Another Sunday- Plus My Opinions On LLBean Clothing

All these photos are from a very late night visit to someone's Pinterest file on black and white room designs.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  Of Pictures.

Today I made a list of things "to do".   I watered the plants on the back stoop and the large planters in front of the house.  The pale yellow petunias are re-growing after being "pruned" by passing deer. I now have the planters covered up with almost invisible deer netting.  It would seem that the nocturnal  pruning of the petunias by the deer was a "good thing" and now they are thicker, more flower buds and happier.  Who knew?

I did my watering before 10am.  By 11 am, it's too hot and humid for me out there.  Breathing is harder.  My next opportunity for outdoor things will be around 4 pm.  I have things to plant in the garden.  To say it's been a difficult summer so far.......well, that's an understatement.

I am reading a real "page turner" right now.  The Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen.  He has also written the Department Q novels which begin with the Keeper Of Lost Causes.  Alphabet House is a dark thriller.  The Dept Q books have some hilarity to them and of course a murder to solve with Carl, Assad and Rose in the basement of the police building next to the boiler room.  Alphabet House is set near the end of WW2 in a Nazi mental hospital, where two British pilots are pretending to be crazy while trying to find a way to escape.

I also found a few more jars of expired foods in the pantry closet.  One item from 2009.  A can of chocolate fudge cake frosting.  I am sure it's still "good enough" to eat.  But we won't.  Some things have too many chemical components to ever go bad.

I have been embroidering on a woven piece for a few weeks now.  Having no plans for it but needing something to do during the long days of not being able to go outside.  A few nights ago, I started cutting it up, then adding borders to the cut portion.  I intend to find out how to take pictures with my phone and send them to myself and then move the pictures from email to my picture file.  Then I can show you things.  Like my floors.  Like my bathroom.  Like my embroidery.

I did sew the new "old" buttons to my shirt.  I also removed the labels and tags from the neckline. I then removed the extra button from one Flax shirt and used it on another Flax shirt that had lost two of it's buttons (they cracked in half).  Does Flax even exist anymore?  Flax used "natural" buttons on it's clothing.  Mostly Flax clothes are linen and after a few years of machine washing are soft and really lovely to wear.  I now dry them in the dryer or let them dry on hangers.  I refuse to iron linen anymore. I wear it wrinkled.  Because who cares anymore????

The new Perfect Pants Cropped pant from Bean is perfect.  Some of the pants I would try on at the store had legs in different lengths etc.  And even in one size--all different kinds of fit.  Too big, too small, too long, too short, too wide, too narrow etc.  At the time (many many years ago 2006?) I had wanted to buy two pair of the cropped style pant.  Tried on every pair in the store in my size.  Only ONE fit me properly.  So I had only the one. As Fate would have it.....this new (from Goodwill) cropped pant fits exactly like the 2006 one.  It's like a miracle.

When I worked at Bean ( remember that?) I purchased all the Perfect Black Pants in the employee store in my size for 20 cents each.  Figuring I would keep the ones that fit me and give the others away.  Guess how many pair fit me??  Zero.  I had better luck with the corduroy pants.  About 25% of them fit me correctly.  The many linen camp shirts I bought cost me $2 and 50% of them were given away or sent off to Goodwill because they didn't fit.  Sleeves too tight, body of the shirt too skimpy, sleeve cut too short etc. and then there were the darts.

Camp shirts aren't supposed to have darts. Anyway, the darts were rarely in places a woman of my age would need the darts to be.  For awhile there, I tried to unsew the darts and resew the side seams.  But the new (cheap) linen shredded easily and once I knew how transparent the new linen was....I gave up buying any newly made shirts.  Now I only buy the ones without darts.  Antique ones. At Goodwill.  Really hard to find in XL or 1X.  But once every two or three years, I find one.

The other really amazing thing about that first pair of Cropped Perfect Pant is that I have worn those  XL (reg) cropped pants when I weighed my maximum, my minimum and all the weights inbetween from the early 2000's to 2017.  And they always fit exactly the same.  Perfectly.  Of course they are no longer black.  And they have holes and bleach spots on them.  But I love them.