Smarty pants

Shown here are two pairs of my work jeans. At any given moment I own four pairs of jeans. The best jeans, my “Sunday go-to-meetin” pair, has the deepest color, the fewest wear spots, and the fewest wrinkles due to being pulled from the clothes dryer while still warm, then immediately folded. It’s the pair I wear to important events, like Forest Service meetings and visits to The Home Depot. The second pair is good enough to wear to Oakhurst without being tossed out of the supermarket for looking like a vagrant. The number three and number four pair shown above are what I wear when I’m engaged in my day-to-day activities. In fact, most of my blogging is done while wearing those very jeans!

The reason I’ve called this post “Smarty pants” is that if my jeans-purchasing timing is correct, which it usually is, by the time summer comes along the legs are ready to be cut off at the knee, making them into shorts! I don’t know how the Levi Strauss Company makes jeans come apart in just the right place, but they’re doing something awfully right as far as I’m concerned!

After decades of enjoying watching my pants evolve into shorts, I have only one complaint: Notice the wear spots above the knee on the right side pockets (left side in the photo). They’re caused by carrying my tiny Swiss Army Executive Supreme Ultra Jihadist’s Dream pocket knife in that pocket. It’s a very small knife, tiny enough to get through airport security without triggering an alarm. But it’s bulky enough to cause wear in my jeans. Levi Strauss needs to do some toughening there. Till they do, I have started putting the knife in the watch pocket above the main pocket. It’s hard to get used to finding it there, though. I should have done that a few years ago when my mind was more flexible, as opposed to being flabby.

Live and learn, to coin a phrase.