Putting the boot to obligations!

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed this afternoon — I’ve just got home with a stack of research paper proposals and accompanying annotated bibliographies which have to be returned tomorrow. There’s a storm promised which always brings the threat of power outages, not so great when you live on a wee island. BloomingWriter tagged me yesterday with an “8 random things” meme and Dana wants to know what bags I use to cart materials back and forth to work. Too many “shoulds” when the storm on the horizon’s inviting me to curl up with tea and a book!

Luckily, the other day I discovered a wonderful site called Blogging Without Obligation, and I’m going to pay it some heed. Because “only blogging when you feel truly inspired keeps up the integrity of your blog,” I am going to write only what I want to today, although I promise that I will get to my “8 random things about me” post within the week. Perhaps I’ll post on my bag/purse/backpack solutions soon as well. In the meantime, though, I’m going to stick to my own regularly scheduled My Shoes Wednesday (by the way, did you notice that my inspiration, Manolo’s Whose Shoes Wednesday,features a male mystery celebrity shoe-wearer today?).

I’ve been holding out on you, having bought these Frye boots (model name: Nora) back at the beginning of October (in a great shop in Victoria called Footloose. They’re possibly my favourite pair of footwear now, if not ever. Besides looking great, they are stunningly comfortable, especially considering the 2 1/2 inch heel — Really! I can walk blocks and blocks and blocks in these shoes. This gently-rounded toe means no squishing of my toes, yet it looks sharp, fresh, and quite compact, I think.

You can’t really tell from these photos, but the boots land somewhere between mid-calf and knee. The gathering is neat enough that the boots aren’t too clunky to wear with a dress or a skirt, but they’re roomy enough to fit snugly over a pair of jeans (skinny are best, but I sometimes fold my bootleg jeans into compliance and tuck them right into the boot). Last Saturday, I wore them to the opera with this Graham & Spencer dress (that’s a photo I grabbed from somewhere on the web, an online shop whose URL I forgot to grab alongwith). While this length might suggest I’m dressing inappropriately for my age, I’ll quickly point out that I’m not quite 5’4″ while the model is probably closer to 5’8″ — the dress is a bit higher above the knees than I usually wear, but with dark tights, I think it was fairly respectable. You can’t tell from the photo, but the dress is heavy silk, satin at the yoke and sueded for the body — it looks and feels very sumptuous. I wore my hair up, added some long black-feathers-and-jet earrings and my boots and felt dressy enough plus was able to easily manage the 30-minute walk from our apartment.

So there you have it — my shoes for the week, brought to you with pleasure rather than out of obligation. Now I’ll go deal with one or two of those “shoulds” before I make the pot of tea that’s going to be so delightful in its contrast with what’s outside my window. You stay comfy too!