Thanksgiving and Black Friday: The Guilt

We--Dave, my brother, and I--had lunch at my mother's for Thanksgiving. We skipped the turkey and dressing, etc., this year. My mother made bean and cheese empanadas (one of my grandmother's specialties) and Dave and I brought carne adobada (homemade with Quorn for Dave and restaurant-purchased with pork for the rest of us) and menudo. The only thing I missed was mashed potatoes and gravy, my favorite Thanksgiving carb overload food.

After, Dave went to his mother's for dinner while I came home to nap and watch Netflix.

Friday, Dave and I went to one of the big, local art shows with Judi. In the first booth we saw, Judi dropped $650 on a necklace made with silver and pearls and turquoise and some other kind of stones. (As she paid for it, I thought about my time selling at art shows and how that first, big opening purchase was going to rev up the jeweler, provide her with some positive feeling about how the rest of the day would go.)

We walked the aisles and I bought a pair of earrings (anodized aluminum in a rose color) for $20. I was tempted by but didn't buy another pair made of silver and porcupine quills. I also bought two jars of honey, one made primarily from desert marigolds (my pick), one from oak sap (Dave's pick). I love honey. (One of the men in the honey booth seemed so familiar to me, but I couldn't place him, even after letting The Brain turn it over for awhile.) Dave's only purchases were a breakfast burrito and a slice of apple strudel.

We dropped Judi off at home, petted Crunch for awhile, and stopped to visit with Paul and make later socializing plans.

Only two more weeks of school and I'll be free for a month to rest and visit with people--sans the guilt that comes with indulging in socializing and laziness when I should be studying.

Oh--and speaking of guilt:

I placed an order for my usual moisturizers (yes, plural; the uberexpensive creams in teeny-tiny jars that a) don't irritate my rosacea, b) don't cause my hyper-sensitive skin to feel like I'm being flayed, and c) keep my extremely dry skin from flaking and peeling off my face) that amounted to nearly $100--and that was with a 25% coupon. I don't know when I became the kind of person who relies on luxury brand moisturizers, but I do know that it was sometime after my foray through every kind of cheaper product marketed to people with dry, sensitive skin. My face laughed--well, cried, mostly--at Cerave products, which turned me red and itchy, as did the Eucerin and Nutrogena all those similar commercial brands. So then I tried all the "all-natural" stuff from the hippie-dippy co-op, including moisturizers that were mostly made from things like bees' wax and goats milk. And all those things hurt even worse.

So that's fun: Being me and having my skin.

Things that work with my uber-dry, rosacea-addled skin? Clinique balm cleansers and moisturizers with labels that proclaim them to be "intense," with "moisture surge" whatever stuff in them. Translation: $40 per half ounce. And sunscreen that has to be specially imported from Australia, made for Australian babies with sensitive skin.

Just a reminder that I grew up relatively poor, raised in part by people who survived the Depression and who did things like save and reuse aluminum foil and wrapping paper and the styrofoam packaging that meat comes on.

How do you combat that kind of thinking? Should you combat that kind of thinking?

So then I went online and ordered a half-dozen new shirts, two white and long-sleeved to wear under my white scrub top and four black to wear when I'm not wearing my white scrub tops. But at least those were on sale.