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Something about silver shoes brighten just about any day. As previously recounted, The Kandimaa family had a bit of a rough night last night. Between time spent at the emergency room with Thing 2 and Thing 1 waking up and demanding iPad time at 4.30 a.m. I didn’t exactly wake up doing summersaults.

Because I felt like a mommy-wreck I wore fancy pyjama pants to work. Because there are limits to my dressing down, I paired them with silver ballerinas. Tory Burch again. Always perfect, always appropriate.

 

Got all shoed-up today in magical denim Jimmy Choos as I was going out for a rare dinner with ex-expat group of girlfriends tonight.

International life has its ups and downs and one of the slight downs is what happens when you move “back home” after several years of expat life. Nothing. Of course I don’t mean nothing happens at all but socially it’s a tricky situation. Living overseas means that every time you come home for a visit the social agenda is jam packed. Evening after evening is filled with dinners, drinks and hanging out with people who are genuinely thrilled to see you and excited to hear of your life in New York/London/Dubai/Khartoum or wherever. Time flies and everybody makes an effort.

Moving back you imagine you are going to slot right back into your old circles and back into your own life only to realise that everybody else has of course moved on and formed a life. Not that your friends aren’t still just as lovely and pleased to see you, as you are them, but naturally things just aren’t ever the same as they were you were all 25 and string free.

To avoid total emotional collapse;  it is a very good idea to arm yourself with a life of your own. This group of former New York City moms who have moved back to Stockholm are a very welcome and dear addition to that life of my own.

Things didn’t quite work out as I had planned. Had to take little boy K to the emergency room as a precaution due to an inflammation in the nether regions. So instead of drinking cava in Choos I’m drinking water out of a paper cup in white sneakers.

 

A real surprise in the process of my 100 day shoe and writing challenge is the real joy that I have found in the documenting part. As a teenager I used to write all the time as a way of sorting my thoughts; carrying around with me a pen and notepad at all times and pulling it out to capture ideas, images or moods. What happened to that? In a box in our storage room I still have material for what I though would be my first big novel and that I’ve started to work on half a dozen times before life, work and stuff kept getting in the way. And while I know I will never likely come up with a Catcher in the Rye it strikes me that somewhere deep inside I still harbour the dream to put my thoughts into print.

Shoes of the day are red Marc Jacobs heels bought on my very first trip to New York. A mass of very fake pearls from a flea market match the little pearl on the front of each shoe.

These days I carry my laptop with me more than I do a pad and pen but maybe my literary breakthrough is still not out of reach…

 

An unexpected side-effect of my shoe purge challenge is that I am making some great new acquaintances. Have slowly started to put up items for “adoption” I.e. for sale online. One of the channels I’ve been using is a local Facebook group on Lidingö. The interesting thing about using a Facebook group is that you get a sneak peek into the  life of the person you are doing business with and even get to veg them on the basis of whether you have any friends in common. Last night I made a new maybe-friend. Sold a pair of green suede Gucci loafers from a sample collection to the friend of a friend and a friend of another friend. We chatted, we talked about shoes, home decor and people we knew and it really felt more like a  social event than a transaction.

Shoe charity fund is now up to 1800 SEK with more (hopefully) to come.

Today I made another brilliant choice of shoes for a client workshop. 10 cm Calvin Klein sandals, albeit with a decent wedge. As my dear work buddy V said at about 4.30 “your feet look like they are suffering a little now…”. No pain no gain!

Sunday. Mothers Day. After taking Thing 2 to football/soccer school it’s off to the garden center where we loaded the car with 4 sacks of soil, two sacks of wood chips and a sack of manure for good measure.

Our garden is finally getting a little TLC today and actually it’s kind of relaxing to dig around so it works out well for both of us. Did I mention the kids don’t really want to help? Which means I get a little time alone – happy Mother’s Day to me!!!

Chipie make these amazing slip on sneakers that have a very faint perfume. Perfect for bare feet in summer!

Shoes come and go, and if they sell out they are replaced by something new. Or, if they are enough of a best seller, they quietly become classics and continue to be  produced season on season.

And then there are shoes that sell out worldwide in an instant. That are hyped and shown in fashion magazines and ads and are impossible for mere mortals to get their hands on.

Meet Esme by Jimmy Choo. Esme has sold out in every reasonable size in every boutique and online store I have been able to find (and I´m pretty good at finding). But as if by magic, destiny or fairydyst; one pair in the right size was waiting for me at NK as I walked past the shoe department with Thing 2. Just one. In the whole world (well nearly anyway). It could only be fate, right?

Oh, and I totally get that this perhaps doesn´t quite fill the prerequisites for the shoe-challenge. Including the fact that I´m adding a new pair rather that getting rid of old ones. Also, outraged and shocked voices might be raised at my rampant consumerism. So to counterbalance all of this nonsense, I am now wearing the most down to earth pair of shoes in the whole world. 

 

What do you do the day after euphoric live bombing with all your fantastic colleagues as a result of a very successful annual reports seminar? Get up, get dressed and go back to the clients who don’t understand that you’ve had “more pressing” matters to tend to for a while.

Also dust off a pair of lovely LK Bennet pumps that are really hard for even me to walk in. But I don’t need to walk much today, or do I?

Big seminar today on Annual Reporting. Yes I know it sounds a bit like having teeth pulled. But having stage-time with decisionmakers from some of Swedens largest companies together with colleagues from Comprend and Hallvarsson & Halvarsson is a great honour.

Those that know me well will also know that I suffer from a mild version of dyscalculia. That is to say that I can´t count. No I mean I really can´t. Never learned long and short division but rather I managed to somehow fake my way through third grade and above on luck and then opened the arrival of the pocket calculator.

Today I proudly spoke to 150 or so CFO´s, CEO´s and IR/CSR executives with statistics on trends within digital annual reporting (yes numbers and graphs about numbers and graphs).

On my feet were a pair of cheap as chips black heels purchased about 10 years ago after two bottles or so of champagne on a weekend in Luxembourg to visit little sister.

 

 

London shoes again.

I wanted to wear a heel today as am still rather afraid summer proper will roll around before I´ve gone through them all, and heels and the Swedish outback do NOT mix. Also didn´t want to wear too much of a heel as I still have a bit of a blister on my little toe from Saturdays´ extravagance.

Enter dancing shoes. Very 1940´s; black suede and leather Mary Janes. Sturdy 5 cm heel and sensible buckle to keep them firmly in place. As I wore heels pretty much every day during my London years, it was important to have something really simple to fall back on.

I was telling a friend that the reason I aquired so many shoes in London that we had very low running costs. I.e. high disposible income. I realise though that it was more than that. I had all the time in the world. Would frequently spend a whole saturday roaming around Chelsea streets. No wonder about 50% of contents of my closet still comes from that time.

 

 

Busy preparing for a big seminar on Thursday where I’m a speaker on trends and best practice in digital annual reports. Mixing it up with flats again. Super-fake snakeskin with polka dots from Zara Basic.

Handed down from my little sister. Actually swiped from a bag of cast-offs that we’re going to recycling.

Mixed feelings?