More Loose Parts

It's been a few weeks and it just happens that all of the best recent comics came from the mind of Dave Blazek.

In no particular order....

It's So Obvious!

Poncho has it right.  If you wanna look cute, there's only one thing to do....

I Wanna Look Cute Too!

38, Si. C, No. (Part I)

I have several bras.  OK, I have a lot of bras.  OK, I probably have more bras than most women do, but I have more sizes than most women.  Mostly, I wear a 38C.

Most of my bras are "full cover" bras, so my pads stay still and hidden.  Some have bands that are too small, some have bands that are too large.  According to a quick fit at a Victoria's Secret, all of my bra bands are too small.  I differ.

According to websites I visit, if I go up a band size, I go down a cup size.  So if a 36 fits, it should be a D cup.  If a 40 fits, it should be a B.  No, I don't understand it either.

And of course if I don't put in pads a 38AA (which doesn't exist) is probably my true size.  Maybe I can wear an A if it's heavily padded.

I have one bra that I've been wearing to bed with my foam pads.  It is pink and lacy and has the marvelous feature that it blends perfectly with a nightie that has a pink and lacy bodice.  It looks like I'm not wearing a bra at all, even though the bodice is somewhat sheer lace.

But last Sunday, for the air museum visit with Marian (in drab), I decided I wanted one particular bra.  It's heavily padded, to the point that it presses gently against my chest without any other pads at all.  It's dark blue, lacy, and pretty.  It has two hooks in the back, adjustable straps that are narrow but wide enough to not dig (at least not dig without heavy breasts cupped in them), and fairly robust (HA!) underwires.

As I said, it's heavily padded, to the point that if I wore something light or tight I would definitely appear to have small breasts.  Maybe an A, maybe a small B.

Instead, I put it on with a new shaping cami over it (from Assets) and a denim shirt.  If I thrust out my chest it would show.  A bit.  With a coat over everything, probably not.  I doubt Marian noticed, and I suspect she'd look for things(!) like that.  I would.

I pretty much forgot I was wearing the bra most of the day, until I'd touch my chest for some reason and notice it stuck out a bit more than usual.  It's a nice sensation.

Sunday evening, I told Charity that it was a shame I couldn't wear that bra under my regular work shirt.  She said "under your purple shirt it should be OK."

Admittedly, it doesn't take much to get me to push the femme envelop.

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Sentence Structure Is Important

We know grammar is important.  Commas save lives.  Consider the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma."  Or the story of the koala who goes into a restaurant and orders a nice meal.  At the end, when presented with the bill he pulls out a gun and shot the waiter and proceeded to walk out.  The maitre d' stopped him and asked him to explain himself.  The koala handed him a sheet describing koalas as "a small marsupial who eats, shoots, and leaves."

My sentence structure  example is not as life-or-death as those examples, but I was going to title this

In Reality, Meg Is Grounded

which is true.   But I also considered

Meg Is Grounded In Reality

which is not so honest.

My friend Kim, of Frugal Fashionista fame, is having a trunk show this weekend.  This is something new for her and it sounds like a lot of fun.  She wrote:

Let's meet up and have a trunk show~ This is not a clothing swap -it's a show so that local businesses can get tables to show and sell their wares! Half of the money collected for vendor space will be donated to RAINN (Rape Abuse Incest National Network. Vendors will be raffling off goods throughout the show!
 
There are other things going on: the game group is having a ladies' brunch (I was thinking about it), for instance.

But Meg is staying home.  It's tax season here in the states and I have decided that it's more important to use those five hours I'd spend getting dressed, going out, getting back to "normal" for getting my financial house in order.  I have a side business; my wife has her own business; my son earned serious (to the government) money.  I don't have a lot of savings, but it's scattered around so I have a stack of forms that need to be processed.

Meg is staying home.

But that doesn't mean I can't wear a comfortable top and skirt while I'm working.  And appropriate underthings.  And maybe a longer wig so I can get comfortable having that much hair, so I can expand my options.  And some shoes I'd like to break in.  And maybe earrings that I'm unsure about ~ I still haven't finished seeing which are comfortable and which are medieval torture devices.  And maybe a different shade of lipstick.

But I'm definitely staying home.  I have a lot of work to do.  And there is a reward: if I finish this weekend I can go out NEXT weekend.  If I don't, well it's still before t (alas, for tax)-day.

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Simple Pleasures ~ Mirror Mirror

Back to the bathroom mirror.

There was a gender discussion at Christine's house a week or so ago.  I haven't written it up yet; I will.

Christine had nametags for everyone.  I decided to save mine.  This is actually my fourth Meg nametag; I wish I'd saved the others.  One was from the UU church when I attended services last summer.  The other two were from Christine's soirees.

In the future, I'm going to keep the tags and make a chain hanging from my mirror.

I don't know if I'm in love with the name Meg, but it's mine now and I like seeing it, and I like hearing it.  But when I introduce myself, I have to think or I'll use that other name that I've had (for fifty years) longer.

Airman Marian

Sorry.  The anagram just jumped out at me.

I spent a near-perfect day at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum with Marian, who came down from New York for the cherry blossoms and Charity, whose presence makes everything nicer.

The thing that prevented it from being perfect: I was in drab.  I had a lingering cough/sneeze/need to sleep from a cold last week.  Charity was recovering from something else altogether.  I'm moving a bit more down the "it's OK for people to know both my male and female self" path, thanks to Star's SO who sometimes presents male and sometimes female, often with the same group of civilians.

Being in drab gave me a bit of a fly-on-the-wall perspective.  A few times, Marian was off by herself, or chatting with Charity.  A group of people would pass by and look up and I'd tag along behind them for a short distance to see if they said anything about my friend's presentation.  And the result, every time, was...

nothing.

Probably the same response they had to passing any other woman my age in the museum.

That's cool.  That's very cool.  I never expected trouble, but I thought I might hear something akin to when a group comes upon an unexpected situation: "did you see the man with three heads/the woman in a wedding gown/the girl on the unicycle/the baby being held upside-down/the group doing the conga/the flash mob/etc," but there was clearly nothing unusual to comment on.

I like that.  Things like that give my confidence a boost.  I mean, I would have loved to hear "did you see that tall beauty?" or something, but hearing nothing is excellent too.

Oscar Wilde said "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."  He was witty, but he was wrong.

One fun thing: Marian and I were on the top level near the stairs when a late-30s guy who was taking pictures turned to Marian and said "you really need a panorama camera in here" and showed her the playback of how his camera stitched together several images to make one contiguous image.  They chatted for a while about the museum until he decided he had to go down to take other photos.

Another fun thing: I walked up to Charity as she was talking to a woman and her young (5? 6?) daughter.  Charity and the girl were talking Star Wars (they had a space toy display case with, among other things, Star Wars figurines) and how there's an R2-D2 figure hidden somewhere in the "Close Encounters" spacecraft in the same hall and kind of how cool science is in general.  The girl mentioned that she didn't like to play with the girls and she liked the "boy toys."  Charity told her that she wasn't allowed to have "boy toys" when she was little and Marian, who had joined the little group, added that the girl was lucky she could play with anything she wanted."

I thought it was a nice convergence of science and gender and generations.

Oh... you can read the visit from Marian's point of view (and see a picture of her and Charity) on Marian's blog.

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Time to Get Off the Pot

I was poking around on the "HR self-service" page on Friday.  I was amazed to find this (make sure you check out the last item)

 I am not making this up.  I decided to click and see if it was really that easy.

 Well, maybe it WAS that easy.  I picked a date one year in the future and set gender to female!

I presume I can change my mind during the next twelve months.  I don't know if changes like this trigger a call or visit from HR.  Or security.

So I moved on to item 2 on the list: update names.  I selected "Edit" and...

I never thought about a middle name since I don't have one in male mode.  I was considering "Miss" since Meg was never married, but went with Ms.

After accepting the change I saw:

(I blanked my current name.)  And after I submitted that screen, I saw:

 So I've taken a big step.  This is a major change, and I can use this as an aspiration image ~ when I see my HR page, I'll be reminded of a goal.  A huge goal.  I'm not sure how I'm going to realise this result yet, but I have until next April Fools Day to figure that out.

:D

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