340 cranes, and boy do I own a very personable hat

Y'all remember that giant, crazy hat from a couple posts ago? Well, that hat is good at making friends. On Sunday I got all dressed up in my retro outfit (sans belt, and with the red bolero sweater this time instead of the black), completed it with my Amazing Friend-Making Hat, and away we went to run errands.

Everywhere we went, at least one person had to stop me and tell me what a wonderful hat it was. Usually it was multiple people. I counted something like 7 or 8 people at Sam's Club alone. I had compliments hollered across the parking lot, people telling me about their Halloween outfits and nutty hats they found at tourist traps, ladies and guys both asking where I got it, a girl telling me she loved my whole outfit and that it reminded her of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (which is a total compliment, Ms. Hepburn was very classy), some dude at Top Foods telling Patrick that he didn't normally like hats, but that mine was a really good one (complete with thumbs up at me across the aisle by the avocados when I looked up), and so forth.

People love a good hat, y'all. If you're ever in the mood for a lot of compliments from strangers, get yourself an insanely elaborate hat and wear the shit out of it.

Here's me in that outfit, unfortunately without the hat, but you know what it looks like anyway:

Sorry about the really dirty mirror. I need to do something about that. And I wasn't wearing any makeup. You get the idea, I'm sure. For the actual outing I did slap on a little lipstick. I very seldom bother doing anything with my eyes unless it's a very special occasion, since usually I'm wearing glasses that make it sort of hard to see any eye makeup anyway. In this case, I had the added deterrent of the hat making any eye decoration very difficult to detect. Since I tend toward laziness in the slap department, I demurred and restricted myself to lip embellishment.

Anyway, the compliments were a nice self-esteem boost and I enjoyed our outing very much! It's always a pleasure wandering around with my delicious husband. The previous day he'd gone off to play Beethoven's Ninth with the Tacoma Symphony after some lounging around, so I entertained myself by watching the new Star Trek film and Bram Stoker's Dracula whilst folding cranes. I actually made 75 of them all on my own!

Progress continues apace on our crane mobile project. Hopefully this week I can get a bunch more of them done and we'll be nearly to the halfway point! Weather's absolutely gorgeous today, so I think we'll do a bit of lawn mowing (Patrick) and flower/pea planting (me) after work.

Enjoy your week, everyone!