saturday camera show and tell

Perhaps I should have kept this for Shoes-day?  LOL. These are really a deep maroon colour, although they look a dark brown here.  The inside picture shoes the colour better than the pair I'm wearing.

These are actually the second pair I've had in the same colour.  They are cheap workhorse type shoes, but ever so comfortable.  The first pair I had for several years.  Particularly in winter they were worn many times.  I was devastated on my birthday a couple of years ago when everything was falling apart at home to find when I reached the bus stop on a very rainy day, that the sole of one had split across the bottom, let in heaps of water and the colour had run all over a good pair of my handknit socks.  As I'd been expecting a lift to the bus stop at the very least on my birthday, it was all too much and I stood there in the rain, waiting for the bus with tears running down my face.

The shoes are American, Thomas McCann, and actually come from KMart of all places.  I haunted the place for a while but they had no more in that colour and I didn't like the brown.  I was in there last week, walked past the shoes and there they were.  My size too.  A bonus was that they were cheaper than eight years ago.  I guess that's because our dollar is stronger now.  I put them on when I arrived home and it was as if I'd been wearing them for years.  Proper fit, no rubbing or blisters at all.  Cheap enough to wear around the house but so far, decent enough to go shopping in.

Like many whose blogs I read, I've always loved red shoes.  These are supremely comfortable and the strap at the side of this pair means I can adjust the fit on days when the arthritis makes my feet swell.  They are soft underneath but with a firm base to the softness.  Another pair I've always been able to wear with no problems.

Now the humidity is easing, the arthritis in my feet is  also easing.  It's been worse this year than in any year for the last ten years or so.  My toes and under the instep are no longer swollen but my ankles still have  some puffiness.  It's going but there's still a remainder.  I look at this and wonder where my very trim ankles of last year have gone.  There's some misshapen ankle bones under the puffiness, a legacy I presume of whacks from a hockey stick in my teenage years.

I was at Sydney Uni in the days of the old Fisher library and in the early years of the new building.  Those wearing shoes with heels small than a 10 cent piece were required to take them off in the new library to save damaging the new floor.  I came back to my desk after looking for a book to find a note left for me.  I asked the writer later how she knew it was my desk.  She said she knew that such pretty new red shoes left on the floor just had to be mine!