Rainy day and little to do today.

Right now I have little to do.

I bought a nice Harris tweed sports jacket yesterday because come spring I am going to make it a point to dress a little nicer for the hell of it. I've been dressing like a grub for decades.

The funny part of it is that one can dress nicely cheaper than he can dress like a grub when you think about it. A pair of Levi 501s is pretty expensive these days.

Six bucks at the thrift store bought me the Harris tweed jacket. It is a classic and therefore never goes out of style.

About twenty years ago I was working at a place that issued coveralls. They stopped doing this for one reason or another. Most likely because it was being abused. The guys generally ruin every single freebie that they run into.

Anyway, my coveralls finally wore out and I was looking for a substitute. Coveralls at the time were running about $35 a pop. However I noticed that pretty good suits were running between five and ten bucks each at a local thrift store.

So I started showing up for work dressed in a suit. The next trip after I told my shipmate how cheap used suits were my shipmate joined me. We were the two best dressed sailors in the fleet!

It didn't last long, though. A dock man told his supervisor and it worked its way up the chain and one day someone told one of the muckety-mucks at the top that the guys in the piece of equipment I was on dressed better than they did.

It was sent down to middle management to settle and when they boarded us I pointed out that we exceeded the dress code. I also told them I couldn't afford coveralls so I had to opt for a suit.

They were shocked until I pointed out that at the thrift store they sold suits for about a fifth of the cost of coveralls.

They returned a couple of hours later with several sets of coveralls they found in a corner of the warehouse and gave them to us. That, of course, ended that.

All in all if you shop around you can often dress well for a lot less money than you can dress like a grub.





To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY