The place to go for shoes in central MN - The Boot Shack

DH needed new shoes for work and we had to be in St Cloud anyway the other day, so we stopped in one of the shoe stores in the mall on Division Street (Schuler's Shoes). They didn't have any boots that would work for DH, but they recommended we try The Boot Shack. So over to The Boot Shack we went.
This is a very small place, but it's crammed to the gills with boots - mostly cowboy boots, but they do have an awesome selection of work boots too. That's not the most impressive thing about this place, though. Not only do they measure your foot when you're sitting down, they also measure your foot when you're standing up and putting your weight on it. Why do they do this? Because for some people, the length of their foot changes when they put weight on it, and so does the height of their arch. They're very good at explaining why they measure your foot the way they do, and how shoes should support your feet, etc. The upshot of all this is that DH has been wearing the wrong size/width shoe for years, which is why his feet, knees, and back hurt when he's working, and why his shoes don't last very long (he can wear out 2 pairs of New Balance tennies in 6 months and those things are expensive). He ended up trying on about 4 pairs of boots in 4 different sizes to find the ones that felt the best - putting both boots on, walking around in them, taking them off, trying the next pair, till he found the pair that felt the best. DH spent over an hour getting his feet measured and trying on boots to find the right ones (we've never spent that much time finding shoes for him before, not even at the shoe store the VA sends him to for his shoes because he has type 2 diabetes and is entitled to 2 pairs a year). His boots ended up costing us $180, but if they last and his feet don't hurt at the end of a 12-hour day spent on concrete floors, they will be well-worth the money we spent on them. We also got him a pair of New Balance sneakers in the correct size, so hopefully, those will last longer than his last pair did.
I just called The Boot Shack today to see if they have women's sneakers and they do, all the way up to a size 13, in widths from AAA to 4E (they carry men's boots/sneakers in sizes up to 18, in the same widths, and they're even having a pair custom-made for a man who needs a size 19, now that's service). So we'll be going back in the next couple of weeks - I want to get my feet measured to see what size I really wear and see if I can find a pair or two of shoes that will keep my feet/knees from hurting when I walk, and maybe, just maybe, stop the supination of my feet (my right foot especially tends to roll to the outside and wears the heel off on all my shoes). I've never been to a shoe store that measures feet as well as this one does, or spends as much time finding shoes that fit your feet and will work for what you need them to work for.
The service at The Boot Shack is outstanding - if you're in Central Minnesota, I highly recommend them:
The Boot Shack
2221 Roosevelt Rd
St Cloud MN
And, no I'm not getting anything from them for this post, I just think they're a great place to go for shoes/boots (I saw other people being waited on while we were there and they got the same amount of attention that we did, it was totes awesome!).

Walking a tight rope (and falling off the rope) / 186.8

For me, a fat woman trying to become a normal, mentally balanced woman and be at a healthy weight, my life is like walking a tight rope, and I keep falling off the damned rope.

My last post on Saturday was about enjoying food. Well guess what? Stupid, stupid, stupid idea! I went crazy, trying new recipes, all Weight Watchers or from weight loss blogs. There are many wonderful recipes out there that are healthy. The trick, though, is to eat just one portion. When the food is delicious and I really enjoy it, I struggle with the portion size.

I made Weight Watcher Chicken Tortilla Soup from the new Weight Watchers cookbook (from Costco). I've had the book for months, since the PointsPlus program came out. I hadn't even cracked it open. The soup is wonderful, but a serving is 1 1/4 cups with 1/5 of an avocado. Not three cups with a whole avocado!

I tried several other recipes since Saturday. I've been a cooking machine. I've also been an eating machine.

Sometimes, I'm my own worst enemy. I get what I think are brilliant ideas that lead to my downfall. It's very frustrating.

Wednesday's weigh-in at my at-work Weight Watchers meeting was 186.8. Tell me, who belongs to TWO Weight Watcher groups and actually GAINS weight?! Oh, right, that would be ME.

Good grief, what is wrong with me?

Okay, so enough with the self-pity? What's next on my agenda? How am I going to turn this around, and quickly?

1. Back to exercising. That's right, in the last four days during my cooking/eating frenzy, I decided I was too tired/lazy/bored/busy to get my butt to the gym. What the hell was that about? As soon as I hit the "publish post" button on this post, I'm out the door and to the gym.

There's a little kink in my plan. I'm officially on vacation starting today and through next week. I'm leaving for Fairbanks tomorrow to visit my sister. My 72-year old sister, the gym rat. The one that goes to the gym five days a week, every week.

Sadly, she's recovering from pneumonia and hasn't been to the gym for seven days. It's unlikely she'll be returning soon since she was really sick. I have to figure out how to get in exercise while I'm visiting. She has a treadmill at home (that she never uses), so as much as I hate the treadmill, I might have to get on the thing. If the weather is good, I could walk outside, but she lives out in the middle of no where (thirty miles from Fairbanks), and walking by myself is a tiny bit scary. I'll just have to figure this out.

2. Food - gosh, what can I say here that hasn't been said a thousand times on this blog about me and food? There's just no way around it, I have to really limit what and how much I eat. This isn't a free-for-all. I can't eat just because I "think" I'm hungry. I can't eat how much I really want to eat. I know what a portion size looks like, I know how to eat healthy. I know what to order when eating out. None of this is new to me.

3. Mindset - Exercise and food are of course the key to losing weight, but more important is having your head in the game. If I don't have that, nothing else matters. I have to be 100% in the game. Period. Doing this halfway, not giving it my all just doesn't work.

My one saving grace here is my sister is a health nut. She's been one for decades, before it was really popular. She's been making her own homemade, whole wheat bread for over twenty years. She eats like a bird and oddly, is never hungry (I sometimes wonder if we're even related!).

The only bad junk in her house is for all the grandkids, yes, she has cookies and candy for the grandkids. She never touches the stuff, but it's there for the kids. This is going to require major willpower. 

I won't be posting until I get back, next week on Thursday. Of course, lately, that's sort of normal posting for me. Once or twice a week. I really need to pick that up a bit. :)

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Awesome things

I leave you with a few "awesome" things in my life. The guy that wrote 1,000 Awesome Things was on the Today show a couple days ago. It got me to thinking that even though as much as I complain about my life, there are lots of awesome things that happen to me every day. I wrote out some of the earlier this week, intending to post them, but I never got around to it. Speaking of the word "awesome", it sort of annoys me because it's so overused. Regardless, these things were pretty awesome to me.

Diana's short list of awesome things this week:

Written on Tuesday, May 2:

1. Talking to my sister in Fairbanks on my way to work today. Discussing how I'll be in Fairbanks this Friday and staying for a week, and how we can't wait to see each other. I just LOVE her!

2. Arriving at work and a group of my favorite people from another team are in the lunchroom. We chat for about ten minutes. One guy that's hysterically funny and has always had a beard says "well, if I shave all this off I'll look like a hairless cat". Cracked me up because I could totally picture him as a giant, hairless cat (he's 6' 4").

3. Last night, reading this on my niece's Facebook page, posted by a male friend of hers: Nothing like killing a terrorist leader to get people to shut the hell up about the royal wedding. So true!

4. At first, I was a little disturbed by all the celebration over bin Laden's death. Of course I'm glad that he's no longer on this planet, but the dancing in the streets over the death of another human being didn't feel right to me. Then I read how the United States handled bin Laden's burial, and I smiled to myself. Even though bin laden was a dreadful, evil person, the United States handled his remains with dignity. It made me proud to be a citizen of the United States.

From the Chicago Beacon-News article:

Bin Laden’s body was taken to an aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, and his burial quickly was done in accordance with Islamic custom. His corpse was washed, then wrapped in a white sheet and placed in a weighted bag, according to news reports. As a U.S. military chaplain read religious rites, which were translated into Arabic, the body was placed on a board, tipped up and dropped into the North Arabian Sea.

5. Last Friday, taking my favorite kitty, Mickey, to the vet because he was doing a weird drooling thing and acting odd. He's never drooled and he acted like he didn't feel good. This is the same cat that four years ago had a 106 degree fever in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms ever. I made my husband drive through foot deep snow on the I5 freeway so we could take Mickey to the emergency vet, where after fluids and a $1,200 vet bill, he was fine.

At the vet visit Friday, she told me all the things that could be wrong with Mickey: kidney failure, some weird kitty virus that can cause death (drooling is a sign), and numerous other things I can't even pronounce. All of them with devastating consequences. He's only six years old. He's my baby. After taking his blood, and waiting 24 hours for the results (and I was just sure he was dying), I get the phone call. All results were perfect. He's perfectly healthy, perhaps just a cold. That could cause the drooling.

6. Waking up this morning with my kitty, Mickey, sitting on my chest and staring at me, purring (and not drooling anymore!).

7. Getting this comment from Christine on my post about Marianne Williamson's stupid weight loss book. This made me laugh out loud:

Christine said:
I bought the book and went with a friend to see her speak. She's a self-indulgent, pompous loon who talks down to people. What she says makes no sense and I agree with your assessment of her book. Don't waste your time reading it. 

8. Walking in the sunshine at noon with a work friend. Everything is emerald green from all the rain the past several months (the rain which I've cursed every day for at least six months). All the trees are budding out and our walk down the Des Moines Creek Trail near work was gorgeous. We saw a bald eagle soaring above us with six tiny birds chasing it and acting like they were trying to attack it. The eagle could have cared less, they were like little pesky mosquitoes to him. The eagle's wing span was a least eight feet across. Beautiful.

9. Truly awesome thing for today, May 5:  waking up and knowing I was off work for eleven days. Woohoo!

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there (NOT)

Yeah, we're rethinking our business with State Farm Insurance. I've been with them for almost 10 years now, and DH has been with them even longer. We insure 2 cars, a truck, a minivan, and our house with them, to the tune of almost $3,000 a year. I had one claim with my mobile home, about 8 years ago, and one claim with one of my minivans about 7 years ago (and they fucked me over with that one). DH and I have had several auto glass claims with them (he drives to work on a state highway and in the spring/summer/fall ends up following tractors/combines that kick up mud/rocks, you get cracked windshields). We've had one claim with them on the house insurance when wind blew away one of those metal pole/tarp sheds and a power surge that same weekend took out DH's computer. No problems with those claims (other than the one with my minivan 7 years ago).
This time, DH was driving to work early in the morning on the state highway and a semi crossed the centerline. DH saw him swerve and he swerved to keep from getting hit. Well, the semi took off the driver's side mirror on the 2002 Buick LeSabre Limited we just bought (it gets better gas mileage than his truck). Luckily, that's all it did, didn't put him in the ditch, or anything else. Truckdriver probably didn't even know he hit anyone, so of course he didn't stop. It was 4:30 a.m. when this happened, so it was dark, both vehicles were doing at least 55 mph, there were 8 or 9 cars behind the semi, and another semi behind them. DH couldn't see what the trucking company was that owned the semi was because of the darkness and oncoming headlights from the cars.
When we report this to the insurance company, what's their first question? Why didn't you follow the semi so you could at least get the name of the trucking company and a license plate number? DH was supposed to turn around after being hit by a semi (that would shake me up, let me tell you), catch up to that line of traffic, pass a semi, a line of 8 or 9 cars, get a license plate number, and then pass the semi so he could see what the trucking company was that owned the semi? And how many laws would he have had to break in order to do this? Well, let's see now. He'd have had to have driven over the speed limit to catch them all, he'd have had to broken the speed limit to pass everyone so he could get up to the semi that hit him, and then he would have had to be able to write down a license plate number and trucking company name while driving, so that's distracted driving, at the least. Perfectly reasonable request on the part of the insurance company, don't you think? Yeah, right. To top it all off, if he had done all that, he'd have been late to work, which he's only been once in the 4 years he's worked there (and that was when he put the truck in the ditch when he hit a patch of ice, he was late, but still made it to work when he got pulled out of the ditch).
So we took the car in to get an estimate to have it fixed. Have to have the mirror replaced, the chrome weather strip by the window has to be replaced, and both doors on the driver's side have to be painted where the mirror bounced off them and scratched the paint. Body shop gave us an estimate of $1,686 and some odd cents. But because it was a hit and run and our insurance can't collect off the semi's insurance, they have to send an adjuster out to look at the car and give us his estimate (and now comes the part where State Farm screws over the insured customer). The mirror is adjustable from the inside (aren't they all nowadays) and it's heated. They don't make after-market mirrors for this car. So the new one costs $680. The adjuster says he found a used one for $135. So he's cut $545 off the body shop's estimate. But he added in $50 for replacing the driver's side window that's chipped (I can't see the chip, but the adjuster says it's there), replace that with a used window. I asked him if they were going to give me a guarantee on the used mirror that's as good as the guarantee I'd get on the new mirror. He said "What do you mean?" I said "A new mirror has a life-time guarantee, if anything goes wrong with it, they replace it at no cost to us. When you buy used parts, you don't know how long they're going to last. If this used mirror quits working in 6 months, are you going to replace it at no cost to us? Since you're the ones refusing to pay for a new mirror? Are you going to give us, in writing, a life-time guarantee on this used mirror?" He handed me the estimate and left without giving me an answer.
So those commercials that say "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there", I'm sorry, if I had neighbors like State Farm, I'd be moving. And when DH gets home from work and finds out what the adjuster had to say and what State Farm is willing to pay, I'm betting that I'll be online looking for another insurance company and State Farm will be losing our business. Hope they're happy that saving $545 may cost them $3,000 worth of business every year. Not to mention the bad publicity they're going to get from me blogging about their less-than-stellar attitude (chase down the semi that hit you, indeed).