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Muggy Days and a Futile Search for Shorts

When we landed in Hartford on May 24, it was drizzling and muggy. Muggy! I haven't been in muggy air for five years! San Francisco temperatures always seemed to hang out somewhere in the upper 50's to mid-60's, and I needed to wear my leather jacket nearly every single day. Connecticut in June during a heat wave (I say "heat wave" despite Channel 3 weatherman Bruce DePrest's statement that it's not really a "heat wave" until there are 3 or more consecutive days with temps in the 90's&#41 is quite a shock to the system after five years of fog. First of all, it's just damn hot. And we live on the 3rd floor of a 3-family house, which is essentially an attic. The first thing we bought was a window fan. The second thing was a matching set of ice cube trays. And then there was the quest for a sinple pair of shorts, which is still on-going.

San Francisco doesn't ever get very warm, and it hardly ever got hot enough to wear shorts for any extended period of time. Consequently, I didn't own very many pairs. I owned three, to be exact, as I discovered after I pulled garment after garment out of packing box after packing box, looking for all the shorts I could have sworn I owned at one point or another. Alas, there were just three pairs: one pair drastically out of style, one pair way too short for my taste, and the third…well, the third pair seems to be really tight. Really uncomfortable when you manage to button the button. They must have shrunk. Yeah. Shrunk.

So, off to Old Navy for a couple pairs of inexpensive shorts we went. Oh, Old Navy, your siren song disguised as a catchy jingle keeps luring me in…and leaving me smashed against the sharp rocks of the dressing room. Every time I go into that store I try on 8 different things and wonder if they're sown together by 90-year-old blind people, because no two garments fit the same way! One skirt is baggy, while another of the same style has a crooked hem.

And every single pair of the shorts in the women's department is a short-short pair of shorts. Trying the men's selection is no help either, because every single pair of the shorts in the men's department could practically double as a pair of pants on me, they're so long. I still haven't bought any shorts, simply because (and this is true for other stores as well&#41 the men's are just too big and I refuse, just refuse to buy a pair of women's denim shorts that just barely cover my ass. I want to be able to wear a T-shirt and still have the shorts show, thank you very much. So, I'm still wearing jeans on the hot days. Old Navy will eventually break me down, though, I just know it. One more catchy jingle and they just may have me walking out of there, wearing the short-shorts, pulling and tugging at them and damning those blind Old Navy sewing-people all the way home.

Posted in Scowls.


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