In less than two weeks, we’re moving to a snowy place. A place covered in white more months than not. A place that has been known to see flurries on the Fourth of July.

I’ve lived in Southern California my entire life. A place without snow. A place where, when the first solitary snowflake is seen at higher elevations, the roads are abandoned, offices and schools become ghost towns, and we sled down dirt or grassy hills on our trash can lids.

As a SoCal girl (like, totally, I mean, like, oh my gosh) my snow shoe collection consists of one token pair of snow boots. Cute snow boots, I must say, but snow boots just the same. Heavy, waterproof, thick soled, fuzzy fleecy lined snow boots. Great for tramping through snow, but necessarily much else.

So, I wondered to my San Diego self, What will I wear in Snow Land when I want to run to the grocery store? Or when I’m just stepping out to the mail box? Or when I’m hopping over to story time at the library?

I decided my flip-flops weren’t gonna cut it.

The alternative wasn’t hard to figure out, of course, being that even here in the Land of No Snow, people are wearing “fashionable snow boots” to walk the sunny streets every day. Our malls and sidewalks are peppered with faux fleece and colored suede, along with the customary crocheted scarves and colorful knit stocking caps.

You know, necessary stuff for 65 degree weather.

But I’d seen a wide enough array of boots to know what would be the best combination of style and practicality for me. I’d just get myself a pair of those and call it a day.

So I opened my laptop one evening and looked up the boots. I choked. On the price. Are there really THAT many  sheeples out there paying THAT much for a pair of boots that, frankly, aren’t even THAT cute?!?!

Apparently so.

But I wasn’t taking the bait quite yet. I started Googling. Clicking here, bookmarking there. I’d find them on sale somewhere. I wasn’t going to shell out that much dough on anything meant to cover my toes.

What I didn’t know was that a product in higher demand than bread or water–being I clearly don’t buy into fads all that often–never goes on sale.

Until–lo and behold–there it was! A Sale! A Big Sale! On the actual brand website!

I hadn’t even bothered looking at the company website in all my surfing and clicking, being I just assumed the people who made the boots would ask top dollar. Oh, how gullible and prone to prejudice! Here they were, having an after Christmas 50% off sale and I was just going to pass them over.

P’shaw. I seriously need to get over my judgements. Who was I to think they would be the bullies with the monopoly on the fuzzy warm boot market?

John was sitting beside me at this point. We rolled our eyes at ourselves and clicked ahead through the checkout pages.

Ridiculous us. We always look for the harder, more obscure way, instead of looking at the normal, well traveled path staring us in the face. There’s gotta be a life lesson or analogy or at least a blog post outta this one. I mean, seriously…

Click. Click. Type. Click. Order Placed. Confirmation email on its way.

I grinned. I’d have my boots. Warm. Fuzzy. Tall. Tan. And best of all, they’d look great with a pair of straight leg jeans tucked into the top.

John grinned. One more thing to make life a little easier on his wife as she moves to his frozen hometown during his year-long deployment. And best of all, we’d only paid half the standard price for them.

We heard the blllling of the confirmation email hitting my inbox.

We opened it.

The return email address was something about authenticboots@blahblahblah.blah.

It was all in Chinese.

~~~

The boots from the lookalike site are supposed to arrive–from China, instead of Australia–today. If, that is, there’s anything more than styrofoam peanuts in the box. We’re still not sure if we’ll be able to get our money back being, that we did, you know, place the order.

Although I’m kinda thinking I might keep them.

And wear them.

And remind myself every time I step outside in the Land of the Snow that perhaps it’s not always better to follow what appears to be the mainstream crowd with the easier plan and promises of less sacrifice. Counterfeits abound.

There’s that and about fifty other life lessons and analogies in this one. And yes, even a blog post.

And here all I wanted was a pair of boots…

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