I’ve been harboring a little secret desire over the last year or so.  I want to design my own shoe line.  No doubt, I have an obsession for shoes, especially ones with red soles, but now I want to create my own.  I don’t need another project, but this one is quickly rising to the top of my priority list.

You see, I like to create things.  And now I want to create things, like shoes, that are:

a) comfortable for a real estate agent to wear while showing houses.
b) durable for a property manager to wear on site while checking work at a house that she’s flipping.
c) practical for a diabetic who strives to take care of herself and yet still look fabulous.
d) expensive to the point where not everyone is wearing them, but affordable enough for the typical real estate agent/property manager type is wearing them.  I want to be able to afford my own shoe line.

I have done a lot of research, it’s amazing what you can find with The Google. I have the financial backing of a dedicated, not-so-silent investor. I have the husband with an art degree to help draw my visions out, I have even already named the shoe line and the first five shoes.  I read the shoe blogs.  And I have already named the shoe line.

I don’t expect to be the next Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo, and truthfully, I don’t really care to make something of my name.  I just want to create something that I love and feel good about doing it.  Chances are my shoe line may never get off the ground but I can dream, can’t I?

My first shoe sketch concept, lacking the embellishments. Wait 'till you see the label!

Yes, I am talking about Things.  And no, this is not one of the materialistic posts about the things I want. I’m talking about the uber-cool “Things for Mac.”  It’s my super human exhaustive To Do List that is somewhat helping me keep my sanity in the office and is my answer to those who ask me “how do you get it all done?”

Things For Mac Screenshot

There is even a Things for iPhone app that syncs beautifully with Things For Mac wirelessly over a wi-fi connection:

Things for iPhone Screenshots

All of this is great because as usual, I’ve got quite a few irons in the fire.  Not only am I managing over 200 single family residential rental properties (luckily, we’ve hired a little help for that department and got rid of a few bad apples), but I’m also helping The Donald teach education classes to other REALTORS® and therefore writing a bunch of new courses.  Plus keeping up with the schedules of the little ones and the hubs, the list can get out of hand pretty quick.  So here is what works for me.

What motivates you?  For me, it’s been a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes.

I have a little bit of a shoe obsession, and these have been on my radar for well over a year.  I finally purchased my first pair last month and now I’m hooked.  They are a classy, patent leather pair to wear to work and they do not have a super high stripper heel height like some haute couture Fendi’s I’ve seen.  Ironically, my new Christian Louboutin pumps are extremely comfortable!  The fact that I can wear them all day makes me think “screw you diabetes” and that feeling is more than worth the price I paid for these shoes.  Now, I’m motivated more than ever to work hard to earn the money to buy more shoes and to also keep my crazy blood sugar levels stable.

So for those of you that are still with me and haven’t tuned me out just yet… here’s the details:  I tried them on at Neiman Marcus just to make sure the fit was right.  Then I ordered them on netaporter.com, of which I am more than pleased with their service.  I have carefully protected my new luscious red soles with the crafty handiwork of Cobblestone Shoe Shop in St. Louis.  Before I even wore them out, I had this amazing shoe repair store place their quality Christian Louboutin red protective soles on the bottoms of my new investment.  I worked with Jeff in the Creve Coeur location on Olive Street in St. Louis and he was so good to me.  Again well worth it.

So thank you for letting me rave on about my new shoes.  I needed to get my mind off work for a little bit.

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I’ve been working on a few different web sites for work the last 30 days and I’ve been doing a lot of the development in WordPress using the Thesis 1.7 theme.  I hit full on panic mode tonight when I was trying to tweak a custom function and added some bad pieces of code unknowingly to the theme footer.  I clicked on my “Big Ass Save Button” (of which I have renamed to a little bit classier version) and went to check on my site and poof! EVERYTHING on the site went blank.  I started breathing into a paper bag as I could not even login to the WordPress backend, like I said EVERYTHING was blank and nothing would load.  O….M….G….

So, if this happens to you, here is how you fix it:

1) Login to your host (cPanel) backend and re-name your Thesis file.  You can find it in your File Manager by clicking on Public HTML > wp-content > themes.

2) Select “Thesis_17″ and rename the file.  I just added four random numbers behind the 17.  This will cause WordPress to reset your site to the default theme allowing you to be able to log back in and getting rid of the kiss of death blank site screens.

3) Once you are logged into the WordPress backend.  Click on “Appearance” > “Editor” on the left hand side of the admin screen.

4) In the top right hand corner, select “Thesis” from the drop down box under “select theme to edit”

5) Click on “custom_functions php” in the right hand column.

6) Find the botched/bad code in the editor window and delete it.

7) Click “Update File” at the bottom.

Repeat step 1 above, except this time change your Thesis file name back to the original “Thesis_17″.  Meaning, erase the random numbers you added.

9) You’re almost done… Now go back to “Appearance” > “Themes” and activate your Thesis 1.7 Theme.

10) And now you’re done. Yay!!

I must tell you though, I had help getting to this point by perusing the WordPress support forums on this issue and also by reading this site.

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