Rain

I like rain. Which is good, because, considering how often I have been soaked to the skin in the last week or two, rain seems to like me, too.

OK, so I have a shiny new bicyle (no good images yet [ETA: images after cut at the bottom]) and spend a little more time outside than I would otherwise... but is that a reason why it should start to rain the moment I walk out of the office to have lunch?

Rain is fun, and pretty, and smells good, and is far preferable to summer heat. Especially if you have a dry place to go to at the end of the day, and towels and dry clothes, and a nice cup of tea. Getting drenched always reminds me of my teenage years. All those holidays spent outside, and the long commute to school...

Yesterday I had the first singing lesson since last summer, and of course while I was getting there, a fierce and enthusiastic rain storm turned the street drains into geysirs and the street into a river. Had I been driving home it would have been great, as it was, 'great' got tempered by me dripping on my teacher's carpet for an hour. On the way home, a cool evening sun was shining. 12°C. I like summer that way.

ETA:( Images )

Grumbling about clothes

I hate shopping for clothes. Everything costs too much, nothing fits well, and the shopgirls are all half-pint sized and make me feel like an elephant. The plus-size store in town takes "plus" into all dimensions -- I'm at least ten centimetres too short for their designs. The hippie/goth store decided years ago that they could make more money in a day at some faire or festival than in six days in town, so off they are and I'm out of a source for the type of clothes I actually like. The "respectable" clothes stores do not fit my style and tend to feminine cuts which do not fit my shape.

I can buy jeans and T-shirts and shirts and sweaters in men's sizes at the jeans stores or department stores, but without the occasional hippie shirt or tie-dyed baggy pants to contrast it, these become drab. Also, at my new job I feel a little uncomfortable with my casual cross-dressing.

Lately I've been ordering from a catalogue which is kind of OK. They have "colourful" and they have it in reasonable sizes and cuts. Only, when in a store I know instantly if I like something and what goes well with it. With mail order stuff it takes me a while to find out - make that weeks or months. Too late to send it back, anyway. So I buy far more stuff than I need or want and become wasteful. Which I hate less viscerally than shopping for clothes, but just as intensely.

Today I got a few new things, and lo and behold, they are all just a tiny bit too large. Only a little, only so much that I think, "I would like to try that one size smaller". Which, of course, I can't. I haven't lost weight. I'm near the low point of my seasonal waxing and waning, but that hardly makes for a whole size, much less two. (The clothes come in double sizes and I used to be closer to the higher one.)

So I thought, "well, maybe they re-adjusted their measurements" (vanity sizing and all that) and visited their webpage to check. To find out that, according to their calculators, I'd need -- four sizes larger. Just brilliant.

So I guess the by now fifteen year old items will stay the stars of my wardrobe, with no hope of ever replacing them. Maybe if I re-dye them they will last another fifteen years.

I want the hippie store back.