March 2019 - Liz Lisa sweet confiture, outfit photo introspection & hiking

This was a long, difficult month for me. I hardly have anything to post about, but I think it might just be as relevant to show that there wasn't much to report and just where my head was during this time.

Purchases
Liz Lisa sweet confiture jumperskirt in purple (191-6014-0), sweet confiture in pink (191-4006-0) & open shoulder sailor blouse in white (191-1010-0)
スウィートコンフィチュール柄ジャンス, スウィートコンフィチュール柄スカート& 肩あきセーラーブラウス

Although I'm not extremely in love with the print itself, I love the cut of the jumperskirt for this series and Berri had highly recommended it as well. Bf helped me pick the color since I was pretty on the fence. The top and skirt weren't initially high on my list, but I bought them as well after seeing some really convincing shop staff photos!

In person, the lavender is definitely more grey than I anticipated, but Berri was right - the cut/fit is great. The fit of the skirt I don't love as much as I expected and overall, it's kind of simple. I wish it had a little bit of hem detail like the jumperskirt does. The top is exactly as expected and I'm glad that I ordered it with these items although I don't personally love it paired with the jumperskirt just because of how the necklines (dont) match up.

Liz Lisa berry bouquet jumperskirt in pink

This has been a wishlist item for me for a while and I had seen it on Mercari before but wasn't sure how much I wanted to pay. With how much overtime I had been working, I decided to treat myself and just get it when the opportunity presented itself again. It's extremely similar to the strawberry bon bon OP I got last month, but I personally like a jumperskirt design a little bit more, so I thought it would be worthwhile to have both. I purchased this using Mintkismet Shopping Service again!

As it turns out, I don't love the fit of this on me at all. My torso is apparently too long for it and it makes me look really boxy so I'm reconsidering what I want to do with it. The print and color are lovely, but I have to admit, this isn't the right item for me.

Watermark knit cardigan in white (183-3030-0) & Lace wedge pumps in pink (181-9603-0)

 透かし編みカーディガン & レースウェッジパンプス

These are both outlet items that I got during the free shipping campaign for the TKL Overseas website's 1st anniversary. I was really apprehensive about it because I was wondering why these didn't sell well (the pumps in particular), but since I have an intended purpose for them, I decided to just give it a try.

When I received them, I didn't notice anything particularly weird (like being scratchy or super uncomfortable) and these items are pretty average for Liz Lisa, so I'm glad that I took a chance. The tone of the pink for the shoes was the thing I was most worried about since it's extremely variable from stock photos, but it's right around what I was expecting although it's not a 100% perfect match to anything I currently have. Closest color pair is the pink from the ice cream series, shown above. (Wearing the shoes without the bow but they were included in the box.)

DreamV (NewlyMe) cross strap pumps in white smooth

I bought another pair of these lol. Last month, I tried them out in red and black. There was a small price reduction, so I decided to treat myself to another pair since I really liked the black ones and was wearing them a lot! I plan to use this pair as a back up to my white Liz Lisa 3D flower pumps, but also I think they'll be useful for outfits where I want a more significant heel. I ordered these in 24.5cm instead of my typical 24.0 because the black pair was a little snug and I think that was a good choice! Worn with the sweet confiture series above.
If I get another pair, it'll be either the beige, lavender or the coral. Let me know which gets your vote! (Although in the best case scenario, I'll eventually end up with a pair in every color lol.)

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Outfits photos and social media

While I ended up wearing the items I purchased above during the month, I was feeling really overwhelmed from work. This caused me to re-evaluate taking the outfit photos as a whole. 

What's the point of taking these outfit photos? To "show off" on social media? 

The way that I used to take OOTD pictures (just on my own, by myself in my room during my own time) felt okay because I was strongly motivated to share what the items looked like on a customer/irl or just how I coordinated certain items. These weren't high quality photographs and had pretty much 0 artistic merit. It did take some time for me to edit and capture, etc, but that was just my own time I was wasting. 

The way that I feel like people have come to expect outfit photos has way more production and aesthetic value and has more to do with taking a pretty picture with a cute outfit rather than showing what the clothes look like. There's aboslutely nothing wrong with this, however, it's not something I currently want to do or ask others to help me do. 

Yes, it's entirely possible for me to drag around a tripod everywhere to get the perfect instragrammable shot in the A++ location. Yes, my bf has told me he is more than willing to help me take photos if I ask him. But I feel like...why? Why should we both use our time taking these photos just for social media? I went all of last year [My 2018] without taking any specific outfit pictures and I didn't enjoy wearing them any less. 

That's why, this month, even though I had a number of outfits I felt would be great to share and thought I looked great in, I chose to stop. I don't want to take another break from blogging - but I do want to take a break from going far out of my way to get a photo just to post on social media. If it just takes a couple seconds to arrange and shoot like the mirror pics, and I would do it regardless of it being shared, then of course I would still take it (and post it here), but no more pausing life (especially other people's lives) to take social media-specific pictures. At least for the time being anyway. I'll likely revisit this in a better head space. 

Lizzie coincidentally recently wrote a blog post "Why Did Blogging Become So Serious?" that I read after typing most of this out and while it's not 100% what I was thinking, it was great to read her perspective too. 

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Miscellaneous updates

I mentioned it several times in this post already, but I had a hard month at work. Although my department is constantly busy throughout the year, this March was particularly bad. We had a tasker that started in November and finally came to its conclusion at the end of March. There was a lot of different team members who contributed to the effort, but it somehow fell on me and one other coworker to collate, manage and QA/QC all the documents and data (in addition to just performing our regular, expected work). At the end of February, I had been consistently doing about 20 hours of overtime per week. In March, I was doing about 30 hours of overtime a week. During the week before the due date, I finally hit 40 hours of OT (83 hours worked total in 7 days). I was tired. The hardest part was that the group we were supporting for the effort didn't even seem to fully appreciate it. 

Bf and I did somehow make time for 2 short hikes this month though. His friends from college were visiting, so we went with a small group to hike at Hawaii Loa Ridge. Photo on the left when we started the ascent and photo on the right is us making our way back down. 

It was really overcast while we were hiking. The haze in the photos isn't some weird grey filter I added but actually the clouds! The view from the top was almost non-existent because it was just grey nothingness lol. (Wow my posture sucks.) We ended up getting a quick lunch and then going straight into work after this lol.

The second hike was more just like a fun activity with my ex-coworker and her boyfriend. We went to go explore Koko Crater Arch!

Not a great idea if you're super afraid of heights, but pretty easy to get to once you understand where to park. We hung around for a little while until another set of people arrived and then we made our way to the beach and a quick lunch after. (Bf and I went straight to work after that too fol.)

Work tasker was actually finalized on March 27, so I had 5 days to enjoy in the month that didn't involve overtime. And what did I want to do the first night? A 1000 piece puzzle lmao.

I really enjoyed all the bright colors in this one. It was nice to be able to work on each individual cupcake as a mini challenge. Some were way harder than I thought because the pieces were a bit smaller which meant many of them looked really similar within the cupcake.

And...that's it really! I wish I had more to share but I do think this is an accurate representation what what I did lol - majority work with just a few small breaks. I don't even have any lackluster photos to share this month because I really didn't take any aside from the hiking. 

We do have some slightly more exciting things to look forward to in April and I'm really happy to have the tasker done (for now). There's still a lot of follow up we have to take care of and the next effort to prepare for, but no more crazy OT hours for a while! I'm happy to have a little extra spending money from the additional hours, but it really isn't worth it for how much we had to sacrifice. I have my eye on a few things to buy next month, but we'll see if the "treat yourself" attitude will even continue. Hope your March was better than mine! ❣