Why is it so hard to find a pair of shoes?

Nothing like making a stupid mistake in a lace shawl. I was working on Birch while watching an interesting show on The Da Vinci Code Sunday night. I was getting to the end of pattern row 7 of my ninth repeat when I realized that something didn’t look right. I somehow got off pattern on the previous pattern row, so there were yarnovers where there was supposed to be knit stitches, and k2togs where there were supposed to be yarnovers. I’m trying to decide if I want to tink back the 2 rows to fix it, or if I want to try dropping the stitches. I’m leaning towards tinking because there are 4 or 5 leaves that are off… it would probably just be quicker to tink back.

I think my knee is starting to feel a little better, and here I stress the word “little.” The biggest improvement is that when it’s bent I can’t find the sore spot. When it’s straight is still a whole ‘nother story.

In order to distract myself from my slow recovery, I bought shoes. I have a pair of slip on dress casual Clarks that I bought about 5 years ago, if not longer. Due to their age, they are falling apart… literally. There are holes in the soles and the leather upper is separating from the sole. Not shoes to wear on a rainy day as I would be walking around with wet feet. A nice man at the Clarks store in the mall had given me a number to call to get a preaddressed envelope to get my shoes resoled. So, I finally got around to calling only to be told by the person on the other end that they don’t resole ladies shoes. Squeeze me? Upon reflection I decided that while I could take them to a local place, I wasn’t sure that resoling would fix the entire problem (losing 40 lbs has apparently made some of my shoes a bit loose).

Thus, new shoes were the order of the day. I really like Clarks (NAYY), so I hit the store at the mall to see what they had. What they had was crap. Nothing but sandals. Was I asking too much by wanting a simple pair of shoes? Apparently, shoes without any holes, planned or not, are not really available during the summer months (so, why can’t I find swimsuits for sale in August? But, that’s a whole other issue…). So, I checked out Clarks website to see if it was just that one store or the company… sadly, it is the company. But, in my search for Clarks online, I came across places that sell shoes on the Internet. One place had regular Clarks shoes… and a fantastic return policy. I ended up getting Clarks Glenwood. They are so cute. 🙂 They got here yesterday, and I couldn’t be happier to have shoes… real shoes. Now, I have to break them in. Hopefully, this pair will last as long as the last pair… they were great shoes.

The shoes are dead, long live the shoes!