Tweaking the Challenge

Pattern Challenge Day 12: Substituting Circles and Squares for Houndstooth -- Thursday, 2/5/15

I'm not sure that I own anything in houndstooth so I decided to try winterizing a lightweight dress with a geometric circle/square pattern instead.

I'm also not sure I've tried the "put a pullover sweater on top of a dress so it looks like a skirt" idea before, but this seemed like the right time to test it out using a snuggly warm wool sweater.  With just the sweater, it looked kind of unfinished so I popped a vest on it.  This gave the outfit a kind of Midwestern winter casual style that seems appropriate to the time and place (and a business casual office).  Maybe I should have saved this for a Friday outfit but whatever.

I know bubble necklaces are basically passe at this point, but I still just love how wearing the red bubbles on a red top adds some subtle texture so I wore it anyway.  It's not like this outfit has anything else currently fashionable about it...except perhaps for wearing a puffy vest to work, which seems to be a thing right now.  I haven't yet worn my seriously puffy Skyrim office leopard vest to work, but I like how this lighter quilted vest works so well as an extra layer for warmth and visual interest.

Black/white/red circle/square dress (thrifted)
*Red cable knit wool sweater (thrifted, Lands End)
Black quilted vest (gift from Mom)
Black leggings
Tall black boots by Fitzwell
Red bubble necklace (Outfit Additions)

Blast from the Past--I'd forgotten that I winterized this dress before.  Well "springized" it, I guess, because I wore it on 4/17/14, but that was still pretty cold in Snow City as I recall.  I really like this first rendition as well--it has an equestrian vibe with the riding boots, classic blazer, and ascot-tied scarf.  I've now moved from equestrian to Midwestern school teacher with this dress.  I haven't worn this dress on its own yet, which is sort of funny, but it does seem to make a nice base for building a cool/cold weather outfit around.

What to Wear to a Meeting with Site Administrators

Pattern Challenge Day 18 #3: Stripes -- Wednesday, 2/4/15

I took this challenge day easy because I wanted to pick out something I could feel confident and professional in when meeting with the administration staff at one of our sites to discuss their quarterly results.  (I do not usually do this kind of meeting, but the person in my department who works with sites asked me to come to this meeting because I do the analysis.  It went just fine.)

In addition to wearing stripes and a skirt to meet the minimum challenge requirements, I also managed to wear a new skirt.  So I declare victory.

(I had forgotten how nice this skirt is--it's a navy suiting skirt, fully lined, and super professional.  In my memory, it was a longer, more dowdy length, but now that I realize it's knee length, game on.)  

*Navy pencil skirt (thrifted, Liz Claiborne)
Purple/blue striped jacket (thrifted, Coldwater Creek)
Magenta T (Walmart)
Grey leggings
Tall grey boots by LifeStride
Purple "gumdrop" necklace (Target)

Wearing an old Walmart t-shirt under your jacket is a kind of questionable seeming "professional" attire decision, but I don't work in a conservative corporate type setting, so I think it's professional enough.

I'm getting more use out of this short purple necklace than I'd anticipated, so that was a fortunate purchase decision.

Blast from the Past--The last time I wore this jacket (5/14/14), I paired it with this same t-shirt.  Yep, it's the perfect color and length so I'm going to stick with what works.  I'd forgotten how much I like the bright pink scarf with this jacket.

More Last Minute Substitutions

Pattern Challenge Day 19: Leopard and Day 2: Abstract -- Tuesday, 2/3/15

I was all set to wear my navy blue/black pencil skirt with the star design for the first time when I realized, damn, I don't actually care for how this fits.  It still has its tags, so back to Nordstrom it will go.  But I already was wearing black tights, blue leopard print shoes, and a black sweater and didn't have the desire to start over, hence the substitution of a black skirt and a navy/blue abstract print cardigan.  This is definitely not something I would have thought to put together under anything but desperation circumstances, so the dual pattern/skirt challenge has pushed me into a different style than my default.  I am actually pretty leery of the navy/black combo, which can look too much like "I got dressed in the dark, oops" rather than an intentional pairing, but the colors of the star skirt made it clear that I knew I was mixing these colors.  I'm not sure whether the shoes alone can serve that function as well, but I figured what the hell.
 

*Black wool pullover sweater (thrifted, Calvin Klein)
Black fold pencil skirt (JCP)
Navy/blue sweatshirt cardigan (thrifted, Rafaella)
Black tights
Blue leopard shoes by C. Label
Blue/green/pearl necklace (Target)

Can these shoes carry the weight of navy/black color mixing?

I like an excuse to wear this necklace, and I thought it nice that it fit so perfectly along the V-neck of the sweater.

This was definitely outside my usual outfit zone, but the combo of wool sweater and sweatshirt cardigan was nice and snuggly on a cold, snowy day.

Also I just noticed that my sweatshirt matches the world's CUTEST snake, so that can't be bad.

He recommends trying the cardigan with a pop of red.

Inadvertent nursery snake patterned sweatshirt cardigan for the win!

Introducing a Week of Winterized Dresses and Skirts

A couple weeks ago, Audrey at Putting Me Together challenged her readers to wear a dress, even though it's winter and a lot of people avoid dresses in winter.  I decided to do that this week--turning it into a full week of dresses and skirts--along with continuing the Pattern Challenge.  This proved to be...well, challenging.  The weather forecast for the week called for highs between 8 and 23 with two days of (minor) snowfall.  So the basic kind of "take a sleeveless dress and wear it with tights and a cardigan" winterizing approach that works in those warm states just wasn't gonna fly.  Add in the need to include patterns and it took me a good bit of trial and error to come up with 5 work outfits that wouldn't leave me absolutely freezing.  My use of my closet is still pretty inefficient, too, because I'm not quite used to how I have things arranged in there, and I need to get additional storage space for a bunch of sweaters, jeans, etc., that are currently living in suitcases in the bedroom.

The photos are a little better than last week because I set up my mirror in my office, where I have two floor lamps and hence halfway decent light.  I mean, at least you can see that the dress has a pattern in it and isn't just a dark grey blur.  That's a start.

Pattern Challenge Day 2: Abstract -- Monday, 2/2/15

First up is an Old Navy dress I have had for a while.  It has an abstract flower pattern that works great for Day 2's challenge, but it is problematic for winter--elbow length sleeves and a deep scoop/peasant neckline.

Here's what I did with it.  This cream scarf is perfect for the purpose because it is huge and makes a really big, warm faux-finity scarf when the ends are tied together.

*Grey/cream/black abstract floral knit dress (thrifted, Old Navy)
Cream scarf (thrifted)
Black moto jacket (JCP)
Grey leggings
Tall grey boots by Fitzwell
Black elastic belt

Blast from the Past---Here is another way I wore this black moto jacket with a grey outfit (for the weekend, 10/4/14):

Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time

Friday was the day that, supplied with contact names from yesterday's meeting, I started calling people working in the programs to find out what the hell was going on.  I started calling them up around 8:15, and it's really convenient how leaving a message that starts "[Your boss's boss] asked that I call you about..." gets a prompt response.

Unfortunately, that response was generally: "What?  You say that is happening?  Let me look this up in [the front end of our database].  Huh.  I see what you mean.  But you can't find these records?  That's weird."  So people were eager to help but unable to supply much information.  But I did get a sort of consensus view that I should talk to M, a person in our IT department who is responsible for the database stuff.

So I know from previous encounters that when I talk to M, he will want me to supply the identifying number of a person in the database where we're seeing the problem.  I found a problematic person (no X data) for Program Y, and I decided that before talking to him, I would also find a non-problematic person (have X data) for the same program.  But when I looked up the "non-problematic" person, I found out that even though I had some X data on this person, the data were incomplete!  The front end of the database reported 4 units for this person, but only two of them were in the data download.  This meant that I had to go back through and spot check individual people's records in the database for all the programs to ensure that this wasn't happening for other programs too.  And I found another program with the same situation -- some but not all the data were there.  (For all I know, the problem could exist in other programs but I just didn't happen to find a record with the issue.  If I could identify the problem records without looking up individual people....well, I wouldn't have a problem then.)

That was one way I discovered that I had more missing data than I knew.

The second way was when I did some basic crosstabs on the X data I had matched up to the records supplied to us, I found oddities like, This person has data in period Z for a program that did not occur in period Z, WTF?  Oh.  Damn.  When the regulatory people had given us their records, they had recoded a lot of specific program codes under one code.  So when I aggregated X data across those codes, it was summing all X data across all programs under the umbrella code.  If a person participated in two different programs, the data were screwed up.

I explained the issue to my officemate and she said, You mentioned a couple days ago you almost wished you were starting over knowing what you know now, and it looks like you're getting the chance.

It's true -- I did say that because I had done a bazillion different "get some data, clean it up, match records to this primary datafile, see what happened, rinse, repeat" cycles and everything was confusing.

So I did start over, and it was a much more clean, satisfying procedure.  And it fixed all those weird mis-matched records so everything looked kosher on that front.  But now I had 2700 records without data instead of 2300!

At the end of the day, I told my officemate that I needed to stop working on this and go home before we lost all our data altogether.

Summary:  The data are getting worse because we have ever more missing records but the data are getting better because they are more accurate.  But damn.

Pattern Challenge Day 22: Polka Dots -- Friday, 1/30/15

This outfit resulted from a last minute substitution.  I had planned to wear my argyle cardigan with it, but when I put that on, it was short and small enough that it looked very weird with the tunic.  The tunic itself was a substitution for a short-sleeved knit top that I had planned with the outfit when I was brainstorming ideas during the fall.  But luckily I have a polka dot blazer that could easily be substituted, fulfilling a different pattern challenge.

I normally would not have paired this necklace with this blazer (it worked better with the cardigan, I think), but I didn't feel like trying to make yet another substitution so I just went with it.

*Plum tunic (Kohls)
Cream polka dot blazer (thrifted, Target)--I love this classic school 
Black ankle pants (thrifted, Eileen Fisher)
Tall black boots by Fitzwell
Purple/gold necklace (Macy's)

This photo is somewhat better because it was a sunny afternoon and with my new awesomely short commute, I got home from work in time to take another photo before losing the daylight.

What to Wear to a Late Afternoon Meeting

So you know those kinds of projects where someone says, Hey, could you do this little thing for me real quick?  And it seems straightforward enough...until you start doing it.  And then it turns into a complete disaster?  That was how my week went.

We had been sent a list of records for people in a subset of our programs and asked to supply data on X for each of those records.  I'm currently the analyst in charge of X, so this got sent to me.  But uh-oh.  We've never looked at the X data for this category of programs before so the X data that I had was incomplete.  Like really, really incomplete.  Like missing X data for 2300 of 7500 records.  For some of these records, that makes sense.  You only get X data in the system when you complete the program, and the nature of the programs (i.e., populated by people who were not getting it done in our regular programs) meant that we would likely have a lot of drop outs.  But not this many!  I mean, one program of over 1100 people had no X data in our datafile at all, and it's not conceivable that every single person failed the complete the program.

I was able to figure out where the X data were for about 650 of those records (well of course one program decided to report their data under an identifying number associated with a different program for maximum confusion) were but the rest were a mystery.  I spent basically all of Thursday trying to get a handle on these missing records.  It's particularly odd because for a lot of them, I could see the X data in the front end of our database system, but for some reason, the records were not pulled through when our systems analyst queried the database to produce the datafile of X data (the X File?) for me.

I had a meeting in the late afternoon with two of the high level administrators for the programs in question.  I found out that this request for data was part of a legislative request of our regulatory body to produce a report on the efficacy of this category of program.  At one point, one of the administrators said to me, Hey, no pressure, but there is $60 million riding on this.

ACK.

Pattern Challenge Day 15: Lace and Day 11: Pinstripes -- Thursday, 1/29/15

The data were a mess but my look was together, fulfilling two pattern challenges at once.

Light blue lace-front sweater (Kohls)
*Navy pinstripe blazer (thrifted, The Limited)
Grey pants (thrifted, Loft)
Pink/blue floral scarf (Target)
Grey ankle boots by Seycelles

Do I get bonus points for matching roses on the scarf to roses on the lace sweater?  You bet I do.

Stripes Strike Again

Pattern Challenge Day 18: Stripes #2 -- Wednesday, 1/28/15

One day of stripes is clearly insufficient, so here's another one. 

*Black/white striped collar sweater (thrifted, JNY)
Black T (Walmart)
Olive pants (thrifted, Coldwater Creek)
Jewel tone floral-esque scarf (Target)
Black ankle boots by Sam Edelman

I loved this outfit conceptually somewhat more than it worked out for two reasons.

(1) Wearing a 3/4 length sleeve sweater as your top layer is pretty questionable in late January in Coldville.  I had to wear a long-sleeved T underneath and roll the sleeves up to match the sweater.  It felt a bit bulky with this extra underlayer.

(2)  I'm not crazy about how I wore the scarf with this combination.  I like this scarf style generally but I think in this instance the scarf would have looked better if it had been left more long and flowing or worn as a faux infinity scarf; the shorter tie just looked a bit off to me.  But because it's cold I wanted more fabric around the neck, and the collar on the sweater was more limiting than I had anticipated. 

These nitpicks aside, I do love the idea of black/white stripes, olive pants, jewel tone scarf.  I even think these pieces are pretty compatible, but it's an outfit definitely better suited to fall (when the underlayer can be skipped and the scarf can serve a more purely aesthetic purpose) than winter.