Today got extremely busy, so we thought we might just share a couple Christmas-y song videos from Love Actually, which is how we’re spending the end of our day today.
We thought we could keep it to just the Olivia Olson All I Want For Christmas Is You, but then we were reminded of this scene (with Andrew Garfield from The Walking Dead!):
And then of course the wedding scene! It’s impossible (we think) to find embeddable, but here’s a link to it.
So! We spent the weekend at Unique LA, which was awesome. The funny thing about being a vendor at a craft show is that you actually don’t get to shop at it at all unless you have a friend with you, who doesn’t mind minding stuff while you’re not there. We didn’t this time around, so we have to make do with scouring the vendors from home. It’s not the worst thing in the world.
We spent most of the weekend across the aisle from Love Nail Tree, and if we’d known how cheap this awesome necklace was, we would have bought it. Take Aim necklace, $38
Of course we love the map necklaces from our friend at The Weekend Store. Vintage map necklace, $28
How could we not want to buy a porcelain origami rabbit? Mini bunny, $15
Vintage Remade had amazing clutches made from recycled materials—this bag is our favorite of what’s on their website. Montreal Crossbody bag, $98
So! We’re in LA this weekend for UniqueLA (come by if you’re around!) and when not scurrying around picking up last minute supplies, we’ll be touring our favorite shops—like New High Mart. We love this shop for many reasons, but none less than the fact that you can search their shop by categories like collectible, heritage, and Lithuania. We like to think of the vibe as DIY, but only if you did it yourself, like, in the country, over a period of many, many hundreds of years.
Like this sweater, above: Wool and the Gang sweater, $179
We thought these would be a little more expensive. Star gloves (from Bolivia), $32
More of these Pendleton-y bags that aren’t, and so cost a lot, lot less. Arrow satchel, $138
Our two favorite things are super expensive, so we had to put them down here, where we can sort of hide them:
We can’t believe how ridiculously crazy this limited edition wallet is, with a lining made from Meiji-period Japanese cotton. Barrett Alley wallet, $460
And then this vintage amber choker, $650
You may be thinking: Wow. There is a ridiculous amount of food to eat at the holidays. We hear you. There is usually not very much food to eat in our apartment, seeing as we spend most of our time out of it—except on Sundays, when we go to Mazzola Bakery in Carroll Gardens and bring home as many cookies as we can carry.
This is perhaps the worst-possible introduction for our post today on P90X versus Insanity.
If you’re looking for a present this holiday season that will help you get fit and deal with (a) holiday food overload or (b) cookies and Wheat Thins, we so heartily recommend P90X. We have written about it previously, and we love it. You may know this if you watch the infomercial every morning on Comedy Central while getting dressed (like we do), but P90X is a 90-day program with a weekly plan of three weight workouts, two cardio, and Yoga X, which is impossible for a lot of the jacked-up dudes who complain about it on the message boards and pretty easy if you’ve ever done yoga in the past. After doing it pretty steadily (even while more or less ignoring the eating plan, which does not include cookies), we literally had a rash of people (including two massage therapists, while working on the best story ever) saying to us earlier this year that we were “fit.” We swear to God: We thought, the first couple times, that they were making fun of us. Then we realized: P90X was working! Even if we still had our Sunday afternoon cookie runs.
We realized, though, that we tended to follow a pattern: We’d stick pretty religiously to the three weight workouts, but the two cardio ones … meh. One of them is “Plyometrics” (“jump-training”) and we found this difficult to do simply because we live in an apartment building, and the downstairs people, we felt, did not deserve an hour of us jumping on their heads. So we’d go to the gym and use the elliptical or we’d run, while watching Survivor. We weren’t making much real headway here. More often than not, we’d skip the cardio. Disaster!
That is, until we saw the ads (because we love those infomercials) for Insanity. Led by Shaun T., Insanity is made up of super-intense cardio workouts. So we did a quick Google search for hybrid P90X/Insanity workouts, and put them together. They are like PB+J. Or two other things that go even better together. They’re harder (at least for us newbies), but they’re shorter (around 45 minutes, while a P90X leg workout is closer to 1:15, from warm up to cool down.)
If you’re only going to get one, we’d say strongly: Go with P90X. (Or P90X2, which will be out in time for Christmas.) We love Tony Horton, who leads the P90X videos. You just—well, we do—absolutely believe him when he tells beginners to “press pause—we’ll be here when you get back.” We found both of these workouts super-hard in the early days, and that makes a difference. Shaun T. says the same sort of stuff, but you sort of think he’ll think you’re a pussy if you do. It seems like a small thing, but in P90X, Tony shares the set with three or four other work-outers, so you can see their form. (These include the awesome Dreya Weber.) On Insanity, a couple of the models who are featured prominently go through the workouts just totally hamming it up, like—this is the face I make when it’s really hard, this is the face I make now. It’s kind of annoying.
Insanity does have some big pros: It’s easier to travel with, because you really don’t need any additional equipment. It’s shorter. And we think we actually saw results faster with Insanity, in terms of an demonstrable improvement in our fitness level. We occasionally have caffeine-induced episodes of heart racing—we noticed these have stopped since we added Insanity to our workout schedule. It’s officially only 60 days—but hopefully it’s not like you’d get to the end and just quit, so whatevs on that one.
Still, our heart belongs to P90X, and it’s the glue that holds our fitness life together. It’s pricey, but if one of your resolutions is to get fit, we heartily recommend it. Stick with it, and it’ll work, and isn’t that all we can ask of our fitness programs?
Above: Lululemon Herringbone Define Jacket, $108. Here’s the thing: Everyone says P90X is expensive, and it is, but it’s not much more than this jacket.
UPDATE 2: Also, we hypocritically invite you to our lovely Etsy shop! We’re also running a 15% off promotion. (TURKEY15.)
UPDATE: We take back all the grumbling, because Seamless is offering 20% off our lunch order (code: MONDAY20). We maintain our position that there’s no such thing as a free lunch (see below). However, we are reminded that there is such a thing as 20% off lunch.
We know it’s Cyber Monday, and we’re supposed to be shopping until blood is literally dripping from our keyboards. (Because we’ve pounded it into submission. And it’s an organic keyboard. As they sometimes are.)
Don’t get us wrong: We love shopping. We love clothes and books and certain $300 blankets. But we don’t like being told what to do (or, indeed, when to shop) by the military-industrial-retail-Christmas complex. Or that we’re supposed to get up at midnight to go shopping at outlets. Or that employees are supposed to give up their holiday dinners to man a cash register. Or get stampeded because there’s a sale on Wiis.
Here’s, in our opinion, the best way to deal with shopping for Christmas (or the holidays, if you celebrate one but not the other):
- Have Christmas on December 25th. Have a lovely family holiday.
- Buy people presents on December 27th, when they are all on better sale than they are now. Exchange presents. Call this “Present Exchange Day.”
We are such grumpy all men here, we can hardly believe it. We close by saying: If you see an amazing deal—be sure to Google it first! We almost fell for this—literally in the middle of the above paragraph. We thought: Before being too grumpy about this, we should just check Amazon. And then we saw in one of those lightning deals, these Denon headphones—half off at $15.99. We thought: We need those! (We don’t.) Then: there’s a waitlist for them. Damn the earth! we thought. Then we took a breath and looked around. Depending on if you have Amazon Prime (with its free two-day shipping), there are potentially as good or better deals just floating around the Internet.
Grumble grumble. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There is such a thing as sticking to a buying plan and getting things you love because you love them, not because Amazon has suddenly reminded you that you need a new pair of headphones. (You don’t.) Grumble grumble.
If you saw Saturday Night Live this weekend and sat through the sketch about the mattress to get to the musical guest, you no doubt saw Florence + the Machine perform Shake It Out—with Florence in another amazing sequined dress—specifically, a Balmain. (She wore a different one for the second song, but—meh.)
Florence always has amazing vintage-y stuff—even this top(?) from the introduction:
Anyway: sequined dresses. They’re like holiday parties to the max, exponetially…awesome. We found it hard to find something as awesome as Florence’s—it is Balmain, after all—and the hard part was finding things that looked embellished (as hers does) rather than head-to-hem sequins.
One great resource is Kate Moss for Topshop—they’re always doing dresses like this, so eBay, for the older collections, is the place to look. We might even buy this before the day is out. Kate Moss for Topshop sequin dress, buy it now @ $99
This is sooooort of the right idea. Anna Sui dress, $530
Again, this is sort of the right idea. But we’re thinking we’ll be sticking pretty close to our eBay search for Kate Moss for TS. Rare for Topshop sequin dress, $130
We sort of have to have it exit our abode. And we’re on our way to the post office! First comment gets it.
Our friends at Sight Unseen just debuted their new online shop—and it’s awesome! It’s more Wearable work of art than, like, Accessorize.
We are absolutely mad for this one above. Check out the website to see how great it looks with a black tee. That’s the thing with basically all their pieces—they’re so beautiful they sort of count as clothes. Iacoli & McAllister necklace, $260
Same thing with this one—it’s tremendously chunky. It’s more like a wearable sculpture than just an ordinary necklace. Tanya Aguiniga necklace, $125
And this is so pretty I’m not even sure we’d wear it. We’d probably just stare at it, and sleep with it, and maybe hang it from a hook. Jim Drain chain scarf, $495
Product: Shellac CND Manicure
Cost: $30, not including tip (pricing likely varies by salon)
What they say it does:
14-Day Wear, Mirror Finish, Zero Dry TIme, No Nail Damage
Our review: We like the occasional manicure, mostly because we are completely inept when it comes to painting our short nails. Yes, it’s true; our nails are always short, always have been, and likely always will be. We’ve had salons refuse to paint them red because they were too short (made no sense to us, either). We love how shiny and clean our nails look post-manicure, but we immediately ding, chip, or otherwise mar the loveliness. And, there goes $15 down the drain. We decided to try a gel manicure after Dearest Friend had a most impressive one when we saw her last. She has never steered us wrong, and she’s often lightyears ahead – so we found a local salon that does it, and we’ve now had three!
The first one blew us away; our nails were clean, short, shiny – and didn’t have any weird mini-air bubbles (honestly the most minor thing but our biggest pet peeve, like we cannot leave if we have tiny little bubbles. Must! Be! Smooth!). We got them done a couple of days before vacation, and by the time we finally peeled it off (not the recommended removal method) 2 weeks later, they had grown out – but NOT chipped. We’re very hard on our hands, we use our nails to do everything – no chips was impressive.
The second manicure we got was less impressive; we chose a light, neutral color, and it chipped within 3 days. We tried again over the weekend with another dark color (black; yes, we know, we know. It’s just so shiny!), and we’re doing reasonably ok. A small chip on one finger, and we kinda chipped our actual nail digging around in something – our fault, not the manicure’s.
The downside: Well.., it’s $30 for a manicure. And you’re supposed to have the gel dissolved for removal. We just peel it off, which we are certain is not recommended.
In short: We’ll do this once a month or as our budget allows. Not a necessity, but we’d highly recommend to anyone who likes having their nails done and is hard on their hands.
Our grade: A with a caveat. If you find a great salon, and a great manicurist, stick with them. Our light polish disaster was from a woman who rushed us through; we don’t need a hand massage or anything, but we DO need time to dry under the UV lights. We found our salon (Genesis Nails, in Philadelphia) via Yelp.
-LB
You have to love a spree killer in a tweed skirt. At least, as long as she is fictional, and played by Faye Dunaway, and not the actual criminal, whom we cannot recommend no matter what she decided to wear to her crimes.
We’re not the pencil skirt skirt: A-line, please. But if we were going to wear a pencil skirt, we’d absolutely want to wear it above the knee—below the knee is the fashion equivalent of seppuku for someone our height. This Zac Posen bouclé skirt fits the bill, along with being (still quite expensive but) 70% off. Zac Posen skirt, was $1290, now $387
(And here it is in a pale blue that’s IMO a bit cooler but also a step away from the warm warm palette of the Bonnie & Clyde film.)
This one also seems quite Bonnie to us. Anne Klein tweed pencil skirt, was $295, now $123.90
Our solution for that delicate, lacy top is to Google “pointelle sweater.” Well, our first choice would be to go to basically any vintage shop in the world and find one there, but there are plenty of things that come close—and a lot of them aren’t that expensive. Like this one from Arden B. It’s showing off a bit too much skin in our opinion for the costume, but—eh. We’re pretty sure that even Bonnie drew the line at see-through tops, and something about a cami layer doesn’t scream early 20th century bandits to us. Arden B. pointelle top, $29.99
For the hat: Essays have been written about the resurgence of the beret thanks to its appearance in the film. (Here’s a better shot of it.)
For this, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel (or get an embellished one, which will ruin the effect.) This one is from the Village Hat Shop, $11.95
Finally, the scarf. This should cost $1, and it should come from a Goodwill.
Optional: rifle (fake) and adorable boyfriend (recommended).
