Operation Spygirl II: The Sushi Files

You may have already heard about the big international meet-up of B.L.O.G. (Blog Ladies' Organization for Good) - maybe you were there. It was held in Vancouver, BC, and agents came from all points of the US and Europe. They were some of the big wigs, too - literally. Although there may have been classified meetings held in hotel rooms and thrift shops, the conclave was not top-secret. You can read about it all over the interwebs, for Pete's sake, and I suggest you do.

I was not able to make it because I was assigned to an important mission here in Oregon that required my surveillance. It wasn't top-secret, either. It was the Premiere Party of a documentary made by myself and my agent partner, highlighting some local musicians who are spreading goodness in our local area.

You are now able to watch it yourself on YouTube - unclassified - although your computer will self-destruct five seconds after you reach the end of the program.

While I was on alert here in a garage, and all the major B.L.O.G.gers were living it up in Vancouver, Agent AMB made contact and requested a private meet-up when she was en route to her home base. I was happy to oblige. I had met Agent AMB once before and found her to be professional and discreet. This time she let down her cover a little bit.

I think she was experiencing an afterglow from the successful conclave in Vancouver. She shared a few details with me, although she did not tell me anything I was not cleared to hear. Damn.

After consuming lots of sushi at a ridiculously low price, we took the obligatory facial recognition selfies, made sure Anne had enough fuel (coffee) for her long drive, and we once again said goodbye. Her visit was too short, but duty called. She was carrying important biscuits to Agent Severo, and they had to be delivered before they turned stale.

It was a pleasure to meet Anne again - I mean, look at that smile! She's adorable! Am I jealous that Agent AMB was able to schmooze with the movers and shakers of our organization, eating, drinking, shopping and gabbing in a beautiful city? Hellz yeah! But I am enjoying reading the accounts of so many other agents who were at the event. I know there will be future events, and my goal is to attend one somewhere, sometime, wherever I may be posted.

Val

PS - I'm going to link up with 52-Pick-me-up at Spy Girl - the theme this week is Raspberry/Perfection/Friendship, so I'm going to throw in this gorgeous rose that I saw when I rode my bike home after meeting Anne. It sort of smelled like raspberries, it looks like perfection, and I had just had lunch with a friend!

Dust in the Fridge, Sparkles on the Bag

I went on a big ol' cleaning spree yesterday - kitchen, bathroom, cabinets, floors, roof, chimney, subconscious. Today my back is very sore. That should teach me to just hire a maid and then sit back and drink gimlets.

I cleaned out the fridge - not fanatically, but I did wipe all the shelves in the fridge and the freezer. I even wiped the lower shelves on the door, which don't see much use, and therefore, they had collected dust. Dust! INSIDE the fridge!? How does that happen? I was so disgusted I threw in the towel. But it landed in the butter, and then I had to wash the towel - and all the other laundry - so my work was far from finished.

Today I'm doing nothing physical. I'm spending a day on the computer researching how to put watermarks on my photos (done), how to set up a web page in WordPress (for a project Mr. S and I will be working on soon), and how to put one of Mr. S's books in CreateSpace for print-on-demand. I think his children's book might sell a bit more in hard copy.

And I'm also taking snaps of my sparkly purse to link up with SpyGirl's 52 Pick-me-up - Bejeweled.

This gorgeous bag of bling was a gift from my lovely stepdaughter a few years ago, and I don't use it often enough. I worry that the sequins and beads will start to fall off, but so what? I should use it and enjoy it, and resew when necessary.

The bag has two faces.

It's my Janus bag, which is perfect for the end of the year, looking to the future and to the past.

Happy Sparkly Days to you all!

Val

PS added on Dec. 29 - I'm linking up with the lovely goddess Patti at Visible Monday!

Smells Like Crone Spirit

It's Grunge week at Spy Girl' 52 Pick-me-up.

I lived in Seattle from 1987 to 1995, the grunge capital during the grunge era. The days before Tiffany's came to town, and when I could still rent an apartment for $500 a month (honest - and it had a view, too). So I had to get in on Grunge week.

Faded jeans, boots, plaid men's shirt over an undershirt, garage bands. And I look just like I did in 1990.

 Oh denial, oh denial, oh denial, oh denial, oh denial.

It's also Third Thursday (T3) at My Closet Catalogue and A Bibliophile's Style, and the prompt this month is to let your outfit be inspired by your best or worst high school read. I can't even remember what I read in high school (it was HIGH school, man). Seriously. I remember reading Herman Hesse books, and Carlos Casteneda, and some science fiction, but I'm not sure how many of those were read for school. I do remember wearing clothes that were pretty much the same as the grunge outfit. Paleo-grunge. So I'm just dressing like high school, not like a book.

Hey, far out! I get to hit two link-ups with one outfit! I love it when that happens.

Sunday update - third link-up at Visible Monday!

Peace.

Val

Heroes and Villains

SpyGirl's 52 Pick-me-up this week is Fairy Tale. It ties in perfectly with Maricel and Selah's T3 prompt to dress like your favorite literary villain. So I'm wearing black and white to represent good and evil, and I'll tell you my own fairy tale that transpired this week.

Once upon a time there were a boy and girl who went to visit a little cottage in the country. They walked up to the porch, which was piled with old boxes and plant pots, and they pulled the clapper on the brass bell hanging by the door. A little troll opened the heavy wooden door and led them inside, then down into the cellar. The room there was piled high with books and boxes and shelves and tools. It smelled horrible, and there were cobwebs covering the windows as thick as curtains. The troll asked them what they wanted, and when they told him he said he could grant their wish for eighty pieces of gold. They left their computer with him and went away.

The troll is the hero in this story. He loaded Windows 7 onto my computer so I can work on my new client's cloud server.

The thing is, heroes look like ordinary people. (Although computer nerds who work out of their own homes are generally a little, shall we say extraordinary. I wasn't kidding about the smell and the cobwebs.)

My own knight in shining armor had already spent hours trying to install Windows 7 and then reloading all my other programs. As day turned to night, we found out that the copy of Windows 7 he had bought from eBay was counterfeit, sold to us by an evil villainess in North Miami Beach!

I imagine her with a bald head, bad skin and snaggly teeth (the bitch!), but she could just as easily look like a cheerleader or a soccer mom. Because villains can look like ordinary people, too, like Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird or Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca or Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Villains suck.

If you want to know the ending of my story, the evil bitch, I mean the seller, responded after about 36 hours with a poorly typed message saying she's sorry for our "bad experience" and she'll refund the money in a few days. Doesn't matter what she does now, we've reported her to eBay and Microsoft. They can throw her in a dungeon for all I care.

Because good always triumphs over evil.

Val

Operation SpyGirl: The Western Edge

Here is my report:

My initial communication with Agent AMB was carried out in code to subvert the potential for eavesdropping. We had an arranged meeting place - the large anchor installed as a feature next to Bay Street in Florence, Oregon.

Source

It was a public place, so we could blend in. However, there were risks involved, too, such as coming into contact with tourists in Harley-Davidson T-shirts, women carrying small dogs, and sullen teenagers trying not to be seen with their parents.

Our rendezvous was scheduled for 14:00 hours. I arrived early and carried out a quick sweep of the nearby restroom. There were no listening devices or cameras (I think). As I was leaving, I received an electronic message from Agent AMB saying "I've just parked in Florence and am walking to the anchor." I decoded this and understood it to mean that AMB was in Florence and had just parked her car. She was walking toward our rendezvous location. The code was fairly simple.

I soon spotted her. She was wearing an absolutely adorable hat I had seen in photos taken by our Russian agent, Natalia. This made it easier to recognize her, as well as her trademark glasses and smile. We exchanged the secret password and she slipped me the encoded disk as we embraced. No one suspected that we were anything but tourists with a little more flair than those around us.

I wore a purple scarf that had been given to me by Agent Bella Q. The scarf could be transformed into a jump jet if it was necessary to make a quick getaway. It was not necessary.

AMB and I went to a nearby restaurant, sitting on an enclosed patio where we were sure there were no bugs (ha ha). We discussed our experiences within B.L.O.G. (Blog Ladies' Organization for Good) and our communications with other agents. We talked about our cover work, and she brought me up-to-date on her recent trip to the borders of our territory.

We then decided to survey the coast for invasion by enemy agents. We saw none; all was secure.

Soon AMB was on her way to her next destination, a location I cannot divulge. I found her to be the consummate agent - polite, friendly, and very sweet. She has beautiful eyes and a disarming smile that encourage confidence and candor. She has already won over several agents she has come into contact with, both friendly and hostile, and I'm sure she will continue to do so.

I hope her mission has been successful; I feel honored to have played a small part in it.

In full disclosure I must add that my report has been inspired by AMB's Fake Journaling project.

Agent VS

T3 - Plaid and Paisley

I'm struggling a bit to come up with something for Thoughtful Third Thursday. It's all about books, and although I've been reading almost constantly, I've only finished a couple of books in the past month. I ditched two books before I even got halfway through. Funny, they were both set in Washington State - my old stomping grounds. They were recommended by a colleague with whom I share lots of book and movie recommendations, but we don't actually have the same taste at all. Except I turned him and his wife on to Donna Tartt and Kate Atkinson, and they turned me on to Tana French and Gillian Flynn. Other than that we haven't been having much luck. I'll tell you more about the rejected books at the end of the post, for anyone who's interested in my sweeping and subjective opinion.

Right now I'm reading Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn. It's the second in her series of Jackson Brodie crime novels, and it's pretty good. I'm not a huge crime fiction fan, but I generally like her writing, although not always. She tends to throw in lots of characters and their musings and history while they're doing other things. It's easy to lose track sometimes.

The book is set in Edinburgh, so I decided to go with tartan for an outfit. Here's a quote from the book:

"The hotel was surprisingly cheap and unsurprisingly awful. Anything that could be decorated with tartan was, even the ceiling had been papered in a funereal Black Watch. On the walls were hung framed prints of Old Edinburgh and heraldic clan insignia mounted on wooden shields."

I mixed the tartan with paisley - another Scottish association. The design is Indian, but when it became popular in Great Britain quite a lot of paisley patterns were produced at mills in Paisley, Scotland.

The style of the book is kind of sardonic, wry, and self-deprecating. There's a bit too much death and blood for my taste, but I do like Jackson. The BBC has made a series of three Jackson Brodie books, and the character is played by Jason Isaacs - aka Lucius Malfoy of Harry Potter fame.

My shirt is a Michael Kors men's shirt, the scarf is Ray Strauss, which I bought from Bella at The Citizen Rosebud on Etsy. The yellow jeans are thrifted Shylo, and the suede leopard sneakers are Born.

Now, about the other books.

I started reading The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, and I didn't like it at all. The style was very aloof and pseudo-poetic in a spare kind of way. Lots of sentences seemed very clunky and immature, and I just didn't get into the characters. Glad it was only a library book.

I read two books by Jonathan Evison, well, one and a bit. The first one I loved - The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. It was a funny, sweet, heart-wrenching tale about a man's life being put back together (in spite of himself) after a tragedy. I definitely recommend this book, as well as another Evison book, All About Lulu. But the one I didn't finish is West of Here. I think it's more of a man's book, long descriptions about wild scenery and men moving through it. And mud. Just not enough human interaction to hold my attention.

Come on over to My Closet Catalogue or A Bibliophile's Style and see the other visual book reports!

Update April 30 - now linking up to 52 Pick-me-up for Yellow Fever.

Val

Forwards and Backwards, maybe Sideways

Thank you for all your comments the last few weeks – well, all the time actually! I've enjoyed sharing some of my past exploits and reading about yours. I'll share more adventures in the future, but I can't tell you everything – I have to save something for my memoirs.

I've been feeling really inspired and creative lately – the muse is making fondue! I feel myself stretching my mind and thinking outside the box, and I owe a lot of credit to my fellow bloggers. I've mentioned Melanie, who gave me the idea of the paper dolls, and there's also Maricel, who has mentioned artists and authors who have stirred some of my creative juices. (I might even read a vampire novel.) And all you sewists and upcyclers have led me to my current phase of trying to customize my wardrobe. I've also been inspired in this regard by Suzi Click, who I found on Advanced Style, so now I have a big pile of unworn clothes in pretty fabrics that I hope to make into unique, wearable pieces. And Sue Kreitzman is also an amazing inspiration for her clothing and assemblages and use of color.

But at this moment I especially have to thank Anne of Spy Girl for her 52 Pick-me-up challenges. The prompt this week is to wear something back to front, and this has led me to wear an old dress in a new way.

I know, right? I love it!

And it was so easy! I bet a lot of you have done this with t-shirts, but have you tried it with anything else?

The dress is from Target, previously seen here and here (the same boots are in the second one, too, but you have to get past my rant to see the outfit). It's polyester so it's easy to wear and pack and wash. I wore it with leggings on the plane to Texas last summer (first link above). The tights are also from Target, and the boots and belt are thrifted.

The back/front puckers a little bit, but I could probably fiddle with the belt to make it look better.

Cowlicks all over my head

 Or just wear a jacket.

This suede jacket (previously seen here, also thrifted) reminds me so much of a similar jacket I had in my early 20s. Same cut, same pigskin suede, slightly different color. When I first bought this one I kept having déjà vu! Do you ever get that?

Come on over to Spy Girl for a pick-me-up!

Val

Do NOT sing that Jimmy Buffet song!

The prompt this week at Spy Girl's 52 Pick-me-up is to dress as your favorite libation. I think it's pretty obvious what I am.

This is an idea I had years (and years) ago for Halloween. In a thrift shop I saw a Lurex pantsuit in a dark lime-green, and I thought it would make a great margarita costume! I would make a lime hairband or earrings, and that would be it. But I didn't buy the pantsuit, I think it was too small, so I never became a walking margarita - until now.

On top is twin set I bought at Target almost eight years ago. It's the only thing I bought new in this outfit. I love the color, and I wear the cardi a lot with other things. On the shelves is a rotary dial phone acquired when I had to clean out a storage unit. I blinged it up myself. There's also a vintage Disney lunchbox (Ludwig von Drake in Disneyland) that was used by my sister, brother and me. Now it holds my sewing stuff.

White pants and sandals - thrift store; white "salty" necklace - hand-me-over from my sister; "lime-and-salt" earrings - made by me; tequila - Lunazul.

But here's the bonus!

My  very own Frida necklace from the lovely and talented Tamera, The Menopausal Supermodel. This has turned my outfit into a Cadillac Margarita!

Uno mas, por favore! I'm also going to link up to The Citizen Rosebud's inaugural Shop Secondhand First Friday. And, oh, let's go over to Share-in-Style at Mis Papelicos for the music theme, but still NOT singing that Jimmy Buffet song.

Val

The Madwoman in the Garden

The following post was originally published on January 31, 2014. I'm reposting it because, well, Blogger and I had a little contretemps and I thought Blogger was going to throw this post in the bin. So I quickly hit Revert to Draft thinking that would save it, even if it didn't save my recent changes to the labels - I added labels so I could get "dynamic pages" on my new tabs on my blog. Cool, huh? I also updated the banner, in case you didn't notice. Doesn't my blog look really slick now?

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I hit Revert to Draft, and it did indeed save my post. But made it a Draft - unpublished - again. I guess that's what Revert to Draft means. Seems a bit cryptic to me.

So now I'm publishing it again, with the labels, so it'll show up if you click on the Short Stories or What I Wear tabs. You can skip the whole thing if you already read it. You can skip the whole thing even if you haven't read it.

But if not, I give you The Madwoman in the Garden -

The day was cold and drear, with an opaque fog seeping in off the Baltic Sea. Nevertheless, I decided to take some air in the small side yard of this crumbling old pile where I reside. I avoid the streets and open spaces. People stare at me and whisper behind my back. 

I prefer my solitude.

I am Valastasia, and I am the last survivor of my illustrious family, the Bugheroffs.

The passionflower vines are dead, as is my youth, and the fog clouds my mind and wraps me in a shroud of nostalgia. Memories haunt me, speaking to me in ghostly voices from the past.

But I find comfort in the confined space and the familiar gargoyle that looks down from the fence.

I wear old clothes salvaged from the dusty trunks in the attic of my family home. They are my sole luxury and my only mementos of past lives – an embroidered brocade jacket, a shirt of the finest imported silk, and hat and gloves made from the fur of an ocelot. 

The jacket's not really embroidered and the shirt is cotton. Of course you know the fur is fake. What a drama queen! 

My belt and boots were left behind by an officer in the military who was my lover in the halcyon days before the revolution.

I remember with yearning the days we spent together, days when we were young and untroubled, when we shared the deepest secrets of our souls, and dreamed of our brilliant future together. 

Whatever.

Alas, it was not to be. One ominous evening we went to see the ballet – it was a magnificent performance – and the next day he was gone. He had deserted the army, discarded his possessions, and abandoned me for another love. I was inconsolable! He had fallen for the lead dancer of the Bolshoi, Ivan Toudance, and they had fled to San Francisco.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Blah, blah, blah, Valastasia never recovered, okay? She hung out alone in that creepy old house, shunning the world and living in the past. 

(No cats? That doesn't seem right.)

This Gothic tale inspired by and linking up with:
52 Pick-me-up at Spy Girl - Short over Long
Share in Style at Mis Papelicos - Gothic
Hat Attack at TheStyle Crone - Hats!

Jacket - Coldwater Creek (old)
Shirt - Jones New York (resale)
Skirt - Fresh Produce (resale)
Boots - JCP (old)
Belt - thrifted
Hat and gloves - WalMart (ocelot, my ass!)

Valastasia