Pffft...

Okay boys, I'm warning you -- now is the time to bail. We're going to discuss the many and varied delights of bra fittings .

Flee now, before it's too late. The truth, it BURNS!!!

Ahem.

Okay. If anyone is still with me, yes, it's all about the boobage today. Specifically mine. Once upon a time I was a very clear 34D, but as anyone who's had even a glancing acquaintance with gravity can tell you, with age comes comes a bit of... well, there's no easy way to say it. Sag.

And when you throw two pregnancies (which put me up to a DD within about three minutes of conception), a combined total of 2.5+ years of breastfeeding (H-cup, anyone?), as well as a rather unfortunate weight gain and subsequent loss of same on top of all that, it can make the term "funbags" a bit more about the "bags" than the "fun".

The girls, they are not perky. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Only through the grace of underwire and superior engineering do I not resemble an Irish washerwoman.

Anyway, this past Saturday it was time to invest in some new support devices for my poor beleaguered darlings, so I dragged myself to the nearest department store, which blessedly was having a 40% off sale in the "intimates" department. I was approached by the ubiquitous little old lady who worked in the area, and when she saw me grabbing bras with "D" on the label, she gently said, "Dear, I don't think you're getting the right size..."

Now God love all l.o.l's, but I've heard this before. Last year, in fact, which was the last time I put myself through this hell.

"I'm really small through the ribcage, so I don't look like a D cup, but really the C's are too small."

"Well honey, you know we all get older. Here, let me measure you."

34D. Shock and awe.

Still, she put some C's onto the rack of bras I was dragging back to the fitting room because, "You just don't look that big, dear."

Twenty bras. Out of those, two fit. Sizes? 34D. Hah.

Now granted, they're coiled up like cinnamon rolls inside the cups (I'm more realistically described as a 34-long), and I'm sure redundant skin now counts for a large portion of the bulk, but still, it's pretty much predictable that the l.o.l. employee in the lingerie department is going to try to tell me there's no way in hell I'm a D, and it's only when she sees me coming out the bottom, over the top, and through the sides of her precious C-cups that she ever concedes that I might, perhaps, possibly have a clue what my damned bra size is.

There's also this little catch: a 34D is nothing like a 40D. The cup is smaller, because cup size is proportional to bandwidth. Furthermore when you're really small through the shoulders and ribs like I am, it camouflages things -- even moreso when you're rocking the hips of the afore-mentioned Gaelic ancestress.

Now all that said, it's always a good idea to have a proper bra fitting every year or so which is why I don't cringe outwardly when I see them hauling out the measuring tape. Back in college I was wearing C-cup bras, and convinced they were the right size even though for some reason the bottom of my bras never would consistently touch my ribcage. Then one day I was bra shopping and the omni-present l.o.l. measured me and said, "My dear, you're a 34-D. Put those C's back -- they'll never look proper."

Whaddaya know... bras CAN touch my ribcage! They just have to be the right size. Which now, still, is not a C.

Second Life - Hogwarts Music Video

Okay, I usually don't post You Tube videos (because I'm a slug and I'm too easily amused -- this blog would be *only* videos if I gave in all the time), but this one just kicks all kinds of serious ass.

I happened upon it at a Second Life friend's blog (original post here). He says it better, but basically the video was shot at the World of Hogwarts role-playing sim in Second Life. Yes, you too can go into SL and enroll in Hogwarts! I haven't myself, even though I'm a total Harry Potter nut, as my role in SL tends to be more on the management/ admin end, but I know many people from the WoH sim and they're just an amazingly awesome, creative group of people. Now of course, when you enroll in Hogwarts you're going to need some sort of backstory, right? So this particular avatar's backstory is that she's a teenaged rockstar. And what do teenaged rockstars do when they're going to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? They shoot a video, of course! Yes, the song's really by Miley Cyrus, but... well, just have a look:



It's totally a blast :)

Brrrrrr!!!!

Oh. My. GOD. It is freaking COLD here.

Remember, y'all, I'm down in Florida. You know, land of sunshine, beaches, palmetto bugs. Well, the sunshine's here and the beaches remain. I'm also fairly sure the palmetto bugs are still around as well but you couldn't prove it by me because even those suckers are smart enough to hide from this weather.

It hasn't gotten as cold as they've forecast -- they were predicting mid-twenties to upper teens last night and it just hit freezing -- but cold is cold is cold.

What's worse is that since we're not used to these temperatures on an annual basis, let alone an EXTENDED basis (we had a similar snap a couple of weeks ago), many of us down here lack proper cold weather gear. Now as an adult, I remedy that by layering myself until I'm easily mistaken for the Michelin Man, but trying to convince my kids (specifically the elder) that yes, Mommy is SERIOUS when she says she wants you to wear three shirts and two coats?

Hmm... yeah, you can probably figure out about how well that's going. On the plus side, I'm older than he is and much more stubborn, so guess who wins? Hint: it ain't the nearly-ten-year-old.

Adding another bummer to the cold is the dryness of the air. Now I actually like cooler weather as opposed to the searing heat of August, but it turns out I'm definitely a hothouse flower. My hair hates humidity -- in its natural, summery state it looks like I've had inappropriate relations with a light socket (and what was I THINKING when I cut it off a couple of weeks ago? oh yeah, summer it's gonna be insane now that I've broken our mutual non-aggression pact by applying scissors and daring to try to have, say, an actual hair style), but it turns out humidity is really popular with my skin. I always tend to dryer skin anyway, and am prone to eczema unless I lube myself up daily with heavy-duty moisturizers. But with the humidity gone I'm decidedly scaly, and my hands have been particularly hard hit. I ended up breaking out the coconut oil tonight and have already rubbed several layers into them and on up to and including my elbows.

It's supposed to warm up for the weekend. I sure hope so, otherwise at the rate I'm going I'll run out of coconut oil and someone will find me crumbled into a dry, flaky pile on the kitchen floor. That's gonna be a mess to clean up.