A Pocket of Cellulite

We celebrated my cousin Jeff's birthday on Thursday night. I took another series of my award winning photographs. This is the birthday man with his record player cake made by his lovely bride, Meredith. If you look closely, it goes to 11. We had yummy Mexican buffet and the cake was delicious and I enjoyed plenty of red wine, which will not surprise my three loyal readers. Meredith's post on the festivities can be found here.


I did not have the best week of my life and Friday seemed to be going in the same direction. I won't write out the whole gory story here but we had made an appointment to get a part replaced in our furnace and at about 8:15a we got a call telling us they couldn't come out until the week after next. After a bit of back and forth, me not at my most kind and friendly, they made arrangements for someone to stop by and re-evaluate our situation and in the end they said it was fine to use our furnace with the broken part. We had warmth once again.

There were some other trivial frustrations and I didn't help matters by taking on some extensive cooking projects. At one point, after a clumsy scooping maneuver with a giant spoon that sprayed casserole all over my range, I thought to myself: "Crap, when is something good going to happen to me?"

About 5 minutes later, something did.

During the summer I entered a fiction writing contest sponsored by Wordstock Portland's big book fair. I got a notice that I made the top 10. My story will appear in a publication for the fair and they will announce 3 winners at the festival. Yay! I haven't submitted anything recently, but I've been doing this writing thing for a long time and have never had even the tiniest smidge of recognition outside of teachers or writing group so you can imagine me bouncing off the walls for the rest of the evening.


Today we went to a wonderful brunch to celebrate my yoga friend Tonya's 40th bday and afterward we went to the mall to see if we could find work clothes.

This is at least my fourth outing for work clothes and I can't find anything that I like or that fits. Help!

Pam's latest fashion tip: don't bother with petites. There is never anything good in petites. I kept wandering around thinking: where are the cute clothes? And I really want wool because I'm half lizard and us reptiles get cold in the winter.

I found three pairs of pants to try on, different brands, all the same size on the label. One I couldn't get over my knees. One I could zip, but it was so tight you could see the pocket of cellulite on my right thigh that looks sort of like Jesus eating a candied apple. The last pair, a higher price brand name, was totally baggy. I also tried on a sweater that was scratchy as if they were trying to make it uncomfortable. So aggravating.

Also, right outside the fitting room there was a TV playing football. "Why would they do this?" I could hear football as I was trying to relax and enjoy girl time and clothes trying on. As I left I saw a man sitting there watching the game. I stopped and looked at him and said: "OH! That's why they have football playing here." And he lifted his arms as if signaling a field goal. Classic.

One more thing: they had a couple racks of something called tummy tuck jeans that made me want to throw myself in front of train. Can you imagine strutting out in your jeans and someone saying, "Hey those are cute, what are those?" and you have to say: "My tummy tuck jeans."