The original title of this blog --- The Eff Years --- is a nod to something I heard someone say roughly thirty-five years ago. She and I were colleagues, high-school English teachers. I was in my early twenties; she was thirty-nine. Over lunch in the teacher's lounge one day, she was recounting, as one does, the events of her yearly gynecologist's appointment, at which she had been given a briefing, with pamphlet, about menopause.
"It was basically Welcome to the EFF Years," she said. "When I get to have hot flashes and grow a beard."
Ah, the EFF years, the forties and fifties. The years that start with EFF.
At the time – I was twenty-two or twenty-three – I thought, "Gosh, she's so brave to be so old."
And here we are. I'm not even entering the EFF years. I've been in them for almost seventeen years. Eff eff eff – as in, every year for a long, long time, my age has been a number that starts with eff.
Now that I've turned 60 and have left those eff years behind, I have changed the title to Going Like 60, which basically means Doing Stuff With Vigor.
Anyway, I'm a religious lady and do not swear much, but I did think The Eff Years was a funny title for a blog about dressing while middle-aged. But all good things do arrive, eventually, at their natural ends, so here we are.
Everything I do ends up being fairly random. I have never had a diagnosis, but lifelong clusters of behaviors strongly suggest some sort of attention-deficit/executive-function-challenge action in my brain, which means I'm not good at brand, unless by brand you mean various. My intent for this blog is to make it a dump for my daily photographic style diary, with installments relating to home, food, and what I'm reading.
We'll see how that goes. Mostly so far it's about clothes: thrifted, ethical, sustainable, minimal, plus the extremely occasional (and past-tense) Walmart impulse buy. Did I say various? Because really, that describes everything I do.
This blog might at times feature affiliate links. I have a Bookshop storefront which I've been curating, as they say, for some time now, so if I link to books, as I almost assuredly will from time to time, those links will almost assuredly be Bookshop affiliate links. My Bookshop lists include my own books, but also books by other writers whose friendship is a blessing to me, as well as general poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selections, and large collections of books for children, including home-education resources.
Of course I felt compelled to create a new blog in 2020, because what I was supposed to be doing at the time was researching and writing a series of critical essays for an anthology project. That book appeared in 2022, and others have followed. And yet I continue to get dressed every day, and to write about that.