Making It Work

This morning- chaos in the closet!  None of my black pants fit anymore.  I ended up wearing the same pair of dressy trouser jeans as yesterday, which is annoying.  Tonight I will take most of my black pants to the tailor and see if I can’t get them to take them in (though the problem is as much the baggy crotch as it is the space at the waist), and then I have to go find some new black pants that will fit in the meantime.  This is all annoying- I’m still working to lose weight, but it’s happening at such a slower rate now that even as I count every calorie, I doubt that I will move to even smaller sizes.  But if I do, then all this money at the tailor and all the money on new pants will be stupid and for nothing, and I will have to go buy more pants.  And buying pants isn’t fun!  They all fit differently, and sometimes I end up buying stuff that does not work when I get it home.  And I’m at that in-between sizing now, where the stuff at the big girls’ stores are maybe a little too big and the stuff at tiny girls’ stores are maybe a little too small.  And do I spend the money on nice pants if they’re not going to fit in three months?

Pants rant!

I had a nice weekend, wearing stretchy jeans that fit when they’re really clean but stretch after a few hours’ of wear and then are loose enough that I need a belt to keep them on.  Grr, stretchy jeans!  (Yet a pair of non-stretchy jeans still fit weirdly tight, same as they did before the diet.  I don’t get it.)

Anyway, it was a nice weekend, pants or no pants.  (Mostly I wore pants.)  Tracy and I watched a couple of AFI movies- Caberet and A Streetcar Named Desire.  I was not into Caberet and don’t really understand its place on the list.  Actually, it’s only on the new list, the AFI list that was released in 2007, where it falls at #63, right above The African Queen, Tootsie, Network, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, all of which seem vastly superior.  I mean, it wasn’t bad, but I felt like I’d seen it before I saw it.  Maybe Liza Minnelli and her short dark hair, long legs, and spidery eyelashes were a revelation at the time, as was the choreography by Bob Fosse, but none of it was really a surprise to me (especially as Liza Minnelli has been rocking the same hairstyle, lashes & short skirts for the past forty years).

Both Tracy and I apparently went through play-reading stages in high school, at which point in our lives we’d both read A Streetcar Named Desire, but neither of us had seen the movie or a stage production.  It seems kind of appropriate to go through a play-reading phase in high school, when you’re desperate to experience something big and new, but all you can do is read the lines and stage directions on the page, and it’s hardly the same.  We were both surprised to discover that this was Marlon Brando’s first real movie role, and how young he was!  She’d never seen him in anything from the 1950s, though I was totally enamored of the movie version of Guys and Dolls in junior high (during my Broadway musical phase) and that was my first Brando experience.  I had totally forgotten that Vivian Leigh plays Blanche- for some reason, I thought it was Elizabeth Taylor.  But then we had to discuss Vivian Leigh and I discovered that Tracy has never read the book or seen the movie for Gone With The Wind.  And that’s just a shame.  The new AFI list puts A Streetcar Named Desire just above Rear Window and just below It Happened One Night, and that seems appropriate.

We went out to antique stores and thrift stores on Saturday afternoon, and came home with more furniture for Tracy, and some kitchen stuff for me.  Tracy also bought two lamps and a set of matching juice glasses.  Then we stopped by my aunt’s house because she’s in the process of moving, and we scored two bookshelves (one for each of us) and a desk (for me) there, as well as a bunch more kitchen stuff.

On Sunday, we went up to see my parents and friends who’d come in for the day.  It was a cold and blustery day after a pretty warm Saturday, but we had a nice time chatting and discussing various current events.

Why do I always say I have great weekends, but then I list what I did, and it sounds like not much?  I guess it was just all very pleasant.

Yesterday, I talked with an upholstery shop in Ashland about redoing my new couch.  Their fabrics are online, so I started looking through fabrics.  I have no idea what I’m going to do.  I’m concerned about pet hair showing up and yet I love the look of bright solid colors on furniture.  I already have those two chairs that are in a neutral stripe, so I want something that has some color.  I’m almost certain that I want a blue or green or something in-between.  And obviously it should be able to stand up to some wear and tear.

My red couch is looking pretty raggedy these days.  Besides being the only furniture in the house that the dog is allowed on (and the dog knows this), it’s been right under an arched window for three years, getting sun every morning, and that hasn’t helped it at all.  The red is pretty faded in specific spots.  It’s sad to see things get older when you use them, isn’t it?  That red couch was the first big new piece of furniture I’ve ever bought or owned, and it was pretty awesome at the time.  Now it looks sad.  I intend to do a lot of rearranging after Tracy takes the furniture to Kansas City, and I think the red couch is going to go in another room, and I was thinking of dressing it up with some colorful blankets and throws and pillows- stuff that can be cleaned if the dog drools all over them, but entertaining for me to look at.

Tonight (after the pants-shopping and a stop by Ace Hardware for a number of things), I promised to help Tracy get started on sanding down the four wood chairs she bought.  She wants to paint them green to go with her bright yellow table.  I need to get some chrome polish as well, to see if we can make the legs of the table look good too.