High Heels are of the Devil.....

I very, very rarely wear heels anymore. Hell, I very rarely wear anything that would LOOK good with heels.

Today, though, I decided to wear a pair of heels that I've only worn once before. They were one of the 42 pairs I bought last fall right before school started. Not really, it was only 7 pairs.

Is it 7 pairs? Or 7 pair? You'd think an English teacher would know. One pair is two shoes, but it seems that if you bought 14 shoes, it would be 7 pairs.

Anyway, I have this really cute jacket that sort of requires dressy brown pants, and dressy brown pants require dressy brown heels.

I took a spare pair (that one I KNOW is singular) of brown shoes (flat ones) to school today for that moment when I couldn't take the heels anymore.

But I never put them on.

Having a spare pair of shoes is sort of like having the granny gear on my bicycle. I like knowing it's there, but it's a point of pride not to use it.

Yes, I realize that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. About the bicycle OR the shoes.

So I managed to wear the heels all day. And it wasn't really all that bad.

Except that my day has now mercifully come to an end approximately 5 hours later than it normally does, and approximately 12 hours and 8 minutes since I put those damn shoes on.

I didn't realize when I put the heels on to go to school that I would NOT, as I usually do, come straight home and kick off my shoes.

Today's schedule included a trip to the tanning bed (don't tell my nurse sister), a visit to the hospital to see my mother-in-law (she's still not doing well, but she's in good spirits, for whatever THAT'S worth in the medical world), eating out (a blessing and a nice mid-week surprise), and an unexpected trip to the store with the big red bullseye-looking logo to buy paint for my hoodlums at school so they will FINALLY finish painting the ceiling tile they're doing for a project and get back to real work.

My puppies are tired.

As is the rest of my body and soul.

Goodnight.

Technological Close Call........

I wrote a post a few months ago about how I feel obligated to use the whole set of something. If I have a 5-piece luggage set, I feel guilty if I don't use all 5 pieces. Even if I'm just going on an overnight trip.

I feel the same way about gadgets. If I have them, I consider it my duty to use them. I have a GPS for my bicycle, so I won't just hop on the bike for a casual little ride anymore. It has to have the GPS on it to document my mileage, elevation gained/lost, and a map of the route.

My first motorcycle had a locking helmet hook on it, so I felt compelled to hang my helmet on its designated place, never mind that the cool people just hung their helmets on the sissy bar or the mirror and it was a B-I-T-C-H to lock/unlock anyway.

Some gadgets, however, I find useful in their gadgetness, not just because they are cool toys or features to have. For example, the key pad on my SUV. It was one of the features that sold me on this car. That and the fact that Hubby had a tee time and he had already told the salesman, "Wash it, we'll be back for it when I get off the golf course."

Using the key pad eliminates the need to carry my keys. Since I also abhor carrying a purse, this is very handy. I don't often have pockets, so I like the convenience of being able to lock the car but not carry a set of keys with me.

You can probably see where this is going.

It almost came back to haunt me in a bad, terrible, rotten, no-good kind of way. My apologies to the author of that childhood story, because I'm sure I just mangled its title.

Yesterday Hubby and I ran some errands, since the weather was too yucky for him to play golf. We meant to go to the tanning bed (give me a break, we're going to the Dominican Republic in a month and we don't want to get sunburned to a crisp), but we had already bought groceries when we remembered.

We took the groceries home, and Hubby said he didn't want to get out again in the yuckiness. So I went off to the tanning bed alone. That was the first good stroke of luck.

When I came out of the tanning bed, my key pad code would NOT let me in my vehicle. No reassuring click, no unlocking of the doors, no flashing of the lights, nothing. I did it a few (hundred) times just to make sure, and then I was pretty sure I had locked myself out of the key pad for a period of time. So I went to a nearby grocery store and bought something I had forgotten on my FIRST grocery buying expedition that morning, and just to kill some time.

No luck. The code just would not work.

So I called Hubby, and he came with the spare clicker and unlocked my door as he drove by. I'm sure the girl working at the tanning salon saw me walk out to my car and open the door and thought to herself, "Well the dumbass could get in all along." But I digress.

We tried the code again and again when we got home. It wouldn't even LOCK the doors. Hubby looked in the owner's manual to see if it mentioned a fuse or anything that could be wrong with it, but he came up empty.

And everything was basically okay, since I had the spare and now I know not to lock my keys in my car.

But I shudder to think what COULD have happened.

Because last night was the night that Katydid and Nurse Jane and I went to the Billy Joel/Elton John concert.

If I hadn't gone back to the tanning bed, I wouldn't have known that my keypad didn't work anymore.

Until after the concert.

In downtown Atlanta.

At midnight.

On a Saturday night.

With Hubby 60 miles away.

NOW who says tanning beds are a bad thing?