(Mostly Non-Sale) Shopping Lately

Self Portrait "Prairie" Midi Dress (affiliate link) - Definitely not on sale, even though the design has been around a long time.

Before we get started, one quick note: work is going to be extremely busy for me later in January - I'll be taking my first ever deposition! - so my posting here may become more sporadic next week and the week after.  

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in my earning a small commission - at no extra cost to you - if you click and make a purchase. Thank you for your support!

Today's post is about some of my shopping ideas recently, mostly not from the post-Christmas and post-New Years' sales. Have you been shopping any of the winter sales? I've browsed some - including the Tibi sale, where many sale items are 50% off - but I haven't really seen anything I was interested in that was also on sale. 

In terms of cool Tibi items currently on sale at various retailers: that plaid wool skirt I bought at full price in October is now discounted at both Tibi's website and Net-a-Porter, though only in extremely limited sizes. Both Shopbop and Net-a-Porter also have a good number of Tibi items on sale, though often only in one or two lucky sizes. This cutout cashmere turtleneck in sky blue is kind of cool, as is the plaid top that matches the skirt I bought (the plaid top is a bit more deeply discounted at Tibi's website). 

As for the non-sale items I've had on my mind, I've been thinking recently about whether it's time to shop for another "wedding guest dress", since I've felt a bit dowdy when wearing my existing ones to the most recent weddings K and I attended. With all my fussy and nitpicky criteria for party dresses - particularly if other people's weddings are the main type of occasion I'm shopping for; which means white, cream, and many white or cream background prints are off limits, as is red for weddings that might have a Chinese or Indian cultural component - searching for a new dress is likely to take a significant amount of time. It's rare to see many options in stores that meet all my nonnegotiable criteria for this type of dress and might, therefore, even be worth ordering to try on. 

A Year and a Half-ish of Fountain Pens

Back in July 2020 - with no real end in sight to COVID work from home and K and I's plans to continue adhering to fairly strict social distancing - I decided to try out fountain pens for the first time, after seeing Adina's Instagram stories about some of her favorite Pilot Iroshizuku inks. Almost immediately, I became completely obsessed. 

It didn't take long before I went from one pen to five and then far more than that, with an ink collection to match. And my pen and ink collection continued to grow somewhat in 2021 albeit at a much slower rate than before. (Which is good, because I was really a bit out of control with how quickly I jumped into the hobby and the acquisition of new pens, inks, and related accoutrements in 2020!)

Fountain pens and journaling were a perfect pandemic-era hobby for me while I was stuck at home at my desk in our one-bedroom NYC apartment all day long for months on end. It gave me all the time in the world to sit and write with the different ink, fountain pen nib, and paper combinations available to me, to marvel at and admire the various colors and properties of all my inks and ink samples, including some with shimmer, sheening, and shading. 

When I was home all the time, it was also easy to refill any fountain pen as soon as it ran out of ink. Some pens, or rather, their converters, have very limited ink capacity and are emptied after writing barely a few A5-sized pages worth of text; other pens might not be completely airtight so they dry out quickly. It was also easy to find 15 to 20 minutes to clean out a few of my pens each week, when I was in the mood to switch those pens to new ink colors. 

These days - now that I'm fully back in the office every weekday, save for a few recent weeks due to the Omicron surge in NYC, and not that I'm also close to billing normal amounts of hours by pre-pandemic standards - I find I'm not able to make as much use of my fountain pens as before. Back while social distancing, once I'd built that rather prodigious collection of pens so quickly, I generally kept around fifteen fountain pens inked at a time, and it was a simple matter to stay on top of refilling any that ran out of ink. I'd also switch up some of my chosen colors once a week or so. Nowadays, having eight pens inked at a time is more than enough. With just that many actively in use, I still have trouble keeping up with refilling the ones that run empty and almost never have the energy to clean any of them up to switch between inks. 

Reselling More with The RealReal

In late 2021, I had a bunch of like-new items - including my Equipment silk blouses, that Babaa sweater and a Babaa lounge set, and a bunch of Smythson notebooks (similar, affiliate link) I bought on sale (that turned out not to suit my subsequently developed interest in fountain pens and colorful inks because the pale blue Smythson paper obscured some ink colors) - which I decided to resell through The RealReal ("TRR"). It'd been two years since I last had anything suitable for sending to TRR, and this time, most of my items for consignment were a lot newer than the ones from last time. 

As in 2019, my main reason for deciding to resell with TRR was that I prioritized ease and convenience over total returns. Last time around, none of my items were particularly new or in-demand, and I thought it was pretty certain that if I tried to list them myself on eBay, Poshmark, etc., it'd take weeks or months and a few rounds of re-listing to successfully sell them. This time around, I did think a number of my items - particularly the Babaa clothing - should have been reasonably easy to resell directly to other individuals fairly quickly, and for a much better price than the TRR commission. But alas, between work stress and pandemic stress, I wasn't really up for handling the listing and shipment of my items myself. 

Once again, I was fairly satisfied with my TRR consignment experience. Like in 2019, my only real goal was to successfully resell these items after having spent as little of my time or effort as possible to accomplish that. Obviously, by using TRR, I knew I couldn't be too picky about the price they chose to sell my items for because I had absolutely no choice in the matter. I also knew I'd only get 40-50% of the TRR sale price as a commission. 

All my items sold incredibly quickly this time, often within a week of each listing going live. That does suggest I could have had far better returns fairly quickly if I resold the items myself, without using TRR as a middleman, but alas, I wasn't really in a position to do that. 

Pandemic Life Lately

Tory Burch Tanya the Tiger Bag (affiliate link) - I would never buy this because it's completely impractical for me, but I think it's kind of cute to look at. 

Happy New Year! I hope that everyone is having a good start to 2022 so far, as much as can be managed in the places - like NYC - where new COVID cases are continuing to increase dramatically. There is some data for NYC suggesting our recent surge is largely driven by unvaccinated individuals (if you click on "Recent Trends" under "Latest" data and scroll down, there is a chart that can show data by "vaccination status"). To tell the truth, I'd hoped I wouldn't need to use the "COVID-era life" tag anymore on any 2022 blog entries, but alas, that's not the position we find ourselves in.

I got back from my trip to see my mom in California in the late evening the Monday after Christmas. Early the next morning, I got a PCR test - negative - and felt lucky that the turnaround time to get results was less than 24 hours. The first Duane Reade I went to in person also had a good supply of Abbott BinaxNow at-home COVID tests, a maximum of four boxes per customer. And I must say, home COVID tests sure are expensive, those four boxes (with two tests each) cost me $99.96! (I believe that's the standard retail price at most stores, but some retailers such as Walmart may have them for cheaper.) I then took one of those at-home COVID test on Thursday - also negative - before seeing K's parents for New Year's. I'll also be required to have another negative COVID test result from after December 31 before my mandatory return date to working in the office on January 5. 

For the time being, I've also decided to switch from my Happy Masks to Powecom KN95s, which I buy from Bona Fide Masks (for ~$1/mask, or less if buying in bulk). I find the Happy Masks a bit more comfortable - mainly because they have slightly softer adjustable straps - and I like that they're a lower-waste solution because they're washable and resuable for many months, but I don't get as snug a fit or good a seal from the Happy Masks as I do with the KN95s. (I also get noticeably more condensation and fog on my glasses in wintertime from the Happy Masks than I do from KN95s, probably because of the aforementioned less snug fit.) 

K and I will probably avoid indoor restaurant dining in NYC for a while, until things settle down a bit on the COVID front. While my international business trips that would have happened in the next two months or so are definitely cancelled, I may still have a domestic business trip or two in the next few weeks. 

Admittedly this post is kind of a total downer, but alas, it's all that's really been on my mind recently. It's hard to avoid thinking about COVID-related matters when NYC keeps smashing all-time records for total numbers of new cases. I otherwise had a good holiday season though, with minimal delays for my flight back to NYC, and I was so glad to be able to spend time in person with my family and with K's family.