Odds and Ends

OK, I've gotten a few worried emails from friends about that last post, so let me clarify a few things:

1) I am hardly a paragon of sartorial excellence, so you are free to point and laugh at my outfits if you ever see me in person. Most of my clothes now have spitup on them within five minutes of my putting them on. Ergo, I am no glamour goddess.

2) I very rarely make fun of people for what they're wearing (OK, the leather pants dude at RT was an exception, but mostly because of his shameless flirting with passersby.). My philosophy is if you like it and are comfortable in it, you go. (With the possible exception of a sweater with a giant barn on it. Moo.) The Frumps R Us catalog had some cute things in it, but the ugly stuff was just SO "old lady," it provided something to riff on here.

The only other exception to my "wear and let wear" philosophy was this woman I met when I was a lifeguard in college. She regularly brought her seven-year-old son to swim lessons and would talk to me while he swam. One day, she voiced her puzzlement that people thought she was her son's grandmother--which made me pull out every ounce of acting ability I had to say, "Get out! Anyone can see you're not his grandmother." Because with her old lady perm and unflattering house dress that looked like the one my grandma wore to kill chickens on the farm in Minnesota, she easily looked three times her age. And when I looked a little closer at her pretty, unlined complexion, I realized she really was just in her early 40s. I didn't make fun of her, but I REALLY wanted to give her a makeover, stat.

3) I probably made myself sound like a short, not-so-bodacious, Latina Pamela Anderson, but I do not dress in Daisy Dukes and cropped shirts cut down to South America. My clothes are age-appropriate. Really.

4) Loose-fitting does NOT equal Frumps R Us to me. Given the state of my stomach after two pregnancies that turned my waistline into a cannonball, I'm not wearing anything overly fitted without a whole lot of lycra. (Wasn't that a Led Zeppelin song?)

In other news, my friend and excellent Bombshell author Sharron McClellan moved to Oaxaca and is blogging about it. So if you, too, spend your days working, chasing around small children, and washing the spitup off your clothes, pay her new Oaxaca blog a visit and live vicariously through the adventures of an expatriate romance writer and the men who adore her.