It's a rosary bowl! It's a puzzle! It's all of the above. Come to my house and enter the Extricate One Rosary challenge today.
Mid-week, and I'm back on a laptop, thank goodness. I like the tablet, which is surprisingly functional --- but it was cheap, and it has connectivity issues, especially with bluetooth, which make it not reliable enough for my purposes. Still, it's remarkably easy to write on, as well as read. As long as I make sure my books are downloaded and my docs are available offline so I don't get caught out, it's good to have in my purse for travel, waiting rooms, coffee shops, etc. Sometimes not having connectivity is actively a good thing . . .
Today's high is --- I can't believe my eyes --- 67F. It's a lovely prospect, but we're all going to have some kind of weird temperature whiplash, especially those of us going to New Hampshire, where it will very certainly not be anything like 67F, next week.
Today's agenda:
*Walk the dog
*Finish my essay on Helen Hunt Jackson for next week
*Work on my own poems
*Work on handouts for next week's Thomas More College classes and plan out my public readings
*Make dinner
Wearing today (for extremely changeable temperatures; right now it's just risen to freezing, so I will step into some socks and boots to walk the dog in a while):
*Wool& Sierra dress (XS) in Iris Blue, bought January 2025, last worn January 18. Wears in 2025: 6 --- already a frontrunner.
*Secondhand Allbirds tencel-merino leggings, bought January 2024, second year of wear
*Secondhand Birkenstock Rosemeads, bought spring 2023, soon to enter their third year of wear
This is the base outfit. I was trying to take not especially flattering photos, because it is good to normalize to yourself how your body looks from various angles --- unretouched, not composed at its best. Not that that's really how people see you. Your body is in motion, so that in other people's vision, it's never frozen in some stance that presents it at its least . . . presentable. But you do get caught in photos that way sometimes, and it's good not to be startled by it. The main thing, of course, is to concentrate on your posture, so that you can learn to move and stand with queenly confidence in your body. However you privately feel about it in your worst, most self-hating moments does not have to be what you communicate to the world. And as in prayer: As the body goes, so goes the soul. You learn to pray with your hands folded, making a cross with your thumbs and your fingers pointing to heaven, because as you dispose your physical self, so you also dispose your inward self. You can learn to stand and move with dignity --- shoulders un-slumped, ribcage raised, straight line from your earlobe through your shoulder to your hips and down your legs --- and your interior self will follow your body's lead. You can say, I will not hate myself. But it's a lot more effective to work on cultivating habits of body --- i.e., good posture --- and to act in the world like a person with no self-hatred. Eventually you do simply start to believe it a little more, in a way that you could never argue yourself into no matter how you tried.
So. I was also checking the fit of this dress, now worn multiple times since it arrived right after New Year's. It's an Extra Small, which is a stretch for me, quite literally. The fabric has relaxed a good bit over six wears, and I know it will continue to do so. It's still a bit snug across the backside, and a Small would have been, probably, a better fit across the upper back and shoulders. I actually like the fit except from the rear, but then . . . I'm not sure I adore any of my clothes from the rear, although here I am normalizing that view for myself.
Overall, though, I do like the length, and I like the skater-dress shape that this slightly-too-small fit affords. Note to self to keep up with my little puny deadlifts and my trampoline . . . I will not hate my body, I will not hate my body, but that doesn't mean I don't want to continue strengthening it, building muscle instead of fat. Note to self to keep on with my arm exercises as well.
So clearly I'm not wearing just this today, because even if it's going to warm up a lot, it's still January.
At the moment, I'm wearing this:
*Secondhand Connemara merino cardigan, bought fall 2024, first year of wear. My favorite warm layer this year. I love the weight, I love the texture and pattern, I love the color that works so well from fall through winter and into the spring. It makes an especially nice complement with the color of this dress (which calls itself blue, but folks, it's purple).
Again, I will put on boots to walk this morning, but for most of the day I think I'll be fine in my Rosemead clogs. I could just add socks, but that starts to look dumpy, so I think I won't. At least the closed-toe look doesn't read as summertime.
If it does really warm up that much, so that I get hot in this cardigan, here's my go-to layer switch:
*Thrifted lyocell (read: non-name-brand tencel) button shirt, bought December 2023, just entered its second year of wear. I haven't worn this shirt in a long time, mostly because I almost never wear it as a shirt by itself, only as a top layer. And it's been too cold for a tencel shirt as a top layer. But I love the color --- again, it pairs really nicely with this blued purple. Like the cardigan, it echoes but doesn't match my leggings. Both iterations of this outfit probably read as a bit matchy from a distance, but the colors really aren't the same.
I can see wearing this last combination a lot through the spring and into the summer. Meanwhile, I'm comfortably set for changing temperatures today, and I'm glad to be wearing my newest dress, one of two new buys I'm allowing myself this year, some more.
I'm also mulling a pair of overalls. I am really enjoying my jeans, especially my wide-leg pink ones, and considering that a pair of slightly oversized overalls might be at least as useful to me as a pinafore would be. You can tuck a shortish dress into a pair of overalls, just as you can into a pinafore . . . I would not pay more than $20, but I do have a few pairs "liked" on Poshmark and am thinking about them . . . again, I'm finding trousers good for transitional weather (would have worn my pink ones today instead of Monday, if I'd looked more carefully at the weather) and feeling kind of excited about wearing them again.
So we'll see. That would bring me up to 4 secondhand purchases, of 10 for the year, all within a single month. Not sure how I feel about it.
I also need to put my planning together for clothes for next week. It's going to be COLD in New England. I plan to take my carry-on backpack plus, as my "personal item," another small carry-on bag that will mostly contain books, but might afford a little extra room for clothes as well. I need to think carefully about layers that will look professional and carry me through days of teaching and evenings of public presentations in comfort and confidence.
But while I think about all this, I had better get on with the day's tasks.