bamboo burgundy swing dress with Snag merino dark-gray tights. I forget the actual name of this color, but unlike the Silver Lining color, which I also own, they're a very dark gray, almost black. I'd meant to war navy tights with this dress, but the charcoal gray works just as well. Thrifted Birk Madeira shoes.
So this is the kind of outfit I can do in an all-wool year, if "all wool" means "something wool every day." I do pause a bit at this, because it would mean, ostensibly, not wearing dresses like this in the summertime,when I often do like to wear them --- unless I wore wool underwear, which I don't currently own and have no plans to buy, but maybe I can rethink that in 2023. At any rate, this ensemble today is soft and comfortable. Even as the rain has stopped and the temperature has risen, it's really not too warm.
I find merino tights easier to wear in fluctuating transitional temperatures than I do even the very soft, comfortable Snag synthetic ones. People complain about the quality of Snag merino tights, but honestly --- for merino items, they are cheap, as in inexpensive. Pricey for tights, maybe, but not for a merino-blend garment. So I guess my expectations aren't that high. If I had paid $80-$110, I'd feel gypped when the crotch gets transparent, as these have done pretty quickly --- but they haven't ripped. I've had a little pilling, especially around the ankles of my Silver Lining tights which I wore so frequently last year, where my boots rubbed, but it's pretty minor and inconspicuous, given that I wear them with boots a lot. Anyway, I kind of don't know what more you might expect from a merino-blend item, worn in relatively high-stress situations (shoes/boots rubbing, lots of movement and pull), at what seems like a very low price point. I enjoy mine and anticipate rotating through them a lot this fall and winter. I like having a warm, comfortable alternative to leggings, that looks neat and even dressy with boots and shoes. Tights were a deliberate exception to my no-buy rule for this year (not that I've been unduly bound by said rule), and I'm glad I went ahead and bought these last spring, to have ready for the cooling-down of fall.
Meanwhile, it's nice to shift into one of these bamboo dresses for a day. I note the difference in quality between these dresses and my wool ones, but I doubt anyone else really does. Burgundy makes a pleasant change from blue, too.
As always, I love the ease of a dress: on and done. No need to match up separates, no real fuss with shapes and proportions. I'm dressed for walking, writing, housework, and anything else my day might hold.
Day 7 hair is feeling a little funky, but not too bad. I have bathed, mind you --- just not washed my hair. Ordinarily by now I'd have put it in a ponytail as a default, but it still looks okay in a half-updo, which makes me feel less like a person whose hair seriously needs washing. I will wash it tomorrow, and it'll be ready to go through the weekend. Possibly, having washed it tomorrow, I'll go get a trim on Friday, in preparation for next week's travel and reading. One advantage of going a good long time between washdays, though, is how this saves wear and tear on my ends. As we move into the colder weather, that's fewer times I have to use a diffuser and heat to dry it. I'd love to get to a point where even in summer, I could mostly just get it wet without shampooing it often. Lately I haven't been trying to style it at all: no gel or anything like that. Just either down, pulled back in a half-updo, or a ponytail or full updo. Don't have the time, and as the weather gets cooler, my hair gets a lot straighter anyway. So I just roll with that.
Been wearing my rescued Miraculous Medal this week for a change. I found her --- last winter? winter before last? --- on a rack of necklaces in one of the Main Street antique malls, and saved her, so here she is. She's a bit hidden by my hair here, but I like the bright teal against my burgundy dress.
Still feeling insufferably self-congratulatory about the tidiness and cohesiveness of my clothes. Also making a note to self to wear both that green twill skirt and that grape Pact cotton sheath dress sometime soon. I've kind of quit keeping up in my wardrobe tracker --- just keeping track of what I wear via my Style album in Google Photos. I dump virtually all my daily outfit photos there, and they're date-stamped, so I can keep up with my patterns pretty well without also having to manage a spreadsheet. I was so happy with my Maggie dress as a top with a skirt earlier this month that I want to remember to try her again in different combinations. AND I bought my birthday dress with that possibility in mind, so we shall see what we shall see.
LATER:
Afternoon dog-walk autumn neighborhood (after a rainy start to the day, the sun did come out, variably):
Back home again, enjoying some dog-in-kitchen-chair love:
And a moment in which I sat in a chair without a side of dog:
Closing in hard on the end of my fifty-eighth year, but all in all, I think I'm doing all right.