My Life, As Told Between (Baby Cakes') Naps

I stumbled across these beautifully designed, offbeat, funny (and occasionally mean) cards on another site.

These are a couple of my favorites:

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about shoes. Mostly because I haven’t bought anything interesting in ages. Most of my shoe purchases in the last year or so have been very practical. Maybe it’s the realization that I have several pairs of extremely adorable shoes in my closet which never see the light of day because they are so excruciatingly painful to wear. Although I occasionally feel brave and slip them on my feet, I usually realize as soon as I get to my car that my feet are already in pain and have to hobble back to the house and change shoes.

However, I’ve been looking for wedding shoes recently and am finding that my burgeoning practicality is tempered by my desire to look good in my wedding pictures. Since I am very short and T is very tall, this requires some high heels.

As some of you may remember, I’m considering these red ones. They’re comfortable enough, at least in short bursts, and are absolutely adorable. (Squeeeee. I LOVE these.) But the heels won’t stand up well in the grass (pun intended!) and they’re not quite tall enough.

I also bought these (in silver) because they’re higher than the red ones (to better offset the huge height difference between T and I), have a thicker heal (might not sink into the grass as much), and have a thick platform in front (so hopefully I won’t feel all 4″ of the heel). My sister hates them and calls them my hooker heels.

Since I’m worried about marching around our grass laden venue, I’ve also been hunting for wedges. Specifically, tall, comfortable, cute, inexpensive wedges with a platform to offset the height. I recently bought these, which, although not nearly as cute as my red shoes, fit a lot of my criteria and are surprisingly comfortable (or seemed to be for the minute I wore them anyways).

And then, for no particular reason, I bought these ivory heels. I don’t love them as much as my red shoes and they don’t have any of the good points of the silver ones or the wedges, so I don’t really know why I bought them (especially since they weren’t even on sale, unlike the other three). They are pretty cute though, aren’t they?

So yes, until I decide which ones, if any, to return, I have four entirely different shoes for a five hour wedding. (Hmm. . . do you think I should also buy some flip-flops? Because, regardless of what shoes I decide on, I’m sure my feet will start protesting at some point.)

If you haven’t read or heard Obama’s speech on race yet, you should check it out. It’s very good.

My friend V and I stayed at the Omni the night before the race so we could meet our running group the next morning and take the subway to the starting line together. We woke up at 5:30, met our group at 6:15 and arrived at the starting line at 7:15, an hour before our race was due to start.

This year’s race got off to a much better start than last year. Last year, we waited in the freezing cold for almost two hours, so this year, I came prepared. Like many other runners, I had on disposable layers. I felt bad contributing to the piles of clothes strewn about the starting line (which I hope gets donated), especially since we weren’t waiting nearly as long this year and it wasn’t nearly as cold as it was last year. (Seriously, it was so cold last year, I feared losing appendages to frostbite. Then, when the race actually started, it suddenly became blisteringly hot.) This year, it was fairly mild to warm for most of the race.

I was oddly tired right from the beginning, but managed to stay with my group, which on track for a 4:30 finish time, for 21 miles. Sadly, at mile 21, I hit a wall and had to slow down considerably. T met me at mile 22 though and said I was looking better than I did last year, when I started out way too fast and hit a wall at mile 15. The rest of the race was a painful blur, but I got myself through it with the promise that I would take a break from marathons after this one. Finished in 04:55:58 and felt miraculously better as soon as my foot crossed the finish line. Quickly devored a banana and some apple slices and was feeling fairly human by the time I made it back to the hotel, where T greeted me with some lovely flowers.

Plus, thanks to a prescient phone call from T, I didn’t get lost this year finding my way back to the hotel! Hurrah! (The last two years, I’ve desperately wandered around downtown LA, lost and confused, for half an hour after the race. This year, I was tempted to make the same wrong turn I’ve taken the last two times – I am nothing if not a creature of habit – but T wisely thought to call and navigate me back to the Omni.)

Done. 04:55:58. About 6 minutes slower than my best time (my first marathon two years ago), but almost 30 minutes faster than my time last year. Think I’m going to take a break from distance running for awhile. This last one really wore me out.