Things I've Learned Recently

1. Friends Don't Let Friends Stencil
As we are people of disparate tastes in our household, we look to programming where our tastes converge, and therefore we end up watching a lot of design TV. However, even among the design shows our tastes diverge: I like the shows where things look better at the end (e.g. Clean House, Color Splash, and sometimes Design on A Dime) and Tiny prefers for the rooms to be transformed into shit-tastic monstrosities (e.g. Trading Space, Color Correction).

One thing we can all agree on is that stenciling is always a mistake. These poor designers, they only have $1,000 to try and make a room all TV fancy - and usually the people they're trying to help have crap furniture (not that I'm judging because I've got my fair share of that and long for fancy furniture) so sometimes, even on the good shows, the designers are forced to make some poor choices. Sometimes it involves inappropriate use of raffia, or the creation of "wall art" for "visual interest" but the greatest heresy is the use of the stencil.

For the love of god. If you have a friend considering stenciling - stop them. Just look at it. It's terrible. Don't do it.


2. The Fleece at Old Navy is Out of Control

Since I've found DC shopping to be sup-par, I've been forced to do a lot of online shopping. Online shopping means mistakes. Behold two mistakes:
You see, I was trying to find some cute and warm winter dresses that could be worn with tights for that cuddly winter look. The dress on the left looks ok in the picture - but when worn, the smocking on the sleeves is enormous giving one puffy-arm syndrome, and the neckline is incredibly dowdy. The look is something I'd like to call Space Matron. As in, I can see someone cast as a grandmother in a futuristic sci fi movie wearing this dress. Maybe.

The other dress, wow. Where to begin. On me, the dress barely covered my downstairs business. And you can't tell from the picture, but there are holes in the bottom of the "skirt" which makes the whole thing even more indecent. If the other dress was Space Matron, this is mutton dressed as lamb. Really poorly dressed Contempo Casuals style lamb. Yeah, that bad. Even worse, the sweater is apparently exactly my skin color so I looked like some sort of oatmeal sweater monster.

When I modeled these for the roomies, Tiny doubled over with laughter. She giggled for about 30 minutes straight. And in fact, the thought of me in these dresses has apparently kept her laughing any time she thinks about it. Yeah, they look that bad. So instead of shipping them back, I trekked to Old Navy to make the returns in person.

And thus I saw the fleece. The yards and yards of fleece. It was a veritable fleece army. And it must be stopped.


3. There are just some things I would have never thought of

You know, it would just never occur to me to combine someone's love of music and gadgetry and masturbation into one magical device.

But someone else clearly did.

That's why I don't get paid the big bucks.



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