My intention was to get a ton of stuff done this weekend: Do my grading, bottle some beer, brew another batch, fix the leaky keg in the kegerator, put the soft top on the Scout, maybe make a recycling run. Of all that, I got my grading 95% complete. The rest of the weekend was kind of a lazy wash.
Our third yard sale morning was somewhat beneficial. Finn and I got up late Saturday morning, wolfed down some breakfast, and hit the east side of town where a couple of community sales were happening. We came upon a man with some hand tools for sale, and I passed up all but three Craftsman metric wrenches because the sockets he had were all duplicates of ones I’ve got. Further down the road we came upon an unused smoker for $20, which I snapped up quickly, and Finn found a tiny luggage key and some good books for herself.
The pickings were pretty slim up the road, so we headed back home and farted around in the yard for a while. Then I stopped over to Finn’s old daycare to finish up training on the website I built for them back in October. After returning home for a shower and a shave, we picked up sushi and beer and went to visit Bear Gebler and his parents to get our baby on. NOM NOM NOM GIVE ME BABY TO HOLD. He was sacked out when we got there, slept through dinner, woke up to pee, had some milk, and promptly passed right back out again. Nice to see you, kid.
Sunday I got up and started work formulating a complicated spreadsheet to sort out my grading, which made no sense until my second cup of coffee. Then I went back and looked over my students’ midterm work and grades, compared it to their final work, factored in attendance and completion, and got my final numbers in order. With a few small exceptions I think it fits with what I was expecting very closely.
I’ve become a shoe guy. There, I’ve said it. I’m not Imelda Marcos with that shit, but I like to have a good classic pair of brown and black shoes for work. I’ve had a brown pair of Dr. Marten 1461’s since 1997 that I’ll never part with. I bought them with my ex at Nordstroms, and spent a lot of money on them, but they’re the original Made in England Docs, and they were made for my feet the day I tried them on. Those are the kind of shoes I like.
I’ve needed a black pair of casual dress shoes for forever; I also need another brown shoe to mix things up. And the trick has been finding something I like. I’ve been buying and returning black semi casual shoes from Zappos since the end of March, with no success. I started with Börn, which looked good online but wore like barges in person. Then a pair of Steve Maddens, which felt like I’d strapped cramped wooden blocks to my feet. Then I tried two styles of pricy Fryes, which looked great but suffered from crepe soles, which are made of snot and apparently turn black with age. For $250, snotty black shoes? No thanks.
With that backstory, we headed down to DSW to return a pair of shoes I’d bought last weekend which turned out to be torturously small in practice (how can that be when I tried them on at 4:30PM?). This was my second attempt at Steve Maddens–never again, no matter how lovely they look. Today I found Penguins, which feel great and look about the way I want them to. Unfortunately, they were out of black. So I got dark brown to replace a pair of $40 Target chukka boots I’ve worn the soles out of. (While I was there I tried a pair of Clark’s desert boots on, and OH MY GOD what crap shoes those were. I felt like I was lacing two sides of misshapen buffalo hide to my feet. What the fuck is that?) I then found another pair of casual dress shoes in the Clearance section for peanuts, so I grabbed those while I was at it; they’re a deep brown and could pass for black until I can find black. Who knew it was so hard to find the right shoe?