I was never a "mom jewelry" kinda person...but Tiny Tags are irresistible. (This is the "dog tag" style, FYI.)
Oversized bamboo hoop earrings. On sale. Yes. (Bought them.)
One family's tale of living the van life. (The Ultimate California Road Trip, via Travel & Leisure.)
God I hate my feet. No matter how much I coddle them and coat them in layer after layer of Vaseline and foot acid and Saran Wrap and whatever else on the planet I can find to make them less hideous than they naturally choose to be, they are the Titanic.
I can initiate all the emergency procedures I like, but these puppies are going DOWN.
Yoga is basically saving my life lately, but there is one sad side effect involved: I spend a lot of time every week staring at my feet, and worrying that other people are staring at them, too (and being grievously offended by them, thereby disrupting their own namaste and such). So I've majorly upped my Vaseline/foot acid/Saran Wrap game...but have also decided that really, the best solution is to just hide the damn things.
Before we begin - on a lighter note - the leggings pictured here are Niyama Sol's "endless" leggings, and they're going to get their own post because if you are a yoga person or a leggings person or just a person, you need these.
Now.
A couple of weeks ago, after I published this post, I got a message from a reader telling me about her dad. Her dad, she wrote, had developed this interesting habit: He'd come up with five things that were virtually guaranteed to make him feel really, really good, and committed himself to doing at least one of those things each and every day of his life. (One of them is eating ice cream, so if it hits midnight and he hasn't done any of the other things that day, he will get himself out to a Thrifty and get a cone in his hand STAT, which makes him sort of a hero.)
Yesterday I wrote about the ballet flats that Francesca convinced me to buy (whereupon she FAILED ME by telling me to buy a size too small...and then, annoyingly, reversed said fail by reminding me that I know how to stretch out leather shoes in a pinch, thereby simply expediting what happens to ballet flats anyway, which is why you should, in fact, buy them a touch too small).
And now I'm going to tell you about the shoes themselves, because they're phenomenal.
Before we begin: I am not a ballet flat person. I feel like ballet flat people are sylphlike and graceful and Audrey Hepburn-ish, and I am none of those things. Whenever I try on ballet flats, I feel like I'm playing dress-up, and not in a good way; in a 37-year-old-wearing-my-daughter's-clothing kind of way.
Making a fashion statement in the bathroom over here
Did you know I'm an actual, certified Internet Authority on how to stretch out your shoes? As unlikely as it sounds, somehow the oddities of SEO have made it so, because check it:
Aarrrrrrgh
OK, so yesterday's conversation under my bathroom renovation post was a little frustrating - you can read it here, if you're interested - but at it's heart was, I think, a solid question:
How in the world does one afford to renovate a house if, say, one has not found themselves the sudden recipient of a trust fund/inheritance/other random windfall of enormous proportions?
Cynthia Rowley Zodiac Wetsuit (c/o)
Wetsuits are not cute; I speak from vast experience here. I bought my first wetsuit when I was 12 and got my scuba diving certification...and I still have the same one. This would be kind of fun - look at meeee, fitting into my preteen wetsuit! - except it's sort of like still being able to fit into an Ace bandage that happens to be purple, and cover your whole body. You can do it...but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a great idea.
The thing about wetsuits is they're meant to be functional. You don't wear them to be adorable; you wear them to not freeze. And so the best-looking ones I've seen - up until now, at least - are only "cute" because they're not terrible and/or neon. In other words, they are black.
IT'S DONE.
I love, love, love, LOVE my bathroom. I say "my" bathroom even though it's the bathroom in the hall (as opposed to the master bathroom) because from the time we moved in it was the only bathroom with an actual bath in it - and we all know how I feel about baths. So while it was the kids' primary bathroom, too, I sort of adopted it as my own.
When I set out to renovate this bathroom (before and after pics are below, but you can take a look at what it looked like when we moved in, and then it's first evolution before the major renovation here), I wanted to make sure that it worked for the kids...but I also thought, what the hell: I've always felt like my bathroom is my sanctuary. So if I'm going to put in the work to fix it up, I might as well go ahead and make it everything I've ever dreamed of.
Before I launch back into writing about our (first) bathroom makeover (which is FINALLY finished, and oh my god that took forever) and the best ballet flats out there and, I don't know, chicken, or whatever...I figured I should probably address the elephant in the room.
I don't know if we're going to stay in this house. Or even in this city.
I don't know anything.
A few years ago - shortly before my daughter was born - a friend of mine told me that she had cancer.
When I say “a friend of mine,” I mean someone I cared about; someone I had special, beautiful memories with. Someone who I thought was smart, and interesting. Someone who’d just had a baby a couple of months earlier, making her diagnosis worse than the worst thing imaginable.
But by then, we weren’t especially tied into each others’ lives. In the old days we’d mostly been casual, going-out-type friends, and in the years since we’d grown up and out of bars and parties and late nights in the company of dartboards, and we’d emailed only occasionally. When the dust settled it turned out we didn't really have much in common at all, and we lost touch. I didn’t even know what she did for a living, or her partner’s name.
