I Can't Complain

What I'm Wearing: Thursday Edition

My friend Stylishboots did an impromptu What I'm Wearing today (which was, as always, quite stylish), so I thought I'd follow suit, and do one, too.  Here's what I've got on today:

Jacket, pants and blouse are all from NY & Company.  The jacket & the pants are actually exactly the same color, despite the difference in color in the pictures.  I really try not to buy outfits exactly as they're presented by a vendor, but this one really caught my eye, so I look a little like a NY & Co. mannequin. 

Shoes are from T.U.K - I actually bought them a few years ago, but didn't feel like I had anything to wear them with.  I found them again in February, emptying shoe boxes for Valentine's Day mailboxes and suddenly I'm wearing them with everything.  As an aside, I wore these to story time again today and got comments from the bookkeeper, all three teachers and two junior shoe fetishists, plus the one who didn't comment but did fiddle with the buckles while I read.

The jewelry is new - the neighborhood tour of historic homes was last weekend, and we hosted two lovely sisters who make their own jewelry on our porch as part of that. They gave me the jewelry as a gift for hosting them.  As soon as I saw the stripey earrings, I knew what I was going to wear them with. They were also a big hit with the kindergartners, by the way. 

I didn't take a picture of myself at home this morning, so I had to resort to  pervy bathroom pictures of myself this morning - I hope you all appreciate my sacrifice.  Actually, because a major water leak upstairs, I couldn't even take pervy bathroom pictures in the bathroom on my floor - I had to go someone else's floor.  Luckily, I didn't get busted this time.   Anyway, I take pretty poor photographs, and I photograph pretty poorly, so it should be no surprise that I take incredibly poor photographs of myself.  This is, no kidding, the best of the lot:

I tried a bunch without the flash, but the lighting was too low and my hand too unsteady to get a non-blurry photo, so this one will have to do. It's a good thing I have this law thing to fall back on, since my career in self-portraiture is obviously not going to pan out.

The Clothes-Eating Abyss of Doom

I think pretty much everyone is acquainted with this place - if you're the parent of a school child or have ever been a school child, you've experienced it, even if you didn't know it at the time.  It's the deep and mysterious place where children's school clothes go, never to be heard from again.  It's happened to all of us at one point or another - a sibilant whisper, a hint of dank air and the slight scent of brimstone, and the abyss claims a small cardigan or a defenseless pair of mittens... 

I know the abyss exists, because there's no other rational explanation for the disappearance of the Bomber's two (three if you count the one that escaped briefly and then was almost immediately dragged back in) logo sweatshirts and now his blue, polyester, totally-devoid-of-style, no-one-but-a-school-child-or-a-door-to-door-vacuum-salesmen-would-wear-it tie.  

I know the abyss exists, because before the school year started, when I came to the realization that the H-bomb would be wearing the same clothes as at least half the people in the school, every single day, I dutifully labeled all his clothing so that we would be assured of always getting his stuff back, yet things disappear without a trace.  And I didn't settle for his last name scribbled in Sharpie on the fabric content label. I know better - ink fades, the label frays and eventually the clothing achieves anonymity. Then separated from its owner, devoid of its identity, the abyss consumes it. Which is why I went to the trouble of getting fancy iron-on labels - 1.5" white circles with a colorful rocket ship and Bomber's full name in bold black font. Like this:

(His actually have his name, but I may well order these for next year - they'd be just as effective....)

And these aren't those wimpy iron-on label strips our mothers put on our camp clothes that started peeling off five minutes after they were ironed on.  These things are made of a space-age polymer that melds indelibly into the fabric and can never be removed. NASA uses these to patch holes in the space shuttle's exterior. If a nuclear bomb hit South Carolina, there'd be nothing left in the resulting crater, except 20 or so white vinyl circles with burned fabric residue around the edges, and my kid's name on them.  (And the palmetto bugs, of course.)

Anyway, given the trouble I went to to label the kid's clothes so if when he abandons them in some random place in his classroom, they'll still be returned to us, there can't be any explanation other than a dark clothes-eating abyss of doom for where they've gone. Can there?