mlroseplant

It's very funny you should mention that, because another friend, not on this forum, said the exact same thing, although I didn't send her the closeup version of the photo. I know it's been a while ago, but you may or may not remember that I replaced the entire deck in part because it was not stiletto heel friendly. It would seem that the wood has shrunk over the past several years to present the same dangers again. Still, I have not actually had a mishap for a very long time. Maybe I have developed a sixth sense about such things?

Why, those are practically Cedars of Lebanon compared to mine! 😆

I have to laugh a little bit about that, I'm sure it's absolutely true, but by the time I came along, at the very tail end of go-go boot time, they were being worn by 8 year old girls. And not with a mini skirt. And yes, I got the chance to try on a pair of these boots--sort of. The neighbor girl, Julie M., had a white pair that were lace-up. No zipper. I do not remember the circumstances, but for some reason she allowed me to try on her boots. I'm guessing I was 8 years old, she was 9. Something like that. Her mother was very suspicious of what we were doing behind the closed door of her bedroom, so of course I never got to actually walk around in these boots, which couldn't have been more than an inch high. And yet, this rather thrilling experience (for an 8 year old, at least) never translated to a love of boots as an adult.

You are quite correct, of course, we do not eat a whole lot of seafood here in the Midwest, with the possible exception of if you caught it yourself. Are freshwater fish properly called "seafood?" Lakefood, maybe? Anyway, I do have two excellent places to buy seafood in my locale. Of course, I have to drive 30-40 minutes up to Des Moines to get it, but it's available. One of them is an expensive place, located in a rich suburb. The other is an Asian supermarket, super cheap, and I probably don't want to know the ins and outs of transport, or food safety practices. The wife and I like fish a lot, and other sea-living species as well, although my wife does have a slight shellfish allergy, which limits our choices. Yeah, I've got a story I could tell under other circumstances. Our son, however, does not like anything that lives in water, so the only time we eat it is when he's away at a school activity of some sort on a given evening. As far as fingernails go, I really do believe Huyen is a freak of nature. She also has longer-than-waist length hair. There's only so much a person can do with diet to get that. I do have a guitarist friend who has been trying to convince me to get acrylics for some time. If I were a more serious guitarist, I might. But I'm not there yet. I don't want to. In the summertime, I can keep enough nail for my purposes.

The only thin hosiery I have ever tried is trouser socks, which look quite a bit like heavyish knee high nylon stockings. I once wore them pretty much every Sunday with a suit and tie and high heeled oxford shoes which were too tight for regular socks. I rarely wear them anymore, however, as I have become more accustomed to wearing my high shoes barefoot. I definitely prefer bare legs for myself, and usually for women. One thing I definitely do not miss about the 1980s, and this is proof positive that indeed one can cherry pick his likes, is the fashion of wearing pantyhose with sandals or open-toed pumps. Not for every day of course, but for dressing up. Why did anybody ever think that looked good? And more often than not, it usually led to unsightly and uncomfortable toe overhang. Dangit, up to now I had good memories of the 1980s, even the silly big hair. Now, I'm remembering bad stuff I haven't thought about in years. I need to stop it!

This is totally random, but I'm always amazed at the durability of my friend Huyen's fingernails. I know it's just an accident of genetics, but I've actually personally seen her wash a whole sink full of dishes with no gloves, no nothing. I really don't think she does anything special to take care of her nails, and yet they just grow and don't break, and she rarely uses polish of any sort, as you can see here. I only need three of my fingernails to grow a little bit for playing fingerstyle guitar, and during this season, it just seems almost impossible. I broke one only yesterday, doing nothing. Time to break out the flat pick again!

Church OOTW for 01/18/26. I chose red, mainly because I wanted to wear my fire engine red pumps. I suppose it would be interesting to choose black and pair it with red shoes, but I didn't think of it in time. I'm typically ironing my shirt 30 minutes before I have to show up. I got a number of comments on my outfit, but none specifically about my shoes. Like I said in the "Aiming High" thread, what once was the outer limit of my skill now seems almost easy to negotiate.

I have a problem that I didn't have before. On the weeks that I actually get a photo taken of my church outfit, I am wont to post it on my usual thread "Ruminations, etc." Now that we've got this higher heel challenge going, sometimes these subjects overlap. After warming up in my training shoes in the snow, I wore these effectively 11.3 cm pumps to church. I'll post the whole outfit (or at least what you can see with my winter coat) on my other thread. Like we keep saying, take a cm or two off the height of our "training" heels, and it's actually pretty easy! Nobody but you folks believes me, though. Brand of these shoes is GenShuo, and I really cannot complain about the quality, for what they are. They seems every bit as sturdy as my usual Steve Maddens, and they offer just a smidge more height. They obviously are not expensive shoes, but they aren't ridiculously cheap, either.

I thought I remembered, but I just had to go find my tailor's tape measure and reconfirm--my calves are 12 1/2" (32 cm). And I don't feel like I've got "skinny" legs. Because I stand only 5'5" (165 cm), I feel like I'm proportional, but I run into this same problem--I'm swimming in most knee high boots. The one pair I own that fit really well are actually vintage. I estimate them to be from the 80s, maybe the early 90s. My shearling lined snow boots with modest 6 cm heels, pictured elsewhere on this website. I wish my stiletto knee highs fit like the vintage pair. Maybe that's why I'm not a boots guy. Once we hit March, I'm not even going to think about this again until next year!

I finally pulled the trigger and went for a walk in these shoes on this cold Sunday morning. The current temperature is -13º C, which is typical for mid January in Iowa, but I wanted to see if I could do it. I still haven't got a true measurement for the steepness of these shoes, but I am confident that the steepness is equal to or greater than 12 cm, de-rated and temperature corrected. Only electricians will get that last reference, I'm looking at you @CrushedVamp, although maybe you don't have a similar rule on the high voltage side of things, being as you don't try to stuff as many wires in a conduit as you can. Is it early on a Sunday morning here, and I didn't meet a single person on my walk. No dog walkers, no joggers. Only one car passed me in the street. That was my plan, because although in the end, I don't think I did too bad, I didn't want anyone to see me walking in these shoes. It was a vetting process, for sure. As usual, after about 1/4 mile, I began to find my feet. Really, a mile (1.6 km) was not too far. Maybe I'm beginning to get the hang of this. The attached photo shows circumstantial evidence that I actually did this. Also, I almost fell on my backside a couple of times, due to the dusting of snow that we got. It looks like somebody preceding me was wearing Birkenstocks, innit? How mundane.

It is true! We will give you honest, real-life answers on here that you won't find on Instagram. It's strange that I have never actually seen a pair of Louboutins in the wild, but you'd think everybody was wearing them if you looked at my social media feeds. I am not sure that I've even seen 12 cm in real life either (non platform). There are only a handful of folks on Instagram who can actually walk well in 12 cm, and I can tell you I'm not one of them. Maybe I will be sometime in 2026. But yeah, I'm not going to blow smoke up anybody's nether regions about it either. It's not an easy skill!

Yeah, that sucks. Cracked heat exchanger, eh? Did it sound like a firecracker was going off in your basement/utility room every time the furnace kicked on? Adds a little too much excitement to life. I was offered a furlough, but I turned it down. Yes, contracts are signed for the next building, and prep work has already begun, but all it takes is for one engineer to change something, and then we're talking May or June before they need me, instead of March. I will not sit for a contractor anymore. I don't foresee not getting back to work before unemployment benefits run out, so the worst case scenario would be that I don't get to take the exact job I want, I would have to take what's available. I am seriously thinking about bundling up this morning and going for a walk, even though I don't want to. It is definitely weather where it would be problematic if the furnace went out, plus it's very windy. A famous saying in Iowa, and I imagine other parts of the Frozen North, "Ya know, this really wouldn't be all that bad if it weren't for the wind."

I have found the same to be true--as long as I'm on an even, hard surfaced walkpath, stilettos seem to be just as easy as any other heel. Better, in fact, sometimes, because you don't have the shoe directing you exactly how to come down on your foot--there is more flexibility and grace there. Add in a few cracks and bumps, however, and suddenly the disadvantages rear their ugly heads! In addition to stilettos, I have a fondness for wooden heeled sandals. This seems contradictory at first, but it's probably a result of the time I grew up in. Like @Shyheels and his go-go boots one decade earlier, by the time I came of age, all the cool girls wore wooden heeled sandals, and I wish I could have. Now all the cool girls are not so cool anymore, and I am the one wearing the wooden heeled sandals!

I can remember very clearly the first time I experienced this phenomenon, albeit on a slightly lower scale. At the time, I was wearing around 9-10 cm pretty much all the time, and got to where I felt pretty good at that height. Then one day I wore those 7 cm sandals that I just got rid of, and I thought, "Man, I can really zoom around in these things!" I almost started running everywhere, because I could. I never much advanced beyond the 9-10 cm range until recently, thanks to this challenge. I don't want to say I can zoom around in 10 cm, but they feel much less like heels than they used to.

I personally do not use earbuds when I am out and about. That is a foreign concept to me. Half the reason I walk early in the morning is to enjoy the relative silence of a small town. In addition, and I hate to think this is even a concern, but I wouldn't want someone to be able to sneak up on me unawares. As you know, I've had very few problems wearing heels in my locale, but not zero problems. I would like to take this opportunity to share the news that I will be laid off today. I thought this day would never come! I am very much ready to go, but I wasn't ever going to actually ask for a layoff. I have a list of things around the house that I've been putting off, and I hope I have the discipline to get them done reasonably quickly, now that I will have the time.