The Dog Days of...Autumn?

Floral 80s dress - $5 Surry Hills markets
Tan leather sandals - $40 Sportsgirl sale
Tan leather eighties elephant belt - $7 op-shop

Well apparently it's autumn now, but no one told the weather gods round here - so I'm still wading through the humidity with no makeup lest it melts off, no sleeves lest I drown in a puddle of my own perspiration, and hair all afrizz and untamed. I do love summer though, so I don't really mind it deciding to extend itself beyond the borders of its designated months. Still, living with the constant threat of feeling the trickle of sweat down the backs of my knees is wearing a little bit thin. I'm not a sweaty sort of person generally - have always been one of those "ladies glow" types who can run ten kilometres without working up more than a light sheen - so I have no inbuilt coping mechanisms for this sticky state of affairs.



I genuinely enjoy being able to just throw on a frock and some sandals, but it does make for some pretty uninspiring blogging fodder. I do have a wardrobe full of things just waiting for a day cool enough for me to wear them, in fact a quick tally of recently op-shopped acquisitions totalled more than thirty new (old) things that have never made an appearance here. Tropical Cyclone Hamish may be on the verge of being downgraded to a mere Tropical Storm but he's still predicted to send some rain our way in the next few days - so I might be able to actually wear some of that vast array of stuff.



One thing I recently scavenged out of the depths of an otherwise depressingly sanitised op-shop (you know the ones - colour-coded racks of polyester bootcut pants and kitten heeled mules from the late 90s, bright fluorescent lighting, no interesting clutter to poke through and a mean lady who checks your handbag when you leave to make sure you haven't stolen anything) was this eighties elephant belt. It was hanging on the special display rack at the front of the store obscured by a burgundy pleather faux ostrich skin Matrix style duster coat priced up at eighty dollars (!) so I almost missed it.



We've been fighting against the elephant thing in our house for a while - it's a slippery slope with these things, one minute you've got a couple of cute elephant things sitting on a shelf, next minute you find yourself building extra rooms to house your collection and making an appearance in the Guinness Book of Records as owner of the World's Biggest Pachyderm Collection. We made a conscious decision to try to limit the elephant population yet somehow they keep sneaking in, but we really don't want to become known as the crazy elephant people - so for anyone I know reading this, please don't give us any more elephants! I travelled around the house with the camera looking for evidence that we might be candidates for E.A. (Elephants Anonymous) and found plenty, tragically there are actually a few more lurking around the place that I failed to photograph...










Elephants with their trunks up are supposed to be good luck charms, I dread to think of the disasters that might have befallen our household if we didn't have the herd hanging around. I suspect the elephants might also be responsible for my super fantastic good luck in scoring a stack of Swan Brand t-shirts from the utterly magnificent Likkle Girl Who Wurves Pwetty Things:



She sent her highly trained cohort of shopping operatives (I could have said "shoperatives" there, but too cheesy even for me) out onto the streets of Singapore and they delivered a pile of pure cotton pleasure - and a couple of little dude-sized Singapore souvenir t-shirts as well. Likkle Girl - you are the newest inductee to my Hall of Deadset Legends!







xx
Skye
PS. There are heaps more of those terrible made-up shopping words, anything with an "op" prefix is fair game. If you happen to be a journalist writing advertorials about shopping malls for a local free newspaper, then this list might give you a few handy ideas:

Shoptimist
Shoptometrist (that's an optometrist who's really good at shopping)
Shoperation
Shopportune
Shopulent
Shopportunity
Shopsonification (that's something about red blood cells and bacteria and stuff, but don't let that stop you)