mlroseplant

I have nothing earthshaking to report, but an acquaintance of mine, a younger woman who must be about 35 by now, wore 3 1/2" wedge sandals to Easter service at the church. She has done so for the better part of 20 years (since high school). Never to be seen in ridiculously high heels, but always something in that 3 1/2" range.

Because I have so many used shoes from so many varied sources, when I say "4 inch heel," I mean actual, not nominal on a size 9 USW/40 EU. Besides that, you can't really trust every seller to measure accurately or even use the same method to measure. The Gold Standard for many people is 120 mm, and though I have several pairs of shoes that approach that height, I would assume that I would need 125-127 mm to equal the steepness of a "nominal" 120 mm. Judging only by sight, my Steve Madden pumps, though styled very similarly, are not quite as steep as actual Christian Louboutin So Kates. The Maddens measure in right at 118 mm, but of course on Size 9. At either 118 or 125, uh, yeah, I can feel that!

I had an experience on Easter Sunday. I wish I could say it was the first time, but at least it's only the second time this has happened to me in exactly this way. When I left the house and climbed into my son's Big Oldsmobile, I had both heel tips. By the the time I arrived at the church door, I had neither. It seems they fell off almost simultaneously. Luckily, the sanctuary floor is carpeted, or I might have been in real trouble.

There is something to be said about not ever forgetting to put your safety glasses on at the jobsite, because you CAN'T really forget.

`Given 24 hours to think about it, I've had several experiences with grumpy old men which were similar to Gige's experience. I swear I am not making this up--they have all said something to the effect of, "Golly gee, those shoes must be awfully comfortable!" The funny thing about these encounters is that you're going about your business, thinking about something else, just living life. To be suddenly yanked out of your own world and your own thoughts, and be expected to come up with a zinger on the spot, that's a difficult situation, and I'm not usually up to the task. I can remember replying to such people, "Believe it or don't, they're really not all that bad." Which, although 100% true, is not a great comeback to a remark that is obviously meant to be insulting, but whatever. At least I don't freeze up like I used to at the beginning of my high heeled journey.

I always say it depends upon your definition of "walk." I have a fairly narrow definition, and sometimes I cannot live up to my own definition, even in 3" heels.

It is hard to know what to do in such a situation. It depends on how hard core hateful the guy is. Some people can be reached, and some cannot. The question is, is it worth it?

Maybe you did get the "wrong" lenses. I personally know four people who have gotten cataract surgery, and all of them have raved about how much better they can see afterwards. Jean in particular, looks weird without her glasses.

I also have noticed this phenomenon. For me personally, the height at which heels begin to feel like heels is somewhere around 3 1/2". At 4 - 4 1/4", they definitely feel like heels, but they seem very natural. By 4 1/2", I'm really at my limit, and on some days beyond it. I do not take wearing 4 1/2" heels lightly, especially if I'm going to be on camera. But yeah, I get it. We have trained ourselves to the point where the unnatural feels natural. To be sure, there are some times when you had better notice that you're wearing heels, so's you don't do something silly like step onto some grating as if you were wearing flats.

You are doing awfully well to get this far without needing reading glasses. In fact, I'm going to guess that you are the 1%. My mother-in-law was also the 1%. She died at the age of 80 without ever needing glasses. My wife has made it to 56 without glasses. I made it to age 10, and I got bifocals before I turned 40. However, if I lost my glasses (unlikely), I could survive just fine for some time without them, unlike other members of my family. Up until a few months ago, I had always thought that glaucoma = high eye pressure. I have come to find out that this is not the case. Glaucoma is a disease which gradually deteriorates one's vision by causing damage to the optic nerve. One of the several factors that makes one at higher risk for this disease is high eye pressure. Evidently, having thin corneas or being Asian are other risk factors. Despite working longer hours, I have managed to keep up my walking schedule. I have lost weight, which is something I have to be careful about, because I don't have a lot of weight to lose. Between my high heels walks and the size of the building(s) I'm working in, I'm averaging about 18,000 steps a day over the last four weeks.

Well folks, it's official. I'm going under the knife in two weeks. Actually, there will be no knives involved, just a laser. I went to an ophthalmologist yesterday to get my high eyeball pressure problem assessed. Evidently, they now have a way to treat this condition that is putatively permanent, without having to resort to daily eyedrops or periodic injections. Apparently, I am a good candidate for this procedure, and it's pretty quick--about 15 minutes per eyeball. Thankfully, I have not yet developed glaucoma, i.e., there is no functional damage to the inner workings of my eyes. I got two overt compliments on my Steve Madden blush colored pumps, one from one of the techs who administered the battery of tests I had to run through, and one from a fellow patient.

That hue range has become my favorite as of late. It seems that no two pairs are exactly the same, even though they are all encompassed in the same color family. The texture of the closed toed pumps sounds interesting.

Having a backup pair of shoes is probably not a bad idea. I did this for years, and what I discovered is that I went to the backup shoes exactly once, and that was when a sole completely detached from one of my main pair of shoes. The backups, however, were never flats but rather lowish mid heels that I know will never bite me back. My test used to be could I work a farmer's market in a give pair of shoes, a venue in which I was required to stand pretty much continuously for five hours, and that's pretty much the maximum that I'm in heels at one shot these days. If I'm in any sort of pain, it will almost always be because of pinched toes, not because of the high heel position. That pretty much only happens with pumps, which I have to wear pretty tight, or I'll walk right out of them. I always wondered how women can slip their shoes off easily and yet still walk normally. That doesn't happen for me. The real secret to my success is how much I walk in heels. Almost every morning, I'm out there pounding the pavement in heels. I feel it really makes a difference. Standing in one spot is much harder than walking in heels (and I would argue in any sort of shoe), but walking gains you a lot of endurance as well as a sense of fluidity and grace if you give it long enough, and do it purposefully enough. Besides that, it's fun! To actually address the original question, I do not believe it's possible to "work through the pain" and gain much endurance doing incidental activities. Therefore, I don't hold it against anybody if they want to bring a pair of backup shoes just in case.

I assume you're talking about something like turpentine or naphtha, and not say, gin.

I had never really thought about the significance of an ankle bracelet. I know that they are very popular among the younger generation of Vietnamese, and I believe my wife was an early adopter, as I am not personally aware of anybody else of her generation who wears one. We've never really talked about it, but I think she wears hers for some rather ill-defined superstitious reason. It certainly isn't worn for any kind of sex appeal. To address the other subject, I have been on the prowl for some new jeans for everyday use. It's difficult to find ordinary straight cut jeans anymore, at least in women's styles and sizes. I rather like skinny jeans, but I'm also getting to be a grumpy old guy, and I don't want to struggle to get my pants on and off every day. I'll save that for special occasions. At the other end of the spectrum, there are flared boot cuts. I have a couple of pairs leftover from the last time they were in style, and I dug them out this year. I don't think they look too bad on me, but again, the use has to be purposeful. Boot cuts only look good with um, boots. Or at least heels of some sort. Otherwise, they look sloppy to my eye. Plus, you can't come home and take off your heels when you walk in the door, because now your pants are dragging the floor. First World problems, I guess.

Although planned obsolescence is a known and perhaps prevalent business strategy, I do not believe it applies in the instant case, strictly speaking. By its very nature, the entire fashion industry is constantly changing, so that my shoe failure was just an ancillary incident, having nothing to do with Nine West's business model. Let's face it--the shoes were already several seasons out of style when they broke. Furthermore, I would also be willing to bet that my particular failure is very uncommon, as very few people put high heels through the stresses that I do. Even further-than-that-more, it would be impossible for Nine West to predict when failure was going to occur, or indeed if it was going to occur at all, and therefore my shoes breaking is not really an effective way for them to maintain or increase future profits. I'm going to go out on a limb here, because I am relying only on my memory, but I'm going to say that I've never actually broken a pair of shoes that I use only for incidental wear. By incidental wear, I'm thinking of all the @Jkrenzer approved stiletto pumps that I wear only for dressy occasions, and don't actually pound the pavement in. They get worn to church, maybe to the grocery store, or maybe out to dinner on the few occasions that we eat out. I have had a high shoe failure rate with my walking shoes, but to be fair, the designers of such shoes never imagine that they'd be used in that manner. Somehow I doubt Steve Madden did any kind of durability/wear testing before releasing this spring's line.

There is a rod, but for whatever reason, it doesn't go quite go the full length of the heel. I have had this exact failure once before, cf. p. 80 of this thread. Those shoes were also Nine West, different model, but of the same vintage. Oddly enough, I bought both of them brand new and owned them for more than a decade before failure. I can't actually see it on these Planteras, but I guarantee you that the heel is beginning to break right where that metal rod ends. Why they didn't make it a little longer to go the full length is beyond me, but I only know that it is so. If I decide to attempt some kind of repair, I think I'm going to go with the superglue, simply because it takes quite a bit of force to get that crack to open up enough to get something in there, so I'm hoping the crack is less than halfway through the thickness of the heel. I don't want to break it more trying to get something more viscous than superglue in there. I have no scientific evidence to back this hypothesis up, but it is my guess that the failure has less to do with the inadequate stiffening of the heel, and more to do with the aging of plastic. Unless something goes terribly wrong, I think I have at least another decade or more of wearing heels left in me, so I shall be interested to see just how well some of these plastics hold up longer term, and what causes them to fail.

Sometimes you have good days, sometimes you have bad days, and sometimes you have both at once. Yesterday when I went for my morning constitutional, I had a few extra minutes, so I decided to wear shoes that were a little bit more ambitious than what I normally wear. The shoes in question are my Nine West Plantera loafer pumps, which I have had a love/hate relationship with for over 10 years. They are one of the very few shoes that I actually bought brand new and paid full price for. Of course the reason why I had to have them in the first place is because they've got these giant 5 1/2" heels, coupled with modest 1" platforms, which gives you a visual of super tall heels, and yet is still somewhat challenging to deal with on a day-to-day basis with a 4 1/2" difference between toe and heel. Furthermore, the heels, while slim, are quite a bit thicker than stilettos, which means the heel caps last a lot longer between replacements. I don't often wear 4 1/2" heels for actual walking, but I decided to challenge myself on this particular morning. Wearing such steep heels usually means that my walking speed is pretty slow. If I make a mile in less than 23:00, I'm doing pretty well. The first mile out, I came in right under 23:00, so yeah, that was about right. I thought to myself at the time that my goal would be to eventually get that time under 22:00. A mile in, I'd evidently found my rhythm because things began to feel more natural and graceful. About that time, I caught a glimpse of my shadow on a storefront window, and I thought you know, I don't really look all that bad, at least not from the side. My second mile came in at 21:30. Whoa! And it was easy! I didn't know I had it in me. I was thinking that I really ought to wear these shoes more often (I've put only 35 miles on them in about 12 years) and step up my game. With home being only a couple blocks away, I began to feel something slightly odd. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to my surroundings, but I've felt this oddness before. Perhaps it was just my imagination. I thought a shank was giving up on me. Upon arrival home, I removed my shoes and wiggled both heels. The right was solid. The left was solid, but wait. . . there was just a little bit of extra movement there. Hmmmmm. And that's when I saw it. Not a shank failure, but the entire heel was working toward snapping in half. It's not there yet, it's still pretty solid, but it is clearly failing. Damn! I might try to glue it since it's not nearly all the way through, but that is very disappointing. And one cannot find this model out there in the wild. I imagine they were not popular enough for them to be floating around in the used market. So that's how I went from being very enthusiastic to being very disappointed within the span of an hour. The workday wasn't all that bad, though.

The answer to that question is yes--for about a week or two. Then the novelty will wear off, and the thing will sit in the corner (or wherever you can store such a beast) and collect dust for all eternity. Why? Again, who is she going to play with? This is the fate of 99% of all people who have ever played or attempted to learn an instrument. If you have no group to play with, it's very, very difficult to get motivated, especially with a single note instrument, i.e., not the piano or guitar.

I'll tell you exactly what to say to that request. "Um, I think not." Let me tell you why, for a reason you may not have thought of. Assuming that she took to such a thing, and became competent at it, where on earth is she ever going to play it? I doubt there is an Alphorn consort to play in. There are very few people who are content to play instruments by themselves for very long. This is why so many people say, "Oh, I played trombone in high school, but I haven't taken it out of the case in years. I really should!" That's because they don't have a built in place to play anymore. Furthermore, the Alphorn is not a chromatic instrument. In other words, you can't really play ordinary pieces of music on it, because there are many "in between" notes that the instrument cannot physically reproduce. I suppose in addition to traditional Swiss music, you could play army bugle calls on it, albeit a couple octaves lower! I would suggest the tuba. Same range as the Alphorn as basic timbre as an Alphorn (though way more focused), same way of producing the sound, and she can join the middle school band and play with other kids.

Yesterday, directly from work, I went to see and hear my son (yes, the Oldsmobile guy) play in three different small ensembles for a high school music contest. He did just fine, as he pretty much always does. He hasn't yet had the experience of crashing and burning like his Old Man has. His first group was a brass choir. It was about 15 members, and I counted six girls. The amazing thing was, four out of the six of them were wearing heels. The trombone section in particular is about half girls, and almost all of them wear heels for dressy events. I have noted this in the past. The lone female bass trombonist was wearing boots with 3 1/2" block heels, the highest I saw that evening. His second group was a clarinet ensemble. Slim pickins there. One girl had on orange sandals with 2" block heels, and that was it. His third group was a trombone ensemble, and it was a repeat of the mixed brass group, on account of the same girls being part of both ensembles. On the way out, a flute group was assembling, and I counted four more pairs of heels. My son did not play in the flute ensemble, mainly because he really sucks at the flute. As do I. Why I own two of them, I have no idea. In summary, it would appear that heels are not dead with GenZ. However, their appeal still appears to be limited to dress-up events. If there are a few who wear heels casually, I don't see it. Also, the heel of choice is definitely an approximately 3" block heel of substantial width, and it's usually attached to a single band across the toes sandal with a closed heel and ankle strap. Only one girl wore traditional black patent pumps with a 3" slim (not stiletto) heel, but that was the lone exception. There were a few boots, but 75% wore the block heeled sandals. Included in this post is a picture of the clarinet ensemble, mainly to show off the giant contrabass clarinet my son was playing. Many people have asked me, "What in the heck IS that thing?"

It seems unlikely that you will get an answer to your question, as most of the people in this thread are no longer with us. At least one of the people is literally no longer with us, and the rest I assume have simply stopped participating in our little community. I would answer your question myself, if only I knew the answer.

I've had this happen before, but it seems to be more extreme this year. Either that, or I'm walking longer distances that I used to. I have instituted a new policy when it comes to wearing shoes which have been unworn for a while. Of course, I have a checkoff list for this, which bears the heading "Vetting." I do a test walk of a mile or less, just to see where the hot spots are, if any. Sometimes, this problem goes away by itself, and sometimes there are shoes which always require some sort of barrier, such as a Bandaid, to wear for any length of time. I've got a list for that, too. Fat lot of good it's done me in the past couple of weeks! I have the same problem with sensitivity on my right big toe, at the base of my toenail. This has been an issue for decades. I can certainly remember having this problem in my 20s, and that of course was with flats. But only certain shoes do it, and some worse than others. Our bodies are at once amazing and frustrating! In other news, I went to a college senior voice recital a couple of nights ago. A young man who sings bass in our church choir will be graduating soon, and we will miss him, both for his personality and his musical talents. He had a pretty good crowd of perhaps approaching 100 people, including about a dozen of us from the church choir. I was the only one in the whole hall wearing heels, and I had walked from my house to the venue. Alas, I had an unfortunate event with my shoes. After everything was over, I started to walk home. I didn't get 20 steps out the door, and the sole of my shoe came unglued to the extent that it was impossible to walk safely. I had to walk home barefoot. Luckily, it was only 4/10ths of a mile, and the shoe is easily repairable. Also, by that time it was dark. I don't think anybody saw me clearly.

I must have done so many times, but you know, I really can't remember, in the same way that I do not remember stepping on the brake pedal when I parked the car last night. I shall have to pay more attention next time, should I find myself seated on a barstool again some day.

In Iowa, there is nothing like the MoT inspection required. There used to be. They got rid of that when I was a kid. I remember the sticker you had to put in the corner of your windscreen every year. Then they went to requiring inspection only when you sold the car. A decade later, they got rid of it completely. I remember as a pre-teen looking through the newspaper classifieds (remember them?) at used cars. The seller would list them as "red title" if the car couldn't pass inspection. One used to be able to pick such cars up for a little bit of nothing. We have never had any kind of emissions test. I am completely ignorant of what the other 49 states do or do not require. Expanding on the general subject, and again this is for the State of Iowa, if a vehicle sustains damage that exceeds 70% of its fair market value before the damage, then it is given a Salvage title, and cannot legally be operated on public roads. If one repairs such a vehicle, at that point it must be inspected. If it passes inspection, the vehicle will be given a Rebuilt title (which, up until a few years ago, they used to call a Prior Salvage title).