The Smoky Eye

I’m on the verge of cancelling my subscription to my last fashion magazine. All these years I’ve perpetuated the myth in my own mind that it’s possible to be fashionable in my current lifestyle. Maybe not so much. Perhaps it’s time I accept reality. I spend most of my time in well-worn jeans and patched, [...]

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Personal Quest for the Best

Have you noticed supermarkets making more room for store brands and pushing old favorites into smaller spaces? Some have disappeared altogether. I went searching for Q-tips. The small area allotted was empty, but there were loads of the store brand. If you‘ve ever had a little piece of cotton stick in your ear from an [...]

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Leather Love Seat

This story begins with an inherited, avocado green couch. It had started life decades ago with my aunt and uncle in “the house”, the old, family residence of my grandparents, circa 1895, depository of all things antique, familial, too sentimental to discard without indescribable anguish, soul-searching and indecision. When the couch was reupholstered in the [...]

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OK, OK, so Happy V-Day

I sent in my Valentine’s Day column (to the newspaper for which I write) after the fact.  If this would have appeared before this “big day”, I’d have been run out of town on a rail. Call me the Scrooge of V-Day. I’m just not crazy about holidays that’ve been, if not exactly invented for [...]

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Fashionable, Flexible Work Duds (PLEASE !!!!)

I’ve spent the last few days of wintry weather walking around HUGE, like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, large and in charge like the  Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man (in Ghost Busters). I’ve been dressed in so many layers of clothing I could barely move,  waddled like a big penguin in insulated camo instead of a tuxedo. [...]

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Stuff

I wrote before about young women at the time of my “coming of age” who regularly did the whole bridal registry thing, ending up with multiple sets of china, silver, and crystal. Many of us prepared for a certain kind of expected social registry/junior league type of existence that never materialized exactly as we had [...]

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Recycling and Repurposing

I’ve always been into recycling, but not necessarily cans, jars and bottles. Years of searching my New York City neighborhood for found objects to use in art projects taught me the value of the discarded. One man’s trash is indeed another’s treasure. (My mother would have been horrified). In shopping at yard sales, thrift shops, [...]

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Fickle Fashion —– Again

I made the mistake of looking at my daughter’s fashion magazines yet again. These things either make me laugh or make me mad. Sometimes they cause me to scratch my head. I always find amazing all the “new” rabbits Madison Avenue continues to pull out of its proverbial hat. Somehow designers, manufacturers, and retailers  convince [...]

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As a Rule, a Man’s a Fool

I really thought I finally had my whole style thing together, all figured out. In fact, I was feeling pretty smug about it. I long ago made peace with my out-of-control, curly hair, learned a couple of ways to wear it that were relatively trouble-free. I must  pull it back when I work. I’d accepted [...]

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Unfashionable . . . . .Again

You might think the following is an exact copy of another post on the same subject. But it isn’t. I wrote the two pieces years apart (but both after my return to Texas and the ranch) during seasons in which metallics and animal prints were in —yet again. (I think they might even be in [...]

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