Thursday Appointment Style. . .

A sunny, warmer Thursday yesterday, so out came the tan belt and shoes when I dressed in a few of the usual suspects to shuttle the Young Master from school to a mid-morning appointment and then back again. Child safely deposited and signed in by 10:15, and I was back home by 10:35.

Now, some scratch their heads and wonder aloud why you should bother to dress for similar kinds of appointments (doctors, dentists, orthodontists, law offices, bankers, air travel, etc.), either your own or your child's, when almost everyone else looks like they just rolled out of bed and pulled on whatever was handy from beneath the it. Frumpy is the new lingua franca it seems.

Here's the answer.

People in all walks of life simply react better to and treat you with a higher level of polite deference and respect when you present yourself well and look like you have more than a couple of active brain cells functioning somewhere behind your eyes. There are, admittedly, adherents to a certain school of thought who take offense at that and make a great show of their outrage. Nevertheless.

I've been on both sides of the table, as it were, and can attest to this. Outré hairstyles, an over abundance of visible body modifications, denim and leather, or stretchy exercise gear of one kind or another, -- not to mention a windbreaker and white socks worn with black shoes/sneakers (Check out the adult males in almost any waiting room in 2024) -- don't have quite the same effect as clean, pressed, and relatively pulled together. Like it or not, appearance is important, and how we present ourselves speaks volumes to the world.

Here's modest proposal.

Why not put your best foot forward when you leave the house? The easy answer is to dress more presentably before walking through the front door to meet the world, so that you might make a favorable impression with whomever you interact.

You just never know.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

Comments

Up North Style. . .

Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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