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The baby aspirin years

~ Ms. Boice falls in love, travels and eats her way through life in the post-40 years.

The baby aspirin years

Tag Archives: fashion

Yes, I got me some Custom-made boots in Ecuador. Uh-huh. Big surprise.

11 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by Ms. Boice in Trips

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

boots, Ecuador, ecuadorian amazon, fashion, Quito, riding boots, style, travel

“…Oh, and there’s this place in Quito that will custom make boots!”

As soon as Olga said that I perked up. We met Olga and her daughter while staying at Sacha Lodge in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They had spent some time in Quito and my husband and I were listening to their itinerary to get ideas of what to do during our couple days in Quito. But boots! Custom made! 

It’s shoes, my friends.  And when it comes to shoes I just melt into a blob.

The following day on the way to our hotel, I saw it:

El Palacio de le Bota Españolas

El Palacio de le Bota Española

What girl would pass this up?

What girl would pass this up?

Clearly, it was meant to be, since it was only a few blocks from our hotel in La Mariscal neighborhood of Quito. When Steve and I went inside a wave of the musky, leathery smell hit me in the face. Oh, this place smells yummy.  I picked up a tan pair of boots. Nice quality and stitching, I noted to myself. There were cowboy boots, riding boots and fashionable ladies boots with heels of all heights. They were all simply lovely. Steve sat down, obviously uninterested in my shoe shopping. This happens all the time. Last time I went shoe shopping at Nordstrom, this happened:

This boy can sleep anywhere. Even at Nordstrom. Where there are SHOES. Who sleeps when there are SHOES?!

This boy can sleep anywhere. Even at Nordstrom. Where there are SHOES. Who sleeps when there are SHOES?!

An Ecuadorian woman and her husband began showing boots to me. Actually, not just showing them, but putting them in my hands, pulling one after another off the shelf and offering them to me while speaking Spanish, of course. They spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish. There was pointing and grabbing a lot of boots and then I found a pair I really liked–a low heel with a strap and buckle. I put them in the woman’s hands, pointed and nodded my head and said, “Sí!”

Yes, please.

Sí, por favor.

She then took me to the back room where there were remnants of all sorts of leather on a big table. Oh, she wants me to choose my color, I realized. There were many colors of tan, brown and even different shades of black.  And then I saw it: Red

Ahhh, red leather! Yum.

Ahhh, red leather! Yum.

I have to have that red!

I nodded my head, pointed and said the one word I know perfectly in Spanish: “Si!”

Then before I could even leave the back room, the Ecuadorian man brought out a big paper tablet and pointed to pages that had foot outlines drawn on it. Oh, he wants to draw my footprint. Of course!

Wasting no time, I took off my shoes and socks and placed my foot on the paper where the man drew a line around my foot, then pulled out a measuring tape and measured my width, my instep, my ankle and my calves. So old school. So simple. Why can’t all my shoes be made this way?

Didn't we do this in kindergarten? Ahh, good times.

Didn’t we do this in kindergarten? Ahh, good times.

Measure twice, cut once, right?

Measure twice, cut once, right?

¿Cuánto cuesta? I asked. (Okay, I also know how to ask how much something costs. I’m a seasoned shopper, no?)

Originally the woman had written down $180, but then the man pointed to my calves and said, “Grandé.”

Yes, my calves are grandé. You see, that’s the whole problem with me and boots. It’s the grandé calves, and that’s why I was here. But it turns out, having grandé means it costs more. $20 more.

They had me choose the style of my toe (pointed? round? squared?), choose the buckles out of a cardboard box and then I paid a deposit of $50 and from the sign language and my guess at Spanish, figured that it was going to take four days for the boots to be made. No problem, we were heading to the Andes and wouldn’t be back to Quito for seven days.

So for seven days and nights I dreamt about red boots.

On our last day in Ecuador we picked up the boots. They were displayed in the window when I arrived, and that made me secretly happy to know that others might have walked by with envy. I slipped on the boots and the leather was buttery. My foot fit perfectly inside and zzzzzziiiiip! It was easy. Not a struggle at all! And the boots weren’t cutting off my circulation. They felt divine. I purred inside like a kitten.

I now have red boots. Jealous y’all?

Keep your paws of my red boots.

Keep your paws off my red boots.

Here they are: Luis Arias, who made the boots, and his wife who so patiently helped me out in spite of my very lousy Spanish.

Luis A. Arias, Propietaro and his wife

Luis A. Arias, Propietaro and his wife

You, too, can get your own custom-made boots (for men as well as women).

El Palacio de las Botas Españolas
Reina Victoria E7-14 y Wilson
Quito, Ecuador
Telf: 2567 205
email: elpalaciodelasbotasespanolas@hotmail.com
They’re also on Facebook

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Most Outstanding Achievement in Hair Over Four Decades award goes to me

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by Ms. Boice in Uncategorized

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

1980s hair, beauty, botox treatment, brazilian blowout, curly hair, dark curly hair, different hairstyles, fashion, hair, humor, marcia brady, musings, pat nixon, Seiren salon, straight hair, style

Hair.

It’s troubled me since I was a child. I’ve always envied lovely, beautiful, trouble-free hair beginning with my mom’s fight with my hair every morning before kindergarten as she vigorously brushed through my “rat’s nest” (her words), to my youthful longing to have Marcia Brady hair, followed by the desire for Dorothy Hamill hair to the coveting of the crème de la crème of all hair–Farrah Fawcett.

Growing up, no one had dark curly hair unless they were on Soul Train.

Still to this day, my hair troubles me. So, last week I chopped off my hair. I went from this:

To this:

I got lots of interesting reactions from the change. Most people exclaimed, “I love it!” Then there were those who said, “Don’t take this wrong, but it’s really slimming.” I’m okay with that, I think. (Wait, are you calling me fat?) It’s better than the opposite, I suppose. The most interesting reaction was when someone came into my office, closed the door and said in a delicate, quiet voice, “Your hair looks great. Is everything okay?”

I laughed and assured her, “Oh for Pete’s sake. No. I’m not going through a divorce,” because that’s what brooding, downtrodden women do when breaking up. I continued, “Steve and I are still madly in love, though he’s out of town and hasn’t seen this yet.”

(I imagined this for the husband airport pickup: Stand next to all the limo drivers who hold signs for their passengers and I’d have my own sign with “Don’t worry sweetie, it will grow back.“)

So, as I was looking through my iPhoto catalogue I noticed that I’d been through a lot of different hairstyles over the years and felt some were deserving of awards. Here I present the Most Outstanding Achievement in Hair Over Four Decades awards (cue drum roll):

Best Pat Nixon Look at Age 3
What a perfectly coiffed three-year-old!
Most Outstanding Skin Smoothing Technique
In order to make sure that my hair stayed in place all day, my mom put me in ponytails that were so tight, I would never have to face a Botox treatment later in life.

The Best Achievement in Layers
Layering the hair certainly helped with the rat’s nest issue,
but it mostly just helped me achieve frizzy hair faster.
(Sorry about the tiny photo. This was my Senior photo from my high school yearbook.)
The “Why Am I Not Dating? Award” goes to…
Just days before I went away to college I chopped off my hair. Bad call.
This hair explains why I didn’t date at all my Freshman year.
That and the unfortunate argyle sweater I’m wearing in this photo.

Best Big Hair Ev-uh!
Thank goodness for big hair girl bands. (Heart! You girls are my heroes!) And shoulder pads. Frankly, the whole 80s! And guess what, I didn’t have to tease my hair to get it to be big and poofy. It just did it all by itself. I went from growing up envying others to having girls envy me! This photo is from my Senior year in college.
As you can see, I let it grow out since my Freshman year.

Best Use of a Barrette Award
The barrette became my best friend. I pretty much had this same hairstyle during all of my 20s, once I moved to California. It was easy peasy to take care of.
Shampoo, run gobs of product through hair with fingers, put in barrette and
go out the door. I didn’t even own a hair dryer.
(And no, going outside with wet hair does not give you a cold.)
Most Likely To Succeed Award
This is my “professional” ‘do that I started sporting once I decided to get serious about my career in my 30s. This photo is a little deceptive. It looks a little bit coiffed, but it’s not. I still maintained my same ritual as above–shampoo, run fingers through with product
and out the door. Still no hair dryer needed.

Best Achievement in Luring a Man
This is me in Scotland. I had just met the man who would two years later be my husband. If ever there was a time that I needed the best hair on the planet this was the time and it certainly delivered. Look at how perfectly those curls rest on my head!
Oh shame to have scorned them when I was younger.
Steve (the man) kept referring to them as springs. (sigh)

Your Hair Is Taking Over the Planet award
This, my friends, is my biggest nightmare.
After I met Steve, we dated long distance for two years, visiting each other in five different countries during that time. This was in Calgary, AB the day after a big snow storm. But the day was warm and the snow melted/evaporated so quickly the humidity in the air created this crazy mess. My hair is like a Chia Pet. It gets bigger as the day goes when moisture is added. It’s a wonder Steve still married me after this.

Best Wedding Day Dream Hair
Bless her heart–that Annie at Sieren Salon made my hair look fantastic on my wedding day. I wish this could be my hair every day.
Every girl should have awesome hair on her wedding day.

Extreme Makeover — Hair Edition
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I learned about the Brazilian Blowout. I did this for almost a year and I loved it. Too bad it’s really, really bad for hair stylists. Frankly, it’s not safe. It’s got formaldehyde in it, much to everyone’s chagrin. And the FDA ruled it not safe. But I’m waiting for a product to come out that’s much safer and when it does, I’m there in the chair again!
Here’s a version of the straightened look, but using a curling iron to give me a few sassy waves. Hey! It’s almost like Farrah’s hair!

And that, my friends, is Lisa’s hair over the years.

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I’ve opened up Pandora’s Box

15 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by Ms. Boice in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

fashion, humor, jewelry, Pandora

I like new jewelry, natch. Especially because I’m not in the mood to be buying new clothes these days since the post-accident weight gain. Jewelry is simple and elegant and always puts a smile on my face (especially the kind that comes in a little Tiffany blue box with a white satin ribbon tied into a bow). And I can gain five pounds and the jewelry still fits. (Rings, on the other hand don’t play nice in the sandbox when I retain water. Phfft!)

But husband doesn’t see the value in jewelry. (sigh)

He feels the same way about my Jimmy Choo shoes, or any shoes for that matter unless it’s a good pair of hiking boots, which he takes great interest in as though he were buying me a space suit that I’d need for, say walking on the moon. He wants to make sure that it’s exactly what I need for every condition I could face hiking. And well, we know what kinds of conditions I end up finding myself in when hiking.

So, while in Roatan, Honduras over the holidays, after a day of diving/snorkeling (Steve dove, but I couldn’t because my ears were plugged up from a cold, so I snorkeled), we were heading back to the cruise ship, passing all the duty-free stores, when I saw the Pandora store.

An example of a Pandora bracelet (from Google images)

AND IT WAS ALL DUTY FREE!

So that meant I could go in and buy me a little something, right? AND it would be inexpensive, of course. (Snicker. I knew better than that.)

I left Steve outside with a poorly made Honduran gelato (I know, that doesn’t make sense: Honduran gelato) while I entered the doors of Pandora.

Stupid me. I let the Pandora sales people put the silver chain around my wrist and we began building my bracelet. By the time it was about 1/4 filled I stopped the two Pandora sales people and said what I never say to a sales person, “Uh, how much is this?”

I’m not going to tell you what they told me, but I’ll tell you this much: I had them shave off about $60 worth of charms/beads and ended up walking out of the store with my bracelet.

I thought I was in the clear, figuring that Steve wouldn’t ask me how much I spent, but all of a sudden the receipt fell out of my hands and the breeze carried it off. Gallant Steve chased it down and then I thought, “crap.”

Yep, he looked at the receipt and then looked at me and I had to walk the Walk of Shame back to the cruise ship as he muttered something about not being able to eat for a month.

“But you got an ice cream,” I told him. “It’s kind of even now, right?”

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