More SHOES!

Just so you know, I'm going to be revisiting shoes a lot.

As I've mentioned before, twice before even, I have special snowflake feet.

The "I love nice things!" part of me revels in this because I get to buy pretty (and sadly, pretty expensive) shoes for completely and utterly justifiable reasons. But as you can tell from my parenthetical, I also have some guilt over this. There's that bit of me that remembers my early professional crap-now-I-have-to-pay-those-student-loan years and my post-divorce-raising-a-toddler-while-trying-to-buy-a-house years, as well as the fact that I was raised by during-and-post-depression era parents who tried to instill in me the need to save and spend carefully (note I said they tried, but that's another story). And I'm spending up to $200 on a pair of shoes?

That said, I also know I got my arches from Dad, who had to actually spend more money than he wanted on shoes, especially when he got older.

And of course, being an attorney, I feel the need to justify frickin' everything. I spend 40 - 70 hours a week doing that, and it's hard to just put the brakes on it.

After that incredible tangent, let's re-route back to the main road and the point of this post - Incredibly comfortable work shoes.

I have to tell you about Cole Haan. Because these are heels I can wear, not just tromping around downtown, but tromping around massive airports. I used to go to Minneapolis (a pretty danged big airport) on at least a monthly, if not weekly, basis. And obviously when I went for work, I had to be dressed up, which usually dictated heels. And it's tough to jam an extra pair of comfy walking shoes into a briefcase.




Yeah, particularly the bottom pair is well-loved. Air Talia open-toed by Cole Haan. Cold Haan, I'm a true 11 (while they are one of the few place to carry 10.5, 10.5s are a shade too small). The pair on the bottom has been to every square inch of the Minneapolis airport with me on multiple occasions (not to mention a ton of other airports on more discrete occasions). Nike Air Technology! I'm serious, a lot of Cole Haan's heels have some kind of Nike magic worked into their DNA. So get one of the lower wedge heels with that killer action in it, and the heels don't feel like heels at all.

The upper pair of wedges are dressier (the stacked heels on the other drops them just slightly down the "dressy" scale), but have just a slight rub against my bunions (bugger), so they don't go airport-tromping with me as often. Still, they are 99 times more comfortable than the vast majority of shoes out there. I cannot remember the name of these shoes, but they also see a lot of action, particularly when it's raining and I don't want my toesies soaking.

While neither of these specific shoes seems to be available right now, there are a ton of other amazing wedge options on the Cole Haan website.

Cole Haan also has some pretty amazing flats. Flats can work very well with skirts (iffy with pant suits), but are also awesome on casual Friday's when you have a pair of jeans or during the week if you have a nice pair of ankle pants with a jacket.




I'll admit, the middle pair, I only wear on weekends and not to work. But I liked them so much, I'm putting them in the pic anyway. The red ones on the left, I've worn as my "color pop" with ankle pants, ankle jeans, regular jeans, and all through the week. They're slightly on the casual-and-breezy side, so I won't pair them with more tailored outfits, but they looked great for breezier work days, like when I'm doing an unstructured jacket with skinny pants look, or when I went on a more casual day trip to Kansas City to get my continuing legal education credits, with ankle jeans and a blue-and-white summery tunic.

The pair on the right work very well with more tailored looks, given their overall subtlety and more tailored look. When I was at the height of torn-meniscus pain, these things (and their fraternal-twin neutral color pair I bought at the same time) did the job extremely well with my tailored dresses and my skirt suits. I made that cane look classy, dang it! Or so I tell myself.

These, too, no longer appear to be available, but there are a ton of other great ballet flats here.

And definitely watch Cole Haan's sales. That's how I picked up the sparkly weekend shoes for only $35.

Finally, Cole Haan has an outlet site where some of the shoes are a little cheaper. Never hurts to give that a look, too.

At the end of the day, though, if you have to pay full price for a good pair of Cole Haan's, you won't regret it. Especially if you have special snowflake feet.

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