Driving Everywhere

Reality Interpreting Style--Thursday, 2/4/16

For today's Reverse Inspiration, I'm liking this colorful spring-time version of my outfit with a floral top (that she says a co-worker said reminded them of huckleberries), striped skirt, and captoe flats. 

From bureauofchic.com

This is most definitely not huckleberry season in Coldville, so I am wearing a top with a snowy background and a lot of mostly bare branches (and a few hardy flowers).

Cream T with flowers and branches (Kohls), $2.55/wear+
Grey and black striped skirt (thrifted, Loft), $2.00/wear
Dark grey blazer (JNY), $10.71/wear
Black tights
Black captoe flats (thrifted, Skyler), $1.40/wear
Silver feather pendant (JCP), $5.13/wear

Outfit total: $21.79/wear

I'm not sure whether wearing a feather pendant is depressing in this context.  Does it represent a bird that migrated the fuck away from all this cold/snow...or died from it?  At the time I put this together, I was just like, Birds and trees go together, boom, done.  Now I'm over-thinking it.  Just winter brooding, I guess (oooh, that was unintentional but I'll take it).

I put this look together in January, then only a few days later saw this "Style Interpreting Art" post featuring an Ansel Adams photograph.

Pretty good, no?  And it's a photo, from 1958, so my powers are clearly growing!
 

In other news...I had an 8:00 a.m. meeting this morning at another site.  I woke up 25 minutes early, left the house by 7:15, drove to the unfamiliar location without getting lost, found street parking only 1 block one way and about 1/2 a block another from the location, was able to maneuver into the parking spot (this part was hard given the snow built up along the curb and the number of school buses driving down a residential street with cars parked all along both sides), noticed that there was a Drug Free Zone sign right next to my car (to aid in finding it again), found the building, and found the room in the building.  Which was locked.  Where no one responded when I knocked.

I was booting up my computer to check my calendar to  make sure I didn't get the day wrong when my manager showed up, equally confused.  He checked his email and found that at 7:40 a.m., we had been emailed to say that the venue was changed and we were all meeting at another site.

Ah, fuck.

So I looked up the address on my computer, found my car again, programmed the address into the GPS, took a route that seemed mysteriously complicated given that I could have gone over about a block and half to drive up the major street the building is on (but my GPS favors speed over simplicity so it took me on the highway for a bit), found the building, white-knuckled it until I finally found the parking lot around the block...and the parking lot was way full of drifts of snow and cars parked as wonky as I have ever seen in this town. 

It was not random--people clearly had the sense that they should park in rows next to each other--but with snow covering all the parking lines, people were parked every which damn way.  And there were no open spots.  I eventually circled back to this empty spot that seemed likely to be not a real spot but where my wouldn't actually block anything, and parked there.  When I went into the building, I mentioned at the front desk that I was uncertain about the spot I parked and explained where it was.  The woman said that as long as I wasn't blocking this particular path (it wasn't), that it was fine.  Also, nobody was going to be monitoring the lot because there were a lot of visitors there that day for an event.  (Which explained a lot to me about the state of the parking lot.  Many of us didn't even have a memory of where the rows/spots were supposed to be.)  And I got directions to the room, which I found without too much difficulty, and we had a meeting.

And then I got to drive back to work, where I parked my car, sighed, and thought, Oh man, it's only 9:40 a.m., my day isn't nearly over yet.

But I managed to make it through the kind of experience that is very anxiety-provoking in me, without actually feeling very much anxiety about it.

(I guess I got it out of my system overnight, when I had a series of dreams that involved having to drive to this doctor's appointment and not having enough time to do it.  My favorite one involved having 15 minutes to make it to an appointment in NYC and thinking that it's not possible without nearly the sense of the absurd it has to my waking mind.  I felt I didn't have enough time the way you feel you don't have enough time to get somewhere 30 minutes away in 15 minutes, not somewhere halfway across the continent.)

And I did manage to get a rather lot of work done on my quarterly reporting project, too, so I declare victory.