Oh fabulosas, I have some very important information to impart to you. This information will hopefully save you from making the same mistake I made a month or so ago. Put on your serious faces and let's talk about home finances.

I decided that in an effort to curb my spending I would give up pedicures and start doing them myself. How hard could it be, right? I had bought an Ped Egg after staring at it for 15 minutes in line at Bed, Bath and Beyond and had good results with it. The calluses just came right off! It was so easy! so efficient! I was starting to think that my idea of home pedis was going to work.

The next time I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond I spied this home spa. It has an electric skin remover thing and I thought, if it's good manually, surely an electric one will be better. That makes so much sense! It would be so easy to just hold my dainty foot out and let the electric magic of the heel scraper go to town on my dainty heels. I also didn't realize that the electric thing was attached to the spa and not removeable. I was hoping I could put a different attachment on it and use it on my face. On second thought, that probably wasn't the brightest idea.

Today was the day I decided to get the spa out of the box and give it a go. It turns out, I had a profound misunderstanding of my pedicure abilities. Not only did the electric magic simply not happen, it was far more trouble than it was worth. After filling up the footbath and carrying it to the living room to lounge in my comfy chair with a book (something that was not exactly easy to do), I turned it on. The wonderful heating thing was more of a tepid buzzing; the electric heel scraper only took off little bits of skin, leaving my heels ragged and in need of manual work. Wasn't the thing I was trying to avoid? I ended up getting the Ped Egg out and using it rather vigorously on my heels; worked much better. So much for the magic of electricity and heel scraping technology. The other problem I had was a distinct lack of patience in filing my toenails into a nicely rounded shape. Did you know that painting your toenails into the shape they should be does not work all that well? Yeah, skin and nail, two very different things.

I chose a weirdly metallic shade of pink that I bought at the dollar store about a year ago as a gag gift for some welcome baskets. It's ok, but not something I would probably buy again. Still, it worked better at the pretend nail shaping than I assume a lighter shade would. After all of these failed experiments, I did eventually get my feet and tootsies into something akin to respectable shape. Who knew pedicures were not the easiest thing to give yourself? And here I was, thinking pedicures were not a necessity but a luxury! What a silly idea.

I may have grossly misunderstood my pedicure ability, but I will never misunderstand my ability to choose the most fabulous shoes.

Today's favorite shoe:

Giuseppe Zanotti

I am a bad, bad shoe blogger. I have been neglecting my beloved fabulosas in favor of writing about other things on my other blog. Oh, it is so wrong! The shoes, how they suffer without me! I shall force myself to touch a pair of Crocs the next time I am at Nordstrom's. But only with my pinky finger and only for half a second. I've been bad but not that bad.

One of my former students was walking through some city and came upon a sight that horrified him: it was an entire store devoted to Crocs. Naturally, he stopped and took a picture for me with his cell phone. I purposely did not save it, for obvious reasons. The question I must ask is, how is it possible there is an entire store devoted to the hideous foam monstrosities? Have we lost our minds? The answer must surely be, yes! we are, as a nation, batshit crazy.

It is often a sign of a diseased mind when a person begins to prefer the lower arts, or lesser artists. If you walk into someone's home and see a copy of a Thomas Kincaid painting, aren't you a little bit sure that there is some simple mindedness going on? Do we really think of the Lawrence Welk types as anything but doddering old fools? If we know someone who regularly sends us "inspirational" and sappy as hell emails, aren't we also sure they are avid Hallmark Channel viewers? Two words, people: Danielle Steele. Two more words: Hee Haw. Save the righteous indignation for lesser mortals; you know I'm right.

It is the same for our support of Crocs and their take over of American feet; we are entering the twilight of our sanity as a nation and starting our rapid descent into the great nursing home of history. There simply cannot be any other explanation for how it is possible that Crocs are not just worn, but popular. We have passed the age of reason, in this country. We have started wearing diapers made of foam because they're just more comfortable and convenient. We have discovered the "joys" of jello colored shoes. We are combative and refusing to do what is best for us, long past caring that we are wearing curlers in our hair in public and not minding it when people see our skid marked undies hanging on the line of ugly that stretches across this country. We are the slovenly crazy lady you see at the store buying bags and bags of cat food, kitty litter, and gin. Quite frankly, we smell.

Je refuse! I refuse to be associated with a country who eats supper at 4:00 p.m. and wears those funky sunglasses you get at the eye doctor's office after your eyes have been dilated. I refuse to live in a county that thinks that foam is something you wear instead of something you use to wash your hands. Je refuse!

And people wonder why other countries think we're tacky!

Today's favorite shoe:

Bettye Muller "Ekland"