Of those things, I’m betting that you guys already know about how awesome popsicles and slushees are, so instead, we’re going to talk about my new showerhead!

Before buying a showerhead, I first thought I would do some research. This led me to Consumer Reports, which reviewed a bunch of expensive ($50+) showerheads. There was also a terrifying section on “shower towers”, which are mind-bogglingly expensive handheld showerheads that also have body jets. I’m not sure how it works, to be honest, mostly because I was busy trying to figure out what kind of person would spend $1100 on a showerhead. (Said showerhead didn’t seem to double as a transport device to a deserted waterfall on a tropical island, so…)

Obviously, I was not Consumer Reports’ target audience for this. So I did what all thinking people do, looked at a few showerheads on Amazon, and then asked Twitter about my impending showerhead purchase. Within ten minutes, I had half a dozen votes for the Peerless Shower System, so I bought it.

Thanks to the magic of a free Amazon Prime membership, it showed up two days later, and I set forth to do battle with the disgusting old showerhead, which, I think, was installed in about 1964 and never replaced. This was more difficult than planned, and required several angry tweets and a bit of blood sacrifice. (Apparently when you accidentally apply torque to your hand instead of the showerhead, the skin tears. Who knew?)

Once that was down, though, the new shower went up in about five minutes. Despite what some Amazon reviewers said about the washers, mine were the standard black plastic kind, which work just fine–no leaking here.

Anyhow, the new showerhead? It’s like magic! Maura can be in the shower with me, and we both have water. I can use the handheld part to wash her hair, and still keep myself cosy warm under the wall-mounted part, which means that I can wash myself while she’s in the shower instead of waiting until she’s out and using the last few drops of hot water to rinse myself with. There are settings on this showerhead–multiple ones, including a please-don’t-hurt-my-premenstrual-breasts setting. After all this time with the one-setting, non-handheld crappy showerhead that we had, this is a major, life-altering event. No longer will I desperately speed-shower with one arm flung protectively over my chest. Instead, I will bask in the warm, comforting fall of water, and I’ll be happy about it.

In conclusion, those of you who have mediocre showerheads should consider buying one of these right now, because they are amazing.

Also, this is making me wonder what other obvious home improvements I’m missing. We bought this house about eighteen months ago, and it’s still virtually unchanged from when we bought it, despite the fact that the people living here before us were old, boring, and inexplicably fond of beige, brown, and tan.

The showerhead was a good start, but now what? The idea of tackling, like, repainting (with a kid, eight cats, and a dog) is sort of overwhelming to me, but surely there are other projects that are relatively easy but have a good return, right? What have you guys done that you think is totally worth it?

This is not a journey that I undertake lightly. I hate malls. I hate how they smell, and I hate how they’re full of people, I hate how the lights are ugly and too bright, and the salesclerks are either invisible or breathing down your neck, and I’m pretty sure that the air is actually thinner inside a mall because I always leave feeling lightheaded and dizzy and vaguely ill, and…yeah. I hate malls.

So when I say that I went to the mall, understand that what I am saying is that I went to the mall despite all of this, because I was convinced for the seven-minute drive there that it was somehow going to be a good thing.

Okay, in truth, I went because of two things. One is that something needed to be done about my eyebrows. I have a buzz cut, and every few months it occurs to me that the amount of eyebrow I have does not match the amount of hair I have, and then I go and give the nice woman at the mall $10 plus a $2 tip to thread them. It’s a $3 tip if she doesn’t get lotion in my eye.

The other reason that I went to the mall is because I’ve once again hit a point where I realize that all of my clothing is unattractive and inadequate, and that despite the fact that I’m a reasonably mature person who has a six-year-old child and a career and a husband and a house and garden that I haven’t killed, I look like a surly seventeen year old. Everyone I know–literally everyone I know–dresses better than I do.

This is partly because I do not care. I don’t like clothing that clings to me, I don’t like things that touch me too much, I don’t like things that are girly… There is a long, long list of things that I do not like in clothing.

The other reason that I dress like I do was driven home in my attempts at shopping. I am, let’s face it, kinda fat. I’m one of the in-betweenies: too fat to comfortably shop in the regular sections of a clothing store, too thin to really fit anything in the plus-size section. Add to that the fact that I’m apple shaped and have small boobs, and you’ve got limited clothing choices. My general objectives are inexpensive and comfortable, which usually ends up being men’s jeans and a tee-shirt. (Not one of those horrid girly-cut things, either, but a bog-standard rectangle-shaped tee-shirt.)

So my options today were this: continue to look like a teenager, or suck it up and go into JCPenny, where there was a big sale, and see what I could find. Somewhat reluctantly, I went for option number two.

Women’s clothing was right next to the door. I grabbed three pairs of jeans (fourteen, sixteen, eighteen) and two shirts (XL, XXL) and hit the dressing room. All the jeans fit, but…weirdly. Eighteens were huge in the legs and gappy at the back, fourteens fit my legs great but squeezed my stomach, and the crotch on the sixteens was much baggier than what I needed. The shirts also did not work–the XL fit, objectively, but was too tight for my comfort, and the XXL was cut in such a way that either a breast or a shoulder was exposed. Pass.

I texted my boss and offered Starbucks in exchange for letting me take a long lunch and make it up later. Deal struck.

The plus-sizes were in a section next to the regular sizes, so I headed over there. It’s like passing into a different world, a world that primarily caters to grandmothers who live in Miami and would like to wear brightly colored animal prints and large, floating muumuu-inspired tops. Apparently, the hot trend for fat girls this season is bright colors, lots of filmy fabric, and tight satin singlets worn under caftans.

News flash: the last thing that I want on my body is something that’s going to billow.

I grabbed several pairs of jeans, a few pairs of capris (I hate capris, but they’re so damn ubiquitous that I’ve given up), and two sizes of every shirt that I didn’t hate. The dressing-room police were off duty, so I was able to take everything in with me at once, which made it a bit easier.

After a dozen pairs of pants, I had two that fit. The shirts were harder, as I’m small-breasted, and the assumption seems to be that if you’re fat, obviously you will have enormous breasts. Out of the nine or ten styles of shirts (styles–I had two sizes for many of them) that I took in with me, one of them ended up fitting. The others either left my tits hanging out, fell off of my shoulders, cut across my nipples in a painful way, or involved a fitted singlet that was attached to a bunch of shapeless, filmy fabric.

Ninety minutes in the store, and I walked out with two pairs of pants and a shirt for a mere $50. Everything that I purchased was on sale, all of them more than half off–buying at regular prices, it would’ve been over $40 just for the jeans.

I made what was a pretty major effort, and I ended up with two pairs of pants and a shirt. It’s depressing, but I’m not sure what else to do–I’m unwilling to join the caftan club, unable to spend a ton of money on clothes, and ultimately unimpressed with my options.