Coffee heat rising

Shopping

Shoes

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Women’s shoes that do not hurt and do not look like orthopedic appliances for nurses are incredibly expensive.

Hevvin help me, this afternoon I dropped $450 on three pairs of pain-frees. Amazingly fine pain-frees…but my god.

The attempt, undertaken almost a year ago, to buy pain-frees at bargain prices by raiding the Clark’s outlet failed miserably. I did buy several cute pairs of Indigos that seemed comfortable enough in the store. Yup. They were just great, as long as I didn’t try to walk in them. As soon as I tried to walk any distance further than across the store to the mirror, they wanted to fall off my feet, exactly as one would expect backless clogs to do, being nothing other than slides on platforms. I had to struggle to keep them on, and that was very uncomfortable, indeed. Eventually I figured out that they would sort of stay on if I adopted a mincing gait, taking teeny little steps that didn’t require me to lift my feet off the ground for more than a fraction of a second.

Picture, then, mincing a third of a mile across a university campus in shoes that wanted nothing more than to fall off or, preferably, to twist their wearer’s ankle. That’s about how far I have to walk from my car to my office.

Well, hell. I knew better than to buy bargain shoes at an outlet. The immediate cause of the neuromas that have damn near crippled me for the past 20 years was a pair of sweet little heels I bought at a shoe outlet. They seemed comfortable enough—when you’re young, beauty knows no pain. After I’d worn them for a few months (all the time, even walking the dog…which occasionally entailed running), my feet hurt so much I couldn’t walk in anything. I couldn’t walk barefooted, for crying out loud! Not until I tried on a pair of Birkenstocks (ohhh lovely! perfect for officewear) was I able to walk around an amusement park on vacation with my husband and child. It took over 15 years for my feet to get to the point where I could wear anything other than Birkenstocks or Mephistos without excruciating pain. Heels have been out of the question for decades.

So. I should’ve known that shoes that cost something under $40 were going to mess up my feet.

Old, tired, not cute
Old, tired, not cute

I dispensed with the Clark’s Indigo slides in the late great decluttering adventure, tossing them in on top of the mountain of clothes that went to St. Vincent de Paul. Absent the shoes that I couldn’t wear to walk in, I still needed a pair of unclunky brown shoes and a pair of brown Danskos (having worn my beloved old brown pair until they fell apart). So this afternoon, with $2,500 in the much-refreshed savings account, it was off to my favorite purveyor of pain-frees.

There I found that the original Dansko shoe (which died when Dansko was sold and the new owners started having the style manufactured, with evil results, in China) is still produced by an outfit called Sanita. Lo! A pair of Danskos that actually fits like the REAL Danskos used to fit.

Buy: $120.

Then, these hand-made Spanish shoes of amazing cut-out leather, almost lace-like, utterly free of pain, the effect incandescent with élan.

Buy x 2: $320.

That would come to, yes, $440.

Plus 8.1% tax. Don’t ask.

But I was personful: I put back the INCREDIBLY cute pair of heels that hurt only one toe and would have looked so unbelievably awesome with the pin-striped pants purchased in the late great recluttering coup. And I also put back the STAGGERINGLY cute moccasin-like flats hand-made by the same Spanish shoemaker. So, you see…after all, I did not spend $600 on shoes today. What a triumph.

As a practical matter, shoes purchased at this particular emporium last for many, many years. The pair I had on when I walked in the door are about six or eight years old and still fully serviceable. When I went into the closet this afternoon to throw out three pairs of shoes to make way for the three new pair, I really could find only one pair decrepit enough to justify tossing, and I haven’t bought good shoes in more than two years. Guess I’ll have to count the three pair of Clark’s clogs I tossed as the “one out for every one in.”

I think that, especially where shoes are concerned, it’s better to spend more on good products less often than less on shoddy products more often. I dunno about you, but when my feet hurt, I’m miserable. And most shoes hurt my feet. Women’s shoes are designed to hurt your feet: a good 95 percent of them are bone-crushers. When you find well-made shoes that don’t hurt and aren’t hideous, you should buy them, cost be damned. When I pay $120 for pair of Danskos Sanitas that last upwards of six years, their actual cost to me is about $20 a year.

So. In 2009 I’ll pay $75 for the use of three pairs of not-hideous, fully pain-free shoes.

Not a bad buy, eh?

shoesJan08

LOL! The pair on the left is not really peacock-colored. They’re black and a subdued green, with gold thread decoration.

The sequelae to this story appear here and here.

Decluttered and recluttered

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PF bloggers hither, thither, and yon offer as a current gem of instant wisdom that when you buy a new clothing item, you should rid your closet of one, too.
😀

Did them one better today, I did. Actually, I did ’em 6.14 better.

This is the time of year when I like to make a run on Talbot’s, one of the very few clothing stores that sells pants that fit around my capacious rear end without leaving six extra inches of fabric around the waist. Talbot’s actually has two major sales each year, one after Christmas and one in the dog days of the summer. The summer sale, however is N.A., because their buyers’ taste in warm-weather togs is incomprehensible: runs to polka-dots and pastels. But their fall and winter clothes are always classic, handsomely tailored, well made, and fully worth whatever price you pay for them.

Because Talbot’s has moved out of the central city, the choice for the likes of moi was to journey to Scottsdale or to the far northwest valley. Decided to head to the north and west, because SDXB agreed to meet me at the nearby fancy grocery store for a cuppa. After leaving him, I dropped by Chico’s and B’Gauze before hitting Talbot’s (all in the same strip shopping center). Found nothing en route.

Talbot’s was having a 40% sale off already marked-down merchandise, plus an additional 40% off the cheapest item you purchased (“cheap” is a relative term in a joint like this). So, this brought the prices down to almost within reason. w00t! I got TWO blouses, TWO pairs of pants (one washable wool, one washable velour) that look like they were tailored for my bizarre figure, two knit pullovers, and a nifty knit vest: SEVEN highly serviceable and reasonably good-looking items. The bill was bracing, but only about half as bracing as it would have been had I purchased the stuff at presale prices.

Well, my New Year’s resolution is to start looking less like a slob and more like a normal human being.

I’ve fallen into the habit of wearing dungarees to the office…and just about anyplace else I happen to wander. This is partly because our office is isolated and inhabited solely by graduate students, and so there’s really no need to wear anything other than blue jeans, and partly because of my general depression: there’s no one in my life to care what I look like, so why should I care?

Gotta quit that.

All my jeans and easy-wash no-iron tops have resided in the master bedroom closet. Dressier clothing has been stashed in the closet of a bedroom that serves as the TV room, with the result that when I’m racing to get out the door, I grab whatever comes to hand from my bedroom closet: generally unironed jeans and a top that grows shabbier with each laundering. Occasionally I show up on campus in my decrepit gardening shoes, having forgotten to change to newer Danskos, a circumstance that I suppose ought to embarrass me.

So this afternoon when I staggered in the door bearing the weighty haul of the afternoon’s hunt, I went straight to work: dragged every piece of clothing out of the bedroom closet and threw out every stitch that was tired, ugly, or didn’t fit. Then I headed for the TV room and emptied that closet, too: tossed out another mound of old, dusty, tired, unsightly, and ill-fitting costumes from that cache. Then I transferred the jeans, the gardening clothes, and the swimming coverups to the TV room closet and filed the grown-up clothes in the bedroom closet!

And resolved that henceforth the jeans will be worn only around the house and maybe to Costco or the grocery store. Socially acceptable outfits will be worn to the university, to meetings, and to upscale malls where shopgirls won’t wait on you if you look like you’re one of the Clampitts.

I kept track of the ejected stuff: four pairs of jeans, three pairs of better slacks, two knit tops, eleven better tops, eight dresses or skirt/top separates, one sweatshirt, three better skirts, eight miscellaneous items, one sweater, and one pair of shoes, for a total of 43 items. Figuring according to the late successful yard-sale prices, that’s a potential $344 worth of resale clothing: about $20 more than I paid for today’s finds.

Hm. Should I try to yard-sale all this junk? Craig’s List, maybe? Naaahhhh…. Come Monday, off it all goes to St. Vincent de Paul.

But consider that: 43 is to 7 as 6.14 is to 1. (I think.) For every one new item I dragged into the house, I’m dragging more than six off to the charity. The used-clothing value of the outgoing stuff exceeds the retail price of the spiffy new loot.
Decluttering on steroids!

Black Friday: To plunge into the maelstrom or not to plunge?

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There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking that I’d like to get, whether or not I’m laid off next month. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning; the mobs (if any) will be in full force at the stores by now. Do I want to go out and see if I can get stuff at a discount?

Lemme think… Here are the items I imagine I need:

  • A small HDTV-ready television to sit on top of the refrigerator, to replace the tiny portable I have up there that’s too old to make the conversion.
  • A pair of nightstands large enough to accommodate a book and a glass of water without pushing the lamp off onto the floor.
  • A small occasional table for the living room, to replace a table that’s pretty much worn out.
  • A Macintosh laptop
  • Apple’s Airport gadget

Do I really WANT to run out and search for these things? Let us consider…

A small HDTV television
Televisions are stupidly overpriced these days. It’s unlikely that I can touch what ought to be a $60 gadget for much less than $350. Do I really need to spend $350 to watch the PBS NewsHour while I’m fixing dinner?

Verdict: Naaahhhh! I’ll miss Jim Lehrer come February, but there’s a perfectly fine radio in that room. I can turn on NPR News instead. Also, with the HD service, you can catch the NewsHour later in the evening on one of KAET’s three HD stations. It’s not like there’s anything else to watch during prime time, most evenings.

A pair of nightstands
dcp_22332Hmm. I would like a better pair of nightstands. The ones I have won’t accommodate much more than a lamp. The phone has to sit on the nightstand that’s on the other side of the bed from where I normally sleep. With Cassie having taken up residence on the bed, there’s now a dog as well as a broad expanse of mattress and a tangle of bedding between me and the telephone. In an emergency, climbing out of the nest and over the dog to dial 9-1-1 in the dark could pose a problem. Plus I hate it that I have to throw books and magazines on the floor under the bed when I’m ready to go to sleep, and that I have to be e-x-t-r-e-e-e-m-e-l-y careful not to bump a glass of water onto the floor if I have the temerity to bring such a thing into the bedroom.

The only pieces I’ve seen that appeal and that are anywhere near my price range are at Ethan Allen. Three hundred fifty bucks is on the high side of the price range, and when you consider that I need two of them, I’d have to get a significant discount to afford them. On the other hand, such a discount might be available today.

But…just to find out whether a discount is available, I’d have to consume a quarter tank of gas traipsing to Scottsdale through murderous traffic and then fight for a place to park. Ugh. This is not a pleasing prospect. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I have a perfectly fine pair of nightstands that will do. I just need to quit putting a glass of water on the nightstand and quit complaining about having to store reading material on the floor.

Verdict: probably nix

A small occasional table
dcp_2232Pier One apparently has been having trouble moving the junk off its floors. Those stores have sales all the time, and some of their stuff is sorta cool. I’ll bet I could get something comparable to the cheap Indian inlaid table my father rescued off the docks in Ras Tanura back in the 1950s and preserved for the ages in polyurethane.

On the other hand, probably I could spiff up the Indian table with the application of some cleanser, a bit of steel wool, and another coat of polyurethane.
Verdict: Go buy some mineral spirits, a small can of polyurethane, and a paint brush.

A Macintosh laptop
At first blush, the comment on that proposition is har har har har har!
On the other hand… I’ve been getting some ominous error messages from the iMac—yesterday even M’hijito couldn’t figure out what its problem was—and my Quicken records have been converted to Mac format and can’t be unconverted. If I’m to keep my Quicken archives with any continuity, I’ll have to stay with Apple.

On the other other hand, I could start anew on January 1 with a much, much cheaper PC. The MacEmperor, after all, has few if any clothes. Both platforms have their shortcomings and their annoyances. It’s easy to store all of one’s Quicken files in PDF format, so at least I’d have records in case of an audit.

But on the other hand, Windows is annoying as hell; Dell’s customer service varies from nonexistent to excruciating; and all the antivirus, antimalware, and firewall software clogs the operating system to the point where it barely runs. Ugh. Do I really want to get another one of those things?
Verdict: If I don’t buy any tables I could probably afford a small Mac laptop. Maybe.

Apple Airport
appleairportthingieDo I need this?

No

Do I want it?

Yesh.

Can I afford it?

Sure.

Verdict: Probably. Maybe. Get this. Yeah. Get this.

Well, you can be sure that the Apple Store won’t be offering any discounts. They never do…’cause they don’t have to. So there’s no hurry to race out and get these highly optional pieces of gear.

Think I’ll stay off the streets today. It’s time to do the laundry, anyway.

Moral of the story: Weigh each purchase before running out to buy it on sale. You may save yourself not just the mark-down, but the whole marked-down price. 🙂

Watch out for “sales” that aren’t

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A local TV station reports that alleged markdowns at a Linens & Things going-out-of-business sale are anything but.

Our Intrepid Reporter took a close look at the price tags and discovered some showed X-ed out prices that were lower than the “sale” price. Other items had layers of price tags, through which an archaeological dig showed prior lower asking prices. An item advertised as 30% off had been marked up more than 40%, so that the “sale” price was more than the former sticker price.

Be careful out there.

Stuff tsunami

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Spent all of yesterday afternoon at a little party helping a friend go through her deceased mom’s clothing. Some of it. The challenge: decide which pieces, in about ten huge bagsful, should go to the consignment store and which should be yard-saled or sent to Goodwill. Press, fold, and box the consignment-worthy stuff; bag the yard-sale stuff.My friend has already earned enough to take a nice vacation by consigning earlier rafts of the mom’s clothes, and she still has many bags and boxes of stuff left to go. So far, she’s made $1,500 selling clothing through consignment. I’ll bet she’ll tote another $800 worth to the store today.

Mom was a lively gal, very funny and charming. She LOVED clothes, and shopping for clothes was her main source of entertainment. Mother and daughter often shopped together. Most of the stuff they bought wasn’t very expensive—Mom worked at WalMart. But she had a real flair, and quite a lot of it is very cute. She was a sucker for sales, and so much of it was bought at deep discount.

The result was that her apartment was chuckablock full of stuff, stuff, and MORE stuff. The clothing alone, as you can imagine from the prices it’s fetching, was enough to stock a boutique. Then there were the mountains of perfumed bathing supplies, makeup, and various bric-a-brac.

Well, she always looked nice.

As a confirmed cheapskate, this habit amazes me. She was far from wealthy. The only reason she finally got out of a cheap rental in a less-than-ideal part of town and into a little condo was that near the end of her life she inherited a small sum of money. I find myself wondering how much better she could have lived—or even IF she could have lived better—had she bought about a sixth of that amount of clothing over the years and done something else with the money.

I don’t know whether she paid for the stuff in cash or ran a tab on a credit card. Either way: she ended up with money out of pocket and a vast clothing collection in house. Many pockets, we might say, with little or nothing to put in them.

What would have happened if she had put, say, $200 a month in savings instead of into pants, tops, skirts, loungewear, and dresses?

Would it have mattered? She suffered diabetes and failing kidneys. Saving $2,400 a year wouldn’t have extended her life, and it’s hard to imagine that the occasional plump bank statement would have done much to make her life better. If buying clothes made her happy, why not? She supported herself adequately and didn’t depend on anyone else financially.

The only downside, of course, is that the clothing collection poses a huge burden for her two daughters, each of whom has spent uncountable hours trying to deal with a Himalayan range of outfits. Yesterday three women spent five hours sorting through bag after bag after bag of stuff. Even after we kiped the things we wanted, we still filled four big baskets to overflowing for consignment and repacked a half-dozen big black yard bags with yard-sale stuff. And that was only a tiny part of the job my friend faces. On the other hand, going through all the stuff reminded us of her mom, a great old gal who should never be forgotten.

She lives on, in her clothes.
🙂

Is that bargain food safe to eat?

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You find a gallon of juice at the grocery on megasale. Only problem is, the “sell by” date is the day after tomorrow; the stuff that’s not on sale has a sell-by date sometime in the middle of next week. Will you have to throw out whatever juice you can’t gulp down in a day and a half? Over at Scribbit, a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Costco is going on; blog proprietor Michelle observes that Costco’s milk often has an expiration date so close to the purchase date she ends up throwing sketchy stuff away.

Depends on what the date actually is. Take a close look at it: does it say “sell by,” “use by,” or “expiration”? Or something else?

Food is not slated to spoil by its “sell by” or “use by” date. Truth to tell, if it’s been stored properly it may be OK even after its “expiration” date, though you might not want to give it to infants or folks with serious health problems. According to Consumer Reports, here’s what those dates mean:

Use by, best if used by, or quality assurance: These estimate the period in which a product is at the height of its delectability. After the date given, it may be less flavorful, but it’s still safe to eat.

Sell by or pull: This tells the retailer when the product should be taken off the shelf. But it’s still safe to eat by the “sell by” date. This date figures in the amount of time most people might be expected to store the product at home. According to CR, milk is usable for a good seven days after the sell-by date.

Package or pack date: The date the product was packaged. It has no direct relationship to the date the product is likely to spoil. Comparing package dates of products on the shelf may allow you to buy the most recently processed item, which is nice, but the older one is not necessarily about to spoil.

Expiration date: For food, this is the term that indicates food may be spoiled. CR says an exception is eggs, which can be used three to five weeks after the stamped-on expiration date. Remember, too, that for other products the “expiration date” is often just a marketing gimmick to induce you to buy new packages of perfectly OK products (such as sunscreen) at regular intervals.

The way a food is stored is crucially important to how long it stays edible. And you may not know. For example, last summer I made an emergency run to the nearby Albertson’s to buy some butter. What should I find but that the cooler where the butter and margarine were stored was out of order! It clearly had been out of order for quite some time: the room-temperature butter was soft, and the other dairy products in the case were warm and kept that way under the display case’s lights.

I didn’t buy it, and on the way out (annoyed that now I would have to burn gas to make a six-mile round-trip traipse to buy a single package of butter) I mentioned the broken case and room-temperature dairy products to the store manager. She just shrugged and said a repairman was supposed to show up that day. It was clear she had no intention of removing the products—as soon as the cooler was repaired, shoppers would have no idea the butter, margarine, sour cream, cream cheese and other products had been sitting at 80 degrees for many hours.

So, as in most cases, we’re reduced to having to use common sense. Give any food item the sniff test, no matter when it’s dated. Does it smell fresh? Any whiff of the rancid about it? And do you see any sign of mildew or dried-up spots? Does the can bulge? Is the can dented? If so, out it goes.

Don’t assume the dates on a product necessarily mean you have to consume it by that date, or that it’s still safe by that date, either. When in doubt, throw it out.