Monday, December 31, 2012

I love Payless

Recently, I've been falling in love with Payless shoes. It had been a long time since I had shopped there because they usually never had anything I liked. However, I've recently fallen in love with Payless.

You see, I have big, muscular calves which I hate because I've never been able to wear those cute knee high boots. For years and years, I've envied women with skinny calves that can wear those boots which they wear over their jeans, with skirts, or with tights. I was so jealous. Having big calves meant that I would have to actually special order the boots and pay hundreds of dollars for them. Being the cheapskate that I am, I would never spend that much money on shoes. This led to years of envying all the skinny calved women and their knee-high boots.

A few years ago, I bought knee high boots that I was able to tightly zip over my calves. The problem was, I was limited to only wearing them over tights because the jeans were too thick to zip over. This made the boots pretty useless. Plus they were too high and hurt my feet when I wore them. So it was back to square one with my search for affordable, wide calf boots.

A few weeks ago, out of boredom, I decided to check out the Payless website and lo and behold, they happen to have quite an impressive stock of wide calf shoes. I found one online that I thought I would like and I decided to stop by one of their stores instead of ordering online because I wanted to make sure that they actually fit. Once I got to the store, I was pleasantly surprised. They had more styles of wide-calf shoes than I had expected!

They had so many styles, I couldn't even decide on which ones to get. Ultimately, I ended up buying two pairs of riding boots (costing me less than $100 for both pairs), which I wear all the time because they are super cute and extremely comfortable. Afterwards, I went on the Payless website again to see what else they had. I now wanted other different colors and styles to add to my collection as well. Unfortunately, a lot the their stock of wide calf boots were sold out. Since this is basically the end of winter shoe season, they were already stocking for spring. Too bad I didn't know about them sooner.

So I'm definitely looking forward to what Payless will have in stock for us wide calved women next season an will be eagerly waiting. Thank you Payless for finally thinking about us. We like affordable boots too!

Saturday, December 8, 2012

I Hate Glitter!

So it's that time of year again. The holidays! One thing I look forward to about the holidays is decorating the Christmas tree. Although I'm an atheist, I still celebrate Christmas. To me, the holiday is not so much religious, but instead a secular tradition. Anyway, back to the tree. Since I'm sort of crafty, I like to find creative ways to decorate my Christmas tree and make it look pretty. I'm very picky about ornaments that I use. One thing that bugs me the most about looking for Christmas decorations is the damn glitter.

I mean, c'mon now! Why the hell do they have to put glitter on all the ornaments? Are we in elementary school or something? I hate it when I find a cute ornament and it's riddled with glitter. Why am I so against glitter? It's messy, it gets all over the place, and it sticks to you all day long. For some reason, glitter bugs me more than anything. For me, glitter lost its appeal a long time ago. 

It really bugs me that these manufacturers insist on putting glitter on everything. OK. Sometimes the glitter does make some of the ornaments look cute but isn't there something else they can use? Like metallic? I guess glitter is just a lot cheaper. Am I the only one who feels this way about glitter or what? Since about 99 percent of Christmas decorations have glitter on them, it makes it very difficult for me to find decent ornaments. I like to buy just a few ornament every year and then add on to my collection as time goes on. This year, all I bought were some high end Christmas lights and two small boxes of ornaments. Last year, I made a bunch of bows from ribbons I bought at Michael's and the Dollar Store. I was also able to get a bunch of artificial poinsettia from Walmart for 25 cents each post holiday season. My tree topper is also a homemade ribbon. Next year, I'm hoping to buy a tree topper such as an angel or a star or a tree skirt. 

Since the theme colors for my tree are blue, white and silver, looking for cute decorations is extra difficult (I'm not too fond of red and gold). But I love my tree this year. It looks so beautiful. Did I tell you my Christmas tree is an artificial white one? Last year I had blue Christmas lights with green wires but didn't like the way it looked with the white tree. So this year, I bought white Christmas lights with white wires. I like this look better. I found an blue-themed angel on Amazon that looked cute so I'm looking to maybe buy it next year. It's quite expensive so it will have to wait. 

Since I'm on a budget, I only decorate about half my tree. haha. I don't decorate the side that's against the wall. What's the point? No one sees it anyway. So my tree looks like it has more ornaments than it actually does. Most of my ornaments are from Michael's. They have high quality ornaments and when you go at the right time, you can get them at 50 percent off. I also have some from Dollar Tree. Surprisingly, some of their ornaments look really high quality. Never ever buy your ornaments at Walmart. I bought some from them last year but ended up returning them because they looked so crappy and poorly made. I can get better ornaments at Michael's for the same price (when they're on sale)!