May 16th, 2019

There are so many things in this universe that I do not understand.  One of them is online shopping for clothes.  It is baffling to me.  I know that people do it.  All the time.  It's a perfectly  normal thing to do nowadays.  

I've looked at clothes online before. Of course I have.  And in those little catalogs that come in the mail.  There are even companies that will send you clothing that THEY choose for you?  What?  Apparently the customer fills out a very detailed questionnaire and then the company chooses outfits and ships them!  I'm happy for the people for whom this works. But I am way too picky.  

 I actually did buy a bathing suit online once.  It was supposedly a custom sized swimsuit.  They asked the questions, I measured what they asked me to measure, typed in the numbers and they made the suit for me.  Wow..great idea right?  Nope.  The size was fine, it was the style was that not great.  It turned out, as a matter of fact, to be a very bad idea.  Which I would have known if I had tried it on before I bought it.  I have not purchased a single article of clothing for myself online since.

Maybe I should give it a second chance.  I don't know.  By this age, I suppose I ought to know what does and does not look good on me style-wise.  And mostly I do.  I think the trickiest part is figuring out the proper size.  

It isn't that my actual size changes. It hasn't. At least not in the past three years.  BUT there are no standardized sizing on women's clothes.  And I find that the strangest thing.  How on earth can anyone know what size they wear with enough confidence to purchase clothing on line??

For example, I have pants, long and short, in three different sizes. They all fit.  How strange is that?  So if I bought a pair of pants online, would I have to buy a pair in all three sizes, keep the one that fits and send the others back?  What?  That seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

Oh I know, I hear all the time that it's so easy to return things purchase online.    I'm told that most companies send your purchase with a return label.  So they fully expect things to be returned.  Then I have to repack the returns and take the package.....somewhere...  post office?  Fed Ex? UPS?  I have no idea.  But the point is, I have to out of my way to send the returns back.  People are terrible are returning library books and Redbox DVD's.  But they are good about returning clothing purchases?  

My thought is that if I have to go out of my way regarding clothing, I may as well go out of my way to a store where I can try it on and walk out with something that fits.  But that's me.  Honestly, while I am lazy, no argument there, my biggest issue is the size thing.  Here's me wearing shorts or pants all various sizes from 6 to 10. It's crazy:

I'ts just crazy.  Everything I'm wearing in these photos fits.  But the sizes are so different.  Supposedly there is about a ten pound difference from one size to another.  So from a size 6 to a size 10, theoretically would be a twenty pound difference right?  I guarantee you that my weight is not going up and down twenty pounds from one day to the next, or one week or one month or even one year!  Nope, my weight, sadly, remains pretty much the same.

Perhaps it's just me.  I have always felt that my body was kind of constructed out of spare parts.  I can never predict how something is going to look on me.  I have to try it on.  I buy tops in the petite section but pants in the regular ladies department because petites are too short.  Long legs, short body.  With one pair of pants a size 8 fits me perfectly, another pair of pants, an 8 is much too large and I have to move down to a 6.  But with yet a different pair I couldn't squeeze into an 8 on a bet and I have to move on to a 10.  That is simply insane.  I just cannot see me shopping online for clothes without having to buy at least 3 of everything and sending back 2.  I think I am opting out of the online clothing shopping thing.

So here we go, a tip of the hat to anyone who has tremendous success with online clothing shopping!  I am amazed.  I am impressed. And I am totally baffled by it all.

PS. I'm taking a few days off so have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back sometime next week.   Hope you lots of fun adventures in the meantime and I hope to hear about them all!