Today as I was perusing the op-ed section of the New York Times the People magazine website, I noticed a blurb that skinny jeans may be on the way out. Apparently photographers have captured Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and some girl I’m supposed to know because she’s on The O.C., only I’ve never watched that particular program, and all three girls have worn their flared boot-cut jeans in the last week or so. People is speculating that the end of the skinny jean trend is near, and for that reason I think we all need to put an extra fiver in the collection plate this Sunday, cheerfully giving an offering above our tithe to THANK THE LORD ABOVE that we’re done with the straightleg jean for another five or ten years.

You can’t even imagine how relieved I am.

If the end-of-skinny-jeans news wasn’t enough, this afternoon I found a pair of sconces that my cousin Paige gave me a few years ago. I’m planning to hang them above the fireplace (with a painting in between), and I think they’re ever-so-much fun. Here’s a picture of one of them:

See? Told you.

Anyway, I was trying to figure out exactly where to place the sconces, and I sat one down one of them down on the hearth so that I could do a little measuring. When I leaned down to pick it up, this is what I saw on the back:

Of course they are.

Now I love them even more.

In completely random news, I would now like to show you a picture of the cutest box of Kleenex I’ve ever seen.

Now y’all. Is that not adorable? I practically squealed with delight in Publix.

It takes so little, really.

I found the finials!

I thought I should tell you since I’m sure you stayed awake all night wondering where in the world they were.

Strangely enough, they were in a box. A box in the garage. Go figure.

I also found the big pewter fish platter that my dear friend Bubba gave us as a wedding present. The fish was quite delighted because he was ready to get out of the box and return to his place of prominence in my kitchen.

Then I discovered a huge green bottle that’s one of my favorite things. It was a gift from Mrs. Cook, a woman in my hometown who owned an antique shop. She also was a member at the church where I grew up, and on Sunday mornings she always walked in the sanctuary at least thirty minutes late, hair sort of artfully akimbo, wearing a look of resigned bewilderment on her face, almost like she was a little ticked off that church had to be on Sunday morning – AGAIN – because really it would be so much more convenient if we could meet on Saturday nights around 9-ish, preferably after cocktails. Her house was CHOCK FULL of decorative goodness, and when I finished grad school, she gave me three funky glass bottles that she found when she was cleaning out closets. Those bottles have had a place of honor in every place I’ve lived since.

Also, last night I discovered that there are lights underneath the kitchen cabinets. Somehow this detail escaped me when we looked at the house, inspected the house, walked through the house, and moved into the house. But last night, as I was trying to figure out if I could put a nail in the backsplash (don’t ask), I looked up, and there were lights! Five of them!

Because I am a freak, I spent the next 45 minutes trying to figure out the optimum lighting equation for the room. I tried just the recessed lights in the ceiling, then just the under-the-cabinet lights, then I dimmed the recessed lights but only turned on a couple of the newly discovered lights, then turned everything on at the same time. Since I’m a firm believer that too much of a good thing is a good thing, I decided that I like all the lights on at once. 

Then, in an homage to my new lighting options, I left the kitchen cabinet lights on all night long. Just because I could. And this morning, when I walked into the kitchen and saw that my countertops were illuminated, I was happy.

You are totally justified in questioning my sanity.

Alex and I went to the grocery store this morning, and I had one of those gigantor lists – the kind where you have to cross off items as you put them in your shopping cart or you’ll find yourself in a swirling vortex of grocery confusion. Usually A. is in a pretty good mood when we go to the grocery store because he considers all of the check-out clerks to be close, personal friends of his, and I knew he’d enjoy getting out and doing a little “visiting” before lunch.

Once we got to the store, we were about to head into the produce section when I spotted a shopper accompanied by two other women, one of whom was carrying a small tape recorder. And I don’t know if y’all remember when I posted the link to that SNL skit about the co-workers a few weeks ago, but Tape Recorder Woman was EXACTLY like the woman with the short wig in the skit. And she was loud. Very, very loud. I know this because I heard her say, “I have a hypothesis about all the reduced-fat foods” from a distance at which her normal conversational volume should have been unintelligible to me.

I’m one of those people who has a system for my shopping, a method to my grocery madness, and as I was very methodically making my way up and down the aisles, I continually ran into the woman who was shopping with Loud Tape Recorder Woman and a companion. I even tried altering my route – skipping an aisle here, reversing direction there, but it didn’t work. Loud Tape Recorder Woman greeted me at every turn.

She was helping an adorable woman who weighed approximately 105 pounds to “shop healthier,” apparently, and the whole thing put me in a foul mood because I was shoveling things like large jugs of mayonnaise and blocks of cheese and industrial-sized containers of peanut butter in my cart. Meanwhile, Skinny Toned Woman and Loud Tape Recorder Woman were debating the advantages of stone ground whole wheat bread vs. regular whole wheat bread, and in a fit of rebellion I wanted to get a donut and cram the whole thing in my mouth as Alex and I passed by them for the 45th time so that I could hear them audibly gasp at my blatant disregard for the food pyramid and my recommended daily intake of saturated fats.

Instead I just smiled pleasantly and tried to camouflage the large cans of cream of chicken soup underneath the value packs of boneless skinless chicken breasts. ‘Cause I’m healthy like that.

And the tape recorder? No idea what it was for – unless she was documenting the contents of my cart each time I passed by her, whispering (no, she wouldn’t have been whispering, for this was a woman who has never acquainted herself with a whisper), “Whatever you do, avoid the following foods” as she listed everything I was buying. It definitely didn’t help matters that I was shopping for a big ole Southern dinner we’re doing at church Sunday night – where low fat fare definitely will not be the order of the day.

Once we got home, I told D. about Skinny Toned Woman and Loud Tape Recorder Woman, wondering what in the world they were up to, and he said, “Well, maybe her husband had a heart attack and she was learning how to cook better for him.” That could very well be. Or maybe STW wants to be even healthier – in which case I wish she’d share a tip or nine with me. But the volume of the whole exchange was a little off-putting…even down here in the South, where we pretty much holler from sun-up to sun-down.

I think I’ll fry up some bacon tonight in their honor. :-)