For a while now I have been thinking about moving this blog to a new (and, I hope, easier to find) location. Mblog was a great place to get started because it was both free and sheltered, but there are capabilities I would like to have that are either difficult, impossible, or unethical to do through Mblog, and I would also like to have a more straightforward URL. I considered various other blogging services and even thought about getting my own domain, and I have decided to go with Type Pad. I had actually been wanting to try Type Pad ever since it was first created back in 2003 but, a) I didn't have a blog back then and, b) I didn't want to pay for a blogging service. But I had to join Type Pad anyway to do Wardrobe Refashion, and when I found that I could get a blog for $4 a month, I decided to give it a try. I also considered blogspot, which is free, but all of the names I would have wanted were already taken. This is all a very long-winded way of saying, come visit Living Small in its new location:

http://ashleystreet.typepad.com

I look forward to seeing you there, and please let me know if you have any design comments or suggestions!

I Emily pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of "new" manufactured items of clothing, for the period of 6 months. I pledge that I shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium for the term of my contract. I pledge that I will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovated, recycled, crafted or created item of clothing on the Wardrobe Refashion blog, so that others may share the joy that my thriftiness brings!

Here are the rules:

1. No buying new (handmade is excepted; so this allows for Etsy purchases, etc.). All clothing must be Recycled, Renovated, Preloved or Thrifted, or Handmade only for the term. Employment-related and special needs clothing (i.e. sports, school), shoes and undies are excepted from the rules, although you are encouraged to have a go at making these.


2. In extreme circumstances, maybe a special event, or the world's greatest and most amazing never to be repeated sale that you simply can not pass up, you may use the Get out of Refashionista Jail Free card. You are able to use this card once during every two months of youf contract. Of course, you need to fess up on the blog and display the button!


3. You must post on the blog at least once a week to let the community know what you've been up to. This will not only give you brag points, but inspire and encourage others! Of course you need to display the button on your blog and have cpied the pledge in at least one post, and provide a link to your pledge under the button.


4. You need to be honest and admit when you've fallen off the Refashionista Wagon! Go directly to Refashionista Jail, do not pass GO and do not collect $200! Apply for parole once there.

I decided to take this pledge because I rarely shop for new clothes anyway. In fact, it has already been six months, so I thought it might be fun to see if I could go another six months. Now that I have taken the pledge, however, I have become very excited about the idea of thrifting and refashioning. I even borrowed a sewing machine from my mother-in-law last weekend, and have already made some pillow covers for the throws on the couch and am halfway through a tote bag. I hadn't touched a sewing machine in fifteen years (I took lessons at a fabric store when I was in middle school), and David's mom didn't know how her ancient Singer worked, nor did she have the instruction manual for it, so it took me most of Sunday (and a trip to the library) to get it up and running. But now that it works, all I want to do is use it! In any case, if you want to see my adventures in refashioning, check out Wardrobe Refashion from time to time.

Sightseeing: Since I can't afford to spend a whole lot on museums or other tourist attractions, my version of sightseeing is pretty much just wandering around a city. I like to think of it as urban hiking. The first place I went on Wednesday night was the Inner Harbor, which quickly disappointed me. It is highly commercialized, basically just a big mall. So I kept walking, and got to explore a bit of the East Harbor and Fells Point before I had to call it a night.

Thursday, after I got the exhibit booth set up, was my main sightseeing day. Starting from the Convention Center, I walked north on Charles Street to the Washington Memorial, which is in the Mount Vernon cultural district. There were a couple of museums here -- the Walker Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum -- but the Contemporary hadn't opened yet and the Walker didn't seem quite as interesting, so I just kept wandering. From there, I went west, and eventually came to Lexington Market. Lexington Market reminded me quite a bit of the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles. It is a large market hall with stands selling just about every type of food you can imagine. And, since it was Baltimore, every other stand was a raw bar. Since I had already had breakfast and it was too early for lunch, I kept walking, this time heading east. A couple of hours of walking later, I found myself back in Fells Point, where I had been the night before. On Thursday, however, the sun was shining and I had more time, so I got to see more of this area. Fells Point was probably my favorite part of Baltimore, and it was the best shopping area (see below).

On Friday I did a bit more sightseeing early in the morning before the conference, heading back up to the Mount Vernon area and going a bit farther north than I had the day before. It looked like there was some good shopping up there, too, but it was 7:30am and nothing was open yet. After the conference, I headed south of the Inner Harbor to Federal Hill. My first stop was the American Visionary Art Museum, which I had heard about the day before. I feared they would already be closed when I got there, but I arrived an hour before closing and, because it was so late, they let me in for free. The museum was fantastic, though unfortunately I couldn't get up to the third floor because a wedding rehearsal was being held on the stairs. Not being able to go up to the third floor gave me some time to browse the gift shop, and I ended up buying an artwork: a piece of Shawn Theron's SOGH project. I had never bought real art before, and was super-excited to take it home and show David. After the museum, I explored Federal Hill, hoping to find some more shopping (again, see below), but all I really could find were bars and restaurants.

Shopping: Given that I'm not much of a shopper (I hadn't been shopping for clothes since September), this was about the last thing I expected to do in Baltimore but, as I said above, there is not much else to do while traveling. The best shopping was in Fells Point. I stumbled upon a consignment store and, before I knew it, had found about fifty garments I wanted to try on. Of the fifty, I ended up buying about ten, and was thrilled to have almost a whole new wardrobe (okay, I guess that is a bit of an exaggeration, since I mostly bought tops) for only $75. There were also some cute home furnishings stores in Fells Point, but after my clothing expedition I began to fear that my suitcase would be too full for anything else. I had hoped to find more shopping in Federal Hill because the Baltimore guide in my hotel room promised resale shops of all kinds, but the only one I found was a used book store.

Eating: Eating was probably the low point of the trip because the food in Baltimore was, surprisingly, just not that great. For the first time in my life, I sent back an entire restaurant meal! The food was also terribly uninspired, and very short on vegetables -- getting my daily 1.5 pounds was quite a challenge! There were, however, two highlights: 1) grits. I had forgotten I was in the South until I wandered into an espresso bar on Thursday morning and found they were serving grits. So I ended up having it every day for breakfast. 2) crab. I expected to eat quite a bit of crab while I was there because, after all, it was Baltimore, but I just couldn't find that much of it. So on Thursday night I went on a crab expedition and ended up at Phillips, where I got crab cocktail, which was quite good. Otherwise, the food in Baltimore was unremarkable. In addition to having trouble getting my vegetables, I also had quite a challenge getting my two daily glasses of milk. I expected to be able to just walk into a coffeehouse and get a cup of steamed milk, but there just weren't many coffeehouses, and the ones they do have close at five. I wandered all over Federal Hill on Friday night looking for a coffee house and couldn't find one. I finally ended up at the SoBo Cafe, thinking cafe=coffe, but I was wrong. It was just a regular restaurant and they didn't have coffee, but I was desperate for my milk, so I sat down at the bar. The bartender asked if I was there for dinner, and I replied, "no, just a glass of milk, if you have it." She looked at me like I had antennas and repeated, "a glass of milk?" But she poured it for me, and I drank it while eating some tangerines I had brought from Ann Arbor. Soon another bartender came out and asked how I liked the milk. I told him it was quite good and he responded that I should come back on Wednesday because Wednesday is their free all-you-can-drink milk night. I told him that I wouldn't miss it. When I finished my milk, I asked how much I owed him for it. Between the three bartenders, nobody knew how much to charge me because none of them had ever sold a glass of milk, so they just asked for a dollar. I gave them two and headed back out.

So that was Baltimore! Overall, I had a great time, though I would have loved to have shared the trip with David. Traveling alone is always really lonely.

So there I was, in the Baltimore airport, having missed my flight by about nine hours. All they could do was put me on standby for the 6:02 flight, but it didn't look promising because the flight was already oversold by six tickets. It was also the last flight of the day to Detroit, so if I didn't make it, I would just have to try standby again for the next day. So I went to my gate, spent about an hour crying on the phone to David, and then calmed down a bit. At 5:40, I was called to the gate desk, where they informed me that I was getting the last seat on the flight. Miracles do happen. So now I'm home, and I plan to stay here for a good long time!

I arrived safely yesterday, checked into my hotel, and spent the evening wandering around the harbor area. Today I went to the Convention Center first thing in the morning to get my exhibit booth set up. This was the scariest part of the whole trip. I had a very half-assed training on setting up the exhibit booth, which pretty much consisted of the ICPSR human resource assistant telling me that I am too short and that there is no way I'll be able to do it myself. The exhibit booth is a 10x10 foot pop-up frame, which then gets plastered with ICPSR information. I have a friend who used to design these things for a living, and she said the challenge was to create an impactful booth that could easily be assembled by one person. I guess the designers of our booth weren't imagining it being set up by a 5'3" tall woman. Fortunately, when I got to the booth space, there were two tall chairs and, standing on these, putting the booth together was actually pretty easy. The hard part was turning the booth's shipping case into a podium. There are some extra pieces that snap on, and then velvet panels that go around the whole thing, attached by magnets and velcro. But I just couldn't get the side panels to stick, so they are standing out at an angle, making the whole thing look pretty low-budget.

I expected it to take about an hour to set up the booth and it ended up taking two, so I'm glad I went early. The most infuriating thing, however, was the people who work here, who are supposed to be here to give any help we need. The whole time I was setting up the booth, four of these guys were standing around chatting in the booth next to me. They never once offered help, though they did make eye contact with me a few times. Instead, they were busy loudly discussing:

1. The fact that restaurant smoking sections are too small (one guy said that he wanted to open his own all-smoking restaurant, where the nonsmokers have to sit in the basement


2. The fact that the surveys showing that a majority of Marylanders don't like to be around smokers are biased because they only survey Democrats


3. Why they need guns


4. The overly restrictive nature of Maryland's concealed weapons laws

I wasn't quite sure why they had to have this conversation right next to my exhibit booth but, as soon as I finished setting up and left to wash my hands, they disappeared as well. In any case, my booth is set up, no thanks to them, and now I'm off to find some breakfast.

[Involuntary digression: it took me a minute just now to figure out if I should use the verb laying or lying. I had never even heard of transitive and intransitive verbs until I studied German in college. Why is it that we are never taught English grammar, so we don't learn grammar until we study another language? In any case, transitive and intransitive verbs didn't make any sense to me for the longest time, until finally it just clicked. Yesterday at work I heard someone say that she wanted to go home and "lay down on the couch" and I just wanted to shout "LIE DOWN -- you need an intransitive verb there!"]

Back to the story: so I spent most of the weekend (when I wasn't spaving at Costco or drinking David's milk) sitting at the dining room table, knitting a sleeveless top and reading Alligators, Old Mink, and New Money, an auto/biography of Alison Houtte, owner of Brooklyn's Hooti Couture. It was a fantastic way to spend the weekend but, by Saturday night, my back was pretty sore from leaning over the table. When I mentioned my sore back to David, he immediately came up with a solution -- I should give him a foot rub. Sometimes I wonder exactly how his mind works: I say my back is sore and, instead of offering me a back rub, he suggests that I give him a foot rub!

1. Going to Costco: I think the best part about having a Costco membership is all the blog fodder it gives me! When we walked in on Saturday afternoon, the first thing that caught David's eye was a display of spring bulbs to plant. We stopped to examine the offerings, and turned back just in time to see a man shopping with his young daughter begin to walk away with our shopping cart. We hadn't put anything in the cart yet, so I wasn't terribly alarmed, but I did exclaim to David, "that guy just stole our cart." David ran right up to the guy and said, "Dude, that's our cart." The guy sheepishly returned the cart to David and took another one from a nearby stack. Realizing that there were a bunch of empty carts nearby, David immediately became embarrassed for having been so possessive of our cart, and explained to the guy that we had become attached to the cart because we had brought it in from the parking lot. As we walked away with our recovered cart, David couldn't believe that he had actually uttered the words, "Dude, that's our cart."
2. Other bizarre things that came out of my husband's mouth: On Sunday morning, when David went to pour milk into his bowl of cereal, he found that his new gallon had been opened, and asked me if I had used some of it. I replied that I had, and he asked, "what did you do with it?" This seemed like a really bizarre question to me. I drank it, of course -- what else does one do with milk? I couldn't very well knit a sweater out of it! Maybe he thought I fed it to his plants...
3. Recreational reading: For the past week or so I have been reading the novel Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I had purchased it as an impulse buy at Borders because it was marked 3 for the price of 2, and expected it to be rather trashy -- basically the high school version of Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. But it wasn't like that at all. I'm not saying it is great literature, but Sittenfeld does an amazing job of capturing the social awkwardness of a teenage girl from Indiana attending an elite East-Coast boarding school on scholarship. It reminded me of my own experience of social life in college, but kicked up a notch. I could so relate to feeling like an outsider around kids who had grown up much wealthier than I had, and feeling like I had somehow missed the memo about how to behave.
4. Spring-cleaning update: I think I have recovered from the spring-cleaning bug, as I did absolutely no cleaning all weekend. It feels good to be back to normal!

So there's the four-point rundown of my weekend. I hope I'll still be able to think of something to blog about tomorrow :)

In addition to adding the neck edging, I decided to block the sweater again, because it was looking a bit lumpy. I had blocked the pieces before sewing them together, but I hadn't blocked the whole sweater. This time, I used the blocking directions in Stitch N' Bitch, which I got from the library the other day. Debbie Stoller recommends soaking the sweater in soapy lukewarm water, rinsing it, rolling it in a towel, and laying it out flat in the shape I want it. It isn't dry yet, but it is already looking better. I can't believe I had never really looked at Stitch N' Bitch before. I own the sequel, which has a lot of fun patterns, but the original is a fantastic reference with super-clear directions for just about every technique I will ever need. Too bad it didn't come out until 2003!

What struck me most about Holla Back was its very existence. Obviously street harassment is very prevalent if it can fuel fifteen websites dedicated to shaming its perpetrators. I was especially shocked to learn how common it is for sleazy men to masturbate on public transit. I had no idea. When I was fifteen years old and saw a guy masturbating in the seat across the aisle from me on the Big Blue Bus, I couldn't imagine that there were men doing the same thing on buses and subways all over the country (and, perhaps, the world). But then a friend told me that the same thing happened to her on a subway in Boston, and two weeks later I discovered Holla Back, which was founded by a woman who had been masturbated at on a New York subway. Of course, camera phones didn't exist back when I was riding buses around Los Angeles, but I'm glad I at least had the presence of mind to tell the driver what was going on so he could kick the guy off the bus. Next time, I'll Holla Back.