And Yet More Cardigan Action

Green and Wild

I've been looking for work-compatible (i.e., business casual, I guess) pants that are not black or grey (the typical colors) or tan (because I dislike tan pants on myself), and I found these very dark forest green ones.  But they basically look black in the photo, of course.  It was hard to decide what to wear with them, so I went for my go-to: wear black and add a scarf.

In this close-up, you can see the colors a bit better.  Perhaps a bit crazy-looking, but I can be like that.

New items:
*Black argyle cardigan (thrifted)
*Black t-shirt from Target
*Dark green pants from Kohl's

Shades of Brown

For the cold, wet weekend, something comfy was in order.

The scarf is a kind of gigantic one that I bought at Target -- I had wanted a brown and black scarf that is not leopard print (so that I could wear it with leopard print and not look overwhelmingly catlike), so I got a different animal print (in a way) instead.

New items:
*Horse scarf from Target
*Brown mary jane shoes from Wal-Mart (see, I haven't stopped my Wal-Mart comfortable mary jane habit yet)

Red and Leopard

I think red and leopard together are the bomb.  And you know what?  I don't think any of these items are new/previously unworn (I thought maybe the belt, but no, I wore that at my cousin's wedding), but whatever.  I still liked it enough to share.

I decided to wear the necklace my parents gave me when I graduated with my master's degree.  It's so sweet.

Birdy Goodness

I am finally wearing this bird shirt that I blogged about when I bought it.  The teal matches one of my new cardigans perfectly.  Excellent.  Man, I really do need to shorten these grey pants; they're even too long with my leopard print wedges.

New item:
*Navy bird shirt from Nordstrom

A Welcome Sight

After a dry spell on the job search, I have a phone interview scheduled for Wednesday.  Regardless of how it goes, it feels good to at least see some movement on the job front again. 

Animal Print Shoes

I think my search for animal print shoes is over.  I tried about a dozen pairs to find the ones I wanted.

Leopard Print Smoking Slippers

I was surprised by how many shoes had a somewhat unattractive leopard print -- either the colors were off, or the print was too big, or something.  I also really wanted some that had both brown and black in the mix, but primarily black.  Finding one that had an appealing print and shape in addition to meeting my fairly high comfort standards was challenging.  When I tried these on, my feet said, Ahhhh.  I think the pattern is gorgeous, and the shape is a nice change from a ballet flat. 

I did not intentionally wear this hot pink cardigan to celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but I suppose that was just a bonus.  It was also accidental that the somewhat wild dotted pattern of the shirt echoed the animal print shoes (I picked it because it had hot pink in it, and I knew I wanted to wear leopard print and the hot pink cardigan), but I liked the effect.

New items:
*Leopard print smoking slippers by Clarks
*Wild dotted knit shirt (thifted, Target brand)

Double Cat Print

While looking for brown/black leopard print shoes online, I came across these grey wedges and fell in love with their look.  My job interview heels are also Cole Haan with Nike Air technology, so I already knew that it was a surprisingly comfortable line of shoes -- and with these being wedges, I expected that to be even more the case.  My sister wore a pair of nude wedges at our cousin's wedding this summer and I became intrigued by them.  When I had the chance to buy a pair of black ones at the thrift store, I did so to try them out in terms of comfort and was astonished by how stable they were and how much not like wearing heels.  (Granted, I won't go above about 2" for a pair of wedges, but wedges seem more stable at a given height than even comfortable heels.)  When I tried them on, I was sold.

I decided to wear them with another dose of animal print in the form of this lightweight cat print scarf.

Add a lace top that I had purchased with the plan to wear it to that same cousin's wedding this summer (the skirt I finally decided on had a white background so I decided against this cream one in favor of the other top I bought at the same time) and a cardigan, of course, and voila.

New items:
*Grey animal print wedges by Cole Haan
*Cream lace top from Target

Dreams and Their Inspirations

Last night I had 3 different anti-carb dream vignettes:

1)  My mom and I were talking about a movie I'd seen that she's interested in seeing.  I'm like, Hey, it's on Netflix streaming, do you want to watch it?  She says no, that she wants us to make and eat a big cake together.  I'm like, Um, I really don't want to eat any cake, do you?  She is insistent that we should do this.  In desperation I ask whether she'd be happy going out and getting a donut or something instead of making an entire cake, and she's down on that idea.  But this weird Dream Mom is also wearing capri-length jeans, white athletic socks, and the most bright red faux-croc faux-leather penny loafer mules -- you know, they are like penny loafers in the front but are missing the part in the back that would hold them onto your foot.  Imagine something similar to these only bright red penny loafers.  With athletic socks.  Obviously this isn't my real mom.

2)  Somebody has left my lunch for me in the warm oven.  And it's two kinds of pancakes -- buttermilk/wheat pancakes with apple sauce and cinnamon and chocolate pancakes.  There are like 6 of each kind.  I try a bite of buttermilk pancake and think, Man, this really isn't very flavorful at all.

3)  I am going through the lunch line at a school cafeteria and WTF it's cookies for lunch day.  I have my choice of two kinds of cookies -- either baked or just the raw dough.  I ask for the chocolate chip cookie dough and they give me like 3 ice cream scoops worth.  In place of the salad bar, they have a cookie bar where you can add e.g. a cream filling/frosting between your cookies to make big Oreo style cookies.  I walk past the cookie bar and dump my tray into the trash.

My guess is I was dreaming about this because last night, after inhaling a lot of dust/etc. while cleaning the apartment pretty thoroughly and thereby really aggravating my allergies, I felt kind of ill and didn't want to eat anything even though I was hungry.  Even the normal things I would have wanted to eat under such circumstances sounded bleh.  I ended up getting Robert to defrost some ground beef, crumble it on the stove with onions, salt and pepper, and serve it to me with guacamole.  That hit the spot.  

But lest you think my dreams were all high-sugar nightmares, I also had one of my standard dreams:  Seeing Exotic Birds in My Mom's Backyard While Looking Out the Patio Door.  In this particular case, I saw two species of prairie chicken.  Exciting!  Robert was taking a nap but I woke him up to come view this awesomeness.  While he was looking at them, I saw another similar-shaped/sized but unfamiliar bird that according to my field guide was a Guadeloupe Something-or-Other.

When I woke up this morning, I was surprised by that spelling of Guadeloupe -- I would have naturally spelled it Guadalupe but I had the distinct memory that it was spelled this other way.  A few minutes ago, I noticed that the level of Solitaire Blitz I have been playing yesterday and today is on the island of Guadeloupe.  OK then.

Masters of the Universe

Tam is defending her master's project tomorrow.  Good luck, Tam!  If I understand correctly, this involves giving a presentation over her material to the professors and other grad students and then, afterwards, answering questions from her committee (not the entire group).  Stressful, right?  But she'll do great and I predict she will be totally high for several hours afterwards. 

It's always good if you can get yourself to enjoy these kinds of experiences (easier said than done, perhaps) because one thing about academia -- people generally really don't give two shits about anybody else's research.  So this is one of the few times you will have the attention of people who are situationally predisposed to care a little bit and who have a halfway decent chance of understanding some broad aspect of the project if not the details (unlike, for example, your family and friends who are not in a PhD program in your particular field).

This has made me think about my master's program and the...I was going to say two but it's really four components like this -- the first year project presentation, the major area paper (just a document that was turned in for advisor's approval), the master's thesis proposal defense, and the master's thesis defense. 

I wrote about the first year project presentation beforehand, but I never blogged about how it turned out.  (In our case, all the first year grad students did their presentations during one big session, and professors asked questions after each one.)  I was nervous, but when I finally got up there to talk, my anxiety diminished a great deal and it went fine.  One of the pieces of feedback I got was to the effect:  I thought maybe she was a bit nervous at first from her voice, but she looked so relaxed and confident up there that I decided my initial impression was mistaken.  Oh, and a funny thing: I actually did get asked a question I could not answer.  I had a complex set of results, and my focus was on the overall interaction and then some specific data points, but of course one professor asked me about the statistical significance of two data points that were not germane to my argument and I totally blanked on whether they were different or not and had to admit ignorance about that in front of everyone.  But it was OK.  I was not humiliated for life, and I passed.

Apparently I never wrote about my thesis defense, but it was really low-stress and pretty much totally great.  I had already been put through the ringer during my proposal defense by the Professor of Doom (who chaired my committee) -- incidentally, this is the same woman with the total hard-ass reputation who made a totally crushing comment to one of my fellow first years during our first year presentations because the student made a slip of the tongue.  So anyway, because of Professor of Doom's thorough excoriation of my proposal (and the not-as-scary comments by other committee members), by the time I got to the final product, I had already addressed the major issues.  And both the proposal and thesis defense involved sitting at a table with my committee, talking about the document, and not a presentation where you're standing in front of a group -- sitting at the table generally feels much less stressful to me.  The Professor of Doom was even in an expansive, light-hearted mood during the thesis defense and I saw her smile and laugh for the first time in my experience, which was nice. 

This also reminds me of how nervous I get before a job interview (like crazy nervous), but how once the interview starts, I don't feel anxious anymore.

And of course no discussion of this kind is complete without my referencing my dad's oral exam for his master's degree in German.  A member of his committee asked him a question about a book that he hadn't read, and my dad (being cool as a cucumber in these sorts of anxiety-provoking situations, something I wish I had inherited) said basically: Well, I haven't read this particular book by This Author, but in his book Whatever, he blah blah blah...  And he passed his exam.

So to Tam I pass on once again my advisor's wise advice re: the research presentation:  Have fun with it!

The End of the Warmth

Here are a few outfits I wore during what seems to have been the last gasp of summer last week.

80 Degrees

I would have liked to do something more interesting with this brown skirt, but when it's this warm, minimal is better.  (Note that this is not my new Lands End white shirt, but an old one of thinner material that I had previously hemmed to be more skirt-compatible.)  God, it looks weird and boxy with my arms up! 

New items:
*Brown cotton skirt (thifted, Ann Taylor)
*Brown flats (thrifted, American Eagle)

Pink and Blue, True Gold

(KSAL listeners might recognize those as lyrics from a Mountain Goats song.)

I liked the coral drapeneck top I got at Lands End so much that I ordered another one.  And they're still on sale!  In solid ($6), striped ($7), and polka-dotted ($7, or $9 plus size) versions (limited sizes).  I'm having to resist the urge to buy some more colors (I really have enough short-sleeved knit shirts).  The top does run a bit large, but I ordered in my normal Lands End size and I liked the fit.  The fabric is fluid enough that it drapes.

New item:
*Striped drapeneck shirt (Lands End)

Finally These Shoes

I have been stalking the Julianne flat by Born for about 6 months.  I tried the black ones from Zappos during my big "finding black shoes to wear with a suit" hunt and I really liked the fit and comfort, but sent them back when I found some comfortable heels that were dressier and more interview appropriate.  I liked several of the other colors, but they were $90, which was higher than I wanted to spend.  Last week, Eddie Bauer had them on sale for $50 plus an extra discount code, so I snatched up this purply-pink pair for $35.  (I am currently resisting the urge to spend $50 on a pair of gold ones.)  I purchased the t-shirt from them on sale also and was happy to see that the purple color matched the shoes.

New items:
*Julianne flat by Born (Eddie Bauer)
*Flowery t-shirt (Eddie Bauer)

For the last several days, it's been rainy and cool and I've been sick, so I've been wearing slight variations on the t-shirt, jeans, cardigan, and scarf combinations you've already seen.

I'm actually doing a bit better today.  Instead of waking up at 7:30 (in anticipation of my alarm, whether I've set the alarm or not -- it only takes me about 2 days to adjust to a given wake-up time) and then falling back asleep for a couple more hours, I woke up and got out of bed within about 10 minutes.  And then did 45 minutes on my exercise bike, the first exercise I've had (other than dragging myself up the stairs in the apartment) for several days.  I'm kind of tired now, but I'm clearly over the hump of this thing.

Yesterday I had a stomach ache so I tried some ginger tea that I had purchased a while back that is supposed to be good for your stomach.  And not only did it help relieve the stomach ache, it actually tasted pretty awesome.  Apparently ginger root and black pepper make a nice combination -- it was an herbal tea with a bit of a kick.  I would drink this stuff whether I had a stomach ache or not.

A Good Time for It

I've sick and very low on energy for several days now -- I've been spending time curled up with crossword puzzles, playing Fate (technically, Fate 2), and starting to re-read the Thomas Covenant books for the first time.  I was out of books from the library, and in my sick and grumpy state, this seemed to fit the bill.  I am somewhat surprised that I have only read the books (well, the first 6; I haven't read the third set) once, a very long time ago, even though I've held onto them through many, many moves and associated book purgings.  I'm enjoying reading the first one with only a memory of the premise, a couple of the characters, and a sense of the protagonist's character.  The actual plot keeps taking me by surprise.  The events are darker than I remember (though obviously not a match for the Gap series, my favorite books by this author).

In requesting some new books from the library this morning, I decided that it was time for me to start reading the Horatio Hornblower series.  I've been saving this option for a time of need (or as it would be stated in a Stephen Donaldson novel, a time of exigency), and I think that time has come.