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From L-R: Sonic Bloom (a hot red/pink/orange, really bright); Whitest White; Big Daddy (a lighter, true orange).

(Sonic Bloom is here.)

I know the two on the ends look very similar, but Sonic Bloom is much more a neon red/hot orange whereas Big Daddy is a more orange juicy orange.

The blue still looks good -- in fact, it's wearing really well -- but I have a meeting Tuesday and I feel the blue would be a little...much.

What sayest thou?

Ahoy

Being more or less out of work avails one of a great deal of time, much of it located in the middle of the day when most people are occupied with jobs and the like. Now, I do have work to do, but I usually finish it fairly early in the day, and then I find myself with several hours of perfectly good daylight to fill. On Thursday, my boyfriend suggested driving out to Whiskey Island to ramble around, and I got to be nosy at the old US Coast Guard Station.



I have been fascinated by this building for a long time. It dates to the precise time in history that I should have been in the prime of my youth, dancing with servicemen at the USO and tending a Victory Garden and painting seamed stockings on my legs due to our boys in France needing the nylon more than I. Supposedly this building is going to be turned into a museum or historical center of some sort but I would much prefer to knock together $15 million and buy it so that my boyfriend and I can turn it into a kickass house.



Naturally, I forgot to bring my real camera. I am deeply ashamed of this poor decision. But it does give us an excuse to go back. For now, crummy cell phone pics will have to do.



After all the poking around we stopped at the Sunset Grille, which is a weird but very awesome place. I have a feeling a lot of people there were Jimmy Buffet fans. All, it was quite apparent, were fans of alcohol. As were we.



We had dinner at Bar Cento, and then we were both exhausted.



You know how after you spend a whole day walking around the sun, you feel really tired but also really good? It was like that.

The Results

Fellow Twitterer shannonerin was the first to answer when I asked what color I should wear next. Thanks!

The color is Marine Scene by Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear. The pink color is on my toes right now, a classy combo for sure. I don't put pictures of my feet on the Internet because...well I am sure you can imagine that feet on the Internet is a whole niche market that I am happy to avoid.

The Weekend, A Photo Essay

The holiday weekend was just about perfect: my boyfriend came home, things were grilled, fireworks were seen. Did you know that at Whole Foods, they have great big ol' real beef hot dogs, hot dogs the way hot dogs were meant to be? Truly, they were life-affirming (unless you are a steer, I suppose). Especially on big soft rolls with finely diced onions and Irish grain mustard...sigh. I love summer.

Speaking of Irish goodies, here is an unbelievably soft blanket and piggy-bedecked dishtowel that came back from Ireland with my boyfriend.


And here is some chocolate that came along, too.


The weekend was full of treats: my mother had a huge shopping bag full of vintage linens for me to go through and pick my favorites. I've developed a serious crush on printed tablecloths from the 1940s to 1960s.


Here is one specifically for use on Saturdays.


And napkins, I collect sets of cloth napkins. Lord save me from the temptation of perfectly worn-in cloth napkins...nom nom nom glurgh.


I also found a home for my haunted mirror, in the Closet Of Girly Wonders.


And, finally, I was able to move my semi-functional treadmill to the basement. In its place I hung up my panoramic photo of Public Square in 1916. I'm starting to amass this oddball collection of Cleveland pictures, I have some old framed pages from Harper's Weekly with sketches of famous Cleveland buildings (famous as of the early 1900s anyway). Maybe someday I'll do a Cleveland wall.


Lastly, Internet, I beseech thee...which color next? The purple is chipping off, I look meth-ish.

The Fashion Sham

I didn't get into Bravo's downmarket Project Runway replacement, The Fashion Show, initially, but the past few days work, migraine nonsense and apartment cleaning have conspired to keep me home, flipping channels and willing to get crazy. So I'm caught up on The Fashion Show, partly because I set my DVR to record it before I realized I wasn't interested, and partly because Bravo loves reruns. The Fashion Show should be better than it is, primarily because of Isaac Mizrahi, but there is too much wrong with the show for him to overcome it.

Issue one: Kelly Rowland. Jesus Christ, what is this woman doing here? What, precisely, are her fashion credentials supposed to be? This bugs me in the same way that I am supposed to buy Katie Holmes as a "fashion icon." Kelly certainly wears clothes beautifully and I am sure she has worn a number of exceptional pieces in her lifetime, but also. So I guess my question is, where does Kelly Rowland get off giving the contestants advice about their designs? Because it comes off more as Kelly's opinion about what Kelly would like to wear rather than the sort of high-level fashion critique offered by someone like, say, Tim Gunn. And really...unless you brought along a Bedazzler, you're kind of fucked. She's fine as a hostess – maybe even a judge, I suppose she knows a thing or two about how to dress for the red carpet, but then again – but I don't understand what she's doing in a mentor-type role. Which brings us to...

Issue two: Muddying of the mentor/contestant relationship. Project Runway is really the only show that gets this right: Tim Gunn introduces the challenges/tasks to the contestants, he checks on their progress and offers guidance and advice, and then is nowhere to be found when the judging takes place. Likewise, the judges see the garments as a whole, not – as Isaac and Kelly sometimes do – as the toned-down product of a much more ambitious initial vision or as a totally different garment than originally intended. Even Top Model gets this simple concept half-right, with Jay Manuel present at photo shoots but absent at judging (although Jay Alexander is both mentor and judge). Why is Isaac checking on the contestants halfway through the process? Why is Kelly tagging along, sneering and poking at half-finished outfits she has no business weighing in on? Does Kelly sketch? Sew? Cut patterns? Study or know fashion history? THEN WHY IS SHE INFLUENCING THE GARMENTS IN PROCESS.

Issue three: Hopelessly tight deadlines and other limitations. I hate the Harper's Bazaar mini-challenge. A bitchy lady from Bazaar is in charge of it, and always delivers news of the assignment in a tone that suggests she expects very little of the contestants (though to be fair...this is usually borne out by the results). The designers usually have anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to MAKE A GARMENT or DESIGN AND MAKE A SHOE or something else that can't possibly be done satisfactorily in the allotted time. The elimination challenges have correspondingly tight deadlines, which just means that almost everything on the runway looks at least a little bit ill-fitting. In fact, when somebody actually manages to make a pair of pants look decent, you have to imagine they are the best fashion designer on the face of the earth.

Issue four: The contestants. When compared to the Project Runway designers, they are, as a whole, less talented, less entertaining, more childish, more weird. Reco is not just self-assured, he has a comically (and unreasonably) inflated ego. Daniella is not just competitive, she's bitchy and cold. Merlin is not just flamboyant, he's a clown. The bottom line is that there is no one to like and no one to hate but plenty of people to pity, which isn't fun at all. On reality television you can be a prick but you can't be a boring prick or a sad-sack prick.

Issue five: It's still too much like Project Runway. It's actually comical – the contestants might as well be staying in the Atlas apartments and sending their models to the L'Oreal Paris hair and makeup room for all the similarities to the original. The Fashion Show is just too plainly an imitation, and it's insulting to the viewers Bravo obviously hopes will be too lazy to turn the channel. They kept the worst parts – team challenges, opinions of pretty starlets handed down in the guise of wisdom, painfully clunky product placement – and jettisoned what worked: the personalities, which unfortunately can't be copied or imitated effectively.

Mizrahi, for one, deserves better. I can't see The Fashion Show coming back for another season since it's neither as good as Project Runway or as awful as something along the lines of Bridezillas. Frankly I'd like to see a fashion-oriented show that revolves around Kelly Cutrone. Everyone except her would be super uncomfortable all the time and it would be fabulous.

Brain Tired.

So I'm on a bit of a nail polish-buying spree just now. I used to buy a lot of it, and then I didn't, and now I guess I am again. This is "Star of the Party," my newest specimen. It doesn't match what's on my toes right now, which bothers me in an OCD way, but whatever. I paint my own nails but not my own toes, someone else will have to fix that for me.

I mentioned this the other day on The Twitter and it bears noting here again: I nearly had a tantrum in the health and beauty section of Target on Tuesday because I want to buy all the different shampoos and face washes and skin creams and lotions, none of which I need. Or at least, I only need one of each at a time, not seven. So it made me petulant in a privileged, first-world asshole way that I couldn't buy everything I wanted. My inner brat was soothed somewhat by a trip to the nail polish display, though.

This particular line of nail polish names its colors in a strange way, as if the person that names them does not speak English as his or her first language. Like, you kind of get what they are going for but it's a bit off. "Star of the Party," for example. "Respect the World," which does not even imply any kind of color at all. In fact, you would be hard pressed to guess what color any of these names are meant to reference. There is also "Dream Maker," "Reach Out," "Believe It, Do It," and "Light A Candle."

Here's the thing: I feel like crap today. The day didn't start out that way, but I feel...just amorphously not well. I don't know if it's leftovers from the obnoxiously bad migraine I had on Monday morning or if this is something new and weird, but it is unfun and it is pissing me off. So I'm polishing my nails and writing about it on the Internet, although as you can see from the picture I did leave the house today, to go swimming.

Which I have to stop doing at noon during Y summer camp, because I am tired of having my shower curtain yanked aside by impatient eight-year-olds. Also, do you know what a small, echo-y shower room full of screeching eight-year-olds sounds like? It sounds like banshees, despair, zombie nightmares. It is bad.

Numby

So this weekend was the big garage sale, which took place in my friend's oversized garage. The guy who lived in the house before her was a nutter about his car, and the garage is much nicer than most apartments I've occupied. It has an upstairs. And a skylight. Also, it's heated and has a DSL line. So we were able to offer garage sale shoppers a luxurious environment in which to browse through our old junk.

The Law & Order DVDs that I bought to entertain me through the dark days of pneumonia sold out in a flash. Other than that it wasn't quite the financial windfall we had hoped. Either way, though, I am now rid of piles of clothes and other junk I don't use or want anymore, and hopefully the woman who told me a sob story about having her hours cut at work in order to pay a quarter less for a charm bracelet is happy with her purchase.

My reward for finishing out the weekend is a whopper of a migraine, complete with the charming face/hand/foot numbness my migraines are famous for. I feel like shit today, and of course I have a lot to accomplish, including taking a shower, which I have not done since Friday. This was more a function of being busy and tired than wanting to be dirty, but I am starting to feel (and sort of smell) like I have been camping, so I will have to take care of that today. The question is, do I go swimming and let the chlorine burn off all the dirt, or should I just work out at home and sweat it off? (By the way, both of these activities would be followed by a real shower -- I'm not that dirty.) I don't really feel like working out at all, but I have found that it's best to ignore the migraine if at all possible. Theoretically I'm supposed to lie down on a fainting couch, hand on my forehead, resting my delicate neurological system until it sees fit to return to balance. Sometimes that works well enough, but this episode seems to have set its teeth into me for the time being, so I'm going to go about my business and ignore it. This should work pretty well until about 7pm, when I feel like going to bed.

Before that, though, I have to finish some work and go buy eggs so I can make a batch of pasta. One must make oneself useful even during times of suffering.