Is it summer already?

Yesterday was 90 degrees and today 80.  I’m dressed for full blown summer right now.  I saw a lot of women wearing short shorts and spaghetti strap tank tops.  Whenever the weather changes like this, it’s always feels like a bit of a shock to see so much exposed skin.  Not complaining though!

After about a week road testing these SAS sandals, I have to say I really like them.  When these wear out, I might buy another pair.  But next time I will buy a half size larger.  They fit fine, but when I’m standing my feet slide forward a little and I’d like a little more of a ledge in the toe area.

With the heat, comes lots of sticky and stinky subway rides.  Last year I experimented with using salt deodorant after I shower.  It really does keep B.O. at bay and I like that it’s simply salt.  It works by preventing growth of bacteria which causes odor, but it doesn’t actually combat the sweating itself.  I don’t sweat that much even when it’s really hot, so I don’t care much about that, but I’m still not immune to odor and the salt stuff has worked pretty well for me in that department.

In other news:  I’ve had my new ThinkPad for about a week now.  And although I love the deep keyboard and classic design of it, I have decided to return it for two reasons:  poor sound quality and the trackpointer (joy stick) which I love using tends to malfunction when scrolling for long periods of time.  Additionally, the Lenovo customer service was atrocious.  The tech support people have poor communication skills and are poorly trained.  It seemed like I was more knowledgeable about computers than they were.  Plus, they told me I had to pay for an additional software warranty if I wanted to speak to someone who knew how to fix the problem with the track pointer.  Hell no I’m not paying for that.  Ridiculous.  Back it goes!

The BF was right when he suggested I buy the Microsoft Surface Laptop instead.  His reasons was that it was a high quality machine, made in the USA, customer service is excellent, ie. you can walk right into any Microsoft store and they will give you a new laptop on the spot if there’s anything wrong with yours.  With Lenovo, you’d have to send your laptop in and be without it for weeks at a time.  I’ll be returning the Thinkpad, and will buy a Surface Laptop with slightly less RAM than the Thinkpad e, and will pretty much break even cost-wise.  I’m looking forward to the vertically larger screen space on the Surface.  It will be more conducive to writing long blog posts and reading other people’s long blog posts.  The BF thought it was a “noble experiment” to quit Macs and try out Thinkpad, but felt very “pleased” with my decision to buy a Surface.  He doesn’t care much about anything I buy usually, but has a lot of opinions about my tech purchases, lol.

Speaking of the BF, it’s time to reveal which dress of the three dresses the BF chose and I ended up buying.  It was so fun hearing your thoughts on which dress you liked the most and why.  Everyone was so on point!  But without further adieu, the BF chose the blue slate Nerona dress!  (yay!) I was so relieved when he chose it, because that was the one I was leaning towards.

I just hope I can pull it off.  The model is obviously very tall and skinny and I worry that it won’t drape the same way on my shorter mid section heavy frame.  We’ll see.

But anyway, some of your comments got me thinking about why we choose certain clothes over others, and the idea that we choose certain things over others because they are “the safe choice”.  And I realized that maybe a lot of clothes I wear may seem like the “safe choice” because they are mostly neutral and modest.  But calling it the “safe choice” doesn’t feel accurate because my intention is to not try to look acceptable to other people (at least not primarily).  I don’t choose less safe choices, trendy stuff, ie loud patterns, frills, bows, ruffles, etc, not because it would be a risk, but simply because I think they are mostly straight up ugly or too ‘try hard’.  I feel like I have a good sense of what I think looks good and I just use that to guide me, and generally don’t care that much about what others think. My outfits might scream conformity, but it’s not driven by a conscious desire to conform or not to conform. It just is, I guess.  But anyway, isn’t it interesting.. not just what we wear, but why we wear what we wear?

[outfit: *Eileen Fisher linen shell top, *Madewell straight chinos, *SAS suntimer sandals, *Cluse watch]