ModCloth Uniquely You: London Summer

London Summer by gladysn featuring oxford shoes

Today I'm excited to share my style board for ModCloth's Uniquely You Campaign! When ModStylist Amy contacted me about their campaign, I was thrilled but also a little nervous. I hadn't put together a style board in loooooong time. But seriously, I shouldn't have been anxious in any way. It's crazy fun to put together outfits especially when you've got the whole of their collection to choose from. And I definitely could have made boards for many of their other dresses, like this one or this one or this one or this one ... there are plenty more on my Wishlist over there. (You all know how much I love ModCloth, right?? Half my wardrobe comes from them!)

But I have to say, given my current obsession with blue and my forever-love of green, this particular dress, Work to Play, was perfect for me. The mint green and navy combo on this dress is killer. I was thinking about where I'd love to wear it this season when all of a sudden, I had an image of me on a gorgeous summer day in London, taking in the sights and having some tea and scones in the afternoon. It's a total fantasy, of course; I've never been to London. But 1) visiting there has been on my bucket list forever (English major in the house) and 2) I've been watching Sherlock over and over and although I know they actually shoot it in Wales, the show tricks me into thinking about London. Haha!

I know there are two pairs of shoes up there, but I couldn't resist giving myself a couple of options (I'd definitely have at least two pairs of shoes in my luggage). The dress is called Work to Play, after all. Both styles would be super cute with the dress, maybe one for walking around town and the other for a nice dinner out. Then of course I had to include the dainty mint purse and adorable owl pocketbook, just to play up that Peter Pan collar. And given that it's London weather, I added the cardigan and the umbrella, for the just-in-case. Et voila, the London Summer style board was born!

This was lots of fun. Thanks for asking me to take part in the campaign, ModCloth and Amy!

xo, Gladys

P.S. Fantastic image of London borrowed from Hull Trains in the UK. Also, I wasn't compensated for taking part in this campaign.

Birthday Fun at the Huntington

So, I'm still struggling to finish the same dissertation chapter I talked about last time. But I'm getting so grumpy from lack of sleep that I thought I'd take a break to post here and fondly remember some recent events. My dear friend M and I had a ladies day out last weekend to celebrate my birthday. We went to the gorgeous Huntington Library and Gardens and of course we dressed up. It turned out to be perfect weather, and really the whole day and evening were fantastic. What a gift.

Dress and sash: Tulle via Modcloth | Cardi: Banana Republic | Leggings: ? | Shoes: Fluevog Erika (different colorways available)
M is also wearing a Modcloth/Fluevog combo. Her boots (compliment-magnets, I tell you) are still available (Bartoli in red).

My dress without cardi or sash

With cardi but no sash

Trying for fierce expressions

Closeup of my new glasses. This is my usual expression when I look at people/cameras.

We enjoyed ourselves at the Huntington, as expected. We loved walking around the place in our pretty dresses and even better-looking and comfy shoes. Our favorite thing was seeing the mind-blowing Archimedes manuscript exhibit. Archivists and restorers are hardcore. Seriously.

Of course we had to eat somewhere special, so we went to the famous soup dumpling restaurant, Din Tai Fung, in Arcadia, just a few miles away from the Huntington. If you've never been and you love delicious fresh Chinese food and you live in SoCal or are visiting, I highly recommend it.

Then of course we got dessert, despite being already stuffed. These were from J.J.'s in the same plaza as the restaurant.

Then, what do you know, in the same plaza we found a cute little clothing store. Their markups were unfortunately too much. We tried on a couple of things anyway, including these adorable rompers that caught our eye from the window. They're certainly well-made and of good fabric, but much too expensive (at least for us -- does $140 for a romper sound reasonable to you?).

Special thanks to dear M for making my birthday special this year! Oh, and thanks also for drawing this for me:

Can you guess who it is? Ah, she knows me so well. Hee hee! #Cumberfangirl

xo, Gladys

(Some Literal) Navel Gazing

I've got to admit it: I've been struggling for some time now with blogging. Not really with the why of it, but the how.

Sometime in the past two months -- I'm not sure when exactly it happened -- I stopped reading other blogs regularly so I no longer feel much inspiration to share. Sometimes, it's like I don't even know how to put together a post. But this is probably what happened: I quit sewing temporarily at the start of summer because I needed to make sure the house was always ready for guests during our swim lessons here. Then my regular reading of sewing blogs petered out since I wasn't quite as interested anymore. But because I'm a voracious reader, that reading vacuum was filled by news and political editorials as well as a return to my large TBR piles of genre novels. (And thanks to that, I haven't slept well since June.) I'm not really interested in doing book reviews here, however, nor do I see this as a space to rant and rave on politics.

The end result is that I don't have anything to post about on a regular basis. Sure, you've gotten vacation photos and you know about my Fluevog visits/binges. But nothing regular like when I'd have a sewing project done every couple of weeks. I don't even take outfit photos that much anymore because I don't dress up that much. It's just too hot! (Also, no weddings or new babies this year.) And when I do take photos, it's like I've forgotten how to pose -- not that I ever really knew how, but I used to feel more comfortable in front of the camera.

Now that my kid has started kindergarten, I'd like to get back into sewing a bit. There's so much else to do, though, like going back to my dissertation, volunteering at my kid's classroom, and continuing with yoga. Did I tell you I've been doing yoga for the past month? Just once a week, but so far so good. I do it with friends, which is nice. I stopped singing lessons at the beginning of this month because of the stress of dealing with the fallout of my husband's car accident and of preparing for the beginning of the school year. For me, yoga is way better than singing lessons for de-stressing.

I'm hoping the coming fall season will bring back some inspiration. As a weekly classroom volunteer, I might start wearing some of my dresses to school. My son goes to a uniform-policy school, so all of the teachers wear pretty nice outfits everyday. It would be a good opportunity to dress up. :-)

As for sewing, I have a project that I'd like to start and finish this week. If I manage to complete it, I'll take some pics and blog about it.

Finally, here are a couple of outfits I wore recently.

Romper: Prim I Am via ModCloth | Shoes: TOMS via Zulily

The romper was worn to a ladies' night out; we watched the 1980s film Dirty Dancing -- a little cheesy but truly one of the most romantic movies EVER -- for the local movie theater's Classics Series. I still have that famous last song and dance on the brain, "(I've Had the) Time of My Life." The film depicts the early Sixties with the characters wearing some gorgeous resort wear with a Fifties feel. The high-waisted bottom of my romper was appropriate, but not the loose top, and overall the outfit looks Seventies instead. Oh well. At least I finally wore the romper in public; it's been over a year since I bought it. It's actually quite comfortable, good for lounging around at home, but I'm laughing a little in the photo because I know it looks dorky (and I felt dorky wearing it, plus I didn't like the shoes. Not that comfy. I'm not a TOMS fan, I must say).

Top: Freebird via ModCloth | Skirt: Old Navy | Shoes: Fluevog Amie via Amazon

This brown, beige, and cream outfit is something you may remember from my trip to Hawai'i last October. I wore it again for a kid birthday party in the park, this time with Fluevog flats. It was appropriately loose and comfortable for a warm, humid day in Long Beach. No doubt I was remembering the heat and humidity of Hawai'i when I was putting the outfit together. 100% cotton is always a good choice for that kind of weather.

xo, Gladys

Ilona Andrews in San Diego

Posing with the husband-wife writing team, Ilona Andrews

I don't talk a lot about my reading habits on this blog, but it's one of my favorite hobbies in the world and I will always have books to fall back on. It's my fantasy to live in a huge house with its own dedicated library room (kind of like the Beast's library in the Disney Beauty and the Beast). If only, right? Reading was my first love growing up and I even wanted to make a career out of it once; after all, I was a graduate student in English for a long time.

But I definitely don't read high-falutin' books all that much anymore. These days, my reading diet consists mostly of genre fiction. Confession: I ended up as a graduate student in literature partly because I was a romance-novel junkie in my formative years. I moved to the United States from the Philippines when I was about seven years old, and in the ensuing years, I became adept at reading, writing, spelling, and speaking English mostly because I read romance novels all the time. You know, the racy but quick-reading Harlequin Presents stuff. Then I moved on to longer stand-alone historicals, contemporary romances, and then paranormal romances (a subgenre which exploded into the publishing scene back when I was a late teenager). In the middle of all that, I also read the more age-appropriate The Baby-sitters Club series and the occasional sci-fi/fantasy and young adult book (think Norma Klein and Lois Lowry), but it's really the romances that got me started. Once I read Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre in 8th grade, I was hooked into a literate and literary life for good.

In the mid-1990s, while in my tender high school years, I found Laurell K. Hamilton and became a fan of dark urban fantasy. When I got tired of the constant sexxx0ring in the later books of her Anita Blake series, I looked around and found Kim Harrison, who introduced me to a funner and funnier version of the subgenre (I highly recommend her Hollows/Rachel Morgan series -- start with Dead Witch Walking). That led me to several other authors later on, particularly Ilona Andrews, whose Kate Daniels series also had a lot of biting humor and excellent romantic tension that never took over the plotting or world-building.

Reading these novels was my little secret for a long time. You may not know how many people scoff when they hear me talk about romance novels. And this is from people who've never read any (sorry, Jane Austen doesn't count). Only my older sister and one of her friends ever read genre fiction the way I did, and my sister now reads mostly contemporary literary fiction. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when my son and I visited his classmate's house for a playdate last year and I found that his mother's bookcases carried TONS of genre fiction, with lots of crossovers with my own collection. Michelle, the classmate's mom, used to be a young adult services librarian, and she even has a book review blog documenting her prolific reading. We've been exchanging books since then, and I have been happy to get lots of recommendations from her. I slowed down my personal reading quite a bit while working on grad school projects, and it didn't pick up again until this summer, when I managed to knock off at least 6 novels plus several novellas from my mountainous TBR (to-be-read) pile since July. (That's a lot for me, by the way. I'm not a fast reader by any means.) I even re-read a couple of books to remember context. I just wish I didn't need sleep! Anyway, Michelle is a huge fan of Ilona Andrews books, and when she told me about their upcoming visit to San Diego and invited me to go down with her, I said yes.

It turned out to be a grand experience. Her friend Becca kindly drove us down to the awesome independent bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, and then we met up with Maggie, one of Michelle's blogger friends, after the talk and signing. The talk was really an hour-long Q&A with the husband and wife team that is Ilona Andrews. Ilona is a Russian immigrant with a charming accent and really fun sense of humor, and Andrew is an ex-military guy with a quieter but complementary kind of humor. They were so wry and funny together, and you could see how it's possible that they haven't killed each other working so closely together everyday. It was also fun to see how each of their personalities is built into their characters, especially Kate and Curran (if you're familiar with the series). What was truly wonderful, though, was how nice they were in person. They were so generous with their time, signing ALL the books that people brought/bought, and then taking a little extra time to take photos with their readers. Even though they must be exhausted from traveling (Ilona said she has a lot of anxiety flying on airplanes), they are so good with their fans. If you'd like to get a taste of their writing, you can check out their blog where they have hilarious posts as well as free stuff you can read.

We ended the outing with sushi and a visit to a huge used-book/CD/DVD emporium called Book-Off, which was conveniently across the street from the yummy sushi place we found via Google Local. We stuffed ourselves ridiculously full (I didn't take photos of the spicy seaweed poke salad I polished off) then treated ourselves to even more books. Gah!!

Aside from requiring such long drives (special thanks to Becca for getting us there and back safely as well as going to the nearby Japanese grocery and providing us with fun candy snacks to keep us awake on the drive home), it was a perfect day with new friends that nourished mind and body both. Bonding over good books and good food is no small thing. What a great way to cap off my summer vacation.

xo, Gladys

Seattle Vacation, Part 4

This is the last post on our vacation (that doesn't have to do with Fluevogs ... wait for the next post!), which we ended on a geeky note. The Museum of Flight is just a few miles from the Seattle-Tacoma airport, so we spent our last hours in Seattle there. It is a very impressive museum with an amazing collection of real-life and model airplanes, space vehicles, and military/NASA paraphernalia. It's a great place for kids because there are many interactive educational exhibits with buttons to push and levers to move, and partial replicas of planes and jets where you can sit in the cockpit. There was a cool replica of a small part of the International Space Station that included the exercise area for the astronauts -- basically, a treadmill that was on the "ceiling" (since they float in space there is no ceiling for them, just six-sided rooms). Wouldn't that exhibit be perfect if they could replicate the floating, too? :-) There was also a room overlooking the large parking lot that mimicked a control tower at an airport, where you could hear the actual transmissions from the control tower nearby (the museum is located on or near a regional airport, not the international SEA-TAC).

There was so much more than what's in these photos. We didn't even visit one whole wing dedicated to Boeing company. Top left photo is of the convertible plane car (yes, it could both drive on roads and fly), invented in the 1950s. It obviously never caught on -- only a few handfuls were ever built -- but it was a cool vehicle.

My five-year-old son B enjoyed the whole place very much. There was so much for him to see and do. After learning about the solar system at preschool, he's now a pro at naming and recognizing all eight planets in our solar system as well as Pluto, in addition to knowing their relative sizes and distance in order from the sun. Plus he loves planes and vehicles like his engineer dad. I'd love for him to be a scientist-astronaut!

A mother can dream, right?

Randomly, I had to have my husband take a pic of the lovely mannequin in the pic below. We had no idea why she was in this particular exhibit, "Early Days of Airmail," nor why her back was turned to the viewers, but I thought her outfit was awesome, even from the back.

Loved the cloche hat and her fur stole.

Here are a couple last photos from our trip: a visit to a Cow Chips, a cookie shop that my husband last visited as a child (good cookies), and the requisite visit to the waterfront (we didn't eat at Ivar's, but we liked how the sign in the window says "KEEP CLAM").

Good spot to people watch

Just being neighborly on a rainy Seattle day

Have a happy Monday. Thanks so much for reading!

xo, Gladys

Seattle Vacation, Part 3

You're probably getting tired of all my vacation photos, but there's so much I want to share from our week-long trip! If you ever visit the Seattle area as a tourist, I can definitely recommend visiting 1) Remlinger Farms where you can pick strawberries in the spring/summer, go on carnival rides, and shop the farm's market (definitely for kids); 2) the fantastic and huge Pacific Science Center (with or without kids); and 3) the stunning Chihuly Garden and Glass (without young kids is a good idea because of all that glass). The duck tour was also fun; it's probably better to go at the beginning of your trip to see what you'd like to explore further. Everything but the first was at or near the Seattle Center, which includes the famous Space Needle and the International Fountain. Our hotel was within walking distance to the Seattle Center, so it was very convenient.

Remlinger Farms

Butterflies and life-size checker board at the Pacific Science Center

Mesmerizing blown-glass sculptures at Chihuly

Group photo

Seattle Center

We also splurged on a fancy lunch at Toulouse Petit, which serves New Orleans-style food. My husband started us off by ordering beignets which came with a coffee-flavored sauce. Yummy! We ordered the seafood gumbo (WARNING: super spicy!!), clam and sausage pasta, beef burgers, and chicken nuggets. The fries that came with the burgers and nuggets were very herby, spicy (cajun seasoning?), crispy, and delicious. My older sister and I shared the gumbo and the pasta dish, but the gumbo was so hot (temperature-wise) and spicy that we could only eat a little bit at the restaurant; she took the rest home. The pasta dish was a different story, very lemony and bright, and it was quickly eaten. I also loved the flavor of the chicken nuggets. It wasn't the usual processed frozen stuff, so of course my son didn't like it. :-( But I thought it was very tasty and tender, partly because they used dark meat instead of white. I wish we had gone to the restaurant earlier during our trip so that we could have enjoyed the leftovers. But it was our last chance to spend time with my sister and her sons, and it was wonderful because of that. I miss those boys so much! I wish they lived closer to us.

xo, Gladys

Wild Things

Google Doodle: Lovely tribute to Maurice Sendak for what would have been his 85th birthday (b. June 10, 1928)

Here's to a great, if not wild, Monday and a great week! It's going to be busy for us here. We're getting ready for my son's preschool graduation and a long-awaited vacation with family. I finally get to see my newest nephew, my older sister's second child. We just have to get through this week first!

xo, Gladys

Spearmint on Stage

New haircut (Yay, my bangs are back!)

Happy Wednesday, everyone! It's International Fluevog Day today! I'm planning to go to the Melrose store later, and I should have a writeup of the event in a day or two. In the meantime, here's an outfit post for you.

Dress: Monteau Los Angeles via Modcloth | Maryjanes: Fluevog Malibran (Operetta family) via Amazon

Pockets!

Fluevog | Amazon

Have I shared this dress here before? My husband gave it to me for Xmas a few months ago. If you're a longtime reader, you might recognize that it's the same exact style as three other dresses I own (1 | 2 | 3). It's obviously a favorite, and I want more in different fabrics!

I wore this simple outfit last Saturday evening, when I had to perform at the Spring Recital for a local performing arts academy. I haven't mentioned it here before, but I started taking private singing lessons a couple of months ago. I used to sing regularly in choirs and a band during high school and college, and I missed it. It's been a lot of fun, but I had forgotten how nerve-racking it was to perform on stage in front of strangers (and friends, too) -- or at least, the idea of it was. The couple of weeks beforehand were pretty stressful, and I'd get butterflies in my stomach every time I thought about performing. Waiting in the wings right before my turn had my heart pumping so fast and hard that I wondered if I'd be able to push my voice out. But once I got up on stage, I surprised myself by how lucid I felt. The audience helped, since they were very nice to everyone who performed. My voice felt shaky in the beginning, but I managed to calm down enough to hit the few difficult parts of the song. (I sang "Almost Lover" by A Fine Frenzy. Not my choice since I'd never heard the song before, but my instructor said it was a good fit for my voice.)

The only problem was the accompaniment, since the pianist never bothered to learn the song beforehand. He kept giving excuses not to play whenever there was rehearsal, and I had a very bad feeling when he was late for call time so no one got to practice their song live. He's the piano instructor, and he messed up the songs of EVERY student he played for except his own students (he was just fine for his own jazz performances). I felt so bad for one of the teenage girls who sang in a totally different key than the one the pianist was playing. Seriously, he couldn't have tested out the key beforehand with the singer so he could transpose? What a jack***! That's why you practice beforehand! It takes a ton of courage to get up there and perform, and even more so when you're that young. She looked devastated by the end, and even the loud applause didn't help. :-(

After watching the footage (my husband video-recorded my piece), I'll say that my song didn't sound as bad as I feared. Most of the audience were probably just relieved that there wasn't another mishap with conflicting voice/piano. My dear friend M who came to watch the show said that it sounded perfect to her (her word, not mine; that's why she's one of my best friends, right!). I was able to stay on pitch the whole time since I asked for the first notes, I knew that song front-to-back, and I had the advantage of many more years of singing experience over the other singers, who were all half my age or less! But I had to improvise a bit when the pianist added extra measures between verses -- the worst was when he killed the momentum leading into the bridge -- and then just played the same tune over and over again at the end when he couldn't figure out how to follow me tempo-wise. (He must have lost his way in the sheet music. Seriously?!) At a certain point, the piano sounded like a march, beat, beat, beat, beat. And he was simply not slowing down at all at the end, the place in a ballad when you're supposed to slow down. Again, that's why you practice beforehand! Ugh.

Lesson learned: insist more strongly on using the karaoke version (the version my instructor had was actually good) if something like that ever happens again. Also, never bring my son to this guy if I want my son to learn piano. I'm probably spoiled by all the talented musicians I've met and played with in my life, but it boggles my mind that this guy is the instructor for a performing arts academy.

Anyway, thanks for reading through this rant. I'm glad I did the performance, and I'm glad to be back singing in front of people again. For the next post, I promise I'll have more pleasant things to talk about!

xo, Gladys

This Week

The Onion gets how I'm feeling about this week. Warning: lots of swearing in the "article." Sorry for not posting much. I just couldn't. And this isn't even a real post.

Except: I'm sending healing thoughts and love to the survivors of the Boston bombing, to all of Boston which is on lockdown right now, and to the families of the Newtown shooting victims who had their broken hearts pulled out of their chests and crushed once again by the soulless, cowardly politicians in Washington DC. I'm hoping for justice to come for all of them, and all of us.

Much love, Gladys

Matching Doctor Who Tees

Recently, I took advantage of a "random grab bag" sale (40% off) at TeeFury, my favorite place to get Doctor Who and other nerdy tees. I had no idea what I'd be getting, especially given the huge backlist they have, but I decided to get a shirt for my husband as well. While the tee I received had a pretty cool Futurama theme, my husband's tee turned out to be a match with one of the tees I already owned, the hilarious (and my favorite) Impersonate Doctor Who design. I'd figured there was a good chance one of us would be getting a Doctor Who shirt, but I love that he got this design in particular. :-D

Also, yesterday, I received this awesome license plate frame in the mail. It says, "MY OTHER CAR IS A TARDIS." My older sister, a fellow Whovian (Whovian = Doctor Who fan), said she got it for me as an early birthday present. She got one for herself, too, apparently. A lot of our interactions on Facebook involve sharing Doctor Who memes. I love it! The idea of having this license plate frame on my dinky old Toyota Corolla cracks me up! Thanks, older sis!

xo, Gladys

Doctor Who Tees

I have a confession. I've been buying fan-art Doctor Who t-shirts almost whenever I come across them. It's all Facebook's fault. While on FB one day in November, I noticed one of the ads with a Doctor Who-themed tee on it, and of course I clicked. The link took me to a site called TeeFury, which sells a different t-shirt design each day for $10. You only have 24 hours to buy that particular t-shirt. For one day after that, if there are still some left, you can buy the t-shirt for $13 ... but there is a new t-shirt design on the front page. The thing is, it's a geek/nerd/fangirl's paradise for t-shirts, with lots of clever mashups and fantastic illustration, everything from Star Trek to Star Wars, Adventure Time, X-Files, Indiana Jones, Breaking Bad, Hello Kitty, Harry Potter, Big Bang Theory, and lots of other cultural phenomena that I'm less familiar with. Check out their gallery of past designs. It's insane.

(Click on the images below to go to the TeeFury site.)

So I snagged the one that Facebook linked to that day -- with the TARDIS framed by all of the Doctor's enemies -- and I've been hooked since. I've bought four other tees to date. That's a lot of graphic tees for someone like me who usually acquires that many over the course of a year!

One of them made me laugh: Daleks, the Doctor's worst enemy, pretending to be the Doctor of different incarnations. I can just imagine that loud, grating, robotic voice plaintively shouting "Im-per-son-ate! Im-per-son-ate!" (instead of the usual "Ex-ter-min-ate!" in case you didn't know).

This tee I oh-so-generously gifted to Shirl, one of the MotleyFlue, who is also a DW fan like me. The tee depicts the verrry-hot David Tennant as the 10 of Hearts (being the 10th Doctor). Swoon.

My most recent purchase was a twofer, since it was a competition between two Doctor Who tees -- the one to the left is called "Bad Landing" and below that is "Time Fiction" (after Pulp Fiction, get it? *g*). I liked them both and since they were the usual $10 each I decided to go for it.

Given that the official DW tees from ThinkGeek cost twice as much (and the designs aren't as clever as TeeFury's fan-made designs), these are a steal. Plus I like the feel of the fabric itself, which is a soft stretchy cotton knit. I'm usually a size Small but I buy the women's tee in Medium, and it's comfortable and a little loose (which is what I prefer in the "baby tee" style) rather than form-fitting.

There are even a few DW designs that I missed and sort of regret:

Most recently the River Song tee. I love River Song's character. I wasn't in love with this particular design (it barely looks like her) but there are so few RS items that depict her face/body that now I wish I'd gotten it. Oh well.

Then there's this totally adorable design made to look like a knit sweater pattern. It would have been the perfect cheeky graphic tee for winter. I'm not sure how I missed this but I'm sorry about it.

And this one didn't strike me as that interesting at first, but 1) it's a different color than the usual black or navy blue of the other TeeFury tees offered and 2) I'm a fan of French, of David Tennant's Doctor (who said this phrase all the time), and of the typography wrapped around the sonic screwdriver. Why in the world didn't I buy it? I think maybe it was because it was too subtle. At the time it came out, I probably wanted my graphic tees to loudly and obviously proclaim my love for DW. Now I wish I had this one as well.

And by the way, I did buy some Doctor Who fabric from Spoonflower in December, just a couple of fat quarters (this and this). I still haven't figured out what to do with them -- people have made aprons, clutches, purses, and tote bags among other things. We'll see what finally inspires me. :-)

xo, Gladys