What to do when you are trying to stick to a budget and the urge for some "retail therapy" strikes? Well, Kate and I decided to go to Home Depot and buy a couple of fancy house keys.
We threw ourselves into the project and even attempted to buy Jer a Star Wars key, which I believe would have provided him with hours of amusement as well as an endless source of trivial conversation as well, but the blank didn't fit our door key type so he was out of luck. I ended up buying three keys. Katie chose a leopard print, I picked a tie-dyed one and since I happened to have Mary Ann's house key with me*, we bought her a fancy brown key with hot pink polka dots. When Mr. Home Depot guy was finished duplicating, he gave me back both of the dull, original keys and I stuck them in my pocket. The entire purchase was well under ten dollars, a success by any budgeter's standards.
(*Clarification: I don't usually run around with other people's keys, but Mary Ann has been up north on an extended visit and I have been on cat duty.)
Back at home, I grabbed the key out of my pocket, put it on a huge keyring and hung it by our front door so that when I go for walks, I can just grab it and go - and that's exactly what I did after supper when Katie and Jerry left to do some errands.
After my evening stroll I saw Mary Ann was finally back, so I stopped in to hear about her trip and presented her with her new key - which is adorable in every way and was suitably admired by its new owner. It was only after I'd hiked back down to our place and tried to get in that I realized the key that I had put on my big-honking keyring wasn't to my front door, but was the original key to Mary Ann's door.
So there I was, locked out of my house. Kate's car was parked in the driveway and had the garage door opener in it, but it was locked too. I was out of luck. I sat out on the deck for a while. It was drizzling out and mosquitoes were buzzing but, on the whole, it wasn't a bad place to be. Still, I had hoped to use this free time to catch up on some reading and my books were inside. I decided to break in.
I walked around the lower level to see if any windows were unlocked. BINGO! One was and (BONUS!) it didn't even have a screen on it. I pushed and shoved and tried, without success, to open it. Now I'm the first to admit that my mechanical aptitude is nil, but burglars make it look so easy. It's not though - at least not for me. (I have no doubt that Jerry could have opened that window in under sixty seconds. This knowledge only made me feel more incompetent.)
Having totally and completely failed at Plan A, I defaulted to Plan B - go get my spare key from Mary Ann. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner! Soon I was letting myself in, just in time to see Jer and Kate turning into our driveway.
That evening when I was getting ready for bed I found Kate's old front door key in my pocket.
A while back I broke my foot and when it healed none of my shoes were comfortable. Then, during my waitress phase, I happened upon Crocs and have been wearing them pain-free ever since. They're great except for one small thing - they're not stylish, a fact which my daughters mention, well, every time they see me. I needed something a little dressier for occasions when Crocs with jeans wouldn't do.
Enter the NAOT shoes I bought on sale during a visit to Salt Lake City in 2005. Now frugality (and college tuition) prohibits me from going wild buying shoes like my own dear mother did. She had an entire closet devoted to shoes, aptly referred to as (drum roll, please) "the shoe closet." That was an enchanted place where dreams were born! Sadly, all that followed me into adulthood from it were the memories.
With a nod to Mom's memory and a great big gulp, I bought the mint green shoes for $50.00, and, that like I said, was the sale price. They were unbelievably comfortable though - maybe you really DO get what you pay for - and I wore them everywhere, including, as it turns out, to tile and grout the kitchen floor of our house in Mantua.
What was I thinking? The shoes did not weather that event well. Both the toes got scuffed up pretty badly and their upscale look immediately vanished. I loved the feel of these shoes so much though that I toyed with the idea of replacing them and looked them up online. That's when I realized what a deal my $50.00 shoes were.
These shoes are made in Israel and the current sale price for my style is $130.00. Faced with my internal spending constraints, I knew that was never gonna happen. I looked on eBay but didn't find any within my shoe budget there either. Still, I kept the shoes. They were so comfortable. Sometimes I wore them around the house when I didn't have anywhere to go. Occasionally I even wore them in public, although even I knew that they looked horrible. But they were so comfortable!
Did I mention that these shoes were mint green? Nobody, I mean NOBODY makes mint green shoe polish. I called the company and asked if I could buy a little dye in this color to repair the leather and they said no. That didn't seem very friendly to me.
Next I bought some Rit Dye and tried that. What did I have to lose? The results were disastrous. The shoes actually looked worse now that they had Koolaid colored toes. Still, I kept them. I'm not proud. Comfortable shoes are difficult to find and I liked having one pair that weren't plastic.
Yesterday while staining our deck Carolina Mud Brown, I got bored. As fortune would have it, I was wearing "the shoes" when inspiration struck. I started staining them with the deck stain. I figured, how could they look worse? It was so exciting to watch them go from icky to cute again! When I was finished staining them, I took a Sharpy marker and colored an accent band black. Upcycling at its finest!
As it turns out, I can wear the brown shoes places mint green never would have gone. Only you and I will know the secret. You won't tell, will you?
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