Cross and Cantankerous

I don’t quite know how to account for the past three days. I had the time off, and yet not a single grand plan came to fruition. I tackled a few chores and ran a few errands, but I don’t feel like I made any headway. One of the things I tried to do was buy clothes, and the many reasons I detest shopping for clothes came flooding back to me.

• The lighting is always wrong. In boutiques it's always hellishly dim, which makes it impossible to determine what color something really is. Department stores are blindingly fluorescent, and I hate seeing myself in a mirror in fluorescent light. I look haggard and about 100 years old. Depressing.
• I have trouble finding my size or even knowing what it might be. I usually take a stab at it by taking two or three sizes into the dressing room. Even so, I often end up traipsing in and out of the dressing room numerous times getting dressed/undressed-dressed/undressed. I can only do that about three times before I want to sever my jugular vein.
• When I find something I like, the only sizes available are extra super gargantuan or broomstick spindleshanks.
• Clothing designers seem to make clothes for two groups of people: teenage girls and polyesterophilic matrons. No one in between.
• I don't know what I'm doing and I agonize over whether I should buy something or not.
• After I get stuff home I invariably decide most of the clothes make me look like a stubby clothespin and then have to go back to the stores/shops and return stuff.

When I got home this afternoon (after returning some purchases from earlier in the week), there was a FedEX package on the doorstep. End of vacation. Boo! And what do I have to show for it? Is the house clean? Not really. Do I have a new wardrobe? Nope. Did I do any socializing? None! Did I catch up with all my e-mail? Maybe half. Did I do any knitting? Not a bit. Worst of all, I don’t feel like I really did anything for myself. Somehow the entire vacation got frittered away with me attempting to address in fits and starts first one project and then another. Nothing got entirely completed (and struck from the To Do list) except that I assembled a cabinet for the bathroom. But B uses that bathroom more than I do, and by rights it should have been his project, but he sucks at stuff like that so I had to do it.

And that, my friends, are a few of the reasons why I am feeling cross and cantankerous.

Actually, I did accomplish one thing tonight and that was to resize and upload to Flickr two of my favorite photos of my parents, taken long before my cross and cantankerous self existed. I’ve been trying to get copies of these photos for more than a year*, so that should (but somehow doesn't) give me an enhanced sense of accomplishment.

Here’s my mom, standing proudly in front of a cornfield she planted. Note the fantastical height of that corn—and the fact that she did her gardening in a skirt!


Here’s a wonderful candid shot of my dad. I love that tie he’s wearing.


*My sister and brother-in-law were going to scan them and they, um, kind of forgot all about it.