Cobbler extraordinaire!

(For those that know me well, you’ll understand me when I say this blog was very hard for me to write, but it has to be done.)


I did something today that at first, made perfect sense. But as I was doing it, I began to feel embarrassed, almost on the verge of crazy. When it was over, I felt a sense of accomplishment and finally, pride. You see, the tip of my left shoe has been scuffed for quite some time now. The sole is a very dark brown but the scuff mark was a very light tan. At first, I’d point it out to people and say “oh, I’ve scuffed my show”, hoping they would think I was too poor to buy myself another pair. But eventually, people knew it was scuffed and that I wore them anyway. I have a brown marker at home and I always meant to color in the scuff with that brown marker but I never seemed to remember to do this. Well, today, at work, I remembered. But I didn’t have a brown marker. So the 5 year old in me said, orange and green make brown. This is where I began to feel like a mad scientist. So I searched my desk and found all the orange and yellow markers and highlighters that I could find. Surely some combination would be close to the color of my sole. I started with Sharpie highlighter orange and Sharpie highlighter green. I used orange first so that the darker color would bleed onto the lighter color. At first, it looked to dark. So I tried the Sharpie highlighter orange with Screamer’s dry-erase marker blue. I thought the blue might be lighter than the green and produce a milder brown. WRONG! Markers are more saturated than highlighters. So I tried the Sharpie highlighter orange with the Sharpie highlighter blue. Still wrong, too dark. So I looked back at my original color swatch and found that it had toned down some. Actually, it was pretty close to the right color. So I made my decision. Sharpie highlighter orange and Sharpie highlighter green it was! I colored it in and low and behold, you don’t see the scuff mark anymore. Know, if you look closely, you can find it. But the casual observer will be none the wiser. My “old” shoes look “new” again. And I didn’t have to through my shoes away after all!