While browsing Facebook a month or so ago, I came across an ad for OutfitEZ. "Hate shopping for clothes?" it asked. Why yes, I do! I checked out the website. It's a service that picks out and sends clothes for you to wear once every quarter. The idea is that someone with more taste than you picks out outfits that are coordinated and they get delivered right to your door. A dream come true, right? What I found funny is that the makers of the site decided there's no point even mentioning that the service caters exclusively to men. (Though now, fanlain is a little bit jealous.)

It sounded tempting, and I decided to try them out. The price isn't cheap: $100/month, but it works out to roughly $40 per item of clothing, inclusive of shipping and tax (well, there's no tax charged unless you're in Colorado). They also have plans for $50 or $150, though the per-item price stays the same. You get to select your size, your profile (I picked Cool Nights), and some other things, like whether you live in a warm or cold climate, your complexion, etc.

My first shipment arrived a couple of days ago, but I finally got to look through it this evening. The collection includes:

• A striped shirt
• A paisley shirt
• A patterned long-sleeve shirt
• A mock turtleneck
• Black pants
• Designer jeans
• A tie
• A belt

One of the reasons I liked the idea of OutfitEZ is that it would be a way to leave my comfort zone and try something new; this shipment definitely did not disappoint in that respect. I think other than the pants, and maybe the belt, I would not have bought any of the rest of the things myself. But I'm pretty sure I'll keep most of these things. You're allowed to return items you don't like, but they recommend you get a second opinion before discarding an item. So this is where you come in.

fanlain and I decided to do a photo shoot to get comments. I put all the photos in a Flickr set. What do you think? Rate them from 1 to 5, where 5 means "ooh, snazzy!" and 1 means "ow! my eyes!"

Poll #1319233 rate my new wardrobe
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

Patterned shirt

... with a sweater

Striped shirt left open, with mock turtleneck

Striped shirt, buttoned up

... buttoned all the way up

Striped shirt with tie

Paisley shirt with black pants

Paisley shirt with jeans

Designer jeans (keep or not?)

Mock turtleneck, tucked in

Mock turtleneck, not tucked in

( our thoughts )

We spent the weekend in Chicago with plans of spending my summer salary. (The university, in a clever trick of saving money, stretches out the 9-month salary they pay me to 12 monthly payments. This means that my summer salary, paid out of research grants, gets added to my regular pay as a "bonus.") Our agenda was to get a bunch of furniture, a used car, and gear for our cycling trip in Norway (I found this part funny, because we scoffed at all those wedding checklists that suggested we needed to buy special clothes for the honeymoon, but here we are). The gear shopping went pretty well, and the furniture was a qualified success: now we have everything we need for the office except for a chair for me (though I'm still unsatisfied with the size of the desks), and we have a plan for buying the rest of the furniture we need for our now-bare living and dining rooms. The car shopping was a failure; we looked at two cars that were both in good condition, but not quite what we were after, and we decided since we don't need a second car right now, it was probably best to wait. We also managed to (finally!) decide on plate settings for our dining room, and have dinner with namazu, who were still in Chicago visiting family.

By the end of the weekend, I felt completely exhausted, both from driving around Chicago suburbs and wandering around huge showrooms and shopping malls, and from trying to make a bunch of decisions about what would and wouldn't work well in our new house. Having two people in this task is both a blessing and a curse; it's nice to be able to bounce ideas off your partner and think out loud, but we kept getting to the point of one of us getting excited about something, and the other saying "No, that's not what I want." But such is married life, I guess. :) The nice thing is that our tastes are not wildly different and we usually are able to find something that we're both reasonably happy with.

I think we need one more trip like this, probably in August, before we're done. But first, we get to go to Norway, with no computers, no decorating decisions, just us, the fjords, and the midnight sun.

fanlain is much better than I am at blogging in realtime. I can only offer a retrospective. We managed to do the things we came for, which is find a place to live and buy a car. Actually, we only planning to reserve a car being currently shipped, but then we found out that someone else's deal on a blue ("Seaside Pearl") Prius with the package we wanted (AM) fell through, so we stepped in and picked it up.

The whole financing deal felt weird. You give them a small amount of money down, sign some forms, and you get a car. In our case, we nearly skipped the money down part because the finance guy at the dealership forgot to take our cheque, and we only remembered while walking out to take this photo. I suppose in some sense, they really win, since we didn't so much get a car but a bunch of pieces of paper. (The car will sit at the dealership until we come back in August.)

We also managed to find a place. We looked at about 10 places in total, some of them fairly nice, while others were cleary a dump, and finally settled on a townhouse that's not too far from campus, but not too close either. I like the idea of a townhouse because it makes a good intermediate step before buying a house, which we will likely do next year. And with no downstairs neighbors, I can keep playing DDR! The lease signing was a little painful; we had to read and sign more documents than for the car purchase, but I guess that's what you get with a lawyer-happy nationwide management company.

Tomorrow we get to wake up way early and drive our rental car back to O'Hare (which I discovered is not a convenient airport for getting to U-C) and fly to Toronto for nearly a week. We still have a lot on our todo list, and I suspect this will remain the case for the near future, but it feels good to get a couple of these big ticket issues out of the way. Now, once my visa paperwork clears, I'll be really happy.