Shopping for a Bathing Suit

It has been several years since the last time I bought a bathing suit. I'm guessing around 6. The two I currently own are losing their elastic properties and one has a few holes in the seat. So I set out today to replace them.
I'm not sure anyone enjoys shopping for bathing suits. For one, the dressing room lights manage to make anyone's skin tone look sickly. For another, I have yet to meet an American woman who feels absolute self-confidence in her body. Trying on swim wear seems to bring out the worst in all of us.
I can't think of bathing suits without thinking of the comic strip Cathy. There seems to always be a scene with Cathy trying on a suit and shrieking "AAACK!"
To verify that my recall is correct, I looked up Cathy on Wikkipedia, source of all internet knowledge. Here is what Wikki has to say about Cathy:
"Cathy has a love/hate affair with food (especially carbohydrates). She loves it, but hates what it does to her thighs. She is often shown in a department store fitting room trying to stuff herself into a bathing suit."
Today's trip typified my previous experiences only more so. Perhaps it was my choice of stores (Nordstrom's) or my tendency to shop at the end of the season, but the suits I found were particularly loathsome. No, this was not my body image problem. I immediately determined that I do not need the slimming suit (one entire rack) since I have been accused of having "no butt." I tried on suits that made me look lopsided, suits that made me look lumpy all over and ones that even a woman built like a fashion model would have refused to wear unless paid handsomely. What were the designers thinking of? These weren't cheap suits either (note I was at Nordstrom's). After trying on around 15 suits I finally found something, ahem, suitable. Nothing great. Just not a granny suit and not a string bikini either. I can wear it in public without needing liposuction or a paper bag to wear on my head. And it doesn't make me look like I have three breasts.
On the plus side, on the way out of the building I fell in love with a dress which I will wear to the wedding I'm attending at the end of the month in New York City. So the outing wasn't a total waste.
By the way, that is really me on the rope swing. It was around 6 years ago and we were in Costa Rica. I was the only adult brave enough to swing with my son. Which is part of the reason the elastic is gone on that particular swim suit. It served its purpose.
Tomorrow we head to California for a family vacation and a few college tours. I hope I get some great shots of Yosemite and Sequoia to share with you. And I hope the natives like my swim suits.
Back soon, internet access willing.

I stand corrected

OK, so I exaggerated. There are a few Native Americans left in Wisconsin! (See previous post and comments). I still doubt the Indian-themed motels I passed are owned by Native Americans. As for the casino, well I figure the first peoples need to take revenge on us "white folks" after all the years of oppression and displacement.
I'm just remembering all the fights over whether Indian names and mascots for college ball teams were insulting. I was at Stanford shortly after the school changed its team nickname from the Indian to the Cardinal. The decision was based on the impression that the use of an Indian name and mascot was disrespectful to Native Americans.
The University of Illinois retired its Chief Illiniwek mascot in 2007. Not all Native Americans were opposed to the mascot but the Chief retired anyway. I was amazed to discover in researching this bit of most-important American history, that Chief Illiniwek has a MySpace account. I guess it is nice to know that some fans are truly in touch with their inner children.
So I guess the logic goes, football team mascots are out, motel names are allowable. Or nobody has gotten around to suing for being tacky yet.

To the Dells and Back Again

Tuesday I took my son back to camp. We picked him up last week because he still had not recovered from his GI disorder. After being seen by two doctors and one nurse, having blood tests, an abdominal x-ray and so forth, this was one kid who needed to be home with mom and dad. I have to give him credit. He stuck with it and was really hanging tough but it was time. A couple of days of mom's special GI diet though, and he was ready to roll, back to the Wisconsin Dells which is where camp is located.
I made the 7 hour round trip in one day. It was long but not too grueling. On the way home I decided I was sick of expressways and detoured on smaller roads. Unfortunately, it got dark before I could indulge in a lot of photography.
My conclusions are:
The Wisconsin Dells make Vegas look tasteful.
They have a thing about Indians. What is with the moccasin shops and native American themed motels? My guess is that there hasn't been a native American within a hundred miles of the Dells in around a century. But you can get real, genu--iiiiine Chinese-made, lead free moccasins in around 30 different stores.
Sigh.
Camp ends tomorrow. I hope my son stays cured. After three days of hot dogs, macaroni and cheese and sloppy joes, I have my doubts.

Iowa Backroads

When you are the only person in the car you can turn off the highway whenever you want.

Severe Weather

Wow! Tornado warnings here in Chicago! The worst has passed and all we have at present is a gentle rain but we had quite the lightning show earlier. I actually had patients holed up in my office for a few minutes until the worst passed by. I had to run home since my son was panicking.
I first heard our local tornado sirens a few years ago (and blogged about it here) and didn't know what they were. Today when they started wailing, the storm hadn't quite arrived yet and I was puzzled. Then the show began. A check of the internet suggested possible tornadoes to the south and north of me but none nearby. Now it is not clear if there were any actual tornadoes sighted. In fact, I'm still not sure if there were any tornado touch downs in the greater Chicago area.
News has it that Wrigley field was evacuated during a game. That must have been exciting. And passengers at O'Hare were taken off their planes and evacuated to a lower level. Of course, multiple flights were canceled.
I'm not flying until Sunday. We had to deal with cancellations on my last trip and I hope this time the weather will be kind to us.

Do I have to?

Write something today? Today I felt sort of at loose ends. This was to have been my final child-free week but somehow things didn’t go as planned. The younger son continued to have stomach problems at camp this past week which culminated in our picking him up on Thursday, one week early. Needless to say, two days later, he is fit as a fiddle, complaining of boredom and asking for a play date. He was also fighting my “upset stomach diet” tooth and nail. Said diet is boring as all good diets seem to be.
Today, if all had gone as planned, I would have driven my son back to Wisconsin to rejoin his camp for the last week. Then, back home to start my final work week before vacation. However, a combination of wishful thinking (I’d rather be home with mom) and non-compliance with the GI diet led to a minor relapse. Younger son doesn’t exactly make symptoms up but he is a bit of a hypochondriac. Sadly, hypochondriasis runs in my family.
So here we are. Happy, not quite, camper is playing video games. And how have I spent my day? I could be revising my novel. But I decided to find yet another way to procrastinate. So I made a quilt. Well, a small quilt. A fragment. I think it will be a pillow cover.
I decided to write about this because I got my sewing machine out of mothballs (actually I excavated it out of the dust bunnies) and have been using it. My first major project in years was to make a quilt out of old t-shirts. We have enough discarded t-shirts floating around the house to make several quilts without compromising our leisure-wear status. The quilt came out pretty well, if I may say so myself. The principle is quite simple. You cut t-shirts into 13 inch squares, sew them together and add backing. I love it because the quilt is made up of outgrown shirts from 16 years of child rearing. I can see the University of Chicago onesie my oldest wore the day I graduated from medical school. And a Seattle Crab shirt I got for him the same year. There are a couple of camp shirts, a shirt from Duncan, British Columbia (from the train phase), another two shirts from the Pokemon phase, and so on. The quilt back was a $1 sheet I found at the Salvation Army. Here’s to recycling!
My next project was to make a pillow case out of a Hawaiian shirt I bought at the same Salvation Army store. The shirt was too loud for any of the men in my family to wear but it went well with the peach paint in our guest bedroom (where the quilt also resides). That project took my around an hour.
Yesterday, I decided I wanted to try crazy quilting. I liked the idea of making something without planning. No patterns needed. No trips to the fabric store for matching squares required. I had bought a couple of scraps of vintage fabric on my trip to Iowa last week. There were a couple of worn quilt squares and a ball of fabric strips intended for making a rag rug. Instead I incorporated some of these strips and scraps, bits of a (commercial) quilted pillow sham we had that disintegrated from too much machine washing, a few bits of the Hawaiian shirt used for the pillow (including a pocket), remnants of the sheet backing for the t-shirt quilt, bits of an old bathrobe and (don’t tell my husband I told you) of a pair of boxers I fished out of the garbage. I ran all the pieces through my truly ancient White sewing machine and I now have a rectangle of fabric waiting for me to figure out the next step. Even my sewing machine was bought used. Today was a good day for recycling.

Ear

Glad mine aren't this hairy.