mlroseplant

Another totally random comment, but what do you guys, and our one gal, think about these earrings/earclips? I don't know what to properly call them. Worn in real life by one of my female friends. My personal opinion is still not completely settled.

Steve Madden actually surprises you sometimes. As it is stupidly cold here for the next few days, I will not be submitting any photographs, but I've actually purchased some new Steve Madden shoes recently. While those particular boots are not really my cup of tea, I do like the look of a close fitting knee boot. Believe it or don't.

Definitely guilty as charged. I was on the high school tennis team in the 1980s, and we all wore shorts of that length. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think we are all too fat in general for that style to ever come back. So I guess it's me and you and Cali. And maybe a few others.

The only reason that I sort of care is because, well, I'm going to need some higher heels. As you know, I have quite a number of heels in the 11 cm range, but only one pair that is really wearable in public that is 12 cm, and I think that pair is kind of ugly, mainly because of the design of the toe. Also, if I wear anything but skinny jeans, it looks like I have no feet. At any rate, it looks like I have two remaining options: Fuss Schuhe and this outfit called the Highest Heels that keeps showing up on my Instagram feed. Or the designer route, but I don't really want to pay that kind of money. I'm willing to pay a couple hundred bucks for the right shoes, but not a thousand. For that kind of money, I'll buy another obscure musical instrument. Did I ever show you my early 20th century Conn cornet?

I actually have some boots that are sort of like that, maybe not quite as sock-like, but a similar idea. I wore them exactly once, and never again. I do have photographic evidence, submitted for you here. I'm not saying they don't fit, I'm not even saying they don't look ok on me, I'm just saying I don't like them.

Somebody wrote about this the other day, this staple of 12 cm heels seems to be on its last legs. No pun intended. I have never taken the opportunity to buy from them, but know a couple of people who have. If they are indeed going belly-up, it's a shame.

I think, but I am not sure, that after 13+ years, that just maybe I am finally beginning to get the hang of this whole high heel thing.

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.

I solved the dilemma yesterday by choosing my big and ugly (but steep) chunky heeled mules (pictured somewhere above), but we are in the midst of a January thaw, and within a few days, if not hours, those open toed shoes will not be an option, even for me. @CrushedVamp, very nice photo that turned out well from a mere snapshot! I also like candid photos, but generally of OTHER PEOPLE, haha.

Haha, I never said that you were. I thought your intent was very clear--to present an interesting snippet of googledom for our consideration. My consideration was I thought it funny that this particular snippet said the opposite of other snippets I'd seen in the past, when in fact I'm not sure any of it makes any difference whatsoever. But, somebody evidently went to at least some trouble to create a diagram saying. . . well, I'm not sure what.

I agree 100%, we live in a very noisy world. I am laughing with you @Shyheels. I always turn the sound off whenever I browse social media, 'cause it's bloody awful if you don't! As you all know, playing music is a big part of my life, but I am also a lover of silence. @CrushedVamp, believe it or don't, I don't play the radio in my car, either. I might listen to the BBC sometimes, but I rarely have any music blaring while going down the road. I don't have background music while I'm folding laundry or doing the dishes. The reason? It can't be background music for me. I will stop what I'm doing and actively listen. Sometimes, I'll analyze certain aspects of whatever happens to be playing. I can't count the number of times that I've commented on some piece of background music in a store to somebody, and most of the time, they haven't been listening and have no idea what I'm talking about. Even in moments of silence, my brain is not silent. In fact, as I'm writing this, a Chopin piano piece that I attempted to learn as a kid is going through my head. Why? I have no idea. I haven't really thought of it in years. There is no other sound beside the ticking of the clock, the hum of the furnace, and perhaps a slight clacking of computer keyboard keys. And yet, there is Chopin. How did he get there?