I was right about the cowboy boots.

My sneakers were still slightly damp on Wednesday morning, so I wore my boots again, and after work I made a beeline to the Fluevog store, which is conveniently close to the office.

My favorite assistant greeted me as I walked into the shop. "Where have you been?!!" She said she'd been thinking of me only that morning, because she has a friend who is a photographer who had recently photographed a client's vast collection of ball-jointed dolls (we had an extensive conversation about my dolls last year). She said she's gone from someone who never dreamed that BJDs exist to seeing them everywhere.

The cowboy boots were even more gorgeous in person than in the photos. And they fit almost exactly as I had expected. I could barely dip my toes into them before my foot hung up. So I tried on a bunch of other short boots before turning my attention to a pair of my boots, this time tricolor and in patent leather, so I had to go up half a size. My assistant said she could hold them for me until I got paid on Friday. I set an alarm on my phone.

Because I was averse to paying another $16 to park, and because the shop offers free shipping, my new boots will arrive via one of the major delivery services early next week.

I've begun season 4 of House. I'm not very happy with him at the moment, because he's winnowing through applicants to replace Cameron, Chase, and Foreman, who either voted with their feet or were fired at the end of season 3. And he's being particularly nasty to the candidate who is black and a Latter-day Saint. Calls him "Big Love" and spouts the usual anti-Mormon propaganda. I did cheer when the candidate punched him in the nose after a particularly nasty comment about Joseph Smith.

Did I mention that I seem to have solved the design problem of the rose and teal cowl? I was inspired to try a combination of Fair Isle and garter stitch. It doesn't curl up like conventional stockinette. The garter stitch bumps keep the Fair Isle rows from being too tight. And the Fair Isle bits mean only one round of purling in a four-round pattern. It's v-e-r-y slow going, and for some inexplicable reason I don't seem to mind. I add about a centimeter in length a few times a week, and eventually I will run out of one color or the other and bind it all off.

I finished the Brené Brown audiobook and have begun a quirky debut novel featuring an English gentleman about my age who is conventionally polite and stiff-upper-lip on the outside and deliciously snarky on the inside. I'm two hours in, and nobody has died*, so this promises to be a chaste but not boring geriatric/multicultural romance. The narrator is superb.

*Actually three people have died, but this is not a murder mystery. The man is a widower whose brother has recently died, and the woman is a widow. His adult son, his sister-in-law, and her daughter are all showing signs of becoming utterly obnoxious. Grief can bring that out in people. But I digress.

This is the part where I go foraging for snacks and return to my watching and my listening and my knitting and maybe even some reading. I'm nearly done with When the Body Says No.