It feels a little as if EVERYONE has a FitBit, so perhaps this post is unnecessary. But if you DON’T have one and you’re wondering what it’s LIKE, then I will tell you in time for you to add it to your wish list.

I have the clip-on FitBit (as opposed to the bracelet style). It’s the least expensive FitBit option and it looks like this:

(photo from Amazon.com)

(photo from Amazon.com)

I chose the green one. It was an agonizing decision.

You may notice it looks different in its two pictures: this is because it’s shown with and without its little protective case (the case has the clip on it). I think the case makes it look even prettier, because it’s a complementary shade of green that takes it from “is this green, or is this yellow?” to “green—a yellowish green, but it’s green.”

You can clip it to your bra strap, or you can clip to your pocket. I tried it both ways, and I much preferred the pocket; my mother prefers to clip hers to her bra, but this does make for an amusing sight if she’s trying to check her steps while we’re out in public. If you clip it to your pocket, you’re supposed to clip it to the INSIDE of your pocket: that way if it falls out of its little clip-case, it drops safely into your pocket. It also means that all you see from the outside is the little one-inch-by-1/4-inch stripe of clip, rather than the whole FitBit. This is something to take into account, though, before ordering one of the brighter colors: the green would be very noticeable against my jeans if I didn’t always wear long shirts.

I’ve had the FitBit for just over 2 months now. I wondered if I would even like it, but I DO. In fact, I really, REALLY like it. And you know I am not an Exercise Person.

Here is what I like: it uses the kind of methods that are effective on me to encourage me to do the exercise I feel like I ought to be doing. I like the feeling of having someone monitor my good behavior approvingly: if I walk to my parents’ house instead of driving, someone NOTICES and makes a little SMILEY FACE about it. It’s why I like the Wii Fit, too: I like that someone is KEEPING TRACK. I get CREDIT. And I don’t know why it would be motivating to have a computer keep track uncaringly of steps or minutes or whatever, BUT IT IS. The downside is the same as for most such situations: it increases the feeling that if the monitoring stops, there’s no point behaving. If the FitBit stopped working one day and I knew it wasn’t recording my steps, my motivation would PLUMMET. Buuuuuuuuut….”plummeted” is near my USUAL level of motivation, so not much lost, and lots gained.

Here is what the dashboard (on the computer) looks like:

(screen shot from FitBit.com)

When I first set it up, I changed the step goal to 2000 because I didn’t have any idea how many steps I might already be doing, and I didn’t want to get discouraged right off the bat. (The miles and active-minutes goals are also adjustable.) After awhile, I raised the step goal to 5,000, and then to 7,000, then to 10,000.

You get badges (little pictures on your dashboard) for meeting milestones: your first 5,000 steps in a single day; your first 5 miles; etc. They’d be more fun if there were more of them: after meeting all the early goals, the later goals feel so unlikely. Also, I don’t like the feeling it gives me that NOTHING IS EVER GOOD ENOUGH. “You went 30,000 steps in a single day? Great! NOW DO MORE.” Also-also, I want to see all my badges in little rows like on a Girl Scouts vest, not just the one they consider “top.”

I like that it differentiates among the intensities of different kinds of walking. Like, if I am strolling around Target, leaning on the cart handle indolently while sipping a coffee and barely lifting my feet, those steps are orange (“light”); but if I am out on a walk, those steps are yellow (“moderate”) and/or green (“very”). The colors can be a little tricky because each line’s color represents the steps done in that 15-minute period. So you can do 5 minutes of fast walking and 10 minutes of sitting down and end up with an orange or yellow line, no green showing—and yet the Very Active Minutes dial will still count those 5 minutes. (Someone who is Very Active Indeed may resent the level the FitBit considers Very Active: if I walk just over 2 miles/hour, it registers as Very Active.)

There was a calorie tile, too, but I took it out because I found it perplexing/upsetting/unhelpful, and because my latest attempt at improving overall health is trying not to get discouraged and give up when healthful moderate exercise doesn’t seem to result in being willowy and underweight, and trying to focus on exercise being good for overall health ANYway, especially now that I am in my Elder Years. But it’s interesting because it tracks ALL estimated calorie usage, including while you’re asleep, not just “exercise calories,” and so maybe I will use it later on.

You can see over to the right of the dashboard screen that you can be friends with people and see their steps, and it ranks you in order and declares a weekly winner. But I think I would find that kind of competition discouraging and/or upsetting and/or annoying. I MIGHT add Paul, if he were to get a FitBit—but I can picture getting annoyed and unfriending him.

I worried that it would be a pain to set up, but it was not. I wish I could remember how much personal information it asked for, because that’s the kind of thing I like to know before setting up something online. I notice that my weekly email from them is addressed to “Kristen Surname Initial,” so presumably it doesn’t make you put in a full/real name. I think it’s first and last name (though I used an initial) and user name and password; also I think height and weight. Then you plug a little nubbin into a USB port on your computer, and you hold up the FitBit, and it syncs up. Thereafter, it automatically syncs every time you get near your computer. (There are separate instructions for setting it up with a smartphone or tablet.) My mom almost never checks on her computer, and always looks at the FitBit itself; I almost never look at the FitBit itself, but I have the FitBit window always open in a tab on my computer.

The email level is nice. FitBit emails once a week to tell you your previous week’s summary: how many total steps, how many total miles, how many average steps/miles per day, highest/lowest daily steps/miles. It also nags you to set up the sleep tracker, but the type of device I have doesn’t DO sleep, I don’t think. FitBit also sends an email each time you earn a badge.

So! The FitBit is one of those devices that seemed very expensive to me for something I wasn’t even sure I would LIKE or USE—but now that I have it, if it broke I would buy a new one WITHIN THE HOUR and I would pay extra for overnight shipping. It’s made a significant difference in how I feel about exercise and how willing I am to do it. If I have to park far away, I think, “Yay, more steps!” If I JUST came upstairs and realize I need something else from downstairs, I think, “Well, I’ll get more steps.” If I’m at 8,000 steps for a day, I’ll think, “Hm, maybe I’ll go for a little walk!”

It takes me from “Very Unmotivated to Exercise” to “Just the Right Amount of Motivated.” That is, I feel a little uncomfortable if I don’t meet the step goal, but I don’t change my life in negative ways (finking out on other plans, staying up past bedtime, forcing myself to exercise even when I’m sick or hurt) in order to meet it. I’m not sure I would recommend it for anyone who feels they might get a little obsessive about it, or who finds themselves prone to “Nothing is ever enough” feelings.

This would also not be ideal for someone who gets a lot of physical activity in non-step-taking ways: I imagine it would be quite frustrating to lift weights all afternoon and then have a frowny-face on your FitBit as if you’d been eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Trees and reading People magazine.

Two things I had to discover by accident about jam, but maybe you have known all your life:

1. Grape JAM is completely different than grape JELLY. Grape jelly is the stuff that’s translucent and kind of like jell-o and doesn’t go on smoothly. Grape JAM is opaque and, after swishing the knife around in it, goes on smoothly. I didn’t learn this until my late twenties; I always just thought I hated grape jam because I was thinking of jelly and didn’t know there WAS a grape jam. But as anyone who has made jam or jelly knows, jelly is basically gelled fruit juice, while jam has the fruit in there.

2. Seedless strawberry jam could instead be called Big-mushy-strawberry-lump-less jam. The seeds don’t bother me so I never bought seedless. Then either Paul or I bought the seedless by mistake—and it was a revelation like the grape jam: it’s LOVELY. Because they have to strain out the seeds, you don’t get those unspreadable big mushy strawberry lumps either. (If those are your favorite part, then you’ll want to avoid the seedless.)

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I have a small diaper bag I bought long ago on clearance at Lands’ End, thinking it might be useful even though I didn’t like the color. It ended up being the Emergency Car Diaper Bag: it was just the right size for two to three diapers, some wipes, some hand sanitizer, and a fresh onesie. It saved my bacon many a time.

Tidying the car recently, I found it under the driver’s seat. The bag is still in good shape, but what to use it for, especially since I don’t like the color? THIS is what:

It is now an Emergency Car Bag for teenagers.

This idea started when I picked a child up from school for an orthodontist appointment, and as he got into the car I made the immediate and uncharacteristic decision to RISK BEING LATE: instead of driving directly to the appointment, we stopped at home to have him change his shirt and put on deodorant, because LORDY. A clean shirt won’t fit in the bag, but a travel pack of diaper wipes and a thing of deodorant would help considerably if we didn’t have time to stop at home.

Also a comb, hand sanitizer, and a snack, which are potentially useful for ANY of us (as are the wipes).

There were requests on the How Religious Are We post for a breakdown of what TYPE of religion everyone is. And I think that’s a fun idea and I think we should do it.

Here is the trouble: I don’t know all the types. So before I make the poll, I need to know what to put ON the poll. I’m not sure how well this will work: for example, there are huge swaths of denominations that fall under “Christian”—do we need a separate poll option for every single one? Certainly the denominations vary considerably, to the point where some denominations would consider themselves significantly different than others (thus the existence of denominations). But do we need to list every single denomination, or could we clump them a bit with adjectives such as conservative and liberal? …I kind of think we need every denomination, don’t you, considering how very very relative such terms are? But multiply all the different religions times all the denominations within that religion and WHEW! We are looking at a long poll, aren’t we! Well, that’s fine. It’s not like we pay by the inch.

And what about people who consider themselves a particular religion but don’t affiliate themselves with a particular denomination? I suppose we’d need a Miscellaneous category for each religion?

If you’re religious but are not aligned with anything (religion OR denomination) that has a name, you can suggest a poll option you think would cover it well. It’s going to be a challenge, though, because so many possibilities would ALSO apply to all the other categories: “spiritual,” for example. Maybe something like “Unaffiliated Religious”?

(If you’re not religious, don’t worry: maybe we can do a non-religious poll later on, because there were requests for that as well.)

Well, I’m not at all sure this is going to work, but let’s try it anyway and see what we get. In the comments section below, tell me what you’d vote for if you saw it. (You may certainly be anonymous if you prefer.) If you’re somewhat flexible, say so (“I could vote for either Methodist or Christian, though I’d prefer to vote for Methodist”)—and it would be a good idea to say it in a way that explains how it works (“I’m a Christian, but more specifically I’d align myself with the Christian denomination known as Methodist”), to help me figure out which things are similar-but-different and which things are subsets of other things.

But remember that it would be useless to have a poll where every single person is the only person voting for their own exact, specific option: we are looking for CLUMP terms to fit a LARGER group, rather than, say, each person’s own name. It would be nice to end up with a format like this for the poll:

Christian: Baptist
Christian: Christian Reformed Church
Christian: Methodist
Jewish: Orthodox
Jewish: Reconstructionist
Jewish: Reform

And so on. I’m not going to make an option for “Christian: Liberal Politically but Conservative Biblically” or “Christian: But I Don’t Actually Believe in God, I Just Think the Christian Religion Offers a Good Model for Living Morally.” We’re looking for how we’d tell it to a census-taker, not how we’d explain it to a spouse candidate.

In fact, would it work to have the answers in exactly that format? ________: _________. Main religion first, followed by section? I’ll bet that WOULD work!

All right, are we ready to try this? Leave your poll-option choice below—and feel free to come back later and change it, if someone else mentions a choice you like even better.

If the temperature drops and the heat inexplicably does not come on, one of the first things to check is if a child has been playing with the emergency shut-off switch “to see what it does” and has left it in the off position. I am so glad we DID think of that (credit: Paul) because I would have been QUITE EMBARRASSED if we’d called a service company to find out what was wrong with our furnace and it was $160 for them to flip that switch back on.

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I was at Target the other day and they were putting up the Christmas stuff—and what to my wondering eyes did appear but OMG INITIAL ORNAMENTS. The Harvey Lewis ones, silver cursive initials with little rhinestone accents. They didn’t have them last year (and maybe not the year before, either? I can’t remember now), and I read somewhere they they’d been discontinued, and we were missing ONE ornament because I was being all picky/questy/relaxed about finding each one on clearance. So I had all these eBay searches set up, but the initial I needed hardly ever showed up, and when it did it had RED rhinestones instead of CLEAR, or else the seller KNEW people were frantic and so set a price of $20 when the ornaments sold at $6-7 full price.

ANYWAY. I stood there stunned for a minute, then put the initial I needed into my cart, full-price and so glad to pay it.

Now that I am not religious, it feels to me as if EVERYONE is religious. EVERYONE. But when I was religious, it felt like it was a rare and special thing to find someone else who was, too. It’s like chicken/beef recipes: when I have two pounds of chicken about to turn on me, it seems like all the yummy recipes are made with beef; when I want to try Edward on some red meat, all the yummy-sounding recipes are chicken.

I’d like to do a poll to get an idea of what the actual percentages are. Has your heart already started pounding with all the scientific/statistical problems inherent in this experiment? But I don’t care much about the population at large: I’m more interested in the percentages of the population I hang around with. And I’m not going to worry about the integrity of non-verified, voluntary-response data collection, or whatever. So we won’t try to apply the poll results to The World or anything—it’s more like a party game.

Here is another huge issue to contend with: what “religious” means. I use the word religious deliberately, even though when I was religious I was fond of saying I was NOT religious “and neither was Jesus,” or whatevs. But we need a word that includes ALL the religions, and “religious” IS IN FACT the word used for that. I understand if it makes you flinch a little, and alternate suggestions are welcome though unlikely to be used: a word that means religious but isn’t “religious” is something that religions would have figured out by now if it existed, I think. And I’m not using “spiritual,” because that one makes me flinch even more, and also I’d say it’s LESS accurate than “religious.”

So does this make sense so far? In this situation we are using “religious” in its nice, loose, no-flinching-required, “we need a good loose category-describing word here and I don’t think we have a word better than this one” sense. “Well, I believe in God and Heaven but I don’t really belong to a PARTICULAR religion” or “I’m a [name used for a member of a certain religion], but I’m not RELIGIOUS” are invalid statements for our purposes. We ALL would prefer to use a word that didn’t have some of the connotations of the word “religious,” but this is what we’ve got.

There is a huge, HUGE spectrum for what “religious” includes, especially when we are trying to cover more than one religion, and I am going to break that down into very rough categories which, as the editor of our local paper says about editing letters, never makes anybody happy. NONE OF US will be happy with these categories. NONE OF US, including me. We are just all going to have to choose the one that BEST represents us, and resist the temptation to say, “Well, I can’t vote because none of these categories describes the EXACT set of feelings/attitudes I have, which I will now list for you in multiple, detailed paragraphs.” [Though you MAY do the multiple, detailed paragraphs on their own, if that would be fun.] EVERYONE belongs to a Religion of One, and there is no poll for that. Instead we are looking for APPROXIMATE CLUMPS.

The category descriptions are merely samples to give you the gist of what I’m looking for—I wanted something that would be more helpful than just “A Little Religious” or “Strongly Religious,” since one person’s “strongly” might be another person’s “medium-low.” I’ll list a number of attributes for each level that MAY OR MAY NOT APPLY to a particular member of that level. You may VERY WELL find that you belong right in between two categories, or that you are a mix of two or three; in that case, pick the one that feels MOST like you. (If they are exactly equal, flip a coin.) Or you may find that you belong to one category for the most part, but one single descriptive point for that category is completely wrong; that’s okay, go ahead and choose it if it’s the category that suits you best OVERALL. This is not a poll to reveal the exact location on the spectrum of any one individual, so these “had to pick one that wasn’t quite right” answers (i.e., the answer of EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO VOTES) should average out overall to show us a group picture.

You may guess from my examples that I was brought up Christian. I tried to make the categories inclusive of religions in general, but I think the Christian thing will still end up seeping through, since that’s the only one I’m familiar with. I thought about trying to give examples from other religions, but it seemed like that was the sort of thing that could misfire and/or cause additional confusion. You may have to modify language, therefore, to get the GIST of the category: if I’ve said “deity” but you believe in a group of deities, or if I said “pray” but you’d use a different word for a different-but-similar type of activity, that still works for these categories. I have confidence that this is something we can manage.

Also, I left out crazy people. That is, I think that many of the people in the extreme categories are people using religion to justify stuff that has nothing to do with religion, to the appalled horror of other people in that religion. So I didn’t make a category for them. If you are a crazy person, you can choose whatever category you feel best describes you.

Let’s start at one end of the spectrum and work down:

1. Not Religious. This doesn’t require you to go around being ACTIVELY NON-RELIGIOUS all the time (though that’s an option). You don’t have to have a Darwin fish on the back of your car (but you can). Maybe you feel a little dismay when you find out someone with Friend Potential is religious, or maybe you don’t care. Maybe you scoff at religion, or maybe you don’t. Maybe you allow for the possibility of one of the many religions being true, or maybe you don’t. But you would not say, “Well, God has a plan for us all” or say that people who die go to heaven. You would circle “none” on the part of the hospital form about religious affiliation.

2. A Little Religious. You don’t go to church, or maybe you go for the Christmas Eve service. You are comfortable with religious-type words/songs, and you might say “God has a plan for us” or refer to people as looking down on us from heaven, but you might not know if there’s an actual god or actual heaven, or be investigating it further. You’re okay with a lot of different religions, as long as they don’t get pushy with you. You don’t necessarily think any one religion is “right.” Your own religious life might mix-and-match quite a bit, or you might try different things sometimes. You’re okay with word substitution: you’d be fine with saying/hearing “God, or Allah, or The Universe, or whatever you believe in.” You pray sometimes, but mostly in the “Please let him be okay” type way. If you found out all the religions were untrue and this was all there was, you might be disappointed but you would be fine.

3. Medium-Low Religious. You belong to a church: it’s an excellent way to meet people and participate in the community, and a good solid foundation for your kids. You like it and you like participating in it and it gives you a good feeling to do so, and you think of it as the sort of activity that makes people better overall. You’d prefer a political candidate to be the same religion as you, but you wouldn’t necessarily make that the deciding factor or anything. You don’t get into intense theological arguments with other people, and you don’t object if people belong to other religions than yours. If you found out your religion was untrue, you’d be upset for awhile but you’d be okay in the long run—and you might think an organization LIKE religion should keep going for the other benefits of it.

4. Medium-High Religious. You belong to a church, and you participate regularly (or you don’t right now but really feel you should as soon as it’s possible). You teach your children the stories belonging to your religion; you pay attention to their religious education, and think it’s important that they get it. You would be upset/worried if they didn’t grow up as believers. You pray fairly regularly and/or think you should do it more. You accept your religion’s structure for how things work: there is an actual supernatural world with actual real supernatural entities in it; there is a heaven and/or a hell and/or other supernatural location where humans go after death. If there is a difficult issue to figure out where you stand on it, you’d take your religion into account while deciding. If you had to make a short list of words describing who you were, your religious affiliation would be in there for sure. You feel your religion is the right one, though other religions may come close. If you found out your religion was untrue, it would be intensely upsetting and you would have to completely restructure your life and beliefs around this new information.

5. Strongly Religious. Everything in life is seen through the filter of religion. It is absolutely true, and of ultimate importance. It is pretty horrifying to imagine your children losing the faith, because it matters in an eternal way. The supernatural elements described by your religion are just as real (or more real) than the reality of the Earth and the humans and animals and so forth. There is an actual deity who actually exists, and there is no question about that (though feeling occasional doubt can be considered normal because of our failings as humans and because of attacks on our faith). Other religions have it wrong to varying degrees. If someone you love disagrees with your interpretation of a religious issue, it can be a very big deal. If you found out your religion was untrue—well, it’s too upsetting to consider that hypothetical.

Okay! Let’s just TRY this. Remember that none of the categories are going to describe you exactly. And it’s anonymous, so you don’t have to worry that you “ought to” choose a different category. As much as is possible with something like this, choose the one that actually best describes your actual level of religion.

[yop_poll id=”4″]

If you are subscribed to receive new posts/comments by email, you might right now be getting hundreds or thousands of emails from me.

1. I am extremely sorry.

2. I don’t know what the hell, but I’m having Paul look into it right this second even though he’s at work.

3. He is extremely upset and riled about it, if that’s any comfort. (It was to me.) We are saying “HOLY CRAP” and “WHAT THE HELL” back and forth to each other.

4. I can’t believe how unpleasant a situation this is, and I am extremely sorry it is happening to you.

Follow-up: Looks like it was an issue with another plug-in interacting poorly with the email subscription plug-in, and not with hackers or anything. Also looks like it’s over, and we’ve deleted the plug-in.

I finally added an actual printable thing for the fridge to the Fall Back (Standard Time) Printout to Avoid the Endless Discussions About Whether It’s Earlier or Later Right Now post:

Fall Back Fridge Printout

Today I went shopping with my mom and Elizabeth, and here was what I said, in order:

5 minutes into the store: “It makes me nervous to let her go off by herself like that—but I think it’s good for her, AND for me.”

6 minutes into the store: “I hope she can FIND us when she’s done trying those chairs.”

7 minutes into the store: “She probably went to the toy section.”

7.5 minutes into the store: “Okay, let’s just go look in the toy section, just to set my mind at ease.”

8 minutes into the store: “Okay, now I am getting anxious.”

8.1 minutes into the store: “Okay, how about if we split up and you go that way and I go this way.”

I walked my entire part of the long main store aisle, and what I was thinking was how incredibly, incredibly stupid I was going to feel if I let Elizabeth go off on her own “because it’s good for her AND for me” and she got taken by some horrible person and I never found out what happened to her and/or did find out what happened to her. Oh, I’ll be SO GLAD I worked on her independence and my anxiety THEN, won’t I? SO GLAD. SO WORTH IT. Why have I been “working on” my “issues” with worrying that one of my children will be taken, when ACTUAL CHILDREN ARE ACTUALLY TAKEN EVERY DAY BY ACTUAL BAD PEOPLE, AND THOSE CHILDREN BELONG TO ACTUAL PEOPLE JUST LIKE ME, WHO IN THOSE SITUATIONS HAVE EXPERIENCES EXACTLY LIKE THIS ONE AND THE CHILD IS NOT FOUND? WHY HAVE I BEEN “WORKING ON THAT”???? HAVE I ACTUALLY EVER USED A WORD LIKE “STATISTICALLY” IN THIS CONTEXT?????

I kept looking behind me to see if my mom had found her, and the answer kept being no. I started thinking about what the next step would be. Alerting the store? Calling 911? Running out into the parking lot? If I’d updated my Facebook status at that moment, I would have been searching for the “feeling dazed horror” option.

I got to the far wall, and I turned around and started walking back. Here was my greatest fear, and what I was increasingly sure I would see: that I would see my mom walking back towards me from the opposite far wall, by herself. I saw nothing. I kept walking. And then I saw my mom, walking toward me without Elizabeth, and then I saw that no, she was with Elizabeth, and that’s when I started crying. Elizabeth was embarrassed and I think a little mad at me, saying that she ALWAYS goes off to look by herself. GOD MOM STOP BEING SO EMBARRASSING. Statistically it was very unlikely it would have ended any other way.

I’m continuing to play Candy Crush, and to retroactively understand all the remarks people were making about it on Twitter, and all the remarks Paul was making about it in our living room. For example: chocolate. Paul kept saying chocolate was evil, EVIL, and I thought sure, it was probably challenging but didn’t require that kind of language in front of the children. Well, I repent, Paul. I repent of my judgey feelings. The children need to KNOW how evil chocolate is. They need to LEARN, while they’re still young.

One of my favorite things now is when I accidentally trigger one of those avalanches of clattering and as a result knock out a chocolate section completely. ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS. That is, I look at the world and I consider all its vast and varied wonders—and after carefully considering all those wonders, one of my FAVORITE THINGS is a thing that happens accidentally on Candy Crush sometimes.

My aunt just left after one of her usual fun visits at my parents’ house, and my mom and I always feel a little wan after she leaves because it seems like now there’s No More Fun. So today after moping around the house for awhile I emailed my mom and asked did she want to go out to lunch and to Goodwill to look for things for Elizabeth’s Halloween costume, and she said YES and we were OUT THE DOOR.

Elizabeth wants to be the White Witch of Narnia. I did an image search so I know that in the movie the White Witch has, like, beaded ballgowns, long fur capes, dreadlocks, and icicles sticking out of the top of her head. We haven’t seen the movie, so I asked Elizabeth what she thought the White Witch looked like, and Elizabeth thought she probably wore all white, so we’re going with that version. We have a pretty good start on it already because she has a white fake-fur coat, white tights, and silver shoes. She also has a white skirt, but it’s a short cotton-knit playskirt—not very White Witchy. My hope was that I could find something cheap at Goodwill, AND I DID:

What a ridiculous picture. There is no way to tell what’s going on here. I will have to describe it for you, as if there were no picture at all. On the left is a women’s size 7 ankle-length Jessica McClintock white shimmery/satiny skirt, or possibly a very fancy half-slip for under a wedding dress, way prettier that it looks in this frankly terrible and useless photo. I’m not sure yet how I’ll pin it—maybe I’ll fold/roll it so it’s still a skirt, or more likely I’ll pin on some shoulder straps so she can wear it as a dress, but WHATEVER, it’s exactly what I was hoping to find. It was $4.99, but then it turned out all the stuff on the Halloween racks was 50% off AND I have a 10%-off-every-purchase Goodwill card (it costs $10 and you can use it for a year, so if you spend more than $100/year it’s worth it—and if not, it’s a nice donation to Goodwill), so it was $2.25. TWO TWENTY-FIVE FOR THE REALIZATION OF MY DREAMS.

I was not really thinking when I took this photo, apparently, because I have the Goodwill stuff interspersed with the craft store stuff, so next there’s a white feather boa from Michaels, looking as if it’s part of the skirt, which gives the whole thing a racy look. (Plus, the hanging-loops are still on the skirt/slip and they’re flopping out looking like shoulder straps, and the skirt is folded over a bit creating a false bustline as if it’s a dress DID NO ONE THINK THIS OUT?) I’m not sure how she’ll wear that boa, but probably just around her shoulders. Or maybe I’ll pin it to the bottom of the skirt? or drape it around and around her neck? I don’t know, but I had a 40%-off-one-item coupon so it was $2.99. Probably unnecessary, but fun to buy.

Next is a package of plain white cardboard crowns, also from Michaels. I was all, “Hm, too bad they only have these colorful crowns and they seem too small, I wish they had something plain white and adjustable, oh well giving up and moving on,” and my mom was all, “Wait, like this exact thing hanging right here?” I think there are six of them in the pack. $2.99. Maybe we’ll decorate one with sparkles and/or glitter glue, or maybe it’s best to leave it white, I’m not sure.

On top of the crowns is a 2-pack of fake pearl bracelets from Goodwill, $.88. Again, probably-unnecessary-but-fun.

And last is a shawl-thing, triangular with impressive silky fringe, also from Goodwill. The fabric is champagne, but I think it’ll work because it’s so shot-through with silver that the overall effect is silvery/shimmery/fancy. It has a border of black and silver beads. 50% off, then another 10% off, so it was $.90.

I’m very pleased. I think this is going to work nicely. She can borrow a pair of my faux pearl earrings, too.

Oh! Oh, and then ALSO at Goodwill, I found a Lands’ End girls’ raincoat, a LONG one, like for SERIOUS RAIN, just exactly the sort of raincoat I would have loved to find for her this past summer for camp. I looked at the tag and it was $10, so I was going to pass it up (it’s in her size RIGHT NOW, so she’d only get one year’s use out of it and it might not even rain), but then I saw the tag was the color of the day so it was 50% off! And then another 10% off with my card! So it was $4.50. WELL OKAY THEN.

It does not look very long in this picture because I’m holding it funny and as you can see I was employing the “Are you going to make it look like it belongs on Etsy or are you going to get the job done quickly and easily?” method of photography, but it’s about knee length. The outside is a very sturdy- and waterproof-feeling hot pink, and the inside is a nice-feeling bright yellow canvas. I’d be surprised if it had ever been worn. I’ll bet someone else bought it for camp and then it didn’t rain.