A life of discovery

There's not much bathing suit season left, but I swim all year round at a local pool, so I have a plethora of swimsuits. Plethora - great word, right?
However, that means attention to...body hair.

Sigh.

It's a huge subject, but for the sake of your valuable time, I'll skip the discussion about the @%#@!! decades of pressure to defoliate.

Although some of my suits have boy trunk bottoms or skirts or frills etc., I do have a few suits where a bikini wax or a close encounter with a razor is goin…

I have a different definition of luxury clothing than stylists.

Mind you, I'm a coach who teaches you how to dress, I don't style you from top to toe, so that might be why.

Here are some of my luxury items.

Fluorescent pink and purple Life Jacket (Costco $44.95) which enables me the luxury of floating in the lake, early in the morning before other people turn up. I bob up and down like a brightly colored buoy. Big fun! It also allows me to stare at the mountain across from me and remember how…

I’m at the lake again. Sheer & utter bliss. My dog and I both need water to play in, sunshine, and strangers to admire us (I’m wearing the most amazing caftan by Prima Dona Studios). 

At Idylwood Park, there’s a sign that says:

“Don’t feed the ducks because it causes overcrowding for nutrition and pollution.”

Are you feeding the ducks in your wardrobe? 

Here’s what I mean by that: Are you overcrowding certain categories? 

Do a quick life circle, segmented into the activities, and then do a …

So you know how they say “physician, heal thyself?”

I was walking Joule (Frenchie) at the dog park, looked down at what I was wearing and thought, if a client sees me right now, I'm running in the other direction. 

Ah...oops.

I had forgotten my mantra. Dress for Your Vision, no matter the circumstances? What the heck had I been thinking? 

After all, it was a client of mine who told me:

"My husband just asked where I was going, because I looked like a badass."

"What did you tell him?"

"Now…

I'm a weather which.

This means I have finally worked out after half a century that I am affected by the weather. Duh. 

Most people are - in my case, too many grey days make me a little weepy, emotional, depressed and as gloomy as the sky outside (I live in Seattle).

However, if the sun breaks through, it hits me like a shot of tequila.

And I've worked out that sunshine + ocean = a huge burst of creativity.

I also think four seasons is three too many.

Knowing which “which” you are is really, really im…

I love epiphanies. They usually come to me when I'm a) near a body of water b) it's sunny and c) I've just had coffee. Coincidence? I think not. 

To paraphrase Einstein: "Coincidence is the Universe's way of remaining anonymous."

So...it came to me that while I love closets, I love clarity even more.

It's something I've strived for my entire life.

Clarity in who I am, what I want, how to spend my time, money, energy, with whom and where...on this one-and-possibly-done go at being me. 

Late…

A few months ago I had the privilege of going to Hawaii. Some people understood why I was going before I had my vaccination… and believe me, it was a long thought-out decision where my husband and I consulted several professionals, but I can get depression bad and I needed the sunshine desperately. 

Anyhoo...,I promise the following has to do with your vision and the life that you want to create.

If you want a short cut - scroll down to the next bold sentence. 

We had a hilarious time getting…

One of the ways I sidestepped the reality of 2020 was to throw a lot of energy, time and money into a relaunch.

I’d stepped away from The Happy Wardrobe in 2019 due to my annual Seattle slump, which sent me in another direction for a while. But just before Covid became a thing, I’d made it to Arizona and sunshine kickstarted me back to my love of clothes and the women who wear them.

Relaunch! New website, looking into virtual assistants for accountability (knowing the slump would hit once the …

Trigger warning. This may be upsetting, feel free to delete without reading.

Or, if you want, skip straight to this article, which explains it all. Or read on, because I was there. When you get to the end, there's a letter from our hotel.

I went to Hawaii last week.

It feels, well, wrong, to tell you I traveled. We were meant to go in 2020 – yeah, right. Then, optimistically, Jan 2021. Nope. But after vaccination, negative Covid tests and masks upon masks, we got on a plane April the 10^th.

Back in 2017 we renovated downstairs, mainly because my father-in-law, 85 at the time and getting frail, was coming from NZ to visit and we knew it was probably his last trip. We wanted him to have a comfortable and private guest suite and my husband works best with a) a mission and b) a deadline.

The new bedroom had a bathroom next door and that’s where it all fell to custard, as far as I was concerned

It needed paint.

I’m great with clothes, but neither of us are interior designers. We chos…