Bill Roper's Journal

I have been buying the Orthofeet shoes for a while now. The problem is that after about three months of daily wear, my feet start hurting. And shortly after that, my knees start hurting. Eventually, I realize that the shoes have worn out and switch to a new pair.

But the Orthofeet people will sell you a new set of insoles and arch supports for half the price of a new pair of shoes. Maybe that would be a way to stretch out the life of a pair of shoes at a lower cost.

Narrator's voice: It isn't.

I swapped out the insoles and arch supports in my most recent pair of shoes a short while back. This improved things for a short period of time. But I have developed some persistent pain in my right heel (which I can alleviate by taking the pressure off a particular spot in the heel) and other things in the shoes are starting to feel a bit caved in.

Today, though, was the acid test. As we continue to try to figure out what to do about the shower in our bathroom, I stopped at Floor & Decor after Gretchen and I had lunch and ran in to see if they had any likely looking tile. They had a lot of interesting things, but none of them were going to work in the current bathroom design.

Fifteen minutes of walking around on that hard concrete floor completely wrecked up my knees. My feet were none too happy either.

Later this afternoon, I pulled out a new pair of shoes, put them on, and my feet now feel much better.

Lesson learned.

In the meantime, tile quest continues. I checked in the garage and there is virtually none of any of the large format tiles left from our previous bathroom work, so whatever we do is going to have to work with the tile that is present or find a way to replace it, because there isn't any more of what's there.

But I have ideas. And I have ordered more tile samples, one of which I think may work really well for solving this problem, if it will just coordinate with the existing tiles.

I suppose we'll see when it gets here.