SheSue Experience

It’s holiday time and that means holiday parties.  This year I am invited to some up-scale parties.  Time to go looking for a ‘little black dress’.  Let me begin this journey with a little background.  I am a comfort

LBD from history

clothing kind of gal.  I did my stint with dresses and suits when I was younger.  Today I wear pants and lots of sweaters.  At home I’m in sweats and T-shirts.  So looking for a dress is not my favorite thing to do.

But I head out determined.  My dilemnas:  short waist, long legs, what I affectionately call my baby belly (what’s leftover after my children),  boobs that aren’t exactly “perky” and let’s face it I have lots of curves in not so attractive places.  According to all the advice I’ve read, I should look for wrap dresses or high waist dresses, no gathering at the waist and not too short.  This is all to camouflage all those body parts I don’t want seen in public.  The wrap dress and no gathering will cover up the baby belly.  The high waist also disguises the baby belly, but also calls attention away from the short waist issue.  All three of these also cover up those curves around the hips.  Not too short for those of us who aren’t looking to pick up a date.

Hint:  Go shopping during the week if you can.  Not so many people out there and no teenagers.  First I head to the discount stores, you know like Ross Dress for Less.   I go here first because I find it difficult to spend a bunch of money on a dress I’m only going to wear a few times.  I find out that dresses are not a hot commodity, so are not easy to find.  Fine, I head for the mall.  Out of 12 clothing stores, only 3 carry dresses.  At each store, I gather my limited selections and head to the dressing room.  Nothing like all those mirrors to reveal more than you wanted to see!  I get down to 2 dresses; 1 a black shear over a black satin slip, the other a black and silver shear over a silver slip.

I like the first one best, but don’t buy.  Instead I head home and email my daughter the picture of the dress for approval.  She likes it!   I’m excited.  Here’s the dress.  Since the dress  has a high neck, I don’t have to worry about a necklace, just some fancy earrings.  Now for shoes….

Is this your Thanksgiving turkey?

Thanksgiving Day is the traditional American holiday on which we give thanks for the many blessings we enjoy. It’s also the day that many women get up at the crack of dawn to spend the day preparing the feast. I remember by mother being exhausted when it was time to sit down and eat! All of this effort was  not without its rewards, as the family enjoyed the food and regaled Mom with compliments.

Fast forward to today. My mom is gone and I spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s family. We try to make it more of a pot luck type of affair. Everybody brings something, but that still leaves a lot of work for my mother-in-law.  So I went in search of ways to make the holiday easier when the time comes for me to host the big day. What I was looking for was easy Thanksgiving recipes and do-ahead recipes. At the same time, I wanted the dishes to be every bit as tasty. The goal was to give me more time to spend with my family on Thanksgiving, rather than being stuck in the kitchen with the hot oven.

Thanksgiving table

The star of the dinner table is typically the turkey. If you’re still basting that turkey ten times throughout the day, wondering why it takes six hours to cook instead of the four hours it’s supposed to, listen up. Here’s the secret. Melt a full cube of butter in a measuring cup and add whatever seasonings you enjoy. With your fingers, carefully separate the breast and thigh skin from the meat. Be careful not to split the skin. Enlist someone to help hoist the bird up, while you pour the melted butter in between skin and meat. With your hands, distribute the butter evenly so that it touches every bit of meat you can reach. Set the turkey on a rack in the roasting pan and cover with foil. You now have the best self-basting turkey ever! Don’t open the oven until it’s cooked according to the weight and time given on the package. This is guaranteed turkey perfection.

Now lets look at food that can be prepared ahead of time. By spending just an hour each day the week before  Thanksgiving, you can get way ahead of the game. So much so that, come Thanksgiving Day, all you need to do is stuff the bird and pop it in the oven. Then you get to kick back and have fun with the family.

Here are some of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes that can be prepared in advance: cranberry sauce, biscuits and rolls, pies, rice dishes and appetizers. Many actually taste better when seasonings marinate for a day or two. Biscuits, rolls and pies can be made a week in advance, as these freeze well for at least a couple of weeks. You won’t spend more than an hour for each. Prepare your cranberry sauce on Tuesday for the best flavor. Green salads or veggies take but a few minutes. You set the table on Wednesday night!

Enjoy this Thanksgiving music video by George Winston.  Watch for the bunny!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s that time of year for holiday parties. As usual, I am on the planning committee. The one thing missing for this year’s party is the psychic reader. At last year’s party we had 3, so I decided to give it a try. I had never been and was curious. Most people assume that the accuracy of a psychic reading is simple and fixed. They read the cards and tell you what you want to hear. I went for fun. I was curious.

But some take it much more serious. For these people, just like going to see any kind of counselor, they see a psychic to come up with guidelines on how to live their lives and accept future experiences. The startling predictions are just icing on the cake.

An authentic psychic reading is accurate, but the predictive accuracy is only one part of it. Anyone trained in psychology can tell basic facts about someone and what they want to hear by the way they talk, the questions they ask, and their mannerisms. This is called cold reading, it is not psychic power. Psychic readings tend be more influenced by someone’s future. Therefore, an accurate psychic reading will tell people enough about the future to convince them of the psychic ability of the fortuneteller and then dispense with some good advice. According to a psychic, it is the good advice that matters, not to reading.

Back to my party. I go into the booth with a lady who is all dressed up like what you see in the movies. She has the long velvet purple skirt and peasant style blouse. She has a small table that has a red tablecloth that goes to the floor. Instead of the crystal ball, she uses tarot cards. She asked me it I was searching for a specific answer or whether I wanted a general reading. I chose a general reading. I was then asked to choose five cards from the deck. This is where it gets a little freaky because the first card I drew was the death card. Now the lady is quick to point out that it doesn’t necessarily mean death literally. She says that for most people it means that we have recently ended something and are moving on to something else.

“Do you know anyone who has died recently?” she asks. I’m not sure what prompted her to ask this. Was it her reading my mannerisms? Because I didn’t say anything when she drew the card.

“My mother,” I reply. My mother had passed on just 2 months before.

The lady is momentarily speechless. Shocked by her own accuracy? Then she quickly recovers and starts laying out the other cards. These cards all had pretty generic meanings. All about how my family would gather around me in my time of sorrow, stuff like that. Just like the psychic above, this lady took my lead and went with it. She dispensed some advice and I was on my way.

Did it make a believer out of me? No. But I have to admit that that death card threw me for a loop.

Have you ever read a book and thought, I wonder what other authors write in a similar style? Well I found a website that does just that. It’s called Fantastic Fiction. You can search by author, book title, book genre, new books, popular titles, book series, and books coming soon.

If you have a favorite author, you can read their bibliography, find out what awards they have received, find all the book titles they have written, descriptions of all those books, authors they recommend, plus where you can purchase all the books. And my favorite part, it tells you authors who write in a similar style.

One of my favorite authors is Anita Shreve. I discovered that she has a new book out, Testimony. I also found out that she has written quite a bit of non-fiction and has received several literary awards. I checked the similar authors list and found many I already read, but some new ones to explore. I’m loving this site! Hope you have fun with it too.

This is a question I have pondered as I nearly always do some sort of fitness between dinner and bedtime.  Since I often have difficulty getting to sleep, I wondered if the fitness woke me up too much.

Old school says it takes 3 hours before your adrenaline and other hormones that surge during exercise return to normal levels.  Plus specialists said that late exercise can raise core body temperature which needs to drop for healthy sleep.

But study after study failed to find that exercise before bed impairs sleep.  Studies showed no effect on getting to sleep or how well subjects slept.  In fact, one scientist felt that exercising eases anxiety, tires you out and makes you more relaxed.  He also claims that the rise in body temperature is actually beneficial in that the area of the brain that helps lower body temperature promotes sleep.

So exercise when you want.  But pay attention to what your body tells you.  Everybody is different.   If you do find that post-dinner fitness is disrupting your sleep, listen to your body, not science.

This is me on my favorite, an elliptical rider.  What’s your favorite?

I have been having therapeutic massage for several years now. It was recommended by my acupuncturist when my arthritis started giving me more trouble and after I was in a minor car accident. Different from a relaxation massage, therapeutic massage is when they work out the knots and kinks. It can be quite painful at times, but in the long run, it helps me move easier. I go at least once a month, twice if I can fit it in.

On my last visit my therapist had been trying out massage using heated stones. After she had done the therapeutic work, she smoothed the stones all over my back. You’re back is already oiled up from the oil she uses to massage with. So the stones slide over your skin easily. She used 2 stones about 3 inches in diameter. It’s supposed to be relaxing and I guess it was – they were nice and warm. I guess I’m just used to her using her lotions that are just as relaxing.

What lotions does she use, you might ask. I’m hoping that I’m not the only baby boomer out there with a bathroom cabinet full of various lotions and creams. I don’t use any sort of drugs except ibuprofen, so I have tried out a variety of lotions. There’s one made from chili peppers that I use for my arthritis, but I kept getting it into my eyes and that wasn’t good. I’ve also used a variety of icy hot type creams. My favorites:

1. If you’ve done one too many push-ups or lifted a few too many rocks, I like the Blue-emu . It’s made with emu oil, aloe and glucosamine. It’s soothing and doesn’t have a nasty smell.
2. Now if I’ve moved a ton of rocks or gone several miles too many in a work-out, then I go for the Biofreeze. This stuff tingles a little when it first goes on, but then it soothes those aching muscles. This is also what my massage therapist uses on my neck after she massages the crap out of it.
3. Finally, if you waited too long and the pain has moved up to your head and have a nice headache along with muscle pain, then go for the Tiger Balm. It’s too late for cooling, you need the heat.