Shoe Porn

So there I was on a recent  Saturday night sitting around at home watching some hockey when I got a call from my buddy Rob.   Rob and I have known each other for longer than either of us would like to admit and he’s been one of my closest friends since we met in high school.  Rob never left our small home town so I try to stop in and see him whenever I’m there.

We call and text fairly regularly and he also visits me for our annual Beerfest celebration at the end of summer.  It was during his last Beerfest visit that Rob noticed that I seemed to have more shoes than most normal guys and I had to admit he was right.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no Imelda Marcos.  It’s not that many shoes and to be honest I don’t know how many pairs of shoes the average male (single, married and or divorced) should own but the reason for the number of shoes I have is pretty simple.   I don’t have particularly large feet so I sometimes have trouble finding shoes in my size.  So when I do and I like the shoe I might buy the same shoe in different colours, styles, etc.  Fashions be damned.  It’s all about comfort so if at some point you see me rockin’ a pair of old school velcro Woolco runners, please don’t judge.

Having made this revelation to Rob, I figured that was the end of it.  The next day we met up with the rest of the crew that normally attends Beerfest.  Amongst this motley crew is my friend Bob.  Bob too has a thing about shoes but his deal with shoes is different from mine.

Bob has a theory that’s he has shared with me on several occasions that you can tell a lot about a woman by looking at her footwear.  What she wears and how she takes care of them seems, to Bob at least, to show something more revealing about the woman than you could ascertain by some other investigative methods.  I’m not sure I agree with him but having never really looked at his wife’s shoes all that closely, maybe it works for Bob.

Bob is one of the guys I go to Grey Cup with every year and 2 years ago, while the rest of us went to grab a bite to eat, Bob went out and shoe shopped for a lovely pair of red sneakers.  I’m sure they didn’t have them in my size or Bob and I would have been shoe twins now.

So there we were at Beerfest where we usually congregate and move from sample to sample throughout the day. I left the group at one point and came back to where Rob and Bob were standing just they were talking about shoes.  Apparently Rob had shared the size of my shoe collection with Bob and was now referring to me as a shoe diva.  Thanks buddy.

That may have been the last time I saw Rob so when he called while I was watching hockey the conversation was odd from the start.

“Ring”

Me:      Hello

Rob:     You have a pair of black sneaker type shoes don’t you?

Me:      Yeah, several.  Why?

Apparently Rob had gone to put his shoes on the other day and realized that one of his shoes was a different size than the other one.  He figured that perhaps when he was down here for Beerfest he’d grabbed one of my shoes and left one of his here.

After I stopped laughing I went to go look at all my shoes to see if I had any off sized pairs and told him his missing shoe was not here.  I also started texting him pictures of some of my black shoes to see if he recognized any of them but to avail.  He then texted me a picture of the shoe he was missing but the shoe porn brought neither of us any relief and at this point we’ve sort of concluded that he probably bought his pair of shoes with two different sizes. If that’s true though, there’s someone else out there with the same problem, just on the other foot and that thought has me chuckling.  Makes me wonder if that’s where the phrase the shoe is on the other foot came from?

So Rob, you can call me a shoe diva all you want, but at least all of my shoes are the same size and Bob, I do want to see Pam’s shoe collection at some point.

Soft But With a Hard (nail) Shell.

Sorry for the delay in getting a new post up. I’ve been busy watching men and women in tights doing things on ice and snow. And then of course there were the Olympics.

Last year I purchased a new (not new new but new to me new) vehicle and it’s the first vehicle I’ve owned that I am leery of getting my hands dirty on because of all the electronics and gadgets and technologies wrapped up within it. It’s been about 6 months now and while I truly enjoy this vehicle, I think it’s making me a little soft.

See I’ve always driven cars that were simple. Vehicles that were carbureted, with manual transmissions, roll up windows, and no power key locks. Most have been pick up trucks where I would think nothing of opening the hood and changing a fan belt or a fuel filter. For many years I carried a tool box and a roll of duct tape that could pretty much limp me home in case of most emergencies. One of these vehicles lasted 350 000 kms before it was sent to the great big recycler and the other retired at the hands of a rear ender with an SUV. No amount of duct tape was going to fix that boo boo.

With most cars I’ve owned a simple set of tools was all I needed and a simple butter knife could open any interior panel to reach and fix a crackling speaker for instance. My latest vehicle required me to buy a panel popper tool to perform the same task and when I finally did remove the panel to reveal the malfunctioning wire harness buried within, there was no way for me to fix it without a visit to the dealer and nice fat invoice to get the issue resolved.

This latest vehicle is just too smart for me. It tells me when my washer fluid is low and opening the hood, I was hard pressed to find most of things I should recognize there. I can find where to fill the window washer fluid but to this day I still don’t know exactly where the actual reservoir is located. I’ve gotten so soft that I currently don’t even carry a set of jumper cables in the car and up until this vehicle that was unheard of. Just last week when someone needed their vehicle boosted I had to use their booster cables and felt a real sense of shame for not having my own at the ready.

Plus it’s just not very exciting driving something you know will get you there in one piece safe and sound and warm. I had a truck that would sometimes refuse start unless you crawled under neath it and smacked the starter motor with a hammer. This didn’t sit well with a girlfriend I had who was somehow not fond of having to perform this maneuver whenever she borrowed the truck. It also came back to bite me when it wouldn’t start one night when I needed to have her drive me to the emergency room in an isolated community.

We’d gone camping and I was chopping some firewood to make kindling while she went to the washroom. She was barely out of sight when I managed to put the hatchet through the thumb of my hand that was holding the piece of wood I was intending to cut. I remember noticing how big my thumb got almost immediately and feeling the blood drain from my face.

My girlfriend returned to the campsite just as I was going into shock and her initial reaction to seeing my face as white as a ghost was to take me to the emergency room so she piled me into the cab of the truck and hopped into the driver’s seat. Then of course as luck would have it, the truck decided it wasn’t particularly interested in a midnight drive in the country. No matter how hard she tried we weren’t going anywhere. She quickly resorted to Plan B which was to get me drunk so that I wouldn’t feel the pain. This plan worked really well except that the pain in my hand was simply moved to a pain in my head in the form of a hangover the next morning.

By the time we were able to get the truck started the next day, the swelling had gone down in my thumb, if not my head. I eventually lost the nail on that thumb and the starter on the truck was replaced as soon as the feeling and nail returned to my finger.

I don’t foresee a similar story with this vehicle though as I haven’t crawled under it to find where the starter motor is located and I don’t camp that much anymore either. Another sign of my softening I suppose.