Okay, so I hate to shop for clothes. There are several reasons. I react to the finishing chemicals on most new clothing, so I can only try on clothes for a short period of time before I end up starting to develop a rash and I have to quit.
I hate dealing with salespeople because I know their pay depends on what they can sell me, and I feel guilty if I can't find anything I like.
I hate the whole exhausting process of getting undressed, dressed in the new clothing, trying to figure out in a few minutes if this is going to work for a whole day at a time, and then getting undressed and dressed again.
And I really hate shopping for clothes that aren't the same size from one color to another or one style to another or one manufacturer to another. (That is why women take so long to shop for clothes, in case you wondered. You can't go buy a "this inch" waist and "this inch" inseam and walk out with it--you have to try the stupid size "this" on to see if this is the size you need in this style or if you need to move up or down a size.)
So, I lost weight, and my pants, the ones I wear to work every day, don't fit anymore. I had inexpertly taken in the waist in order for them to not fall off, but this ended up in pads of heavy material resting on my hips and making them hurt all day. Plus, as I had lost more weight after the initial sewing, I still needed a safety pin to take the waist in the rest of the way.
Point being, I needed new pants. Really. I put up with this situation for over a year before finally coming to a conclusion that I also needed help to get new pants. Sophia knows clothes (or more than I do) so when she came to visit I asked her help to go buy new pants.
We went shopping together, which is always better since I don't have to do all the fetching of the next size up/down myself, and I don't have to do all of the dealing with the salespeople, and so on and so forth.
I think it took us four hours all told, and it was exhausting. I discovered a dreadful fact--manufacturers seem to think that if you are a smaller person, weight-wise, you don't need the same size pockets as the same pants in a bigger size.
Um, nobody issues us miniature house keys, car keys, or tiny credit cards to match our size, people. Everybody's pocket stuff is the same size, whether you're wearing size 2 or size 12. Also, manufacturers apparently think most women don't use their pockets for anything, but that's stupid--don't put the pockets in the pants in the first place if you're not going to make them useable.
Sophia was the one that found out that not only do different manufacturers and different styles mean different sizes, it can also be different colors. She found (was handed by a salesperson) a pair of black dress pants that looked stunning on her (even I could tell, and I'm not good with clothes, if you hadn't gotten that idea by now) and since she actually did need new dress pants, she decided to try on a different color in the same style and size to see if those would work too. It was a lovely color, but they just looked wrong. Something in the hang or the fit or something. She tried the next size up but that was wrong in a different way. But the black pants, and another color of that same style/size of pant, looked just fine. Is it any wonder we hate shopping for clothes? (She hates it as much as I do, but two people meant it wasn't quite as dreadful for either of us.)
Finally I found a pair that my phone fit in the pocket, as well as the pants fitting on me. I bought two sets, we went home, and the next day I wore a pair to work.
And discovered that the phone barely fitting in the pocket wasn't enough to work for a whole day of wearing them. It fell out a few times (luckily no damage) but the pocket kept the phone so tightly suspended against the pant material that it couldn't register my leg movement, which meant the pedometer function only sporadically worked.
I found this out at home, and kind of had a minor meltdown about it. If I don't know how much food to eat back to counter my activity level, I'm going to keep losing weight or compensate too hard the other way and gain it. The app I'm using to calorie-count and exercise-count is the only way I feel I can maintain my weight. Which is kind of important to me. Very important.
Okay, fine. I've been reading about women from the Victorian age and such-like, and they always seem to be letting out dresses and re-sewing dresses and altering clothes and if they can do it, pants can be altered, and if you can alter one part of pants, you can alter the pockets to make them bigger.
A woman in my neighborhood had posted on our neighborhood facebook type group that she did alterations so I called her and took them over on Friday, which we had off due to my company trying to give us Easter Friday off and missing by a week. (To be fair, it's just weird having Easter in March.)
Her place smelled intensely of smoke but she insisted that she herself didn't smoke and didn't let her nephew smoke in the house now that it wasn't winter and I felt bad having bothered her for nothing so I let the pants there with instructions to keep them in a secure plastic bag unless actually working on them. I got home, turned around at my driveway, and went back.
It took an incredible amount of courage to knock on her door again and explain that I changed my mind and wanted them back but she didn't seem upset. I'm glad I did. In the five-ten minutes it took me to drive home and drive back, the pants were already beginning to smell of cigarette smoke.
So I was out, going to get these pants altered if it killed me, so I randomly, without researching it first, chose the nearest alteration place from a google map search and let Siri take me there. Turns out I've driven past it probably my whole life. I remember the sign and the location like other people would remember the face of a childhood friend. I'd never gone in there. Just driven past it a lot. I reasoned if it had been there for that long, they probably knew what they were doing.
It was one of those sewing alteration places run by people who barely spoke English (I'm guessing Polish or another East Europe country from the accents) but they had all kinds of clothes hanging up to be altered or picked up, including some gorgeous prom dresses. I believe altering a pocket was almost an insulting request, for how simple it would be (not that they, the wife and husband, behaved that way!) I had brought the old big pants with me, to show what size pocket worked, and I'm glad I did, since my knowledge of the language they spoke was zero and their knowledge of English was less than optimum and complicated by my inability to hear the words properly due to their accents and my hearing processing delay disorder.
But we got it worked out, and they said they'd have the pants by next Tuesday. I picked them up that next Tuesday, and now my phone fits in my pocket. My left pocket, to be precise. Alteration is expensive work, and I didn't see any point in altering the pocket that I don't keep the phone in. (Now you know which side of me to pick-pocket if you're trying to steal my phone!)
Phew. I hope these pants last for a long time, because I don't want to have to go shopping for pants anytime soon.
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