Favorite This: June 2016

June 28, 2016

This month’s favorites are a little all over the place. I mean more than usual, silly.

check out this top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list!

I had a couple weeks of intense client work, followed by a personal escape of the most wondrous, Greek, marital variety. The resulting favorites list is a jumble of organizing products and lifestyle favorites, in no order whatsoever. The latter I possess no legitimate authority to discuss on a public platform besides being a person, who happens to like some things more than others. Great! Let’s kick this off, shall we? (Also, I’m sorry.)

 

From a top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list--"this powder SPF is the only thing I wore on my face for 9 days in Greece, and I barely walked away with a freckle!"

Powder SPF 

I wore this exclusively to protect my face from being burned the entirety of my time in Greece (plus the SPF in my moisturizer, but that cancels out after a while). I’m telling you I reapplied this. With diligence. And with ease. And nary a red nose was to be seen.

The fact that it’s a powder formulation means that responsibly reapplying it is a legitimate and not altogether unappealing option, you see. On the other hand, tasked with reapplying a liquid SPF, well, I’d have the head of a lobster currently.

If you’re wearing makeup, then applying a liquid formula on top of that is a nightmare. And if you aren’t, and you’re out and about, touching all the things, your digits mingling with all of the germs, then touching your face at all is something akin to a grave sin.

This allows for hands-free, goop-free (Gwyneth’s presence undetermined) skin protection that doesn’t even require a mirror to apply, cannot be felt at all on the skin, and, conveniently, abates the shine. It’s worth noting that I also happen to have impossibly sensitive skin, and this caused negatory irritation or break-outs.

It’s a tad pricy (as compared to your average bottle of banana boat, maybe), and worth every penny. It also happens to last forever.

Have you clicked away to guy purchase this for yourself yet? Because really, what are you waiting for? I want you to have it, it’s that stellar.

Let’s all swallow the emphasis of that statement…

(FYI I have the medium shade, which is very nearly translucent and should work for most skin tones.)

From the top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list--"If you're going to keep your CDs, you're going to need this box."

160-CD One Touch Box

Lots of my clients readily let go of impressively vast CD collections. They’ve come to view CDs as being apt only for the musical enjoyment of the dinosaurs, and can’t wait to be rid of them.

Yet, there are still the occasional clients who hold firm to their CD collection. They are often music devotees. And they care far less about technological trends than having ready access to killer jams.

Since both are right, I happily cart of big bins of music discs to donation sites, and help clients locate suitable storage for the physical copies of music they’ve resolved to keep.

Of course, there is the spatial cost one must pay if one retains a great number of CDs…

One of my client’s this month has a music library as vast as her space is small and falls into the second group of CD owners, making it essential to find a storage system that listed “compact” as one of its chief attributes.

This version is impressive to me. It holds 160 CDs, is very compact, has an in-built cataloguing system, and each side opens with the press of a button.

So if you’re going to keep your CDs, I vote you do so with the help of this.

From a top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list--these no-brainer cord wraps are the end of the inevitable cord webs.

Bobino cord wraps: Large warps // Small wraps

I’ve been finding look-a-likes of these things floating in clients’ drawers for years, without ever giving them much consideration.

I had made it a point, however, to find a method of wrangling my cords while traveling. That laptop cord is really a behemoth (not that I’m complaining about length, Apple; we all still wish your phone cords were longer), and even the small earbud and charger cords, unharnessed, can easily make one’s backpack feel like a hot mess.

These are ultra flat and lightweight; I figured it was worth a shot.

Now, don’t let’s hyperbolize the things: they’re small pieces of rubber and plastic composite. They aren’t curing malaria or organizing the contents of your hard drive for you. But you know? For silly little bobbins, they really do the job well. They’re structured enough to withstand the heft of a large laptop cord, but they also have just a bit of bend in them, allowing for easier tying and untying. The material isn’t slippery, though not quite grippy, which, it turns out, is what you want in a cord wrapper.

All in all, I thoroughly appreciated having them on my trip, and will continue to use them for my cords at home.

From the top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list--"these bootshapers will take your boots from limp lasagna noodles to the queen's guard"

Boot shapers

Who can remember which items I’ve included in a previous favorites and which I haven’t, huh? (No, really, have I included these??) In any case, this month, boot shapers made a big impact in my client’s closet life. We’re talking limp lasagna noodles to the queen’s guard in ten seconds flat (or however long it takes to insert these; it’s probably less than that.)

From this top 5 organizing and lifestyle favorites list-- this collapsible water bottle is the answer for hydration on the go.

Vapur Element Water Bottle

The hunt for the optimal water bottle, begun so long ago, marches ever onward…

Right before I left (I mean really, pretty much right), I got it into my head that a collapsible water bottle was the thing to have. I’m the kind of person who always carries water. This is a significant distinguisher, and the main way I might recognize my besties immediately and far away in a crowd.

Only, I’ve grown rawther tired of toting around that old bottle. For one thing, when you factor in the water, it weighs about a ton. For another, it’s cumbersome is what. And there’s kind of no winning with one; I mean, the only reason you actually remember to drink the water you’ve fastidiously equipped yourself with is to relieve yourself of the weight of it. But with a standard bottle, even if you guzzle the H2O, you’ve still got to look after (read: try mostly unsuccessfully to fit in your purse) the container.

So I found this one, and ordered it same-day delivery on Amazon.

I happened to catch sight of the Amazon truck as it sped past my house at 4:00pm. For a flickering nanosecond, I considered running out of the house, chasing it down the street, and waving my arms like a wild lunatic: “STOP! I THINK YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO STOP! MY WATER BOTTLE; WAIT—” But it was out of sight before the thought fully crystallized.

I tracked the package over the next several hours, shaking my head each time. “Messed up. He messed up.”

When, by eight o’clock the bottle hadn’t arrived, and given it’s “delivery by 8pm” status, I’d resigned myself to the truth: I would be heading to Greece water bottle-less.

“I’m boycotting Amazon.” I said in my most tremulous, victimized voice. It was 9pm, a hydration tragedy.

At 9:03pm my ears detected the unthinkable: the sound of a truck, of the sliding of a large door, a beeping of some sort of scanner–it couldn’t be–and then it was: the gentle thud of a cardboard box being lain on the porch and two abrupt, rhetorical knocks.

“AMAZON IS THE SHIT!” I cried, whizzing down the stairs to collect my prize.

And since approximately none of you are still reading this, I can now relay the only pertinent details mentioned thus far: this collapsible water bottle is the real deal. It holds a liter, it’s puncture-proof (from what I can tell), it has a screw-off top for easy filling and an attached carabiner for toting and/or keeping the empty bag tightly rolled up.

Totally worth the emotional turmoil of the delivery process.

 

Other favorites of the month:

Greece. The Country.

-Greek people.

-Greek food.

-Everything Greek.

Eloping.

-You.

 

3 Comments

  1. Laura on July 9, 2016 at 11:53 am

    Considering buying the powder sunscreen for an upcoming vacation. Did you get SPF 30 or 50?

    • Annie on July 11, 2016 at 9:54 am

      30.

      GET IT.

  2. […] favorited this powder SPF once already back in this post. I’m all hot and bothered (though never burned!) about it again now that there is sunshine in […]

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3 Comments

  1. Laura on July 9, 2016 at 11:53 am

    Considering buying the powder sunscreen for an upcoming vacation. Did you get SPF 30 or 50?

    • Annie on July 11, 2016 at 9:54 am

      30.

      GET IT.

  2. […] favorited this powder SPF once already back in this post. I’m all hot and bothered (though never burned!) about it again now that there is sunshine in […]

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