I discovered Agatha Christie when I was 11 years old. My friend Veronica’s sister, Salomé, was a fan and she loaned me her first Hercule Poirot book, The Mysterious Affair At Styles
I have to admit that I liked every single mystery that Agatha Christie wrote (I never read her romance novels), but I do have my favorites (among them Cards on the Table
It involves a young girl with a thirst for adventure who decides to go after a master criminal and in the midst of this falls head over hills in love over the prime suspect. It’s one of Agatha’s Christie’s earliest works, published in 1924, and it differs from the mostly formulaic mysteries she later wrote in several ways. For one, the book is an adventure as much as a story of detection. For another, the story is actually told mostly in first person by the female protagonist. I don’t know if Christie ever had a female narrator again.
As a fourteen year old, I have to admit that I loved the spunky and daring female protagonist and her manly and strong love interest. This book, along with They Came to Baghdad
I just re-read the book after two and a half decades, and I was struck by the similarities between women back then and women now. Christie’s female characters are always strong, smart, independent and have free will. They also embrace their sexuality. We tend to think that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were chaste virgins with little thought of sex, but that’s not at all how Christie saw women – and that is refreshing.
I’m not a big reader of romance, but I think after this book I may look up one or two of her romance stories.
Author: marga (Page 22 of 158)
I have never been much of a perfume wearer. Though my mother has gotten me a few from time to time, I have never seen much of a reason to wear them. A big reason for this was probably that none of the perfumes I’d gotten were that pleasing to me.
In the last few weeks, however, I’ve gotten quite a few perfume samples from listia.com, a low-cost auction website. I was surprised to found several perfumes that I really liked. Norell
is one of them.
If I had to describe Norell the first word that would come to me is “powdery”. The second would be “old lady”. This is definitely the type of perfume you’d imagine a woman in her seventies-eighties to wear. It’s completely non-offensive, with no high notes, and yet very pleasant. Surprisingly, I find it very calming. It doesn’t directly remind me of my aunt Gladys, I can’t really remember if she or my grandmother wore a perfume like this, but they very well might have. I thus associate it with old ladies in tailored suits, pumps and perfect make up – the way Gladys looked when she went out to any social engagement.
One thing that I’ve recently realized (about me, at least) is that I like wearing perfume so that I can smell it – not others. And I think I will put on this perfume from time to time when I want to feel all warm and fuzzy.
The girls and I have been playing at putting on make up quite frequently lately, so I’ve been looking for a good (and cheap) makeup remover. I found the Blum Daily Cleansing Towelettes
The selling point of these towelettes is that they are made with natural and organic ingredients (though if you look at the ingredients the only organic ingredient is the tea tree oil). Some of the ingredients (salicylic acid, gluconolactone) don’t sound very natural, but who am I to know? The towelettes are pretty thin and they are a bit rough when you apply them. The ones I use are for combination/oily skin and they don’t contain any oil – which means that they leave you with a dry feeling. That’s probably a good thing.
The problem, however, is that they don’t work well. My kids applied a lot of makeup to my face today, and I tried to thoroughly clean it with the towelette. It removed quite a bit of the stuff, but by no means all of it. I followed up by cleaning my face with cotton balls and a combination of 2/3 aloe vera gel and 1/3 jojoba oil, and I was amazed at how much makeup there was left over. Of course, using oil to clean my oily face is probably not a good idea – but it does work.
A little while ago I came back from picking up Camila at daycare. Her daycare is about 2 miles from my house and I walk to pick her up and back – this means that every day, in the middle of the day, I spend almost two hours under the sun, not a trivial amount.
In my youth, that wouldn’t have been an issue. I always tanned beautifully and seldom burnt (though I remember one trip to Ecuador where I didn’t fare so well). But with age my skin has changed and now my face and upper chest acquires an ugly red tint if I spend almost any time under the sun (my arms, meanwhile, continue to tan just as well).
I usually hate wearing sunscreen, both for the oily feeling and the horrible coconut smell. I like spray sunscreens for this reason (and because they are easy to apply), but even those with a high SPF don’t seem to work that well for me. So Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock
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