mlroseplant

My thoughts, @Shyheels Perhaps it would be good to set defined goals, such as "we're going to wear our 12 cm (which I don't technically own, by the way) three times a week for x minutes, or y meters. Something like that. Maybe you will have the opportunity to move your boat to a better spot for getting off of it without safety concerns or ruining nice shoe concerns. But, if you're already having to carry your art supplies to someplace, why not a different pair of boots? As for me, I need to get over feeling a little self conscious about "walking over my head." @higherheels evidently does not have a problem walking around her neighborhood in insanely high heels, so perhaps it's time to take a page out of that book. Happy New Year everyone!

It makes sense that a washer/dryer combination would take forever and a day to dry clothes, at least in the western hemisphere. The handicap of 120V. With a normal cord-and-plug connected appliance, you're just not going to get all that much wattage out of the dryer portion. Even with the heat pump setup, you're never going to get the blast of heat that you'll get with a traditional 240V dryer. Even one with one broken heat element, like mine has. I suppose I'll fix it someday, buy why? It actually works just fine if you turn it up to high!

In other news, as it is the last day of the year, and I know I won't go out walkin' until AFTER midnight, I can report that I walked a record breaking 460 high heeled miles this year, or 740.6 km, whichever you prefer. I do not at this time have the statistics about how many were walked in mid heels vs. high heels, and in any case my definitions have changed this year, thanks to standardization brought about by the high heel challenge documented elsewhere. How did I break my previous record by more than 100 miles? I didn't intend to. A little history: I had 312.7 miles in 2023, which barely broke the previous record of 310.1 miles way back in 2014, which was my second year of public heeling and I was way enthusiastic. I followed that up in 2024 by exceeding 350 miles. At the beginning of 2025, I had this idea that if I were to average 30 miles a month, I could get 360. Then I thought, let's shoot for 365, or one mile per day. Then, due to a combination of good weather and being laid off for the first part of the year, by the end of April I was WAY ahead of a mile a day. I decided to up the goal to 420 miles, or 35 miles a month. It was then that I ran into a problem. I had a job again, but it was more hours than I really wanted to work, and six days a week. How was I going to keep up that walking schedule, especially when I often got in over 20,000 steps at work, depending on the day? My solution came by accident, as oftentimes I would crash right after supper, sometimes as early as 7:30, being exhausted from work. I started waking up naturally at 3:30 in the morning, way earlier than I needed to. I used this time to get things done around the house that I didn't get done the previous night, like mop the kitchen floor, and I set aside a couple of days a week to walk. It was in this way that I was able to get the total annual mileage up, little by little, often one mile at a time. By the time I got to October, I knew I was going to blast past the 420 mile goal, so I again upped it to 455 miles, or one mile per cubic inch of displacement in the engine of my son's 1973 Oldsmobile. And I did it, having only walked 16 miles this month. I purposefully told myself I was going to take it easy in December. I do not know whether I will take the trouble to figure out some interesting statistics about this year or not. Since I do not have any kind of spreadsheet, I have to go through and figure it out manually from what I have written down. As for next year? It would be crazy to plan to walk that much again. I think I'll dial it back to a one mile a day average, or 365 miles for the year, and then see what happens.

The main problem with Keds is, while wearing them, a person is not going to get any better at wearing 12 or 13 cm heels. To be fair, this is probably not a wise endeavor when one is 8 months pregnant. To answer the question, and yes this is my bias, everybody already knows it: If it had been me, I would have worn some cute leather sandals with the sundress, same as I would with a Dirndlkleid for that matter. But that is a matter for somebody else's life, as I am destined to wear bifurcated lower body clothing for the remainder of my days.

I'm surprised you didn't get clocked on the head with a frying pan!

Even though this is supposed to be a thread about durable heels, it seems like a good place to put shoe failures as well. I just had Shoe Failure No. 4 in 2025 last night. I really thought I was going to make it with just 3 failures this year. My BCBGeneration Queenie wedges yielded up the ghost. Funny thing is, I never really wore them all that seriously. They were pretty much just house shoes. I'm sure I wore them to the grocery store or other errands quite a few times, but I do not have any record of them having been part of my walking routine. I do not know whether I will attempt to replace them, since I have other mid heeled wedges that are less clunky looking.

OK, so I felt guilty about slacking, so I pulled out my highest regular heels for church yesterday morning. I actually had the morning off from musical duties, so I could sit with my family in the congregation like a normal person. These particular pumps are some off brand called Elisabet Tang. There is another brand called GenShuo that is exactly the same. They are inexpensive shoes, but appear to be well made for what they are. They are slightly higher than the similar Steve Madden shoes of that ilk like the Daisie, but still clock in at a mere 11.3 cm when translated to size 38. I thought I did ok in them. I didn't have to walk more than 30 meters at a time, though, so I can't give a real assessment. At the time this photo was taken, the wind had picked up to about 40 km/h, and everything was starting to ice over. Therefore, I switched to boots to after that to run errands.

I understand that foot size often changes during or after pregnancy. My mom said she used to wear size 5 back in the 60s and before. By the time I came along, all I can remember in her closet is 6 1/2 or better. And yes, I did try on her shoes when she wasn't around. My ex-wife's feet swelled up something terrible when she was pregnant with my older son. Luckily, it was summer, and she bought a pair of single band leather slides, and that's all she could wear for a couple of months. Amazingly, only a few short hours after giving birth, her feet shrank back down to normal size, and that's where they've stayed ever since, as far as I know. My current wife's feet increased a whole size after giving birth to my younger son. This was kind of disappointing to me, because we had gone to the great trouble of bringing about 50 pairs of shoes from Vietnam, most of them heels, and none of which fit her within months of coming to the U.S.

It has still not been a great month for practicing in super tall heels. Part of the reason is the weather, but part of it is that I'm taking a bit of a break from walking in heels just for the sake of walking in them. I've had the last four days off due to the Christmas holiday, and I've actually gone out walking on three out of the four. I purposefully wore mid heels for two of those days, because I figured I would be a little out of condition, and didn't want to overdo it. Nothing bad happened, so I switched to actual high heels yesterday. I did my 2.1 mile (3.4 km) route in the equivalent adjusted steepness of 10.5 cm, and wow, the difference between 9 cm and 10 1/2 is remarkable, or so my calves thought! And it's not like I gave up wearing heels altogether, I just haven't been pounding the pavement like I usually do.

This might explain in part why my feet have actually gotten smaller over the last 10 years. Not a lot, but certainly noticeable with picky fitting women's shoes. I am now solidly a size 9/size 40. Used to be more like a 9 1/2. 9 1/2 these days is always too big, even in boots. Not only do I wear heels, but I do arch strengthening exercises every day, twice a day. I just had a go-round with safety last week. A junior safety guy finally noticed after 9 months that I wasn't wearing steel toes. He wouldn't let it go. I threatened to drag. The head safety guy came to visit me about an hour later, and said basically, "Well, if nobody has noticed in 9 months, I'd just let it ride. Just pretend that never happened." At least I don't have to worry about it until the next project now.

I have not been forced to stand still for hours since my wife quit doing the "big" farmer's market a couple of years ago, I might have lost some conditioning by now, but I know that at church, I never think about how much I have to stand vs. how much I have to sit. In other news, I had Christmas dinner over at my parents' house, as we do every year, their health permitting. One of the perennial guests is my ex-wife. To explain, the now adult son we had together is always there too. Anyway, my ex-wife was always a heel wearer. Not a high heel wearer, but a regular heel wearer, sporting 2-3" heels several days a week. Not that I would expect her to wear heels to come visit my parents, because she was never really that kind of heely girl, but I had noticed that her shoes have been completely flat for a couple of years. There's a reason for that. I do not know how the subject came up, probably under the general category of "getting old," but she evidently had to have surgery on her left foot because of arthritis in the toe joint. She said before the surgery, it hurt to wear any sort of shoe, heel or not. She showed me how she can't bend her toes anymore into "high heel" position. Oddly enough, my sister has the exact same problem. My sister actually wore 3" block heeled oxfords for Christmas Eve service, but told me she had to get out of them as soon as possible because of the pain in her toe joint. I am writing this because it really hit home. I also have a bit of arthritis in my toe joint, especially my right. Thus far, I have kept it at bay by doing ballet type stretching exercises every morning. But it does make me think that I cannot absolutely count on being able to wear heels forever. Hopefully it will be a couple of decades before I have to give them up, but there is no guarantee.

Or you could throw caution to the wind and join @Shyheels, @higherheels, me, et al. in our quest to manage steeper heels in everyday life. I'm sure you've seen the thread "Aiming High" in the Everybody section. We are certainly not up for injuring ourselves, but each of us thinks we can do incrementally better than what we already do. It's a lot of fun!

I've had shoes that gave me blisters, but that is not what sticks out in my mind as a beginning heeler. Mind you, I was a beginning heeler at age 45, not age 14. I wish I could have worn heels at age 14, but that's another subject for another time. My first journey in heels definitely resulted in muscular fatigue that I had not anticipated, but it was relatively mild, like having overdone it at the gym or something. It is this trip to the shopping mall that keeps coming back in my stories. I doubt I had blisters, because I was wearing boots with actual socks. I do not remember muscular fatigue in the calves or ankles. What I do remember is having to unexpectedly stand in line for about an hour at a mobile phone store. That damn near killed me. The pain in the balls of my feet was close to more than I could bear, and I tend to tolerate pain pretty well. I cannot explain how a person sort of gets used to standing in 10 cm heels, but that is what has always killed me. Walking 3 km in 10 cm heels? No problem! Standing still in 10 cm heels for an hour? Impossible! Well, it isn't today, but I've no idea how I got here. It must have been all of those farmer's markets I did with my wife over the years. I suppose that was my training ground for standing in heels. As an aside, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! And for those who don't celebrate, I don't have to go back to work until Monday! Naturally, it's unpaid, but it's a much needed several days off from a place where I don't get to wear heels.

I'm not saying that high heels are supposed to hurt (although you'd have a hard time convincing 95% of the population of that), I'm just saying that suddenly you're exercising muscle groups that you haven't before, and that results in, at the very least, soreness. In my case 13 years ago, it was fairly intense pain until I figured out that I can't go from 0 to 10 cm instantly. Thinking about this further, I suppose I could have gone the other way--stuck with the 10 cm, but for only short periods at first, gradually increasing the wearing time over weeks or months. The route I ended up choosing was to wear 5-7 cm pretty much every moment that I could, take long walks and so forth, then gradually increase the height over a period of time. Which do you think is the more effective method? On edit: I've heard many people say that a bit of a heel helps with back pain, but for me personally, I have not been able to tell any difference either way. The condition of my back has a lot more to do with my work than it does with my choice of footwear.

Sorry to hear about your news. But at least the band is back together!