You were right. . .

. . .those of you who told me I needed a bootjack. Exactly what I needed. It works perfectly. You step on the back with one foot, and stick your other foot in the U-shaped opening and pull. Then you do the same thing with your other foot.

So easy. No grunting, no strain, no getting your hands in whatever you have on your boots.

I found my bootjack at a store called Coastal Farm and Ranch, out just beyond Hillsboro in farm country. I feel like such a city girl. I didn't know it existed and what a great store! I wandered around for nearly an hour, with my bootjack, just looking at everything. They carry all kinds of boots and work clothes, as well as other casual clothes, any kind of rope or twine you would ever want, tarps in a gagillion sizes and colors, tools, woodstoves, car stuff, pet supplies, animal feed, wheelbarrows, wheels, chain, hardware, ranch-y furniture, lighting, cages for animals of all sizes, many things I could not even identify, but I'm sure were dandy, etc. etc. etc. They had the greatest looking buckets I have ever seen. They were heavy duty plastic in all the colors of the rainbow. I guess this is so you know which bucket is for the chickens and which one is for the pigs, but I just thought they were great looking buckets. Outside the store there was more—fenceposts and water troughs and tubs and on and on.

So, thanks for the tips on the bootjack. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities!

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Thanks, too, for even more comments on the blog redo. Candied Fabric mentioned that the new template looked skinny. I agreed, but I had not been able to see a way to change that. I finally figured out that I could tweak the html and change the width. I like it better. I also brought the size of the font down a notch. Bigger than the default, but not as big as I had it. I am so impressed with how much Blogger has improved their layout tools.