Fabulousness, lately

Hello fair readers-

I hope that the world has been kind to you lately. For the most part, things have been unremarkable in my life lately, but I realized that there are little bits of fabulousness sprinkled throughout the chaos that is my life. I don’t feel compelled to compile a list…but feel free to add your own numbers if that constitutes a bit of fabulousness for you…

First and foremost, I have finished a conference at work…no more angst, insomnia, ulcers, twitchy eyes or migraines- until the next conference. Fabulous. In a corollary bit of fabulousness, the completion of the conference has freed up all sorts of time to spend with previously neglected friends. Spending the morning lounging around the pool with my girlfriend and all our little boys is just what my cynical soul needed. The scads of intermittent rain showers weren’t ideal, but hey, it’s my fabulousness…allow me to interpret it in the most fluid terms possible. While poolside, we made plans to head out on a road trip to Washington, DC, a la Thelma & Louise, although with slightly fewer incidents involving adultery and vehicular conflagrations…maybe more of ‘Patsy & Edwina Hit the Road’ (if this reference is lost on you, you need to abandon this blog immediately and immerse yourself in ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ archives…go ahead, they don’t call it Absolutely Fabulous for nothing. I’ll be here when you’re done.)

Next on the fab agenda…dinner with dear friend, Wendy. Not only a stellar individual, but one of those very few people who actually does know exactly what I mean when, after listening to me ramble on about something esoteric and flake-y for, well, ever, responds with “I know exactly what you mean.” (This should probably be a source of concern for her and others who love her, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, so far be it from me to cast aspersions.) Extra fabulous points accrued for meeting at Eclipse de Luna, one of my favorite tapas places…even their green beans make me happy. Probably because they are deep fried and sprinkled with sea salt. And it must be said that dining with a PhD in counseling elevates the usual sniping and whining to a whole new level. Usually it costs $150 bucks an hour to get someone to listen to you unpack all of life’s little indignities…and they never offer you sangria and goat cheese stuffed pimentos. I’m telling you…my life is silly with fabulousness right now.

And at the risk of sounding like one of those strident TV cleaning products salespeople…but wait, there’s more! The eldest of the progeny is heading off tomorrow for a week at Boy Scout camp in Virginia. There is no doubt that he is his father’s son…he looks like my husband, thinks like my husband and gets jazzed about the whole ‘nature deal’ like my husband, but he also likes to come home to Frette linens, triple cream brie, a hot shower & yours truly…just like my husband. The appeal of Boy Scout camp, which is pretty much seven days of marinating in B.O., bug spray and, oh yes, a gooey film of sunscreen while dining on a steady diet of cafeteria food and MRE’s and earning patches for valuable ’skills’ such as identifying an animal based on excrement (would that I were making this up), had begun to fade. Go figure. In spite of having a mere pittance of compassion, even I couldn’t bear the idea of my sweet baby being heartsick and miserable all week. Suddenly, his nature camp malaise has been swept away by all the fabulousness. He can’t wait to go. I should so buy lottery tickets today…it just doesn’t get better than this.

Well, I am off…fabulousness and love to you all. jill

rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated…

Hello dear friends, bored strangers and web junkies of various and random origins! It has been forever since I last posted…perhaps ‘forever‘ smacks of hyperbole, but still, it’s been a pretty long time and if you wanted to read something precise and strictly factual, you would be perusing the guide to your DVR, so I will allow myself a certain degree of artistic license. I have been completely preoccupied with an event at work and if I were of a more balanced disposition I may still have been able to function in some moderate capacity…but we all know that couldn’t be further from reality so I give you the latest top 5 list:

Top 5 things I have NOT done while obsessing over work event:

1. Laundry. Seriously, I have a veritable Mount Everest of laundry. Today I wore a pair of Seven capris with an over-sized tee shirt (heaven help us) and snake skin gladiator sandals…no lipstick, no earrings. Seriously. Yes, seriously. I mean, I could end the whole list right here, but let us soldier on to number 2.

2. Housework. Not really something I have missed, but chaos in the casa totally wrecks any of that soothing, June Cleaver, yes-the-house-is-immaculate-but-here-I-am-with-martini-and-pearls, 50’s fabulousness kind of vibe that I like to substitute for reality.

3. Groceries. As if I would leave my filthy house in that ridiculous outfit to go buy groceries. Just order the sushi and let’s move on…of course, I would rather not speculate on the absence of our goldfish and the empty bottle of tarter sauce in the trash….

4. Personal maintenance. Ugh, if I don’t get a pedicure and a bikini wax, like ten minutes ago, well, it doesn’t bear description. To quote Joseph Conrad, “the horror, the horror”. The number of issues with haircut and color would require its own list. I am seriously considering switching from a loofah to 40 grit sandpaper.

5. Sleep. No one other than the guy at Krispy Kreme should be up at 3 o’clock in the morning. I cannot happily maintain the illusion of my alternate reality on 3 hours of sleep. That kind of self delusion takes a solid 8 hours of rest to sustain. I might as well start wearing sensible shoes and eating healthy. It’s a travesty!

Well, rest easy dear friends! The event has concluded and I am ready to return to life as I imagine it. Needless to say, I’ll keep you posted…

i am skinny fat

Because I don’t have enough hang ups, I am now spending my time watching Discovery Health and finding all kinds of new things that are wrong with me. For instance, this weekend I discovered that I am skinny fat. Truly, I am not making this up. Apparently there is a whole group of people who, while having a body weight in proportion to our height, have an excessively high body fat ratio…presumably from opting to eat an entire carton of Ben & Jerry’s in bed while watching Discovery Health in lieu a regular schedule of diet and exercise. So here I am, completely surrounded by fat. At the same time I am watching another show that says that most of the population is sleep deprived and that excessive sleep deprivation can lead to slow metabolism and even a pre-diabetic state. Well, whatever…am I supposed to get out of the bed or not??? I either lay there with my fatty organs, getting fatter by the minute presumably, or I get, up in which case I will undoubtedly suffer from some sleep-deprivation related malady. On the upside, I sure am glad not to have gigantism. (That was the featured malady after the fat organ show…obviously I decided to stay in bed.) While I ponder this health conundrum, I have decided to give up coffee. What am I thinking? Honestly, I couldn’t say, but I figure that substituting Kashi & soy milk for the cartons of cream and mounds of sugar in my coffee is a good start. So if you hear of some fat organed girl in Atlanta going on a caffeine withdrawal rampage, you’ll know what happened.

stairway to…heaven?

I have decided to paint my stairs. It’s a decision made more by neurotic necessity than by a desire to paint stairs, but regardless, the stairs will be painted. It is going to be one of those thankless projects that consists of loads of sanding and prep work followed by hour after tedious hour of cutting-in. However, once finished, we should have a stairway of love…as opposed to the oak-y stairway that graces our home now. (Not to mention that it would cost me the price of about 6 pairs of REALLY nice shoes to have someone else do the work…yes, this is the economic scale I use for most important decisions.) The oak treads have never matched the rest of the floor on the main level, but I could get past that, mostly. Unfortunately, Maisy decided that the landing was her favorite hang out and it didn’t take too long for her to trash the floor on the landing and to scratch up the treads upon falling (a la Aunt Bunny, of the hysterically funny, but terribly vulgar Eddie Murphy stand up routines from my youth) all the way to the bottom of the stairs…usually between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning. Now that Maisy has taken up residence in the study (a stair free environment) it is time to start painting. I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

doldrums, part II

Hello world! I hope all is well wherever you are. I am happily listening to a thunderstorm while lounging around with my wonderful girl Maisy.

She is somewhat less enthusiastic about storms than I, but she seems to feel better after lounging on Jamie’s side of the bed.

Hopefully the rain will help to wash away my summer doldrums, but I will continue to fight the good fight with the guaranteed doldrum antidote of gratitude. Thus, the five things I love about my ridiculously small and poorly designed pantry…

1) Obviously, the best thing about our pantry is that we are blessed with so much food that it won’t all fit. By all rights, this accounts for all 5 of the reasons to be grateful, but in the spirit of the exercise I will soldier on until I can come up with 4 more reasons that I love my pantry…mockery that it is of all that is efficient and helpful.

2) It is a miraculous growing chamber. Old MacDonald and a team from the Dekalb Farmers’ Market with a NASA grant couldn’t come up with a heartier and more adaptable plant than the half rotten onion lurking in the back of my pantry. Miracle grow all you want…if you want true results, ignore it in the back of my pantry and it will grow like clover on Three Mile Island.

3) The big jar of Nutella…no, no, not the one on the door shelf that the boys know about…the other one hidden behind the balsamic vinegar and the bottle of disgusting fish sauce. (I mean, how could I have fooled them for so long…no one can actually want to eat fish sauce…they should realize it’s just camouflage.) Anything is good with Nutella on top…except pickles which are clearly repellent food of the devil…as are beans.

4) Peanut butter…all four varieties. Crunchy, smooth, cinnamon and Goober Grape for those times when you crave the PB & J experience, but can’t be bothered by bread. I love it, I love it, I love it.

5) Monster bag of Harney & Sons Earl Grey Supreme sent to me by my lovely friend Marie. The smell of Earl Grey tea that that comes from the bergamot oil with which it is infused, makes me happy. And, further more, prepare yourselves, for I am about to make a statement that has the potential to bring down the entire British Kingdom (or what’s left of it)…I think that Harney & Sons Earl Grey Supreme is at it’s most succulent and fabulous as sweet tea. There, I said it. No more pinkies out for me…but I’m still totally into the tiny tea sandwiches.

Hmmm, now I’m hungry…and thus, truly grateful for my crazy pantry. See, this whole doldrum defeating thing totally works!!!

summer doldrums

I think I am in the midst of my own summer doldrums. I can’t seem to get all that excited about anything. Plus, I have reached that point where I hate everything in my closet….as opposed to those days when you don’t have any good tops or you’re desperate for new pair of jeans, this is all encompassing closet loathing. Don’t get me wrong, there are some truly egregious sartorial experiences in my closet, but I don’t really think the problem is the clothing. It’s bigger than that. I’ve actually begun to loathe the closet itself. I could give you all sorts of compelling reasons why (not least of which is the wall color…a filthy shade of yellow that looks like custard gone wrong and makes me look like I died yesterday) and in the end I could probably convince you that it is a grotesque and hateful place, but really it’s just a room full of stuff. I think that the problem is just me…wherever I look I see something that makes my lip curl (not in any kind of rakish Billy Idol/Elvis Presley way, but more in that “what IS that disgusting smell” kind of way) Even in my self serving quest to create a reality that justifies my every opinion and action, I have to acknowledge that this is not a reasonable state of affairs. So, in an effort to readjust my perspective whenever I feel the lip curl coming on, I am going to focus on five things about the lip-curling situation that I love. So, in honor of my hated closet, here is the first list of the summer:

5 Things I Love in My Abysmal Closet

1. My wedding dress (made by Tomasina, it has dozens of handmade soutache ribbon flowers all over the sleeves and hem…I felt like a princess in it…until 6 hours of wedding festivities made me feel like I was wearing chain mail and I had to recruit 15 girlfriends to help hold it up so I could pee)

2. the Louis Vuitton purse my mom got me on my very first trip to Paris…it was love at first site (both with Paris and the purse.

3. The Schiaparelli coat found it a vintage store on Hilton Head…can you believe it?! Captain Jack Sparrow has never found treasure like this.

4. Seafoam green tiered lace skirt from Anthropologie. Unapologetically girlie and lovely…I’ve had it for 5 years and still get compliments whenever I wear it.

5. Tie between glitter covered jewelry box given to me for mother’s day (a hand’s down sentimental favorite, even if I do manage to end up with glitter in my eye every time I even look at it) and Jamie’s vintage army fatigue pants…possibly the most universally unflattering things ever created, but so comfy, with the added benefit of striking that absurdly eclectic balance when paired with the ubiquitous wife beater and strappy pink patent leather sandals. Perfection…especially in the Stepford Wives world in which I live.

So there it is…my 5 step program to beat the doldrums. I do think I feel a bit better…but I am starting to have very bad feelings about my pantry…

Hello world!

Hello all. I have resisted the impulse to join the blogging world for quite a while now, but no more. So, all of you who have requested that I blog, you have no one to blame but yourselves for the altar of self absorption built here one word at a time. Welcome to reality according to jill!