Monthly Archives: October 2015

A Test of Clothing

General, Travel

I decided to do something different with my latest Eve Convention. I decided to dress in a more business casual model. Normally, I toss on whatever comes to my hands. Jeans and loose t-shirts with a pair of my beloved Vibrams.  I pull my hair back into a bun at the base of my skull and I stride out into public knowing I am clothed and violate no laws.

I’ve never much worried about my appearance. I never desired clothing. I didn’t wear makeup until I was in my mid twenties. I often blamed this on the fact that I went to private school until I was fourteen. I never developed a sense of fashion.

However, that is but an excuse. Many people who go to private school develop a sense of fashion. I just never had one. I’d irritate my mother until she left the store when she tried to take my shopping. I remember her frustration that I had to pick another color besides black or blue. I branched out to gray. It was not because I was goth or trying to be rebellious. I recoiled from pastels and bright colors. Later, I came to understand that a lot of it had to do with my not wanting to bring attention to myself. Blend in, be unremarkable, that is the safe way to go about things.

When I was first planning to go to Iceland for my first CSM summit in 2014, I told my husband that I needed dress shirts. He asked why and I informed him that I was going into a business environment and I wanted to dress well. He shrugged and went with me and I gathered a handful of button down, shirts that I paired with jeans. I also applied a light layer of makeup. Enough to brighten the eyes and make everything look a little bit more pulled together.

I decided to take this look to Vegas. I believe that it is because I don’t feel casual about my CSM position. I also wanted to look nice for the potential attention. It was not quite vanity. It was more a desire to avoid sneering or the surprise that my appearance brought. I don’t know what people expected of me. My dowdy, plainness is not it.

It has also been a season to experiment. I’m a bit behind by ten or fifteen years in discovering myself and discovering my look. I wiggled my blue painted toes in my open toed sandals and strode out into public.

There is something deeply depressing in the fact that people treat you differently when dressed for business. Hawkers of naked girl cards ignored me. Casino security greeted me and passed light weight pleasantries. And something happened that has never happened before. I was told that I looked nice.

What a fraud I felt. It came to a head on Friday as I slumped on the bed and told my husband I had lost the courage to wear the skirt I had purchased. It is a frothy thing of lace layers in a burlesque style. It is knee length in the front and floor length in the back. It flows. It is like nothing I have ever worn. And, at the end of the day, I wasn’t able to bring myself to wear it.

My weight isn’t where I find it acceptable. It is my own fault and I blame nothing else. It makes me picky about what I wear. Mixed with the fact that I’ve never loved skirts and dresses, I felt foolish and ridiculous. I’d watched an endless stream of women trot by in tiny butt length skin tight dresses and sky high heels. I was still not in fashion and while I was okay with that I found my courage had deserted me.

“I’m a fraud,” I told my husband.

“That isn’t how it works,” he told me.

I’ve always found clothing shallow. I look at the women who shove their overly abundant bodies and bellies into skin tight clothing with a puzzled air. I don’t care that they are wearing the latest fashion. I’ve just never understood wearing clothing that didn’t fit. Beyond that, wear what you want. I wish we had a broader sense of fashion. These days it is tights and little dresses. It is boring and repetitive and it must be hard to escape from a car and run through a forest if one found themselves in that situation. Beyond that, who cares what others wear?

Yet, my experiment tells me that people do. I may not care to my hearts content but the world is different depending on the cloth you cover yourself in. And that left me rather depressed and extremely sad as well as more than a little bit lost. I feel as if I twisted my ankle on the path of discovering myself and now I sit in the middle of the road with a broken shoe. Do I fix it? Or do I take it off and walk barefoot without a care?

The Truth About Bell Peppers

Gardening

I don’t like the taste of bell peppers. My mother and husband do so I have grown them. Most of them have become additives to my husbands salads or mixed into his omelettes in the morning. I did make stuffed peppers for them a few weeks back. I’ve since discovered a more interesting method to make the filling and I will try it again.

However, I don’t like bell peppers. I don’t like hot peppers ether. The only pepper fruit based thing I like is green Tabasco sauce. I just don’t like the taste of them. I had hoped I’d like my own bell peppers, but I did not.

Still. I have this bell pepper plant. My mother broke it when it was young but it recovered and kept growing. At any given time it has about half a dozen peppers on it. I mostly ignore it. The peppers grow rather slowly and I don’t have a huge call for them with meals. I do wish that I did. Peppers have grown very well for me which is irritating because I do not wish to eat them.

It has been a busy few months. I’ve left my peppers on the vine. It didn’t seem to hurt them any. So, imagine my surprise when my bell peppers started to change color.

In the store bell peppers are sold as green. There are yellow, orange, and red ones that are often more expensive. I figured they where a different type and their pricing was just about color. Lots of what the market does is just because it can. The pack my peppers came in had green pictures on them. Not being a pepper fan I didn’t research them enough to realize that they change colors just like hot peppers.

My stupidity and ignorance is shared so that others do not have to suffer this fate.

Now I understand that the red, orange, and yellow bell peppers are more expensive because it takes forever for the color to come into a green bell pepper. It has taken about two weeks for the pepper to turn that red. It is almost solid red now but that additional time on the vine is money. If the fruit was removed it would prompt the plant to work on the other fruit or grow new ones.

My plucked green peppers do not turn red with age. Now I know that I can make red bell peppers. I don’t think my husband cares in the slightest but as always, Gardening has become such an adventure.

 

Spousal Understanding

General

When I came home from work today, my husband looked at me and said, “I never realized how long your day was.”

Last Friday, I transferred to a new position. It was a lateral transfer. I did it because I badly needed change. I was burning out at work. My font of patience was running out. I’ve been stressed and miserable for a few years now. Every morning was I questioned why I hated myself.

I wrote a while back that I am not a morning person. Three years of mornings did not help me become a morning person. I tried everything. I went to bed early. I ate in the mornings. I woke up early. I did this. I did that. my life has been a miserable, grumpy blur until 1000 to 1100 when I start to wake up.

They take applications for positions. No one came to tap me on the shoulder and promote me. My confidence level was low. My belief in my quality as an employee was nonexistent. I expected to be laughed at. But, I was encouraged  by my boss to apply so apply I did. I went in with no knowledge of what to do. I did my best. I hoped that was enough and then a few weeks later I learned that it was.

It took two months for the transfer to come through. And now, I’ve been there for two days. I’ve discovered things about my job that I like. I had forgotten them. I’d reached a point where I absolutely hated my job and my every day. I felt lost. Hopeless. Worthless. Pointless.

But, back to the time thing. In the six years that I have been at this position, I have worked nights or days. Nights was 7pm to 7am. Days was 6am to 6pm. My husband, being a smarter and more talented person then I am has a job in IT. He wanders to bed at some point. He wakes up sometime before ten. He gets to work around ten thirty. No one cares if he is on time. No one checks what he does by the minute. If I am a minute late I am written up. The expectation is that I am there of my own will at least ten minutes in advance. There is no excuse. If weather is bad, I should leave early. If I get stuck with a wreck I should have planned better. It goes on and on.

The real point is that my husband has never experience my full day. He would sleep through it when I worked days. He learned not to tell me how sleepy he was when he crawled out of the bed at ten in the morning and I had already been at work for four hours. When I worked midnight he was often in bed for a chunk of the night. Now, he has been waking up with me at 0800. I make breakfast for both of us and I’m out the house around 0930. I am back at ten pm and he is learning that the twelve hours that I am gone and he is wandering around the house is a long time.

Yes. Yes it is.  It has taken him a while to realize it. But, once realized it was strangely fulfilling. Twelve hours is a long day. I think he’ll appreciate what is my every day a little bit more.

October and the Tomatoes

Gardening

The season is done. My husband looked at the weather this morning and told me that we where not going to get anything above 70 (21c) from here on out. That is not tomato growing and ripening weather. Plus, we have had rain for the last week due to a hurricane coming up the east coast. What I do have on the vine is starting to split and rot and fall. I have so many smaller type green tomatoes it is a mess and my red currents fell into the sweet potato bin and have tried to sprout. Ahh, nature.314

I started plucking the larger green tomatoes in hopes that they will ripen for me before they split. I picked the ones that where close to being ripe. The younger ones are just growing, if slowly due to the cold weather.

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Today is more yellow tomato sauce preparation and hot sauce making. The plants are looking terrible. Leaves and branches are starting to die and I’ve had a rash of ripening yellow tomatoes. I’ve really debated just saying goodbye to these plants and thanking them for what they have done. I can gather the green tomatoes that are mostly mature and see if they ripen over the next few weeks/months.

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I am cutting down the jalapeno plant and cooking it down into hot sauce. I have canning jars and plan to make both green and red. This will allow me to use all of the jalapenos that I harvested and froze last month in anticipation of this day and to let the plant mature more.

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