This is not a style blog

Yet. As you may or may not know, I am in deep love with Tsubo shoes. They are amazing--not super expensive, but expensive enough I shouldn't really buy every pair I like in each color (which I sometimes do). My newest infatuation is this hot sandal, which retails at $110. Not bad. I bought them in this color combination, which pretty much rules (don't copy me).

But run, don't walk to Amazon, because they have them for $44 right now. You're welcome.

Winning

I've never been a great thrifter or deal-finder. I guess I lack the patience and commitment to going to the discount and second-hand shops regularly enough to find the hidden gems. Also, I live in Laramie and have fewer shopping options (shoptions?). Also-also, most of the good vintage stuff is a lot smaller than I am, and wearing a size 10 shoe also limits the selection a ton. Still, I aspire to be that great shopper, even though I never will.

So now I'm going to brag about a find, of course. Back over spring break when I was in Seattle, SJ and I set out for a day of discount shopping. We hit the Rack, TJ Maxx, Ross, and Marshalls. As usual, I didn't have too much luck finding what I was looking for (dresses) and thought the day would be a bust. At Marshalls, I happened to try on a pair of kind of weird sandals I'd seen at a department store for $125. I wasn't even sure if I liked them or not, but something about them made happy and I decided to buy them for the $30 asking price.

Of course, they sat around for a few months and I thought several times about wearing them with bright tights while the weather was cold, but just never did. Every time I spied them in my closet, I sighed and thought I'd wasted money. But now that it's warmed up and I'm all pedicured and wanting to wear sandals, I keep wearing them, and now I love them. Every time I wear them I get compliments, so at least some people in this town have the same bad taste as I do. I just looked online to see how much they're selling for, and the cheapest I can find them in this color in a store is $75. Win-win-win.

Westward ho!

In late July/early August, Melanie and I took a road trip that largely followed the Oregon Trail. In fact, Mel was on the road all the way from the east coast, so she started the OT in Missouri and saw the whole thing. She picked me up in Laramie, and we had a great adventure.

Wyoming landscapes are gorgeous, but I've posted so many pictures of it I'll try to restrain myself this time. Please enjoy the Sinclair refinery interrupting the scenery.


I love roadside oddities. Mel is nearly indistinguishable from these stoic westerners in either Kemmerer or Diamondville, WY. I can't remember exactly.


It is seriously so pretty out here.


Straddling Wydaho.


On the trail!


We stopped at the Oregon Trail interpretive center for just a minute, and met a trail celebrity (although we didn't know that until later).


On the way to a wedding near Sun Valley, we took a big detour to go to Craters of the Moon National Park. It was very odd, but cool to see all that black lava rock.


Of course we had to make another stop out of the way to visit Ketchum, the last home of Hemingway. Finding his grave was super easy.


It cracked me up to watch Mel post to Facebook from the gravesite.


The Sun Valley Lodge has a really pretty monument to Papa.


We drove back down to Twin Falls for the night. Can you believe we're finally at Day 2? In the morning, we visited Shoshone Falls before hitting the road again.


From Twin Falls, we drove to McCall for Elizabeth and Jasper's wedding. I took a little break from photos for a day and just enjoyed hanging out with friends. The wedding was gorgeous and small, and the ceremony took place at a cute little inn on a patio that overlooked the lake. It was so fun to be at the wedding of two awesome people who've been together for 17 years!


This one is probably in Idaho, but could be in Oregon.


Of course we stopped in Baker City, OR at the end of the trail. The interpretive center there is really neat, and the wagon ruts are quite impressive.


The rest of the day was spent hauling ass to Portland (Lewis & Clark trail, now!). We followed the Columbia (gorgeous) and stopped for the night at the White Eagle. Bunk rooms are cute and cheap, if you need a fun place to stay.


We had breakfast at Tiny's, a cute coffee shop in the neighborhood, and made plans to meet up with our friend Shel for lunch.



For a true Portland experience, we ate at some food carts. It was Monday, so lots of neighborhood pods were closed and we had to go downtown. That was okay with me! It was hard to choose what to eat, but Mel ended up with Thai, and I had a beet and apple juice smoothie.


Then it was time to haul ass toward Seattle. After a brief stop in Seaside at the end of the Lewis & Clark trail (we're all about the detours), we took the bridge in Astoria over to Ilwaco, Wa.


We made a stop again to see the North Head and Cape Disappointment lighthouses and to see the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center. We had to hike up a short trail, but the views were so amazing. This is North Head.


The Pacific Ocean.


Cape Disappointment.


We wanted to get to I-5 before dark, so we only stopped in Long Beach for a quick dinner and drove up the Coast Highway for a while but then had to cut over after Willapa Bay to start making good time.


It was an amazing trip, and we got to see a lot of the west we love so much in just a few days.

travelin'

You know what? I have gone several places in the past few months. I'm not going in order here. In August, I went to Sweden! This time it was Gothenburg, on the west coast, so now I've been to both sides of the country. The visit was for a library conference, but it was a lot of fun, too. I saw so many cool things.

An ABBA cover band opened the conference. You have not lived until you've seen 5000 librarians get up and dance with glee.


On our first night, we met up with some fun Danish and Finish librarians and stayed out all night barhopping. I think this photo was taken at about 3am in the "shittiest bar in Gothenburg!"


I ate a lot of good food and drank a lot of free wine. This table represents maybe 1/3 of the wine consumed by two people at one reception. Oops.


We visited several libraries. I won't bore you with the dozens of photos I took, but at one, I found a printer named for me.



We saw Jose Gonzales with the Gothenburg String Theory for free in the street because the city cultural festival was happening.


Cass and I rode hotel bicycles around town one day (yes, I was in a dress).


With two friends, I ate at a Michelin rated restaurant. My lamb was AMAZING.


Cass and I went to a two-day music festival and it kicked ass. Let's just say I've never been to a better festival in all my years. The lineup was fantastic and there were club shows for three nights. Crazy.



LCD Soundsystem was great, and we were way up front.


On our last day, we went to the archipelago for a rainy ferry ride. It was gorgeous.

department of complaints department

Have you seen that commercial for Disneyland that has parents surprising their kids, who are "so excited!" about going to the big D? It kind of makes me laugh because my parents also pulled a Disney surprise on my brother and me back in the day, and let's just say it did not go well. Picture two children, aged 9 and 12, bursting into tears at the airport and asking why they can't just go home. Poor Mom and Dad. We were so ungrateful.

Speaking of commercials, though, I am in HATE with the new one for the (disgusting) McRib. In addition to the gross-out factor of McRib sauce dripping off people's lips, the music is an insanely schmaltzy love song that I can't get out of my head thanks to Hulu. It seems to only want to show me the McDonalds and Disney ads.

And speaking of things that make me crazy, what up TSA? I have three plane tickets for the next two months and will soon be booking a fourth for March, and I'm mentally preparing to refuse to go through the peep-show machine if directed and just submit to getting groped instead. My bra almost always sets off the metal detector in Denver (but not other airports), so I've gotten used to the pat down and wanding. But last month when I flew to Baltimore, I got the new and decidedly unimproved touching. The woman who aggressively felt me up was so into invading my private areas that she totally forgot to wand me.

The just-for-show non-security bullshit is making flying not feel worth it. I'm considering only using air travel for conferences and driving home when I want to visit family, even though it is a 2 12-hour days, multiple mountain pass crossing project that's kind of treacherous for the first day several months out of the year. Still, it might be worth it to just take my money out of a terrible system.

sing me to sleep

My brain often refuses to power down at night, leaving me physically exhausted but mentally preoccupied. Usually, I'm just scrolling through everything I need to get done and coming up with new ideas to torture myself with overwork. People, I need new project and/or research ideas like a hole in the head.

Sometimes, though, I can't stop thinking about my day and all the bits I wish I could rewind and rerecord: missed opportunities to tweak a piece of writing before sending it off, something I should have said in a conversation, a moment I should have stopped to enjoy for bit before rushing off, a lecture I didn't attend, an invitation I didn't accept, a photograph I didn't take. I'm secretly a perfectionist, I guess--just too lazy to realize perfection.

But every once in a while, the odds and ends floating through my fatigued mind are just random memories. Tonight's sample:

1. During my first year of community college, I took trigonometry from a teacher who pronounced the letter W as dub-ah-yuh. And W was often a variable in our problems.

2. A fairly irrational paranoia that I'll lose all my teeth.

3. Where is my passport? Oh, right. Don't forget to pack the passport!

4. Can I justify the cost of a ticket to Way Out West? Can I really go to Göteborg during the festival and NOT get a ticket?

5. There's a book on the hold shelf for me at work.

6. Whatever happened to my white jeans?

Insomnia is not new to me. When I was about fourteen, I used to listen to my cassette tape of Louder Than Bombs every night to put myself to sleep. Man, I was obsessed with the Smiths. My first bedtime album was their debut, but I always had to listen to it about three times through before I'd drift off. LTB is way longer, with the bonus of ending in the track "Asleep." Think it would work for me again, a couple of decades later?

fugged

Today's Go Fug Yourself installments featured Angelina Jolie. Now, I'm not either a big fan or a strong hater when it comes to Angie here, but on first glance I thought this photo was pretty cute. Then I realized I like her hair here. Then I realize she has the exact same bangs I just got (similarities end there). Finally, I realized the Fug Girls dissed the bangs.

By extension, I think I got fugged, too.