I KNOW I'm not the only woman in the world with short arms. OK, let me amend that -- I know my sister and I aren't the only ones in the world with short arms!! :o)

So why are all the shirts made with excessively long arms?!

The ideal now for models is a slender woman with impossibly long limbs, and somehow the giraffe-like proportions on these girls are supposed to be lean and elegant and graceful.

Personally, I think their long arms are just funny-looking, especially when they have long and skinny arms. They just look like they're constantly folding themselves up.

But the folks that make clothing have apparently decided that these women have arms of a normal length. This is definitely NOT SO.

Pants and jeans and the like are no problem, really. Most pants come in a petite length, which, unfortunately, is still too long for my diminutive sister, but fortunately, that is her problem, not mine.

(I love you sissy!!! *wink*)

Petite pants fit me just fine. I can even stand the average length if and when I ever decide that tapered leg looks good on me (eeewwww!!!) since the taper on the leg prevents the pantleg from descending below my shoe. Now that bootleg is much more popular, I have to stick with the petite length.

So why in the world don't they make petite-length shirts?! Don't tell me that I should just look for shirts in the petite section of my local department store. Have you ever looked at the clothes in there?? First off, they're pretty much too "old" a look for me. I mean, I do want people thinking I'm my age, but a 24-year-old who looks like a 17-year-old dressing like a 40-year-old is just too ludicrous to even contemplate. No, thank you. Secondly, the clothes that are ageless and classic in the petites department are really meant for the office. Really, can you see me, a domestic engineer, going about my vacuuming in black trousers with a houndstooth wool blazer??

I think not.

Besides, we're talking about long sleeved tee shirts -- something that I will wear about nine months out of the year here in the glorious (and not very balmy) Northwest. I much prefer to wear a long sleeved tee versus a short sleeved tee with a sweater or a sweatshirt. Long sleeved tees aren't something that's in high demand in the petites department in the stores.

If a long sleeved tee doesn't have some sort of cuff (like a sweatshirt) or other means of keeping the cuff tight to my wrist, by the end of the day the sleeve hangs far past my fingertips. And I cannot ABIDE shoving my sleeves above my elbows. If I do that, then I am guaranteed the sleeves will never be tight against my wrist again, even straight out of the dryer, thereby dooming me to never have my arms fully covered again while wearing that particular shirt.

Just to give you an image of how ludicrous my arm length is -- my wonderful sister just recently bought me the COOLEST Tampa Bay Buccaneers long sleeved tee at her neighborhood Target. It even has "Tampa Bay Buccaneers" written down the left sleeve with the Bucs' flag. The sleeves are SO long on this shirt that if I let them fall past my hands, my fingertips only make it to the place where the cuff is sewn onto the rest of the sleeve. This means there is another three inches of sleeve PAST my fingertips. When I'm wearing this shirt, the excess fabric ends up bunching up on my arms, rendering the cool Bucs' logo on the sleeve just about invisible.

And one other thing I'm getting a little peeved about. I am a well-endowed woman, meaning I'm well-endowed in just about every area of my body, with the exception of my waist. This means I am at the upper end of the misses' sizings (and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not call it "missy"!! It is NOT "missy sizes." It is "MISSES' sizes." Someone needs to inform QVC).

I was really thrilled with the introduction in the last year of "juniors' plus sizes." This meant that I could FINALLY get out of wearing the misses' larger sizes and start dressing my age again.

I recently went to Target and tried on a pair of stretch jeans that I was really stoked about. The problem with being my size is jeans (which is all I ever wear) only come in a limited range of colors -- washed blue, dark blue, and blue. I am rather tired of blue jeans. These jeans were a really cool plum-brown color. I went for the size 19, which I assumed was between a misses' 18 and a plus size 20.

You know what happens when you assume?!?!

At any rate, no, these jeans did NOT fit. I could not even bring them up over my hips. They were tight on my knees. This makes me think that this size 19 is closer to a size 14 because I can get a misses' 16 over my hips -- I just can't fasten them. I was really bummed too.

Oh well. Back to basic blue for me!