mlroseplant

It looks like they don't have anything for me, even if I were willing to spend that kind of money for something I couldn't try on first. However, the custom shaft circumference and height sounds like something I could use.

Looks like I will be wearing said pair within a couple of hours. We got snow! I'll have to see if I can't grab a picture. I'm sure I put them somewhere in the New Boots thread last year, but they are actual vintage knee boots, and they are easily the most quality pair I've got. I think they're from the late 70s-early 80s. I bet they weren't cheap when they were new.

I know that if it weren't for heels, I wouldn't get nearly as much exercise. 'Cause who wants to walk around my neighborhood in athletic shoes? How boring! Lots of people, evidently. They have no idea what they're missing. At this time of year, when it's below freezing, there are very few of us out. I run into two types: Hard core runners, those are often college kids, and hard core dog walkers. I will not be walking today, as it has snowed 6 inches overnight, and it is still snowing. No fun to walk in at all, much less in heels.

I intend to keep my '04 Crown Vic as long as they'll let me, and as long as they keep making parts for it.

I will not pretend that my calves were not feeling it by the end of that walk, but I nevertheless wore the boots to church later that morning. I will at least pretend that doing such activity on a regular basis has made my legs look a lot better than they did 12 years ago. I've seen some old pictures of myself, and my legs looked like toothpicks sticking out of my shorts.

Last winter, I purchased some shearling lined knee highs almost specifically for snow removal. They have broad 2 3/8" heels, and that's of a height for me (and I imagine most people on this site) where that's really the same as flats. I bet they'd do just fine in the mud, although I don't ever intend to find out. I hate mud probably as much as @CrushedVamp. However, shoveling snow in my low heeled boots is just as easy as flats.

I guess that's what I was thinking when I said I had Chelsea stilettos. Not so much the heel, but the elastic bit on the side. The only reason I got rid of them is because they were size 9 1/2, which is in most cases simply too big for me, even with inserts, and these were even with socks. I never could make them quite work. Now--off the subject a bit, but I reckon we all like a good story--I tried to do right by my "Chelsea" boots and give them to one of my son's female friends, who was probably 13 or 14 at the time, tall and willowy, and wore size 9 1/2. I do not believe she'd ever even thought about trying heels in her life. Just about the time I thought I had her convinced that maybe she ought to try them under my tutelage, it happened to coincide with the time she decided she wasn't so interested in my son, and she quit hanging around our house. Which in the end was a good thing for everybody.

I have been very lazy about taking any photographs lately. However, a friend captured this still image from the church livestream and sent it to me. I think the only reason this worked out is because the camera operator forgot to zoom back out for a few seconds during the "greet your neighbor" portion of the service. And yes, those are ankle boots I'm wearing. I see I still need a little bit of work on my pageant walk.

I did something that I rarely do yesterday. I went walking in stilettos. I am not 100% sure what possessed me to do it, but I did it, and walked just shy of 2.5 miles, or 4 km. Part of the reason is because I had not shown my Aldo ankle boots any love for a long time. In fact, according to my records, I haven't worn them in two years. That might not be quite right, but it seems accurate. Back in the day, I somehow wore these a lot, as I've evidently had them reheeled three times. They are fairly steep boots, sporting a 5" heel with a 5/8" platform. Here's what I noticed. They're fine. Perfectly stable. Other than having to pay very good attention to where I stepped due to the stiletto heels, they were just like wearing any other high heeled shoes. How I managed in them 10 years ago is another question. I must not have looked so great. I can tell you one thing for sure--ever since I got on this fascination with the SE Asian beauty pageant coaches, my heel tips have started lasting a lot longer. According to my records, I got about 7 miles out of each set of tips in the past. The current tips that are on there have got 5 miles, and I guarantee they will last a lot longer than 2 more miles.

I can say with reasonable certainty that when I'm wearing shorts, I do not look like I just came from the beach. Having said that, I do not think I would choose shorts to travel in. They are fine for cloth seats, but are slimy with leather or vinyl seats after a short while. Also, practicing the organ is almost impossible in shorts. Your legs stick to the bench and you can't move to reach the pedal notes. If one remembers to bring a small towel, 99% of the problem(s) is alleviated.

I think this is a first for this thread! We've gone as far as vintage outboard motors before (nod to @pebblesf), but this is a whole new level! Which is somewhat ironic, because outside of cruise ships, heels and boats don't really mix all that well. Although I do remember travelling on a narrowboat in Thailand, and there was another passenger who was wearing sandals with impressively high heels. I suppose that's a little bit different. It's not like she was piloting/crewing the boat, she was a tourist passenger like me. I wonder if I could find that picture somewhere? It probably got lost on a hard drive that blew up at some point.

I kind of wonder what auto restorers/hobbyists will do in 30, 40, 50 years' time. I am already irritated by my fairly old (2004) car's climate control system, which actuates little servos to change from hot to cold or from heat to defrost. What was wrong with cables to do this? Nevertheless, the system is still serviceable. In other words, I can fix it with some time, effort, and a little bit of money. I cannot imagine relying on a single touchscreen to do every function of the car. Number One, you have to physically look at the touchscreen, and Number Two, what happens when that screen fails? You don't drive the car. At all. We won't even talk about the expense or the complexity of putting it all right again. I do understand that a lot of these cameras and sensors have actual benefit. I can still easily swivel my head/body around to check my blind spots, but that is not the case with everybody, including my dad. He says he'll never buy a car that doesn't have a backup camera. At least if the camera goes out you can still drive the car without issues.

Haha, I only do it in the name of promoting high heels! I did not really introduce myself, but thinking about it in retrospect, the girl most likely already knew who I was. I mean, how many others dads show up to every band event wearing heels? Now, if only I could get my son to have a middle ground in his own style. It's either ratty t-shirt and jeans or suit and tie. And only the suit and tie when he is forced.

That's a little bit different than the way I imagined it. I'm assuming the integral system must be 12V, because there's no way you need 95 amps x 240 volts on that tiny vessel. I thought the domestic power would be on a separate generator, but evidently that's not the case. Thanks for explaining that.

There have been attempts to water down my job, but in my personal experience, none of it has worked very well just yet. Having said that, it's only a matter of time. I don't think anybody has come up with a way to actually replace me, but there are a lot of ways that they have tried to replace my brain and skills. The big idea is to build large chunks of electrical systems off-site in a factory somewhere, using more or less unskilled cheap labor, and then we, the qualified and skilled electricians, simply plug it in and we don't have to be paid to actually build the stuff.

OK, we're going down the electrical rabbit hole once again on my thread. @Shyheels, what have you got for a generator/alternator/dynamo on your boat? Evidently, it must not be a Honda. You can't break those things. Actually you can, but it takes considerable effort.

I have some actual out-and-about news, and I have a picture. I didn't intend to have a picture, but when I sent a friend of mine a picture of my son playing with his jazz band, he wrote back to me, "Whose disembodied ankle do you suppose that might be in the far right corner? Betcha it's my beloved Brother's!" Meaning me. I could not figure out what in the heck he was talking about for a while, and then I remembered I had cropped the photo right after I sent it to him in order to get rid of the director's backside, which also got rid of the ankle and sandal. Of course, it wasn't me, why would I be up on the stage? Somehow I think my presence there as an adult would disqualify them from the competition. Anyway, I finally figured out what I had done, and restored it to the original. As it turns out, the young lady in question plays the bass trombone, and my son didn't immediately say something negative about her, so I figure she must be OK. The band uniform is all black with a splash of color. All of the boys choose to do this with a necktie, but many of the girls choose to wear somewhat unusual shoes. In this girl's case, her splash of color was these shiny pink sandals. I approached this girl after their performance and told her that I thought her shoes were really cool. She actually took it quite gracefully and naturally, which surprised me a bit. I think it helped that I was wearing heels myself, and also that her mother was standing right beside her at the time. I purposefully kept our conversation shorter than 15 seconds, but it might have gone longer if I hadn't stepped away. The sandals had a squared-off toe, which I'm not fond of, and oval shaped heels, which I'm also not fond of. I would estimate they were 3-3 1/4" in height, no platform. Not bad for this day and age!

I have always sucked at doing two things in heels: 1) Walking down stairs. I have never once felt truly graceful doing it, especially if there is more than 3 or 4 of them at a time. 2) Bending over to retrieve dropped objects. Number Two really hit home the other day when I was out on my morning walk. There was a small branch laying across the sidewalk from an overhanging tree, and as I bent over to pick it up to move it, it suddenly seemed like it was a looooong way to the ground, and I found myself doing a spread-kneed squat to actually pick up the branch. Not graceful at all. I have no problem picking up stuff off the floor in flats, I don't know why it's so much harder for me in heels. Another thing for me to analyze in the future! It may come down to being as simple as that when I'm wearing flats, I don't worry about what I look like, because I know nobody is ever going to notice me anyway.

You are both quite correct, and there are so many other factors which affect stability besides heel width. All of the shoes in question that I tested are sandals, and thinking about it for a minute as I write this, they were all mules as well, so zero ankle support, aside from my own muscles. None of it really means anything, it was only a pleasant distraction for a few minutes. I can remember from my youth watching girls my age walking in heels, which back then was not a rare sight as it is today. My estimation back then about a girl's skill was based upon whether each step was rock steady, or whether there was a slight lateral wobble with each step. Memory is a very unreliable thing, but I kind of remember the number of girls who could walk in narrow heels without wobbling was maybe half a dozen at the most. I guess those 5 or 6 had the strongest ankles. Nowadays, I have a different set of gait characteristics I look for and strive for, and the wobbling metric really doesn't apply these days, as nobody wear stilettos anymore. I should do another test where I step on a certain size pebble wearing different shoes, just to see how they really react to it. That will test the old ankles out!

As a result of the latest turn to the conversation, I actually dragged out several pairs of shoes to do an experiment. I wanted to determine at what heel width does the heel start to contribute actual stability to the human platform. No pun intended. Although my experiment doesn't meet any sort of scientific standard and is purely subjective, it might interest some, as this has been a subject of discussion in the past. My methodology was to walk slowly, stopping often at key points in the stride to get a feel for how much force it took to tip the heel sideways from the normal vertical position. The key points being those times when both heel and forefoot are in contact with the floor. Most of what I discovered is not surprising, but some of it is. I didn't even bother to test stilettos because I think we can all agree that the heel itself very little lateral resistance to tipping. While I don't find them difficult to walk in, that's not universally true. I started with heels that are 3/4" wide, of which I own many pairs. It's my favorite heel width besides stilettos, being much more practical for everyday outdoor use than is a stiletto. As I suspected, at 3/4", the heel provides very little lateral stability when standing or walking, very similar to a stiletto. At 1" heel width, that's where one can begin to tell that's he for sure not wearing stilettos. By 1 1/4" in width, the heel is a big contributing factor to shoe stability, in that it takes a lot of ankle force to rock one's heel from side to side. Once you get bigger than 1 1/4", it seems like the law of diminishing marginal return kicks in. Of course, there is nothing really surprising here, and there are a number of other factors which can affect shoe stability, so it's kind of a silly exercise, but I did it anyhow, just to put some numbers on it. The one kind of surprising thing I found it that when the heel cap becomes significantly worn, as many of mine are, that throws off stability more than you'd think. A 1" broad heel with a worn heel cap is significantly easier to move laterally than one with a brand new one. Keep in mind these tests were done on smooth, hard flooring, and may not directly apply to the real world.

Haha, I am so one-dimensional at times! I knew it in the back of my mind, but hadn't considered it in ages. That is, to pay attention to something besides the shoes. Yeah, men, or at least men of a certain socioeconomic class, were quite the peacocks, weren't they? Yeah, we're not getting that back, and I'm not sure we want that back, at least not all of it. Had the technology existed at the time, I suppose those guys would have worn stilettos.

Ah, like the belly button piercing, for example. It seems that there was some video back in the 80s, during the MTV times, whose popularity instantly made that particular piercing a female-only thing forever. To put forth an unpopular opinion, which seems to be a thing on social media at the moment, so I'll bring it here: We like to say heels were invented by men for men, and while that's technically true, nobody was wearing what I consider "real" heels until the 1950s. Even King Louis XIV, whom many people like to look to for inspiration, did not wear "real" heels. At least not in that famous painting. The Persian cavalry did not wear "real" heels, they were for utility. The point is twofold: Firstly, what we are talking about centuries ago is fundamentally a different animal than what we have today, and second, it kind of doesn't matter anyway, because they are firmly entrenched in the worldwide psyche as being feminine, and it's going to be damn near impossible to get them back. There is one hope, though. Long hair and earrings. We did get those back from the girls, so maybe high heels are simply unlikely, rather than impossible.

That article was behind a paywall, but I found a short Reuters video of the fashion show. The boots appear to be very tall and very loose at the top, so that the tops of the boots flap against each other when you walk. The suits that went with them were slouchy and the models themselves were slouchy, keeping their hands in their pockets the entire time. Obviously they were told to do that, so nothing against the models themselves. Like you said, not really all that bad for a fashion show, but still just. . . WEIRD somehow. Can't quite put my finger on it. Here is the link to the Reuters video. https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW704229012025RP1/

I don't know anything about this site, but for that price, they better be decent!

My block heels tend to be a bit smaller than that, with one exception. I know I mentioned it somewhere else, I just can't think where--probably on my personal thread, because I remember posting a picture of my "motorcycle" boots with heels that are 2 inches broad, super huge for me. I am still debating about whether I want to keep those boots or not. Despite their hugeness, the heel caps are wearing out at an alarming rate, and I'm going to have to spend money on them if I want to keep them. I don't hate them, but had I known just exactly how big the heels were, I don't think I would have bought them in the first place. 1 1/4" in heel width seems to be pretty average for block heels in the rest of my collection. In addition to having to pay money to get the heel caps replaced, I'm afraid that they will lose the near perfect sound that they currently have. I know that Vibram or some other similar material is far more durable, but I also know that the boots will lose their "tock, tock" sound. Seems silly, but it's right up there on the list of important features for me.