Tag: clothes

The Clothing Assassin

On September 13, 2011

Joel is a wonderful person and I wouldn’t trade him for anything. One thing about him that baffles me is how hard he is on clothes. I have clothes that I’ve owned since 1997… not that I should be especially proud of that. And also not that I actually wear those clothes (ahem) often. But I still own them and they’re still in decent shape.

As far as the clothes that I haven’t kept for their sentimental value, they generally last me a long time. They either go out of style or I grow tired of them. Some of them that I wear really often get that pilled up look after awhile. (Which makes otherwise perfectly good clothes look rather ratty by the way. If anyone has a solution to this me and my wardrobe would be eternally grateful.) I have one pair of jeans that I got from a friend who bought them at a thrift store. After wearing those jeans for seriously years they finally just got a hole in the knee. That is the only pair of jeans that has ever gotten a hole in them without already coming home from the store that way.

Joel is a completely different story. I swear the man goes through clothes like you wouldn’t believe. It’s been about a year and half since the last time we bought him jeans and he just informed me that of a dozen different pairs he has one pair left that doesn’t have holes in the knees.

What. the. heck. people?!

He isn’t a five year old rough and tumble boy who crawls around. In fact, I can’t think of the last time I saw him crawl. He doesn’t play sports. He has a desk job for heavens sake. How does sitting at a desk 40 hours a week wear holes in your knees?!

It’s the same with shoes. Today he was complaining that his feet hurt after walking around all day. After taking a look at what he was walking around in it wasn’t hard to see why.

These shoes are about a year old. One year old!

Holding them up to the light. You can see through them completely!

How does this happen? Just, how?!

I realize that I own easily twice as many clothes and shoes as he does so it makes sense that his clothes would wear out a bit faster. But this seems really excessive. Do other men destroy their clothes in record time like this? Or am I seriously married to the clothing assassin? Is there a way to prevent the massacre? I’m pretty sure I see pants and shoes alike shudder in terror as Joel walks by. Send help people. Future clothes depend on it.

No lie

By Abigail

On November 26, 2010

In pictures, thoughts

The other day I was getting ready to leave the house. I was searching for a pair of my pants and couldn’t seem to find them anywhere. You’d think it would be strange for me to have a hard time finding a pair of pants but unfortunately it’s a fairly common occurrence around my house.

See, right now my clothing situation is a bit of a disaster. I have plenty of clothes (Joel says too many, I say he’s crazy, you can never have too many clothes) but when we moved we went from a big beautiful walk-in closet to a normal sized regular closet. Waaaah! Sad right?

So, since we moved in July I’ve never quite gotten a handle on getting all my clothes organized and put away because I simply don’t have enough room for them all anymore. This means I often have piles of clothes all over my bedroom and sometimes the living room depending on if I’ve recently done laundry or not.

We were running slightly behind schedule (per usual) so I was getting a bit frantic searching for my missing pants. I had Joel looking as well and neither of us could find the stupid pair of pants anywhere. Not long ago I packed away all my summer clothes so in a moment of desperation I started digging through that box. I pulled out a rather large pile of stuff when suddenly Joel yelled that he found them. They were hanging in the closet. Go figure.

I grabbed them and ran into the other room to finish getting ready. I asked Joel if he’d please pick up that pile that I had just pulled out really fast so my packed away clothes didn’t get mixed up with the other piles in the room. He mumbled something that I assumed was an unenthusiastic yes and I didn’t think anything else of it.

We got out of the house mostly on time, went about our day and got home late that night. We began getting ready for bed when we started smelling the heater. It was a very sharp, hot, almost chemical smell. We have the kind of heaters that are low on the wall and heat up with water. I want to say they’re radiators but I’m not really an expert on that sort of thing. Anyway, they do get very hot. So hot in fact we often have to open windows sometimes so it stops feeling like a tropical rain forest. There’s not really a happy medium, they’re either set at sweltering or off.

We’re really careful to keep things away from the edges but the smell kept getting worse so Joel got down with a flashlight to see if he could find anything. He found a rubber band that had fallen into one of them but it didn’t seem to be hot or melted or what was causing the smell. To be safe we just turned the heat off and went to bed.

The next morning we got up and began to get ready. We still had the heat off from the night before. Weirdly we began smelling that same smell again. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when suddenly Joel ran in from the bedroom shouting about how he found where the smell was coming from with a smoking pile of clothes. He had been standing in the bedroom when all of the sudden he noticed little puffs of smoke coming from that pile of clothes I’d asked him to clean up.

Needless to say what I thought was a mumbled yes was really just a mumble about how he didn’t want to clean up my clothes. And he didn’t. What we both didn’t realize is the pile went high enough that a couple things were resting on the light bulb of an Ikea lamp in our room.

Apparently, those light bulbs get extremely hot.

Especially when covered in clothes.

Hot enough that this happened.

In case you can’t tell that’s what use to be two of my suits.

It burned a hole fully through five layers of suit material.

Here is the light bulb of doom.

See, normally this lamp would have had a fancy light shade over it. But we just replaced the burnt out bulbs and hadn’t gotten around to putting the shade back on.

Thankfully nothing more was hurt than a couple of suits I don’t ever wear anymore. I’m a little sad because one was the suit I got hired by my airline in. ::sniff:: However, I realize things could be much worse. I only just moved the dried flowers that had been sitting there a few days ago. We’re the kind of people who obsessively turn lights off when we leave a room. Had we left the house with that light on like that we might have come home to no house at all.

But no one was hurt so now it’s just a ridiculous story I get to tell.

Also? I had to get rid of some of the “too many” clothes Joel says I have. He says he definitely did not set fire to my clothes on purpose just so I’d get rid of some. But what’s that saying again?

Liar, liar, pants on…..

I’ll let you be the judge.

It’s official

By Abigail

On September 11, 2010

In trips

We have our visas and as of today Joel and I both have plane tickets.

We really are going to India.

Oh my gaaaah!

I’m so excited and a little in shock and nervous at the same time. This never would have been possible without the amazing people that donated. And our guardian angel who offered to donate his airline miles for a ticket to India. I’m blown away. Really I am. The amazing generosity of people. I wish there was a way for me to show how grateful I am.

I wish I could come over and give each of you a giant hug.

But even that wouldn’t seem adequate.

But yeah. I’m going to India.

In two weeks.

Wow.

Now that it’s 100% official I feel almost overwhelmed at what I still have to do. Suddenly all these things we talked about if we get to go have to get done and fast. But everything has worked out so far so I’m not stressing too much. Yet.

I need suggestions and input though. We’re flying out a couple days before the actual mission work is supposed to start so we can do some touristy things. I want to try and make it up to see the Taj Mahal (because, seriously how often will I get a chance to go to India?) but it seems kind of complicated to get there. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get there easily I would appreciate it.

That’s the only touristy thing I really want to do though. My heart is to go and help the children. I’m planning some fun activities to do with them while we’re there like face painting or games. If anyone has any suggestions on good cross cultural games that would be awesome too. I’m expecting them to speak no English so it should be interesting. I’m sure some of you teachers/parents have some good ideas on games that don’t require verbal communication though. Right?

Oh! I also need clothing suggestions. I have a hard enough time dressing myself every day as it is. With it being a completely different culture and climate I’m completely clueless. HALP?!

So yeah, it’s always on my brain now and I’m finally allowing myself to get really excited about the trip. I was afraid to get my hopes up before since we didn’t raise all the money that we’d hoped to so it seemed iffy on whether or not we’d actually get to go. But we are. We’re going. We’re really seriously going.

It still doesn’t feel real. No matter how much I say that. I guess I’m going to have to wait until we’re actually on the plane to India before it sinks in. Or maybe it won’t happen until I actually get there. Who knows. I can be kind of slow sometimes.

Whether it’s sunk in or not, we’re going. We. Are. Going. To. India.

Finally.

Shopping FAIL

By Abigail

On March 25, 2010

In thoughts

The other day the Dominick’s near us had a promotion. For every $50 worth of groceries you bought you got $10 worth of Kohl’s cash. Seemed like a pretty good deal and luckily our fridge was pretty much empty. Plus, we were out of toilet paper and cleaning products. When everything was said and done we got what is basically a $30 gift card to Kohl’s. The only difference is, it has to be spent at certain Kohl’s stores and it expires. Seemed like a pretty good deal…

Until I got to Kohl’s, that is. My first clue was when I had trouble determining when the girl’s section ended and the junior’s section began. It was full of clothes that looked like something I wore in middle school and that my almost 15 year old sister would wear now. Cute(ish) but not really my style. Or at least not my style anymore. I thought maybe I’d just outgrown junior’s so I wandered into misses. Yeeeah… That was full of stuff my mother would wear. Again, cute but not at all me. I didn’t even bother looking at women’s.

I decided to give junior’s another chance and after a lot of searching and rifling through crap like this:

I mean, seriously? Seriously?! Who wears this? I didn’t realize I went shopping in an 80’s costume store. Also notice that lovely, brightly colored, leopard print shirt in the right corner? Put those together and one glance could send someone into a shock induced coma. I’m just saying.

Anyway, I found a few things that I thought might be cute. Once I got into the dressing room however it was one FAIL after another. A medium shirt was skin tight while an extra small in a different style was huge on me. Nothing looked right. It was seriously frustrating.

It was the complete opposite of the experience that I was expecting. It just pissed me off. So, now I’m home and, instead of eating my weight in chocolate like I want, I’m stuffing myself with berries. I’m eating them with whipped cream so they’re not too super healthy though, don’t worry.

Moral of the story, don’t buy $150 worth of groceries until you’re certain the store you’re getting the bonus cash to has stuff worth buying.