Living Small

Bleeding for Fashion

About halfway through July, my summer shoes began to fall apart.  They were cute, comfortable slides, but the part that goes over the top of my foot was disintegrating: the stitching had come undone and the insides had become visible from the outside.  The shoes were black, but the insides were more of a tan flesh color, so it looked like I had band-aids hanging out from under them.  Nonetheless, I wore them for the rest of the summer, telling myself that when the weather got too cold, I would throw them away.

Over the weekend, however, I decided that I really needed new shoes, so David and I went to DSW, where signs in the windows proclaimed that clearance shoes had just been marked down again.  David was excited -- as he said, he can always look at new shoes -- but I was more apprehensive -- it had been two years since I had even been shoe shopping, and I was afraid that I wouldn't know what to look for.  After scouring the whole place I did find a pair of flat Mary Janes with a delicate strap and a rounded toe that I liked a lot, and when I moved on to the clearance section I found an adorable pair of strappy sandals with a wedge heel marked down to $10, so I got them both. 

Yesterday, I debuted the sandals.  They seemed to fit well in the store, but by the time I had walked to work in them, I already had blisters on the backs of my heels from the heel strap.  I'm never sure if it is better to wear the strap tighter, so that it doesn't rub, or looser, so that it doesn't pinch.  In any case, when I got to work I was relieved to find that I had two band-aids in my purse, so I put them on and tried to walk around the office as little as possible.  But then I still had to walk home and, when I got there, the band-aids had come off, and my heels were covered in blood.  What won't we do for fashion?  Next time -- moleskin!

Buying In Bulk

To follow up <a href="http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~eklanche/archives/2007/02/costco_shopping_1.html">last weekend's trip to Costco</a>, David and I went on another bulk-shopping expedition yesterday, this time to <a href="http://www.gfs.com">Gordon Food Service</a>. GFS is a major supplier of food to restaurants in the Midwest, and I learned last week that they have <a href="http://www.gfs.com/gfs_marketplace.html">"Marketplace"</a> stores open to the public. Yes, we too can buy restaurant-sized and retaurant-quality food products.

Our trip to GFS was, well, quite a trip. To begin with, they had the largest shopping carts I had ever seen. Even bigger than Costco shopping carts. And they had some very large products. I bought a 6-lb can of tomato sauce and a few 5-lb bags of frozen vegetables. They had David's favorite <a href="http://www.franksredhot.com/">hot sauce</a> in gallon-sized containers. It was fun to find large quantities of products we like at low prices, but shopping at GFS was also a little bit disturbing. It was kind of like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz or, in this case, on the entire food service industry. It was, in fact, pretty scary to see what is actually in the so-called "foods" that restaurants serve to us. For example, David read the ingredients on a 5-lb tub of pesto and we were shocked to learn that the first three were soy oil, water, and salt. When we make it at home, the ingredients are basil, parmesan cheese, olive oil, pine nuts, and salt. When I marveled over a 5-lb tub of yogurt, David asked if it really was yogurt. I checked the ingredients and found that, even though it was labeled "plain" yogurt, it had sugar in it! How wrong is that?

Nonetheless, we still left with a pretty full shopping cart, and now we have a full freezer. In the future, though, I don't think GFS will become a regular stop on our shopping schedule. The only things that really seemed worth getting there were bagged salad mix and baby spinach. The frozen vegetables at GFS come in larger quantities than at other stores, but the price per pound isn't any less than at <a href="http://www.traderjoes.com/">Trader Joe's</a>. Most of the products there were just not things we eat, which makes sense: because GFS caters to the food industry, they sell things the food industry needs, and the food industry thrives on Americans' taste for really unhealthy stuff. For example, you can buy a 4.5-lb jar or <a href="http://www.hersheys.com/reeses/">Reese's</a> pourable peanut butter (main ingredient = sugar), but they don't sell natural peanut butter. However, if David and I ever open a small restaurant, we know where to go for fake cheese sauce, pourable peanut butter, and to-go containers in every size imaginable!