In My Closet--February 14, 2013

Dress: Lilly Pulitzer (older)
Tights: Spanx
Shoes: MIA (from DSW)(older)

First of all, please excuse the pile of hanging clothes stacked behind me. That is every shirt I own that's not a t-shirt. It was all part of the Great Closet Reorganization of 2013. Fear not...I fit everything back in there. Now, that's not to say it's not packed so tight that you pull out the two items on either side of what you're aiming to pull. But for now, it's gonna have to do. That said, I had this "Trying to Go to Sleep" epiphany last night about something that MIGHT work to alleviate part of the problem. It would involve a trip to Goodwill/Red, White and Blue, some Pinterest-y craftiness and a complete Soviet-era Re-Education as to what's allowed to be folded and what simply MUST be on hangers. I'm actually kind of excited about it to tell you the truth.

Anyway, yesterday, I mentioned that I had lost something. Other than my mind and my patience. Back in the late spring, there were still a few things in my closet that were winter-y. I guess they would be termed "transitional pieces". All the rest of my winter stuff--and I mean the REAL winter stuff like cords and wools--had long since been packed into Rubbermaid tubs with cedar blocks and stored away. But these things, I had left on the off-chance that the sometimes persnickety New Jersey weather took a turn. Only last spring, it never really did and so when it became clear that summer was really gonna happen, I took the clothes and put them, to the best of my memory, in a Kate Spade shopping bag, which I stuck in the corner of my room. The idea was that at some point, I would go into the attic for something else and at that point I could take the bag up and put it in the Rubbermaids with the rest of my stuff. Only...I don't remember doing that. And now I can't find the bag. I can't even remember what all is IN the bag, although I know off the top of my head three pieces of clothing that I cannot find anywhere. I know they aren't things I would have loaned to friends. I know they aren't things I would have sent to a better home. I wouldn't have even sent them away on accident, at least not in the Kate Spade bag, because that thing was HUGE and pretty sturdy, so I would have swapped it into a different bag. This is driving me BONKERS. I have looked everywhere in the house I can even begin to imagine I would have put it. Admittedly, the cold has made me reluctant to do more than a cursory search of the attic or the under-the-deck storage room, and if it's gotten lost or misplaced or picked up and thrown out because someone thought it was in the discard pile? Well, that's my fault and I can live with it. But LORD it is making me NUTS. Okay...it's making me nuttier.

So, when I post the pictures of myself, they are a day behind. What I mean is that I take a picture every day, but I don't USE that picture until the next day. What I'm really hoping is that I can post on Monday through Friday, but I'm ALSO hoping that I can grab a picture or two on the weekends (like this weekend? I'm going to NYC for brunch with one of my best friends so I'm going to need to look awesome.). That way, if I have a day where I'm cleaning closets and never leaving the house, I don't have to get dressed beyond yoga pants. Well...yoga pants and a shirt.

Here's what I like about what I'm wearing in the picture. Obviously, I like the Spanx tights. If you've never had a pair, they are a revelation. They're not as tight as actual Spanx, but the are definitely tighter than these amazing pantyhose my friend, Carrie, discovered in college that were super sheer in the leg but tighter than any control top known to man in the top and were known forever in the sorority house lore as "Suck 'Em In Pantyhose". They take away any number of bumps and lumps. The dress is an oddity in that of all the Lilly Pulitzer I own, it's one of exactly two Lilly pieces I own that's not ferociously summer season. The other is a cord skirt that's so old that it's got the 1990s tag with the Lilly logo in black. We have Lilly Pulitzer Signature store right in Palmer Square in Princeton. It's called Palm Place and it's absolutely lovely, as are the couple who own it. They have an incredible sale in August and pretty good ones at other times of the year. I got this dress--you can't see in the picture, but the pink part is pink high heels--right before Christmas before last when I was checking the sale rack to see if there was a dress for my niece's gift and ended up wearing it to my family Christmas party. It was actually in the pile of stuff to go in the Lost Kate Spade Shopping Bag when I decided to pull it out to wear over the summer and I ended up wearing it a couple of times, with a pair of sandals on days when the temperature dipped down into the 70s. But the real find is those shoes. I got them at DSW over a year ago to wear with one specific outfit and I have ended up wearing them over and over and over with EVERYTHING. It took me a while to get the hang of the wedge-heeled booties but once I figured out that it was okay to wear them with something other than jeans, they've become my shoe of choice. I got another pair of MIA wedge booties this fall in brown and I've worn the hell outta them, too.

In other news...I tried a different approach to the whole picture thing today for the picture you will see tomorrow. Part of that was out of necessity--everything I did today took longer than it should have in a sane world so by the time I stopped long enough to do it, it was so dark that I got NOTHING from my window (the easiest way to explain this is that my window looks, not outside, but into a small sunroom that's an addition to the house.) and partly because I wanted to see if this might be a better approach. And yes, this was one of the more exciting parts of my Valentine's Day. But for those of you who had awesome Valentine-y stuff going on--I hope it was great. And if you're STILL having awesome stuff going on--I hope it's STILL great. Happy Valentine's (or Single Person Awareness) Day!

In My Closet--February 13, 2013

Tunic: Anthropologie (old)
T-shirt: Gap
Leggings: Lulu Lemon
Boots: Frye

Okay, I'm going to have to complain about a First World Problem. I have too many clothes. There. I said it. And really the first step is admitting you have a problem, right? I love nothing more than trawling a consignment shop or thrift store. And here's where I admit to being an even worse person. I'm not looking for something cool that I can repurpose and make super hip. I just want...clothes. Sometimes I'm absolutely FLOORED by what I find: 2 pairs of Nanette Lepore pants, a Lilly halter-neck top with the tags still on it, a vintage Black Watch plaid Laura Ashley dress with a velvet collar. And those are from THRIFT STORES, not consignment shops. Anyway...maybe it's just me, but if I find a pair of Nanette Lepore pants for $3.99, well, they're coming to live in my closet whether I need pants or not. And I don't. Need pants, that is. What I need is closet.

I actually have two closets in my room. One is composed completely of shelves. Which sounds like it would be awesome. And on the surface it is. You can get some SERIOUS shit done with a (albeit single) closet with shelves--it's like Shoe Heaven in there. The problem is that the shelves mean the closet space isn't utilized correctly. They're VERY deep, so whatever you put on them has to be right on the front edge. This particular problem is compounded by the fact that there's no light in the closet. At all. I've put some of those little tap lights in, but the cavernous depths are barely thwarted by their meager light. The other closet is a double closet. It's got one of those design-it-yourself built ins. It's divided into approximate thirds--one-third for long hanging clothes, one-third is shelves and three drawers and one-third is a top and bottom hanging bar. This doesn't sound like a bad gig, right? The problem is, I don't have a chest of drawers in my room (and there's no place to put one if I did). This means that all of my folded clothes have to fit into three drawers, three shelves and the two smaller drawers in my bedside table. Not only that, there are two huge pipes in the section of the closet with the stacked hanging bars, which SERIOUSLY cuts into the available hanging space. I've moved stuff around every single way I can think of and I'm still not making it work. I am a closet failure. (Here's the part where I admit I'm closet spoiled. By the time I was REALLY into clothes in upper elementary school, I had a huge bedroom with a gigantic chest of drawers and a double closet, plus free reign of the coat closet in our playroom. My first apartment had a big ol' walk-in and my first place of my own? I lived alone. ALL the closets in the house were mine.) I'm GOING to figure this out. I refuse to be defeated by my own clothing.

I guess I need to stop obsessing and discuss the clothes, I've taken out of the tragic closet and put on, huh? Since this has gotten all confessional, I should tell you that I'm not wearing the bracelets that I usually wear with this tunic top because I couldn't find them. Why? Because in the midst of the great closet re-org which was happening sometime between soap opera and dinner time, I picked up my pink summer Kate Spade bucket bag and realized that I had put it away with stuff in it. Stuff included my square lime earrings, three pens, my Burt's Bees travel-sized hand cream, about five dollars in quarters, a tube of Clinique Black Honey lipstick and the bracelets that go with the tunic. Now considering that I would never have carried a cotton candy pink purse with that top? I have no clue how they got there. I'm just glad I found them (speaking of...lost items are my next topic. Tune in tomorrow.) What I REALLY wanted to share with the world is about investment pieces. Now, when the fashion magazines talk about "investment pieces" the mean things like Birkin bags and fur coats and Chanel ballet flats. And I would consider those things to be investments for sure. But not being independently wealthy, I have a different standard for investment pieces. The Frye Melissa Button Boots and the Lulu Lemon leggings. Y'all both of those items are SO worth it. To the point that I now have a second pair of the same leggings in a capri length AND a pair that are reversible. And it wasn't that I got them because I was afraid the first ones would wear out--they are seriously good quality pieces. I got them because I want to wear them every day and I didn't want to have to keep doing laundry. And the bonus is that if you get yours in a Lulu Lemon store? They will hem those bad boys for you free of charge. The boots...oh, how I love them. Especially since Frye makes them with extended calves (which is my all-time biggest rant subject). They're pricey, but so, so worth it. Treat yourself. You shall not be sorry.

Weird. Life is weird. And also chaotic.

I said it earlier this month. Life feels...weird. I don't know if it's the changing of seasons (which, by the way, can't seem to commit to changing) or what, but I've felt for a while that except for a few incidents where I am specifically engaged in a specific activity doing specific things and whatnot, that it's like life is happening, but I'm not happening with it. I hope that makes sense. I don't even know if it makes sense to me. So maybe it REALLY doesn't make sense to anyone else. Of course, it may just be that I've got so many THINGS happening at this very second, that I can't focus on any one of them long enough to really feel engaged. May and December are always hard. As a nanny (even as a nanny to very grown-up persons) they are spectacularly busy. Moving in and out of dorms and finishing the school year and doctors' and dentists' appointments and packing for trips. It's...a lot. And due to several things, this year is particularly "fun"-filled. I'vve also immersed myself in a kind a peresonal reorganization. Actually, this started way long in the past. The closet reorganization and clean-out started last November. The weekend of the Iron Bowl, to be precise. And I know this specifically because I was decoupaging a bookcase to go in my closet and became so engrossed in Alabama taking Auburn to the woodshed that I put a paintbrush full of ModPodge into my beer. Suffice it to say I have gotten rid of bags and bags of clothes. I thought about taking them to the consignment shop in town, but then I remembered how awesome it is to find something super-cool in a thrift store and I took them to Goodwill. It felt especially refreshing since our closest Goodwill was flooded completely during last September's hurricane and they lost literally ALL of their merchandise. AND I have a theory that doing that makes good thrifting karma for me down the road. And I'm pretty sure I'm right. I took a trunk-load and then the next week, found two pairs of Lilly pants, plus a Dooney and Bourke purse for K at Red, White and Blue.

Another ongoing, but almost finished project, has been going through the absolutely enormous stack of old magazines that had seemingly mated and multiplied in the corner of my closet. Long before Pinterest allowed you to virtually pin cool outfits and recipes and party ideas, I had kept big binders of stuff I had found and torn out of magazines. Of course, in one of those, life is happening spans of time, I had allowed a pretty good stack to start growing. And then, as the stack grew, it became just intimidating. So rather than deal with it, I just let it sit. And grow some more. I'm not finished. I've gotten through pretty much all of the fashion magazines--they're easy. I see it, I like it and I tear it.--but the cooking magazines are so much harder. That involves things like reading ingredients and weighing the relative difficulty of making whatever it is. It's also harder now that television season is winding down. Going through old magazines is an absolutely PERFECT activity when you don't want to JUST watch.

So closet-95% organized. I even have, at this very moment, exactly TWO things sitting next to the ironing board waiting to be ironed. This is a MAJOR accomplishment for me, since it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility for me to have two complete baskets waiting to be ironed. Magazine clean out? About 70% done. I still have to put the fairly sizable stack of awesome things I've found into the pockets in the binders. I've completely cleaned out one storage room and am about halfway done with the other. I'm attacking that tomorrow.

I've stage-managed on high school show. Been to see the other. Saw a friend in a show last weekend. Seeing friends in another on Friday. Have to get through my show in June. And maybe Mimi's if I can get home for it.

I'm setting small goals. I've finally figured that it's the only way to make anything happen. And if, on some days, said goal consists solely of making the bed and hanging up the towel rather than throwing it on top of the hamper? Well, I'm okay with that.

Because Ferris was right. Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.