Shoelaces for Josie

Because of the significant increase in the number of miles I’m covering, I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade the running shoes. They’ve put in five years of good service, and it’s time to retire them to the stinky shoe bin. So I was doing some research online about how to choose the correct running shoe as I start The.Perfect.Shoe hunt. *I’ve decided The.Perfect.Shoe is necessary for three reasons: 1) My legs are pissed off at me for the severe beatings I gave them for six years. They are now demanding I take care of them. The nerve. 2) Every day I get older, I realize I’m not younger. It would be so cool to still have knees at 60. 3) I am a woman.*

And my research online said it’s important to know if you have flat feet, normal feet or high-arched feet. The best way to tell? Yep, a wet foot test. You take your wet foot, slap it on a piece of paper and then look at the imprint. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It took me 10 minutes to find a piece of paper that wasn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog or my eight bank statements I haven’t opened. Actually I looked for five minutes and got frustrated. Then, with my brilliant brain, thought that substituting a shirt would be the same difference as a piece of paper. Wrong. The imprint looked like I had hobbit feet. I wasn’t willing to accept that, so I looked another five minutes before I finally found yellow tablet paper.

So I brought my yellow paper down the hall to the bathroom, and as I leaned over to set my pieces of paper on the floor, my just-washed hair dripped all over them. I flipped my head back to keep my precious pieces of paper as dry as possible, lost my balance, tripped over my mud boots and nearly fell to me bum.

The bottom of the shower was still wet, but since I’d never taken a wet foot test before, I wasn’t sure just how wet my foot needed to be. I had one shot; I didn’t have any more paper. So I thought I’d best make sure my foot was wet all over. Just in case that’s what it needed to be. I flipped the shower on to a trickle, poised on one leg and stuck my right foot into the stream before promptly losing my balance. Balance that I regained by lunging for the shower faucet that I happened to be hanging onto, effectively turning the trickle of water into a wooshing torrent that drenched my whole leg.

With a foot that most certainly was adequately moisturized, I hopped and dripped my way across the bathroom floor to the paper and plopped it down square. I lifted my foot, hopped back to the shower and poked my left foot in for the same treatment. After picking it up from the second sheet of yellow paper, I peered sharply down. I shifted around. I squatted next to my imprints and finally picked them up and held the papers up to the light.

For crap’s sake. You couldn’t tell where the wet imprint stopped and the dry part began! It kind of – well – maybe…there? Like, a little, just at that part, possibly down around here…