Well, Eff Me!

Went to Holt Renfrew Last Call in Vaughan Mills a while ago, on a hunt for shoes. A specific pair of shoes. Brown suede Manolo Blahniks that I had seen months earlier. They had been marked down drastically, but for some strange reason, I didn't buy them. Didn't think about them again until recently, when I was overcome by a desire for brown suede shoes. I held out hope that they'd still be there on the shelf, which was of course ridiculous.

What the hell is with the height of heels these days? Are women supposed to be able to walk in their shoes? Almost every pair in the store were 4, 5, even 6 inch heels. Some platform, some not. It was like I was in the Rich Hooker section of Holt's. Who wears these? Where does one wear these?

I'm not one for high heels. Well, not anymore. In my 20s, I refused to wear my glasses out at night. Put a nearsighted, klutzy girl in a pair of F*ck Me shoes, stick her in a dark club, and you'll see some spectacular spills. Luckily for me, I did all my falling in the Pre Camera Phone era. I can still pull off the standard 3-inch heel, but even they are not great for work. In the mornings, before I have been suitably caffeinated, I would be in constant danger of tripping and landing on my face.

I rummaged around Holt's for a bit and managed to find a lovely pair of Manolo flats- black, pointy, and quite elegant. Somehow, out of the hundreds of pairs of shoes on the rack, I seemed to have found the most expensive pair. They had started out as $850, and were now $359 ... still too freaking expensive for flats. Well, flats that aren't Chanel. Thank God for Tory Burch and Michael Kors.

I came away shoeless, but managed to find some great skirts for work. Super cheap Tory Burch and Teenflo. Could have thrown a YSL and Valentino onto the pile, but I restrained myself, which is not something I do very often :)

Islands and Barns

When I returned from the Bahamas in February, I had fallen completely in love with the easy Colonial Island style we saw around Eleuthera and Harbour Island. I'm an Anglophile at heart, but overstuffed chintz, huge paintings, and crazy patterns would look a little weird in my itty bitty downtown condo. Island style combines some elements of traditional British design, but softens the look with, obviously, island touches. It's also much more spare than the Country House look. Just adding a few candles in hurricanes filled with pink sand I brought back (like an idiot), spreading some shells and a starfish on a dark wood shelf, and buying more vibrant flowers have helped bring the look home with me.

This afternoon I was browsing in a popular home store that isn't a Barn and doesn't sell much Pottery. Apparently the style they are pushing this season is Coastal Style. Oh, great. They were selling bags of shells, pieces of (fake?) coral, and sand-filled hurricanes at fairly exorbitant prices. Now I look as though I bought a bunch of stuff at this store. Please. Islands are far more inspiring than Barns.

In the Daytime

I've been lying in bed for about 48 hours now, struck down with flu, it seems. I am exhausted and bored to sobs. My eyes are very tired, so I haven't been able to read much. I have an old TV in the bedroom, and I have discovered that daytime TV is the saddest place on the planet. I tried to find entertainment first with the Food Network, but you can only watch so much food preparation when you are nauseous and periodically projectile vomiting. At one point I seem to have drifted to sleep. I awoke to a Baby Daddy fight on Maury Povich. I have to assume I rolled onto the remote, because even high on Benylin I would never watch Maury Povich. My solace has been, oddly, the Military Channel. I watched most of a documentary series about the First World War. It was truly fascinating. In 1919, the victors re-drew the maps of Europe and the Middle East, and I think we can all agree they did a bang-up job with that!

Believe me, I channel-surfed. Even doped up, I can't enjoy The Facts of Life or Fantasy Island. Dr. Phil is a show of such epic train-wreck proportions that I believe I would emerge from a coma to change the channel if that blithering fool were on my TV. After a while, I just gave up, and dragged myself out of bed to do laundry. Maybe this is all a corporate conspiracy- in order to ensure people don't take too many sick days, Big Business got together to make sure that even with mountains of channels, daytime TV would still be awful. I'm planning to go back to work tomorrow, not because I feel all that great, but because I am so thoroughly bored I can't bear another day in this room. The daytime TV landscape, even with hundreds of channels, is a barren as one of those WWI battlefields.