Oh la la - Sweet Pins Stockings !

 

As I continue to age (hopefully as gracefully as I am able) I am becoming loath to put photographs of myself online. Not because I am ashamed of my body or anything - I am starting to care less and less what people think of me, maybe that is part of the growing up process! - but more because I take such shocking selfies !!! I follow my dear friend Marianne from Esme and the Laneway, and am always inspired by her creative and artistic images. I on the other hand, find I am constantly frustrated by my own attempts !

 

Which leads me to my story here today. One of the wonderful delights about blogging is when you get a request to try out a new (and blog appropriate) product. Naturally I was thrilled to bits when Sweet Pins offered to send me a pair of stockings to try out - and do I love them or what! But then, the day came when I realised I was going to have to photograph myself in them....not only a selfie, but one in my underwear no less !!! Hmmmm.

 

But before we get to that horror, (I want you to have some time to brace your self for it), let me tell you candidly how I found these stockings.

 

Firstly, they fit my tall frame bea-utifully. Score one.  

Secondly, unlike some other Cuban heeled stockings, I found that these gripped ever so much better. Have you worn Cuban heeled stockings? My feet oftentimes ache at the end of a night in them simply from trying to hang onto my shoes. How my beautiful friend Chrissy Keepence ever manages to dance in them is beyond me. So score two for Sweet Pins.

 

And also unlike other natural coloured Cuban heeled stockings I have worn, Sweet Pins delightfully highlighted every curve and muscle in my legs. In the past my natural stockings have tended to have a flattening, or 'matt' effect, but not Sweet Pins. They felt sexy and they looked sexy ! Score three. LOVE them.

 

But it wasn't all sunshine and lollypops. In winter (when I am more inclined to need to wear stockings) I actually tend to dress in 40's trousers, leggings or 60's capris. And in the spring/summer, most of my dresses are lovely light weight and light coloured cottons. Here in lies my only problem with Sweet Pins. The black band at the top and adorable bows - with most of the dresses I wear stockings with, this band is visible through the light coloured cotton. This means I will need to wear a petticoat - which isn't so bad....think Elizabeth Taylor from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This is also why I don't actually own a much more sexy black garter belt/ or girdle, as you will see in the delightful photographs. I have only white as I am so practical - I need it to be invisible under my light colour dresses. Maybe I need to get myself a man to dress up in a black suspender belt for.....but that sounds like a topic for another post, another time.......

 

Firstly, thankyou Sweet Pins, for this wonderful opportunity to test drive your fantastic product - loved your generosity, and really loved your stockings !

 

So - deep breath shoppers - here you go. Photographs of these delightful stockings as modelled by yours truly in some truly hideous selfies. A thousand apologies in advance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Einstein

 

Interesting Fact : Marilyn Monroe was said to have the same IQ as Einstein. And considering some of the inspirational sayings attributed to her, I can well believe it. She certainly had a lot of insight, despite being an emotionally tortured woman. I have spent a good deal of time looking at some of her encouraging words here at Alice Jean's, so I thought it would be insightful to swing around in the other direction and take a look at Albert Einstein, and the many uplifting thoughts he voiced about life - aside from contributing brilliant mathematical formulas and scientific theories. Here are some golden nuggets of wisdom to inspire your week ahead....

 

 

 

 

And here is a brief background to one of the most famous and inspiring minds of last century - its quite humbling, but I remind myself of a non Einsteinian quote I read recently "Never compare your middle to someone else's end"....keep that in mind as you read - your journey serves a beautiful purpose in existence too !!!

Albert Einstein 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics).^[2][3] While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"),^[4] he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".^[5] The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.

 

Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe.^[6]

 

He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940.^[7] On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential developing of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was in support of defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced using the new discovery of nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.

 

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works.^[6][8] His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.^[9]

 

Marriages and children

With the discovery and publication in 1987 of an early correspondence between Einstein and Marić it became known that they had a daughter they called "Lieserl" in their letters, born in early 1902 in Novi Sad where Marić was staying with her parents. She returned to Switzerland without the child whose real name and fate are unknown. Einstein probably never saw his daughter, and the contents of a letter he wrote to Marić in September 1903 suggest that she was either adopted or died of scarlet fever in infancy.^[33][34]

Einstein and Marić married in January 1903. In May 1904, the couple's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Their second son, Eduard, was born in Zurich in July 1910. In 1914, Einstein moved to Berlin, while his wife remained in Zurich with their sons. They divorced on 14 February 1919, having lived apart for five years.

Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal on 2 June 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912. She was his first cousin maternally and his second cousin paternally. In 1933, they emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Elsa Einstein was diagnosed with heart and kidney problems and died in December 1936.^[35]

 

Death

 

On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Dr. Rudolph Nissen in 1948.^[78] He took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it.^[79] Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly."^[80] He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.

 

During the autopsy, the pathologist of Princeton Hospital, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed Einstein's brain for preservation without the permission of his family, in the hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.^[81] Einstein's remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.^[

 

In his lecture at Einstein's memorial, nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer summarized his impression of him as a person: "He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn."

 

From Wikipedia 17/08/2013