Just some thoughts as I browse through the “shop” section of the Girl Scouts of the USA site.

• There is a big flower on the Daisy tunic now! And what’s this? A Daisy VEST? Nooooo! They wear tunics! For some reason they even sell a set of iron-on petals…that can’t be because they still sell plain tunics, can it? Nah, it’s for the hand-me-down tunics, I guess. Oh, and for when a Daisy’s petals fall off.
• Brownies are wearing brown again, that’s good. But it’s paired with powder blue. When I was a Brownie, we wore brown and ORANGE and we LIKED it! Can’t beat THAT for classic 70’s/80’s style. But what’s this?! NO FLASHES?? Those were SO COOL when I was a Brownie, I really wanted flashes for my socks! At least the Brownies aren’t wearing that floral pattern anymore. God that was awful…I think it was the late 90’s when they came up with that one?
• I’m not sure that the green of Juniors is quite as IN YOUR FACE as it used to be. Man, we wore BRIGHT green.
• Khaki? Older girls wear khaki now? Blue was so nice! But, erm…what is an ambassador?
• Adult uniform stuff is just as boring as always. Oh well.

Before you think this is some new thing that I’m obsessing with, I’d like to note that I was obsessing over Girl Scout uniforms back in November 2001 when I wrote this article.

It doesn’t take much to get me to write about wedding dresses, I like to look at sets of things that are very alike and yet have their own similarities.

This dress is really pretty, I like the slimming wrap-around effect and the way it has the rhinestones following the length of the wraparound. I also like the little off-center spot of sparkle on the back. The dress is by Maggie Sotero.

The Bridal Shop has lots of other wedding dresses, and they also have some dresses in lots of colors for bridesmaids, proms, and so forth. I especially like this one for its colors, although for just a prom dress it is a little on the expensive side!

Today at GenCon I bought colored contacts. Black actually. Never having worn contacts before ever in my life, it took me 45 minutes to get them in. A nice lady gave me a bottle of solution to keep, and passed along some tips for putting them in. Fortunately the hotel sundries shop had a $2 contact lens case for me to keep them in!

I have been wearing them for about six hours now and they feel fine. They give me a tiny smidge of tunnel vision but it’s not bad - I am pretty amazed that I can see out of them perfectly normally! (Remember, before today I had never even held a contact lens, let alone worn one.) Once I take them out tonight, I may not put them back in for a while -
probably not till after I get home from the honors retreat and stuff. I definitely want to come home to A with them on! Then again, maybe I will practice putting them in a few more times.

I have wanted colored contacts for SO long. I was amazed that these were only $45! I was kind of torn between the black and the red, but I decided the black would be more subtle. I want people to peer at my eyes wondering “hey, is something weird with your eyes?” rather than just saying “whoa, you’ve got red eyes!” I got them from ExoticLenses.com; they had a lot of different styles but the black and red (and maybe white) were the only ones I was really interested in.

Update: I took them out after about eight hours of wear. They looked really cool, and only took a couple of minutes to take out versus 45 minutes to put in! I finally signed up for the $10/day internet, so when I am not so tired I will type up the past couple of days worth of happenings.

On Saturday, we went to Leesburg Outlets, where I looked high and low for a pair of embellished jeans. In the entire mall I found exactly one pair that fit…except they were too long. One place I didn’t check was the Coldwater Creek outlet, because I figured they wouldn’t have that kind of thing. But I checked their website yesterday and they do have embellished jeans! We have a store locally, so today I called them up and asked if they had any in my size. They had two in the size below mine, and one in the size above…but none in my size. So I saved time by calling, but I had to order them over the web.

I almost never order clothes (other than t-shirts) online, and I wasn’t sure if I should get a petite size or not. The ones I tried on over the weekend were way too long, so I ended up ordering these in my size (petite), and these in my size (regular). Whichever fits, I’ll keep; the other I’ll return to the store in Tyson’s.

But good grief, they were expensive. They were $43 and $49 respectively, but shipping was $11! Because I live in a state where they have a brick and mortar store, taxes were an additional $4.65. If I had only ordered one pair, shipping would still have been $10, so I’m not losing too much that way - I’ll only lose half the tax when I end up returning one of them. But still - why on earth should two pairs of jeans cost $11 to ship? I’m quite certain I could put them into a flat rate Priority Mail box and send them off for $4.05…they are just raking in the dough with those extra shipping charges.

For some reason BitTorrent is not working for me right now. Last night I downloaded the Borat movie to watch on the bus to New York (we have a headphone splitter), and then this morning I tried to download a movie that A wanted to see, but for some reason it wouldn’t download. I tried a different movie and that wouldn’t work either. I guess I will just convert the Borat movie to iPod format while we’re doing family stuff the rest of the day, but I was hoping to queue up another movie for conversion so I could do two at once. I suppose I could always rip something from a DVD we already have, not that I know how to do that…

Oh well, back to brushing my hair and admiring my new boots that I got at TJ Maxx for $30.