K-mart and Payless Shoes are no longer in business here. I haven't found any acceptable* shoes at Target or Walmart or Kohl's lately. My everyday pair of shoes has been getting increasingly worn out. I put Shoe Goo on the worn out parts of the soles to make them last longer, but the Shoe Goo comes off after a while.

Shoe Carnival, a store I hadn't been to before, sent me an ad. It didn't say where they're located (I've noticed that with paper ads before; what's up with that??); I had to look it up. I stopped by their closest store after work yesterday. Browsing the aisles, none of the shoes struck my fancy, but I made note of a few possibilities to come back to if I didn't find anything better in the rest of the store.

In the back corner of the store, I found a pair that did strike my fancy - black & grey with bright red accents. But it wasn't available in my size. I found a few others that looked good, met most of my criteria, and were the right size. Then I saw that this whole section of shoes was on sale for $20 or $30 dollars each pair. Yes! I ended up getting 3 different pairs. None of them are a perfect replacement for my current shoes (2 have mesh on top, not waterproof. 1 has a non-mesh fabric; TBD how waterproof it is), but they'll keep me going a while longer.

*My criteria for acceptable shoes:
Athletic style; must be comfortable on my feet.
No white rubber on the bottom; that will get dirty-looking too easily.
No real leather; synthetic is fine. The shoes' material must be specifically labelled. (This rules out Nike and New Balance and several other brands).
No high(ish) heels; I find them uncomfortable to walk in.
Must have at least some contoured arch support inside.
Should be mostly water-proof - not having only mesh fabric across the toes like so most athletic shoes nowadays have. Should have thick enough rubber soles so that if I step in a shallow puddle, the water won't soak into the shoes.
Not having skid-resistant/work-style soles with the very narrow grooves in them; they are too hard to clean out after stepping in gunk.
Must look good to me.

This morning while re-lacing a shoe, it occurred to me how hard it would be for a machine to do that. I wondered if there are people whose only job it is, to lace up new shoes. Apparently there must be.

https://qz.com/966882/robots-cant-lace-shoes-so-sneaker-production-cant-be-fully-automated-just-yet/

World’s First Automated Shoe Lacing Machine (posted Sep 26, 2017):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeXw3awuaM
The shoes in this video have solid white eyelets; most shoes don't so they would be harder for a machine to handle.

I fixed holes in the tips of my shoes by cutting pieces from an old black synthetic belt, and gluing them on with Shoe Goo.

First shoe done. I used too much goo so you can see shiny stuff around the edges.


Second shoe done; this one turned out better.


To help the pieces adhere well, I stuffed some socks into the front of the shoes and used a bag of pebbles over the glued pieces to apply pressure.

It's so easy nowadays with the internet to look up information and to share information with others.

When I was a kid, if I wanted an answer to a question, I'd have to ask people, or look it up in the encyclopedia or dictionary that we had at home, or go to a library and search through books. But even if you did all that, the answer might not be found.

That isn't to say that I spent much time as a child searching the library for answers to hard questions.

But still. Even if you had a whole library of books, where would you look up the answer to a question like, "Why do my shoes squeak and creak, and how can I make them stop?"

Sometimes you can figure out answers by yourself. In the past, when my shoes squeaked, it was usually due to friction between the tongue and the top of the shoe, or due to small holes in the sole. I found ways to prevent those noises.

This time, the culprit was neither the tongues nor the soles. Internet searching provided some answers I hadn't thought of. The foam layers on one of the insoles* were coming apart. So I glued them back together with silicon sealer. That fixed one of the squeaks. I also sprinkled talcum** powder under the insoles, and after a few repetitions, that got rid of most of the creaks. One of the creaks kept coming back, which I now suspect was due to a thick thread that was under the insole, perhaps letting air in. I trimmed the thread. For the time being, the squeaks and creaks are all gone. Yay.

*I originally thought that insoles are glued in, but in many cases they aren't, and you can simply pull them out.
**Corn starch didn't sound like a good idea, as it might get pasty when wet. Nor did I want my shoes to smell like baby powder. Luckily, I found that non-baby-scented talcum powder can be found in the pharmacy foot-care section. The one I got smells like wintergreen!

Anyway, I was thinking about the above, and also thinking about what will happen to that kind of data over time. People die. Then what happens to the data they've posted to the internet? If they had their own website domain, and if no one takes over paying the domain fees or web hosting provider fees after they die, their website will be gone. If they've posted data on other sites, then it will depend on how long those sites stay around. Websites are not permanent, and most will disappear or radically change over time. Some data may get archived on various sites. But the Internet Archive, for instance, while it has old webpages, isn't very searchable in the normal sense. Google's cache is sometimes useful, but I'm not sure how long Google maintains cached data, once the original websites are gone.

So the answers that I can find today while doing an internet search, may someday no longer be there to be found. Or may no longer be found in the same places. New people will have to post the answers in new places.

Another useful piece of info I found today is that if your Lotus Notes locks up for a long time whenever you paste rich text from a webpage into an email, check the Lotus Notes proxy settings. Make sure it doesn't list an old proxy server which is no longer valid.

This regards the lamp that I nearly electrocuted myself on (though Qiao, having more experience with such things, thinks it unlikely that I would have gotten more than a nasty shock).

After taking the lamp apart to replace the socket, I discovered that the socket didn't actually have a contact missing, and it wasn't actually intended to take a 3-way light bulb. The socket does have a 3rd terminal, but it's not for controlling the extra filament of a 3-way bulb as I expected.

The old socket has 3 screw terminals, whereas the replacement 3-way socket I bought has only 2. Four wires come up out of the base of the lamp, and 2 wires were connected to one of the 3 screws.

It turns out there is actually a little bulb in the base of the lamp, which Qiao and I never knew about! The base is ceramic, with a lot of cut-outs in a nice pattern. The inside of the base had a paper lining, hiding the stuff inside. Inside that, there was a little Christmas tree type bulb, which must have burned out long ago. Turning the knob once would turn on the little light in the base, twice would turn on the top light, and thrice would turn on both.

Not sure what I'm going to do with it now. I think it would look neat to replace the little bulb with a short string of white LEDs, but I'll have to figure a way of hooking that up.



(Nearly every time I take a photo in the above room, I'm chagrined to later discover a roll of toilet paper in the picture. I use it for blowing my nose, as it has a higher recycled paper content than facial tissue. It even managed to sneak itself into the above photo.)


I love how these socks look together with these shoes! (Kudos to you if you can figure out how this photo was taken).

Some years back, I noted the disparity between athletic shoes marketed towards men and women. The ones for women were mainly all-white, or white + pastel colors, or sometimes all-black, whereas the ones for men more often had vivid colors.

Now, vividly colored shoes are available for both men and women. There are still color differences - the women's shoes are more likely to contain pink, purple, salmon-orange, and turquoise colors, while the men's shoes are more likely to contain primary colors. But overall, I'm impressed at how many snazzy looking shoes are on sale!

Me: Shows Qiao photos of the Beautiful Rainbow shoes and points to one of them.

Qiao: "Naaah"

Me: Points to another pair.

Qiao: "Naaah."

Me: "But.... But you could see me wearing those shoes, right?"

Qiao: "Oh yeah, everyone who knows you could see you wearing those shoes."

My day...

My back was achy this morning; one of the vertebrae was stiff and not moving right.
I washed.
I did Neti against my allergies.
I relaxed on the electric back massager mat for a while.

Serena's tags were missing from her collar. So I went looking in the yard, and found them. Yay!

I searched for sh*t and shoveled and buried it. This is to avoid inadvertently stepping in it, and so that when I rake leaves, I'm less likely to get nasty surprises.
While I was in the yard, my vertebrae finally loosened and snapped back into the right position. Yay.

I washed dishes.
I buried the scraps in the compost pile. I cut up the pumpkin, which had unfortunately gotten moldy through a bad spot, and put it in the compost too.

Leave it to Walmart to have most of the things on my shopping list which I hadn't found in other stores.
- queen-size fleece bed-sheets for my new mattress. Check.
- stackable plastic crates with carrying handles, for storing recylables. Check.
- S-carabiners... they didn't have the size I wanted.
- but they had some other small carabiner clips which will work as well, for clipping a small pouch to my belt. Check.
- full-metal tire pressure gauge. Check.
- comfortable athletic shoes, with all man-made materials. Check.
- another pair of comfortable athletic shoes! Double check.
- but they still don't have any hot-pink sparkly athletic shoes in my size. Oh, well. Maybe someday they will.
- blue sweatshirt. Check.

I do get a small kick out of shopping, especially when I find exactly what I'm looking for, or something unexpectedly nice&nifty that I wasn't even looking for.

Kohl's was open until midnight. I found several nice things there too, including a $42 faux-fur vest. That's more than I'm usually willing to spend on a single item of clothing, especially something as simple as a vest. The vest isn't even perfect in all ways. Yet it had appealing aspects (it is reversible, although it wasn't advertised as such, and reversed, it matches my black shiny pants!), and I figured I'd regret not having bought it. So now I have a frivolous soft black vest to go along with my frivolous black silky pants.

My back was aching pretty bad again by the time I was in Kohl's. It usually does while I'm out shopping. It reminded me that I had planned to go see a doctor about my back pain at one point. But then I decided to try exercising more... still need to exercise more on a regular basis. Hopefully the new mattress will help some, too.

Kroger was open til 1am. I picked up some groceries and left there a little after midnight.

Got home. Unloaded the car. I ate dinner at 2am. Then I had an allergy attack. (How can a nose produce so much snot in such a short period of time? Where does it all come from??) So I took a loratadine pill.

Good vegan chocolates (somewhat expensive, but delicious):
Sjaaks.com

..

Some Asian/Oriental markets sell various kinds of "mochi" sweets. Mochi is a chewy substance made out of rice flour. The regular mochi sweets - flavored, and with various fillings - are ok, but I discovered one brand (Royal Family) which has chocolate-covered ones. The kind I bought includes chopped almonds and a sesame filling, and they are yummy! They are like chocolate-covered marshmallow confections. Vegan marshmallows are hard to find, and I haven't yet come across any vegan chocolate marshmallow confections, so this is a kind of treat I haven't had since becoming vegan. The mochi texture is thicker and less sweet than marshmallow, but similar enough to do the trick. I covered some other mochi sweets I had bought (with a taro filling) which were just so-so on their own, in chocolate, and they are now yummy too!

..

I thought I was going to have to buy new shoelaces, as some of my shoes' shoelaces are made out of slippery synthetic fibers which come undone too easily and which don't stay tied. But then I found a simple way of tying the shoelaces differently so that they stay tied better, and they can still be opened just by pulling on the ends like normal.

Life is torturing me. It really is. I just want somebody to be able to look at the day I've been having and to tell me, that yes indeed, life *is* being cruel today. That I'm not just being oversensitive due to PMS.

Even when I took a break to go for a walk, my shoes squeaked the whole way!

I was trying to give it the benefit of doubt, as my computer is old and there are many parts that can be causing problems, but I think this Dynex Wireless-N USB (DX-NUSB) adapter is ::insert impolite words here::.

I shall still try it out on Q's computer to see if it works any better on his computer than it does on mine, or not.

We ended up returning the LinkSys router yesterday, and we got a NetGear WNR2000 instead. The new router has been working fine. I was hoping that the new router in conjunction with the new wireless adapter (both wireless-N), would improve my internet connection speed somewhat, as my internet speed over wireless is always much slower than Q's. No such luck. It ended up being even slower, during those periods of time while it was working. (Why, life, why???) This, in spite of the network speed being shown as much higher, and the signal as "Excellent".

Miss Fortune has been laughing mockingly at me all day too, every step of the way. ::tortured sigh::