Riddle me this, livejournals: Who else do you know who could burn her upper arm on a baking sheet while taking cookies out of the oven? Who?!!



That's what you get for talking on the phone and baking at the same time.

I learned my lesson; tonight, I'm eating pre-packaged mini chessmen. Thanks, Pepperidge Farm, for being there when times get tough!


p.s. My podiatrist also thinks I have a stress fracture from cheap footwear.

Have any of you ever used one of those programs that transfers music from an ipod to your computer? If so, what was it and how do I get it?

I lost all of my music in The Great Laptop Fall of Three Months Ago and would like to get it all back on my computer if possible.

I'm also willing to pay for the program, but probably not more than $30 if possible!

[x-posted to fatshionista]

( Fall essentials behind the cut! )

Grrrrrrrrrreat. Now I have mice in my home AND in my office. One scurried along the wall when I came back from lunch and turned on the lights.

Dear Universe:

The cute animal tricks were funny, but I moved to NYC because I'm not so big on the nature, so could you let up a little on the small fuzzy mammal infestations? I sure would appreciate it.

<3 Tara


In other, less gross news, have some fatshion! (Click either for bigger.)



Outfit #1:
Dress: H&M
Cardigan: H&M (In retrospect, I don't think that this was the right cardigan for this outfit. I needed something shorter and more fitted.)
Leggings: Old Navy
Boots: Duo (A year later, I'm still in love with these! I wish they would bring this design back so I could get them in black.)

Outfit #2:
Dress: Target (This is what I call my Wednesday Addams dress.)
Leggings: Old Navy
Crocheted knee-highs: Target
Boots: Naturalizer Hunter Wide Shaft (I got these this season and they are seriously awesome. They just fit my 17" calves, though, so I wouldn't go there if yours are much bigger than that.)

I thought I'd tell you all an amazing Halloween/I hate to love/love to hate NYC moment from today.

Today, Holly and I were riding the train on the way to brunch. We were chatting normally as it pulled into the station. I looked out of the window and saw a large dirty rat scurry past us. "Lovely, a rat," I remarked.

Not 10 seconds later, I saw two people screech and try to jump out of the train while the doors were closing. They didn't make it in time and screeched again, running to their seats. My brain didn't quite connect the two events until we started moving and more people started to screech and yell in a wave from one end of the car to the other end where we were.

And then, all of a sudden, there it was. The rat had gotten onto the subway and had begun to run laps around the subway car, people's fearful shouts following it closely behind. Holly and I put our feet up on the row of seats closest to us. I saw two women jump and stand up on their seats, gripping the metal bars to steady themselves. Soon enough, we pulled into the next stop, and we all watched the doors, waiting for the rat to exit. But it didn't.

I began to laugh hysterically. What had initially seemed grotesque and a little frightening now seemed like the beginning of a bad B horror flick about mutant rodents eating Manhattan. Holly gripped my arm and buried her face into my side. This incensed me further; now I was gasping for air I was laughing so hard.

The rat didn't get off at the next stop. Or the next. People decked in skeleton, witch, and axe murderer costumes routinely leaped up with a yelp as the rat passed them underfoot.

Four stops after the rat had joined us on the train, Holly and I got off. It did not. In fact, we saw the doors close and peeked through the window to see a cranky furred face on a rodent that was now sitting on the subway bench like any other cranky NYC resident. We shook our heads and I cackled a little.

Happy Halloween, y'all!

Lunch: "Sloppy Bao" banh mi with curry beef, green mango, cilantro, basil & pickled jalapeños from Baogette + a juicy juicy apple. Fuck yeah!


p.s. Guess who's dressed like a certain Queen B from a certain hit teen television drama for Halloween today?

On Thursday, I had the most incredible meal.

11 Madison Park recently got a 4-star review by the New York Times, and it's right around the corner from where I work. They also have a $28 prix fixe lunch, which yes, is crazy expensive, but ohmygodsofuckingworthit if you can do the splurge.

I also wanted to celebrate getting a raise at work, so that in and of itself seemed like a good enough excuse to round up some friends and go.

Holly, Zoe and I got all dressed up in preparation for what we hoped would be a delicious meal, and our minds and palates were pretty much blown. There's a damn good reason they got 4 stars, and we sat in those cushy booths for close to 2 hours stuffing ourselves silly.



(Click any for bigger)

( Mega food porn behind the cut! )

5 hours later, I have this beauty:



My roommate walked into the kitchen just as I was finishing it up and her eyes grew wide. "That's very impressive," she remarked.

To accompany, I sauteed some fresh yellow and green squash with shallots and some of the broth from the pork shoulder. OMG FOOD COMA.

I foresee many porktastic meals in my very near future.

It's closet cleaning time once again, and I wanted to give y'all a head start before I repost to fatshionista tomorrow!

( Fall bargains behind the cut! )

So, I've lived in my same apartment for 2 years and 9 months now, but just recently got around to making major decorating changes in the living space now that I'm the alpha/longest tenured roommate.

Last night, I finally finished with the accent wall decorations, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased with myself!

Here's the before (click any for bigger):


Living room before.


Kitchen before.

I loved those red swivel chairs, but my old roommate took them, so when he left, I was essentially left with no seating and no art. The only thing left was the dining room table, coffee table and bookshelves. ( Look at what I've done with the place! )

Suprisingly (to me), the biggest decorating challenge (aside from money) is trying not to make things too girly. After all, I don't want to alienate current and future roommates or make them feel like they're living in a Barbie Dream House. I know it's really obvious that someone with feminine tastes decorated the space, but it's as neutral as I was willing to go.

Of course, there are always more things that I could do. For example, I want to repaint an ugly blue drawer and red bench that we have in the living room, and I'd also like this coffee table. I also need more wall art for both the kitchen in the living room, and probably the hallway too, since there's a lot of empty space, but art and frames are expensive! Some plants and other cute knick knacks would be nice too, but all of that costs $$$, so it's all a slow piece-by-piece work in progress.

They're playing the hottest hits from '99 and I'm trying to start a queer hs alum club. There are so many of us homosexual s!!!!


p.s. Wow, I forgot just how popular country music is here. Also, Richmond is still incredibly segregated. Wowsers.

A week from today, I will be pre-gaming with High School BFF in her mom's living room.

Why? Well, we want to be good and drunk for our 10 year high school reunion. Y'all, I have a plane ticket, a hot outfit, and $10 that says next weekend will be interesting to say the least.

HS BFF's mom is going to make us cocktails and chauffeur us to and from the bar where the reunion's happening so we can get good and sloshed. Because really, these things are much less enjoyable sober.

I'll also get to spend a little time with my parents the next day after they get back from celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in Hawaii. They're both pretty invested in me reconnecting with old friends, so they are delighted that I'll be in town.

Oh! This also means that I could potentially hang out with some of you Richmond folks. I know there are at least 2 of you on here! Let me know if you wanna do coffee or thrifting or shopping at Target.

Anyway, there may or may not be drunk liveblogging from the event, so make sure to keep yourself glued to the computer next Saturday night.

Tonight will be rowdy too, but much queerer and with 78% more BMI, as I'll be shaking ass with a big ole crew of folks at a dance party! We're celebrating Zoe's birthday tonight at Rumors and tomorrow at Fire Island. This will only be my third time at a beach all summer, which is a tragedy. I can't even think of a summer when I only logged a total of 3 days at the beach, so this will be my last oceanic hurrah before NYC beaches close.

I'm not gonna lie; you can probably expect some intoxicated liveblogging tomorrow too. With a beach full of naked rowdy homosexuals, what other choice is there, I ask you in all seriousness.

This August, I celebrated my first year in dresses. I wrote a post about it for The Pretty Year and fats.com, and am reposting here for folks who didn't see it at either one of those places.


About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to see what life would be like without pants.

I was inspired by Lesley of fatshionista.com’s pantsless life, but I wasn’t so sure that I could pull it off. I had a lot of reservations about whether or not I could do it, and as I saw it, there were several potential obstacles in the way of a life in dresses:

* Did I have enough dresses?
* What about the chub rub factor?
* What about winter?
* Would I get sick of all dresses all the time?
* Would eliminating pants from my wardrobe make me a happier person?

I was initially only going to try this no pants thing for just a couple of weeks, so I don’t remember the exact date of my decision other than that it was sometime in August. And first and foremost, there was the question of quantity.

Did I have enough dresses?
When I began my challenge, I think I probably had 20-25 dresses in my closet. Now, that sounds like a lot of dresses, and theoretically enough for four or five 5-day work rotations, but about 7-10 of them were dressy dresses, so those were out. I also had several unbreathable vintage polyester dresses in my closet that I knew I wouldn’t be able to wear until winter, so those were out too.

Thus began the dress collecting. One, sometimes two at a time, I began buying dresses. Most of them were priced under $25 since I didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend. I bought a shitload of dresses via fatshionista’s sales post Fridays, many of which were from Cupcake and Cuddlebunny, a truly fantastic plus size vintage business run by my friend Rachel Cupcake. I also frequented my favorite cheap dress haunts, Rainbow and H&M. I probably got about one dress per paycheck, and slowly began accumulating a collection.


To help me afford all of this, I also sold a whole lot of nice clothes, shoes, and accessories that I had been meaning to get rid of forever. In the past, I’ve been a bit of a clothes hoarder, but I’ve slowly trained myself to throw things away that don’t fit and/or that I haven’t touched in a year or more. So, I did a big sweep of my collection and sold a whole lot of things online. This netted me a nice chunk of change, and enabled me to get some really exciting pieces to start off with. ( Read more... )

Last night, I accidentally dropped my laptop on the ground. For about an hour and a half after that, it worked fine, but then I got the blue screen of death saying that it was doing a physical memory dump. After I see that screen, the computer then restarts itself, but can never get back into Windows because it cycles back into the blue screen and then back into a restart over and over again.

I just emailed some repair people via craigslist, and all of them think I damaged my hard drive and that I should just get a new laptop or a new hard drive.

I am so fucking broke right now that I don't even know what to do. And I don't think I can live without a computer at home! Waaaaah.

My living situation is a little unbearable right now.

We have a mouse problem that's slowly been ratcheting up in levels of horrifying-ness that culminated last night in an evening full of really scary nightmares.

At first, maybe starting at about a year ago, I would occasionally see a mouse run through the kitchen, but they mostly stayed away because we had cats in the house. Then, my roommate with the cat moved away, and it's been getting worse ever since.

Not only have both of my roommates and I seen mice in our bedrooms, but I've also seen them in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and last night, my roommate came home to find 2 mice hanging out on his BED. Not to mention that one time that a mouse decided to perch on his FOOT while he was sitting on the couch reading.

These mice are not afraid of people and in fact, seem to be getting bolder every day.

So last night, I woke up in a cold sweat several times, convinced that mice were going to jump on my bed and bite my feet. I also had nightmares of mice jumping out at me from behind furniture, which is not an unreasonable fear given that one time that I went to take my trash out to the curb and a rat jumped out at me when I opened the lid to the can.

A few weeks ago, our landlord planted poison and glue traps, but clearly they haven't done shit. I called him again last night, and I think he's sending in an exterminator this time.

In the meantime, I really don't know how well I'm going to be able to sleep at night for fear of what they might do. I never thought I'd long for the days of simple cockroach infestations, but seriously, I will take those disgusting winged fuckers over these nasty mammals any damn day.

So as part of my lj reading, I get CNN's daily headlines.

How many of you would classify a story about CANKLES as a top story?!

Here are some of my favorite bits of this important breaking news:

There are exercises that can keep your ankles firm. However, they don't always work. Jeff Timmons, a personal trainer from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, says he has clients who constantly complain about the size of their ankles. Many plead with him to help them shape their legs and give their ankles definition...most cankles are stubborn and stay put because they're part of a person's anatomy.

Zinszer says we take our feet for granted. "You know, feet get abused. ... We expect them to always be there when we need to do our activities," she says. She recommends that we...learn to deal with cankles as a part of life.

Apparently, the average ankle is between 10 and 11 inches in circumference. Also, I blame fightscrime for the media obsession with cankles. You started in with this mess a few years ago, and now look what it's come to!

So I got a lovely new camera because my co-worker bought my old one off of me. Tres exciting!

God bless the prix fixe meal.

Oysters, salmon burger, & salad. Yum!

Holly (my friend/co-worker who's in culinary school) took me to a cheap and incredibly delicious Mexican joint right in our neighborhood last night. I would like to eat there again now, pls.


An incredible carnitas taco and a beef picada.


Jarritos!

This weekend, I:

* Had a delicious sushi lunch with nerd_dog;
* Went on a fun date and got very very drunk;
* Slept for about 4 hours, got up, and hopped on a bus to DC;
* Had a late lunch and shopped with i_dreamed_i_was;
* Had a sleepover and mutual birthday celebration with lizs18;
* Had a Very Gay Brunch with Liz and her girlfriend Luna;
* Hopped back on a bus to NYC;
* Finished this book; and
* Ambled home, worked out, and had a lovely phone chat with zevitoro!

The weekend in pictures:





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( Outfit details under the cut )

What a lovely weekend! I have to say that it was really nice to get out of town. And I need to go back to DC more often, especially since this was only my third time back in the 2 years, 8 months, and 16 days since I moved.

Did I also mention that I got my hair cut about a month ago? Here is how long it was before, and you can see what it looks like post-cut above. Bryn did a freaking AWESOME job, and I have to say that on a 94º day like today when I'm at work, where there is no air conditioning, having less hair is a godsend.

Completely unrelated to the above, I'm working on a post about my year sans pants. Yes y'all, it's my Pantslessversary!