Coffee Break: Via Flat

63 Comments

1. I wear comfortable shoes. Since the pandemic, I wear flats 95% of the time. I would feel unattractive and dowdy the whole day wearing the featured shoes. The proportions and style are just graceless and ugly.

   1. I could wear these no problem. Eye of the beholder I suppose.

   2. Totally agree.

   3. Ehh, you’re not going to win any style awards in them but they’re not heinous. The ones without the heel are actually pretty cute.

   4. If you’re judging just by this picture I understand, but I clicked through and the toe is more square and looks fine to my eye.

   5. I hear you and yet I am dowdy and unattractive when I hobble around or wince or grimace in pain.

      I can be unattractive or my shoes can be and I swear no one really looks at my shoes or cares. No one even has an attention span for the important things much less an invisible woman of a certain age.

2. How do Quince clothes run, size wise? Compared to say JCrew.

   1. All over the place.

   2. Roughly the same size, Quince is cut a touch roomier but it’s closer to JCrew vs. Old Navy sizing.

   3. I wear medium tops at both; haven’t bought many pants

   4. Pants run really narrow for my muscular legs, but that could be a me-thing. Tops seem comparable to JCrew.

   5. Save your money. Terrible quality.

3. Does anyone have any particularly festive/pretty holiday tops or sweaters they’d suggest? Boden has a pretty velvet top but $168 is out of my budget. I’d prefer $100 or under, I’m a size 4/6 usually a small.

   1. Jcrew factory, depending on your aesthetic: ll bean, and I think Lands End had some over the top festive tops chasing my algorithm.

      1. This velvet top from JCF is pretty cute: https://factory.jcrew.com/p/womens/categories/clothing/shirts-and-tops/long-sleeve-blouses/velvet-puff-sleeve-top/CP102?display=standard&fit=Classic&color_name=black&colorProductCode=CP102

      2. Altar’d State has some in your price range. They skew young, generally, but festive should have no age restrictions.

   2. Try Banana Republic Factory – they have a pretty one-shoulder velvet top.

   3. Check Talbot’s. Everything should be 50% off for the first couple hours of Black Friday, then 40% off.

   4. Anthro usually has some options in this price range – Maeve pieces are most likely on the side of “cute on a full grown adult” vs. twee IMHO.

   5. You might check Poshmark. I got a cute NWT Boden holiday top from there last year for $20 or $30. It’s not something I anticipate wearing frequently, so I didn’t want to spend much.

4. if you have glass containers for flour and things in your house, what else do you keep? i just got a set of nice ones as a gift

   1. Flour, sugar, brown sugar, coffeemate (for my MIL when she’s over), basmati rice. I don’t keep a stock of any pasta or dried beans around (I just purchase when I need them for a recipe), but that would be the other thing I’d consider.

      1. Same but also chocolate chips and whatever open snacks – currently have pita crackers in one and pretzel sticks in another but this is because we pack those for lunch snacks and I hate having open bags of stuff.

      2. In addition to the above, coffee beans, cornmeal, oatmeal, granola, bread flour, whole wheat flour.

   2. If your kitchen doesn’t lend itself naturally, they can make pretty seasonal decor – like filled with ornaments for the holidays, pinecones for fall, faux moss balls for spring, etc.

   3. I dont have fancy glass storage, but I keep Cambros of flour, sugar, rice, powdered sugar, honey, brown sugar, and a few types of lentils. I also keep pint or quart mason jars as needed of various dried peppers and spices.
      I’m primarily a scratch cook and live very rural, so I like being able to put a meal together at any time with things I have on hand.

   4. Coffee, rice, beans.

   5. Lentils, quinoa, farro, barley, nuts, granola, loose tea.

   6. Chocolate chips in every depth and cinnamon chips in ours!

   7. Dry goods that don’t come in shelf-friendly containers (things that come in bags, like flour, dry beans, rice, lentils, split peas, and sugar). Not pasta, cereal, or other things that come stackable rectangular boxes.

   8. I have a medium size one that corrals small open bags of stuff (dried tomatoes, packets of yeast, maybe the last of a bag of chocolate chips,etc) – trick is keeping it small enough you can actually see everything in it (and it lives in a closed cupboard, so I don’t care that it doesn’t look aesthetic).

   9. I don’t actually keep flour in my glass containers, but plenty of other stuff. Oatmeal, buck wheat, pearl barley, cacao powder, cane sugar, brown sugar, lentils, chia seeds, popcorn kernels, chili flakes (yes, I have a quart glass of chili flakes), basmati rice, jasmine rice, tea, coffee and dried mushrooms.

   10. I like to bake so I have a lot of sugar and flour canisters with different varieties, but they are in cabinets.
       For keeping out: Teabags, coffee beans, laundry pods, candy,

   11. A follow up question – I have never been comfortable decanting flour, sugar, pasta etc into glass or other containers, because I want to keep the expiration date info from the original packaging. Any ideas?

       1. My first reaction would be to consider that many packages don’t have expiration dates. Just checked the Costco pasta in my pantry, and it’s a best before date. This is true for tons of products. It’s worth a lot to critically think about where expiration dates make sense and where they don’t.
          When is sugar ever going to go bad? Never. It could draw too much moisture and go clumpy or something annoying. It could attract ants. But it can do that within the best-before date.
          On the other hand, if you very rarely use some products, so that it takes you years to go through them, maybe it’s more relevant to know in those cases.

       2. right on it with a whiteboard marker?

          but tbh, I am ok with expired dried goods. If it tastes weird or stale, then it’s time to throw it out.

       3. Sugar lasts basically forever, so sugar will keep better in an air and smell tight container without a date than in a paper bag.

          Wholewheat flour, brown rice etc will go rancid, so those you need to use or toss. I use freezer tape to mark glass containers. I tear off a strip of tape, add to glass, and write my use before date in a sharpie on the tape.

          I do the same for condiments with a short use-by date like pesto.

       4. I cut them off and tape to the bottom of the jar.

   12. Oatmeal, Special K, rice or quinoa, sugar, lentils, pasta.

5. grumble. husband made an appointment for our kid who doesn’t like to be disturbed during school times, so we often take appointments far off. just realized the orthodontist appointment is for 3PM next tuesday… when the kids don’t have school anyway — and now we’ll have to drive 10 hours the day before thanksgiving (or move the appointment to mid-December and pull him midday from school.) feels like the “let him put the diaper on the baby’s head” mentality just means there’s @#$@#$ everywhere.

   1. The ortho is 5 hours away?

      1. I think she means Thanksgiving is 10 hours away?

      2. I think she means the ortho appointment will cause them to delay leaving for their Thanksgiving holiday trip, which is a 10 hour drive. But I read it this way too at first.

   2. I’m not following- why can’t you do some of the driving after the appointment? We left after school like that a lot when I was a kid. Even if you only do 3 or 4 of the 10 hours that’s a lot better for day 2.

      1. Midwesterner here – is 10 hours a two day drive requiring a hotel stay? Though, it would be money well spent in this case

         1. She has three windows to drive: after the appointment; all day Wednesday; Thursday morning (since I am sure the festivities do not begin at 5 am). This seems very, very solvable, to the point that I am struggling to see what the issue is at all.

         2. Are you saying you do 10 straight in a day without thinking twice? We did that once or twice out of necessity but everyone was way happier breaking it up.

            1. I’m not the original commenter, but yes. It’s not that big a deal unless you’re doing it multiple times per month or something. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

            2. Not the OP, but yes, 10 hours is absolutely a single day trip for us. We will go up to 14 hours in a single day, although at that distance we really prefer to swap drivers back and forth a free times.

            3. 10 hours only requires a stop if we leave after 6pm. And if we’re driving home and not to a destination, sometimes that is still a day trip. Also midwest, where it’s always an eight hour drive to the nearest major city.

         3. Also Midwest and it’s not to me – anything less than 12 hours we definitely do in one day and find it much easier to just get there and not burn a second full day on travel (because it’s not like a day with a 5-6 hour drive is going to be fun or relaxing). But I think I may have been a long haul trucker in another life because apparently this attitude is not common.

            1. Same here. 10 is no big deal. I’ve honestly never split up a road trip that short into two days. We only consider stopping overnight if the trip is more than 13-14 hours.

            2. Same, I would prefer a 10-hr (12 hr door to door with potty stops?), and it seems less tiring than ” a 2 day trip”. But can see how that would not work for some kids at some ages

   3. Move the appointment and pill them out of school. Sometimes family timing needs trump school preferences.

      1. ask your husband to move the appointment and be responsible for driving him to the mid-day december one :)

   4. Just leave after the appointment?

   5. if there’s no other alternate appointments available over the next month anyway, it seems likely there wasn’t at the time your husband made the appointment, right?

      sometimes you gotta miss school for medical stuff. just like work.

   6. So he scheduled it for a day the kids don’t have school, and you’re mad at him because you might have to cover 10 hours of driving in the evening of Tuesday, the entire day of Wednesday, and the morning of Thanksgiving….? I do not think he’s the problem here…

      1. I would not want to drive on Wednesday if I could avoid it. Traffic will be better on Tuesday. I would move the appointment.

      2. To be fair, it would suck if they had already discussed and settled thanksgiving plans, and arranged things like “I’ll take Monday and Tuesday off; so we can spend a whole week at Wherever”; and this was a “I scheduled it without looking at the calendar/remembering when thanksgiving was” issue (but even so – not a huge problem for the adult responsible for orthodontics scheduling to just go solve, by rescheduling).

   7. Is December really the only option? Call the ortho office and see if anyone canceled for earlier in the day, then start driving asap after the appointment

   8. OP – I was more concerned that travel the day before Thanksgiving is horrible and slow and an already long trip would take 2x as long.

      1. Sounds better to drive late on Wednesday then. It’s not ideal, but it’s doable with an (assumed) 4pm departure.

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