Happy Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Local Business Saturday/Whathaveyou

It's day 2 of the holiday kick start and I have to admit I have not done much shopping yet. I have only picked up a bunch of used CDs that I've already sampled and ripped in my external HD. Mostly early music, with a side of world music:

I'm also quite eager to dig into leftovers, come lunch time. Here's how the turkey prep started and how it ended:

Pretty majestic, I think. And as healthy as it gets - it's only the breast, and we cooked it with light butter instead of regular, the rest of the flavors came from aromatics. Granny Smith apples and a boatload of fresh sage. We basically made humble vegetables taste like stuffing. Quite impressive.

The original plan for today was to leisurely go out to the stores just to see what's there after the door busting crowds are gone, but the winds outside are flat out insane; I had trouble opening the car door, and keeping it open once I managed it. Now I'm indoors in front of my glorified typewriter  desktop and the wind howling is of horror movie quality. Might as well stay in until it passes some..

Things I'd have not expected to do ten years ago

1. Be at my current weight without being angry at my daily menu. I had dieted before, with very good results, but there was famine involved, and the weight came back along with the re-introduction of things that people actually like to eat. This time I took a more inclusive approach.
2. Wear brown and black at the same time! I blame the pair of brogues that have brown leather uppers and a black rubber platform sole, and the Longchamp Pliage back pack that I received for Xmas many years ago, but in general this was one of the biggest frowns some time during the 90s, and possibly the beginning of the 00s. I still discourage my husband to do black belt and brown shoes, though.
3. Cut my hair chin-short. I had short hair as a teenager, then I hated it and let let it grow, and grow, and grow and it was my trademark or sorts.
4. Opt for contact lenses after a life of wearing glasses every waking hour (and some sleeping ones, too!). I used to get teary eyed for no reason, or so I thought, until I realized that it would almost exclusively happen while in claustrophobic, smoke saturated bars. Now that there is a smoking ban in such premises, bring em on! The first time I went to a masquerade with an actual mask on, I almost cried.
5. Understand American Football. It did take a long while. And I'll never, ever understand baseball. I'd really like to learn more about rugby, though.

The post about the parsnips will have to wait after I cook the batch that is currently in the fridge, in the off chance that I'll remember to take a pic or two.

Sometimes I confuse myself

When I started this blog, it was meant to be a bit of an all-inclusive type of thing. After all, it started as the outlet of an immigrant sharing thoughts and updates with a couple of real life friends, before we all decided to move the news-sharing business over to Facebook along with everybody else we knew. Why multi-platform to the same people, anyway?

But I've always loved the blog format. I've always liked writing paragraphs with more than fifteen words, so to speak, and interlace photographs along with my text rather than sending people over to an album (don't get me wrong, online photo albums are wonderful things!), plus I tend to care more about the shape of my text when blogging vs. facebooking. That been said, I never text speak. Ever. Not even when texting. Especially since my latest Android update, I can just dictate my texts instead of typing them. It saves me time and the fact that it 90% understands my accent is just amusing to me.

So, back to the original thought that dictated this post, this was never a themed blog. Sometimes I talk about food, sometimes I take pictures, sometimes I rave (or rant) about clothes and shoes, sometimes I touch on my weight loss. All these things are of equal importance to me, and I experience them daily. I wake up, I weight in (yup, daily, it keeps me informed), I decide what to wear, I wear it, I go to work, I eat lunch, I get home, sometimes I cook dinner, and I abuse my Instagram account and cameras as frequently as it makes sense to me.

bad picture of delicious tentacles

I've always been very specific to the amount of things I share in this blog, since it is public. I've never posted pictures of myself other than to shoot shoes while I'm wearing it. Which is really funny for me because there is an abundance of pictures of me publicly posted in a number of venues, as I am a performer and well, when I perform in public, everybody has the right to snap my picture and tag it with my name as it appears on the concert program! So, perhaps the whole deal of not showing my face on this blog is a tad obsolete. After all, this has never been a venue to share deep thoughts, dark secrets or shameful moments and that's a reason for which the disconnect feels quite unnecessary.

Along with my face, obviously comes the body, and the body issues that pretty much everyone has. And it ties with the weight loss that I've obtained. It's a huge deal to me, no matter how lightly I touch upon it on this blog.

I have lost 95 pounds in almost 2 years. That's almost a whole person off me. That's 10 dress sizes. Were I to add all the inches I've lost off various places of my body, we might be talking three digits. That's huge.  And I'm not even done yet.

vintage crocheted gloves I found for obscenely cheap

 

And it's brought me to a point that I love my body again and that I love to dress it. I am, mostly anyway, at peace with fashion and the clothing industry and I want to make for the lost time that my shopping was only happening in selected stores and styles.

And perhaps I'll want to blog about it. Not in a fashion blogging way of doing so. I'll probably come with some sort of outfit - chronicling format or other. We'll see. I guess it all boils down to the fact that I feel good about myself. And the chase towards the absolute feel-good is essential, or it should be.

(Knowing myself, I am expecting the next blog post to be about parsnips, because I'm lately quite obsessed with them. Until then, I leave this post with two very carefully selected random pictures that have nothing to do with the context of this post. Or not.)

Today's message

And so should you! We opted for early voting as to not take any time off work, and got to the election center at the time the gates opened. Waited for only 40 minutes which was awesome. And then had awesome brunch of which there are no pictures because it kinda got eaten. But it was whole wheat pancakes, Canadian bacon, fruit and coffee, all of which are great things.

This is the first time I was eligible to vote for the presidential elections. It was quite important to me. In Greece, I grew up with the notion that voting is mandatory, because until the mid 2000s it was - you could not obtain a passport without proof that you have voted once you were of voting age. Now it's not mandatory any more, which makes me kinda sad, especially during a crisis such as this along with the political situation Greece has gotten itself into. But that's a rant for another time. Meanwhile, if it's election times and you can vote, do it. It might feel useless, but really it isn't.