Shopping SHEIN

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My SHEIN Shopping Experience

(this is all Fondles’ fault)

(those of you who read her will understand)

screenshot of my SHEIN order
My first Shein order — WOOT!

SO

What with my online shopping Corona-iduced clickety-buy behaviors and all, I have had to apply my “shop smart” rules in new (for me) ways. I mentioned recently that I have taken to buying secondhand online over the past year; at the encouragement (*cough*) of a fellow blogger, I decided to give firsthand-buying a try and see how it went.

I did not have great hopes, honestly. But what with ‘oversized’ being ‘in’ right now, I figured if I erred on the side of BIG, I’d be fine. And since the total of the seven items you see above came to only $105, I figured it was worth a little risk. (For those of you who don’t understand how $105 is a deal, I should explain that I live in an expensive-real-estate area of the U.S. Sweaters like the ones pictured above easily sell for $39 on sale at regular retail stores, fun T-shirts routinely cost me $15-20, and it’s pretty much impossible to get a swimsuit for under $40. So if I was to mall-shop for all these items, I’d be spending at least $235. Therefore: $105 for 7 items = DEAL.)

One of my pieces of advice to anyone shopping secondhand, online, and/or at a venue that does not allow try-ons is to know your brands. Know how much they sell for retail (so you know whether you’re getting a good deal: as per the above paragraph — check!) and how they fit. It was the ‘how they fit’ thing that most concerned me with ordering from an unfamiliar entity.

BUT

It worked out!

: happy dance :

Partly because I was advised to check for for specific shoulder/arm length/waist/rise measurements listed on each and every garment (thank you!) and partly because Shein has a little “my measurements” tool you can use to enter your height and weight and general body type information. This tool will then ‘configure’ for any item you view and tell you, based on those measurements, what your size should be.

I ordered the sizes advised.

They were not necessarily the sizes I would normally buy when shopping typical U.S. stores, but the site-recommended sizes for each item were the right sizes for me, regardless.

I haven’t tried on the swimsuits yet. I have to be in a very specific headspace for that. But eyeballing them out of the packaging, I’m guessing they’ll be fine.

As for the rest of it (from the top left):

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Saturday Night Fever: In The Dark

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square, mirror-beveled close-up of woman's hand over her breast in the dark

Skin warm, half-dreaming mind waking to the gray light not-yet fading in through barely-slitted curtains, I feel my way in the dark.

The softness of morning surrounds me, blanket-like, enveloping, caressing my curves with velvet promise.

⇔

My hands follow suit, heeding the quiet, gone-night urgency

to

Come

Awake

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Crash Conditions

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I remember the slowing of time. The realization that, as I crested the rollercoaster-steep descent of that last hill — unable to slow down, brakes anti-locking and tires sliding over a fresh slick layer of snow covering a week’s worth of packed-by-drive ice — I was about to crash. That despite all my years of driving experience, my carefulness in the snowy conditions, my slow speed, my knowledge of the terrain, my deference to the danger… Despite all that… I was about to crash.

It was a matter of seconds.

A matter of the car in front of me — a little 1980s sports coupe with somebody at the wheel who had no business being out driving in the snow — creating another obstacle, a matter of said obstacle combined with the T in the road giving me no option but to go right instead of left (if I could have gone left, I probably would have made it), a matter of inexperienced and unprepared municipalities not having cleared the roads, a matter of heavy body and four-by chassis and sturdy metal guardrail held up by driven-deep wood-stake pilings.

It was a matter of no choice, of remember-your-upbringing, of surrounding circumstances preventing any better option.

And I crashed.

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Comparing Costs: Budget Changes in the Time of Coronavirus

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grocery receipt laid over packages of food, image from pixabay
image via Pixabay

One Year Ago vs Today

Now that we are approaching tax time, I’ve been delving into some numbers from 2020. Mostly I’ve looked at our income (which took a hit; we were down about 20% from the year before), but I’ve also been looking at how we’re spending — or rather, how much we are spending — right now in a few categories, because it feels like even though we are tightening our belts in terms of how much we are buying, we are still feeling the squeeze because of how much things are costing.

During the past year, I’ve had the overall impression that costs keep going up — especially where food is concerned — but it’s a little difficult to know exactly by how much, because how we shop right now has changed so drastically from a year ago. A year ago, we took multiple trips each week to the store (whichever store we chose, whenever we felt like it) but did one “major stock up” trip during the month at a mass merchandiser. In 2021, due to COVID restrictions and a desire to shop only locally, we are paying ‘only local’ prices (which is something we are literally paying the price for) but are making fewer trips overall. So the ‘how’ and ‘where’ has an impact on our totals.

BUT

With that caveat/understanding in mind, I decided to look at the hard numbers (I know the numbers because I write them all down — I have a yearly budget book that is really handy for that) from January 2020 and compare them to January 2021 in the categories of Groceries and Dining Out to see if my gut feeling that we have been paying more for food was correct.

No surprise: It was.

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