Shoe Shopping

I hate shopping for shoes. I really do. And this is why:

If I go to get a pair of jeans and I know I wear 28″ waist with 29″ inseam, then I know that any pair of jeans I pick up that says 28×29 are, well, going to be 28×29. That’s not the way with shoes. This shoe is too small and it’s an 8. This shoe fits and it’s an 8. That shoe is like, way big and it’s an 8. SAME SIZE!!

And now they went and changed the width stuff.

In women’s shoes (which I don’t/can’t wear), size 8D means it is 8 Wide. 8 2E is size 8 double wide. In men’s shoes, 8D means 8 Medium. 8 2E is 8 Wide.

Arrgghh!

At least now that I’m mostly using a wheelchair, I only need to get shoes once every two years or so. Except when a certain Shepweiler (rottweiler/german shepherd pup named Mike) decides shoes are tasty and make good teething objects and really fly when tossed by the string.

For years, I have worn Thom McCans. I love those shoes and they were in Kmart (vs the evil Walmart). But a few years ago, they changed the style and they aren’t as comfortable. When I walked more, these were the only shoes to survive past 3 months. My pronation or whatever it is can wear down shoes in now time flat. Thom McCans make excellent dress shoes and I wore Saucony sneakers. But the place we went to today seemed to be lacking in Saucony shoes in my size (whatever size of the moment they happened to be) so I went wandering about in the men’s shoes while Lorna wandered in the women’s section.

I found some hiking shoes that I fell in lust with. They’re by Merrell. Lorna called (to make sure I hadn’t killed anyone) while I was looking at them and I told her to look to see if there were any in women’s. She found me a few minutes later and had fallen madly in lust with a pair of her own. She got the women’s Phaser Rush and I got the men’s Pantheon. She also got a pair of Saucony’s.

I don’t know how long we were there. We’d shopped together for a while but drifted apart in the madness that is shoe shopping. We like the store (Discount Shoes out on Brevard Road) because they are so freakin’ big that we have a good chance of finding something we like. They ought to have a hot dog stand in there, though.