Broken Things

Friday, 11 April 1997

My other shoelace broke last night. The first one broke a few weeks ago, and I just tied the broken ends together and ignored it, but the second one's broken in a less convenient spot, so it was either buy new laces or walk around with a loose shoe flopping around on the end of my leg. This would be unremarkable, the buying of new laces, if not for the fact that I don't think I've ever done it before.

Honestly, I can't remember ever having to replace a broken shoelace. I know I must have, probably as a child, when my parents took care of such things. I know I haven't recently, since I stopped wearing shoes with laces about fifteen years ago, in high school. But it's something I'm going to have to get used to, since Chris says that the kind of shoe that I recently bought, with metal loops instead of traditional grommets, really grinds up laces. Looking, as I was replacing them, at the damage wrought on the old laces, I can see she's right. It would be enough to send me screaming back to Velcro, if I could get Velcro shoes anymore. Which I can't; I bought the laces at Bradlee's, and stopped off in the shoe department to check. Which is another odd thing: The Bradlee's on Union Square keeps its shoe department on the second floor, but shoelaces and shoe polish are all the way up on the fifth. You'd think they'd keep them together, wouldn't you? Maybe they don't want potential shoe buyers to be reminded that shoes have upkeep costs associated with them, or to get the implication that Bradlee's shoes in particular ever need polishing or relacing.

Anyway, the new laces are bright, almost glowing, white, unlike the black-and-yellow nylon pair that came with the shoes, and look like they won't last a week. I'm going to need an alternative source of laces.

Continuing with today's theme, our sysadmin got the news server up again today, which lasted until a minute or two after I launched my newsreader, specifically the moment at which the newsreader tried to download the group headers. Perhaps XHDR is the "Make server crash" command. I can imagine Microsoft implementing such a thing.