Natal Lily at Samuels Bulb Garden--Wednesday, 3/14/18
I'd been wanting a pleated skirt for a while in a lackadaisical manner when I happened across this one at Goodwill. They had multiple ones in various sizes, and the brand on the inside tag had been cut through, which I associate with donations of remaindered items coming straight from the store. (I assume the original retailer does that so no one who thrifts it can return it to their store.)
I am extremely pleased with it. It's better than I would probably have come up with had I been designing one in my head because (a) the coral/orange color matches a lot in my wardrobe and (b) I don't really think about how much coral/orange I have, so I wouldn't have come up with it.
Lying in bed the night after I bought it, I thought of this outfit idea, and I got up to write it down so that I could stop thinking about it and go to sleep.
*Navy/coral/green floral skirt (thrifted, Target), $2.99
Outfit cost per wear (OCPW): $9.52
What's the deal with the natal lily? It's an odd name, isn't it? It also goes by bush lily and Kaffir lily as well as its scientific name, clivia miniata. Confusingly, natal lily is also a common name of a totally different plant, crinum moorei. But it appears that both of these "natal lilies" are native to the Kwazulu-Natal province of South Africa. The "Natal" part of that name refers to the Natalia Republic, a Boer republic in the 1830s that was ceded to the Zulu. That region was named Terra Natalis (from the Portuguese for Christmas) by Vasco de Gama in December 1497 while searching for a route from Europe to India.
So I was thinking that it was odd for a flower to be named the birth lily, but I suppose the "lily from an African region a white dude named for Christmas because that's when he saw it while looking for something else" makes more sense, unfortunately.
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| Missouri Botanical Garden |
Grant's Zebra with Griffon Vultures--Thursday, 3/15/18
I think this might be the first time I've worn this black/zebra reversible quilted vest to work with the zebra side out. I thought it was a fun juxtaposition of animal prints.
OCPW: $7.09
What would be really cool is if I had a zebra/crane zoo photo. I don't...but I do have this zebra/vulture photo, and that's pretty damn on point.
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| Indianapolis Zoo |
In other news...In addition to catching up on Netflix while I was sick, I read a bunch of books on my Kindle using the library's Overdrive subscription (it's the bomb dot com). This was one of them.
The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
I was fascinated with the basic premise: four friends at a bottom-feeder for-profit law school are approaching their last semester of classes, drowning in debt and terrified at the abysmally low rate at which their school's graduates pass the bar exam. I kept having this strong assumption about where the story was going, and it went somewhere different.
As a fan of anti-graduate school screeds, I might have enjoyed it better had the book focused on the events of the 3-4 years leading up to this point rather than the events that came after. It was a weak story (especially by John Grisham standards), and the characters were not his usual type (smart lawyers with strong moral compasses).
It's more successful as a series of lectures about immigration, student debt, banking bad-guys, and for-profit colleges than it was as a novel. But the student-victims were sufficiently unsympathetic that it might have made me feel (temporarily) less strongly about the issues than when I began.
So, an unsuccessful book on every front. I got through it okay because I was sick and didn't have much in the way of standards as long as I was occupied/distracted. I advise you to not waste your time.
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