This is one of the oldest outfits in my outfits-to-try list, so was glad it finally turned cool enough again for me to wear it. Of course, by the time I got around to wearing it, the shockingly sudden start of Winter, Part 1 occurred so now it's most definitely not to warm for the weather.
The inspiration photo combines black tights, brown leopard boots, and a lovely shade of green.
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| From...??? StyleUp, I think |
I wish I had a beautiful green coat like that, but it wouldn't be much use to me at work except for the few minutes I spend crossing the parking lot. But a green striped shirt? That can be awesome all day long.
Green/blue striped button up shirt (thrifted, Nine West)$2.00/wear+
Black sweater vest (thrifted, Foxcroft), $0.80/wear
Denim skirt (thrifted, Great Northwest Indigo), $0.83/wear
Black tights
Black smoking slippers by Clarks, $2.63/wear
Owl pendant (Kohls), $1.89/wear
Outfit total: $8.15/wear
I don't know why the button up shirt/sweater vest/owl pendant combination screams 1970s librarian to me, but there are worse looks I could be channeling.
In other news...I arrived home to find the two books I ordered from Amazon had arrived, as I'd hoped, so I am going into the long weekend with a good supply of reading material. There is something decadent about purchasing hardback books. I really can't remember the last time I did so. (I almost never buy books at all, of course.) But I think these are going to be good ones!
Today at work I spent some time validating the data in some visualizations I've been developing on and off for a few months, and not only do they look great and have some nifty functionality, everything on the data side checks out so far. This feels like a minor miracle given the complicated joins/calculated fields/sets/parameters/table calculations involved, but I guess all the time I spent finding problems in the data by looking up records on individual people in our database paid off. Actually, I ran into one thing in a dashboard that did NOT match up with my data download--the percentages were pretty close but the number of records were about four times what I had in my download--and I was a little bit freaked out for about 2 minutes until I remembered, Oh yeah, those guys hadn't finished entering their data by the Q1 deadline so what I got in my download was only partial data. In a way, I find it reassuring that I did notice when something didn't look right.
This alert Dutch bunny looks ready for a treat. So am I! But unfortunately I have to cook it first.
...Which reminds me of this article about the myth of easy cooking (sent by Tam). Every one of those celebrity chef assholes who publish "15 minute" recipes that require about 15 minutes worth of vegetable chopping before you even start cooking can go fuck themselves. I mean, seriously, could anyone who is not a professional chef produce anything that looks like this in 15 minutes? (And as the article points out, clean up time also matters!)
4 comments:
I tried to post this earlier but it looks like it didn't take.
My idea of an easy recipe is something like throw some chicken leg quarters in the oven, cut potatoes up and boil them, microwave a bag of veggies, drain the potatoes when they are soft, butter and salt everything to taste, and serve. Or cook some ground beef and canned tomatoes in a pan and then serve it with rice, or add beans and make it into chili. It's not trivial to prepare a protein, starch, and veg, but it can be pretty simple if you have basic skills and can wait an hour for dinner. But you can't make a cookbook based on those actually simple ideas.
My favorite part of that article: "It's practically a haiku" about a recipe that's actually quick.
Robin often calls things "easy" that take a long time. So I'm trying to stop using the word "easy" and start using the word "quick." Really, most cooking is "easy" except for opening hard-to-open jars and a few tricky bits like soufflets or whatever.
I do want to point out that it's almost as quick to make some things from scratch as from a mix, such as taco meat, instant oatmeal, and cake.
And Tam, I do think you could make such a cookbook and I think it might even sell. Just make sure to have color pictures of the food on gorgeous plates on a color-coordinated table cloth plus have lots of humor in the cookbook so that it's just plain fun to read.
Speaking of cookbooks, one thing that bugs me is that if I go to some ethnic restaurant and then want to learn to cook something I like from there, all I can find are cookbooks and recipes that are authentically from that culture when really I want the Americanized version I tasted in the restaurant.
One exception is fried rice--lots of people also publish fried rice recipes that are just rice plus almost random things fried together whereas fried rice in restaurants are almost always the same as each other in some ways (like there's egg in it and there's soy sauce in the egg) that these recipes don't share.
Sally, your inspiration picture reminds me of Girl Scouts. I want to add a few badges, or at least patches, to her coat.
Debbie, it does seem like we are living in an era of "authenticity" (with the full meaning those quotes imply) such that recipes for Americanized versions of things do seem scarce.
Fried rice recipes that don't call for egg cooked with soy sauce? That is strange! I only ever had one fried rice recipe but it did include that. Huh.
I think the easy vs. quick distinction is an important one that was sort of ignored in the article. I can usually handle things that take a long time (because I cook a lot in advance of meals anyway) as long as they don't require much/any babysitting during the process.
Sally, that's yet another dimension--low prep time. Some people come home hungry and want to be eating ASAP, so a low-prep-time recipe would not excite them if the start-to-finish time was still long. (Hmm, except maybe the kind where you throw everything in a crock pot the night before.)
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