THANKSGIVING MANI A TAD LATE

Well, I think maybe the holiday mood is starting to creep in. I decided to get serious the other day and did some major shopping.

Part of that shopping included a new camera for myself. I've been saving up my credits on my survey account, so I ended up getting $432 in Amazon credit to use toward the camera. I've been saving for a pretty long time, but I'm so glad I did that. I never would have bought a new camera without that extra help towards the cost. I bought the Canon Rebel 5, and it came with a big bundle of other stuff to go along with it. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out how to use it without too much difficulty.

Yesterday I took the day off. Kev and I went to Oconto in the morning for a long overdue follow-up EGD and a colonoscopy. Good times. The prep on Tuesday night was not cool. Drinking that stuff was not easy to do, and nothing started happening until after 1 a.m. which means I was up most of the night. I slept for part of the drive there. We got there at 10:45, and I have absolutely no clue what time we got home.

Everything went great and after years of problems, my ulcers have finally healed. I'm pretty happy about that. Poor Kev had to tell me my results probably five times yesterday because I was seriously out of it all day. Apparently I ate crackers at the hospital. I'm pretty sure I talked to my mom on the phone yesterday, but I'm going to call her later to find out what I said. I slept all the way home and then slept most of yesterday. I managed to stay awake long enough to watch a couple of tv shows and eat supper, and that's about it.

Since I was in a coma, Kev did the entire tree all by himself. He did a great job, and I didn't even rearrange anything. My only contribution to decorating it was some icicles that were in a box he forgot about. It's so weird how I can have a real surgery and snap right out of it, but knock me out for something like an egd and I'm useless for 24 hours.

I'm just glad it's over. I've been trying for many months to get it scheduled, and now I don't have to think about it again for a very long time.

This is the mani I wore on Thanksgiving.

I started with OPI My Private Jet and stamped with Essie Good as Gold using the Uber Chic 6-01 stamping plate. I like it. It was purdy.

Now I'm going to finish up cleaning. At some point maybe I'll wrap some presents so the tree doesn't look naked. Or maybe I'll just finish my sweater. All that's left is to finish knitting the hood, so I should have no problem getting that out of the way. I slammed my finger when I was cleaning earlier and loosened a nail so I suppose I'll have to soak them off in the next day or two. I really jammed it hard because it's painful to type.

Have a great weekend, peeps!!

A BIT OF STRIPING TAPE

Oh, man....it is going to be very, very quiet at my house when I go home. Seven the pup went home last evening, and my daughter headed back to Illinois with Zero today.

Last night I had Seven's owners and their kids, and then my two "almost" daughters came over with their kids. That's a whole lotta' people and dogs crammed into my living room. Everybody seemed to be having a nice time even though the dogs were wound and so were the kids. I'm not used to so much activity!!

At least I won't be completely alone this evening because Kev got home last night, too. I'm pondering whether or not I should see if he wants to go out for dinner. I'm so exhausted from not great sleep over the weekend that cooking does not appeal. Not that it ever does.

I did manage to sneak in a mani on Sunday night, and I even managed to not have anything disastrous happen with the puppies running around. Those 10 months olds are quite a bit bigger than their momma now so when they play, you never know what'll get knocked over.

It's been quite some time since I did anything with striping tape.

I began this with two coats of Sally Hansen Color Foil Sterling Silver. I did topcoat it before applying striping tape, and in each section I used a Darling Diva holo, Queen of the Night, BEWBS!! and Nightbird.
 
I thought it might look kinda' cool if I did sections with holos. Turns out I was correct. I've been doing so many light colors lately it was kind of nice to play with these.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; if you don't have any of the Darling Diva holo polishes, get 'em! They really are nice, and I only needed one coat for these. I'm a fan of anything that only needs one coat. Such a time saver.

Although I am usually more than willing to spend a ton of time on a mani, sometimes it's nice to have a smidgeon of a shortcut.

HELLZ TO THE YES!!

The bossman is on vacay, so my work hours are pretty random for a week. Yesterday I wandered in at 1:00 and worked until 5:00. I got a lot of work done, all of the kinds of things that are hard to do when I'm doing actual work. I closed so many files that I completely emptied one of the file drawers, which is awesome. Now all I need to do is convince him that it's time to purge some old files from our storage closet. Nobody needs to keep files that are 15 damn years old. At this point I've stacked boxes so high I practically need a ladder to get them down. Not so fun.

I had been there about ten minutes, and my left eye was super irritated. I keep contact solution at work so I took out my contact, cleaned it and put it back in. It still felt kind of scratchy, but since I thought being able to see was a good idea, I just carried on.

After I'd been home for about an hour, I decided to take my contacts out and throw on my specs. If I'm not going anywhere, I do that often. Not that it matters because I'm pretty much blind as a bat no matter what I'm wearing. Low and behold, I discovered that my contact has a rip in it. No biggie, I figure; I have one spare left in my traveling makeup bag.

Wrong. I have 3 right contacts and no left ones. So now I'm sitting here wearing a torn contact. Not pleasant. I've been meaning to make an eye appointment so I called and can't get in until April 7th. I did get lucky, though, because they do have the lens in stock. Good news for me, so I'll be picking that up on my way to my physical. 

Last night I took off that pastel water marble. And decided I wanted another water marble. It was a great decision.

I couldn't be more happy with this one. I am in love with it. Even though I've never had much luck using holo polish for a holo, I figured I'd try it again.

The stars aligned perfectly on this one. I did one coat of Sinful Colors Black on Black as a base and then used it with Too Cute-icle Enchanted Lagoon and Color Club Halo Hues Eternal Beauty.

All three of them worked great. I only had to re-do one, and that's only because I accidentally marbled over it when it was already done.

I went for just a no pattern look, mostly because I didn't even start this until 10 p.m. and didn't want to waste a ton of polish trying to make some perfect loopy thing.

There isn't one thing I would change about this. IMHO it is gorgeous, and I'll be wearing it for at least 2 days. I wish it was sunny out so I could go freeze my ass off to get the holographic effect to show up better.

Sometimes these water marbles are just so fun. And if you don't like this one, then I'm pretty sure we can't be friends.

HOLO ON HOLO. HOLLA!

For those that may not know me here, I've worn my Custom Nail Solutions nails every single day since May of 2012. I've had different lengths at different times, but if something were to happen where I couldn't wear them.....

Let's just say I wouldn't leave the house without gloves on.

So just imagine my horror when, as I was driving on Wednesday afternoon, I ran my index finger of my left hand over the thumb nail next to it and felt a CHIP!!  Oh, hellz to the no. This simply can't be happening. I damn near pulled over to see if I was imagining things.

It wasn't chipped when I painted them the night before, and it wasn't chipped after I showered and made myself presentable to be seen in public. So at some point between noon and 4 p.m. I chipped a nail. I wasn't even doing anything.  

I couldn't get to my computer fast enough. I needed to email the company to have them send me a new one per their guarantee. Before doing that, I checked what the procedure was and it said I'd have to send the broken nail to them. Oh, I do not think so. I took pics and attached them to the email and told them I was keeping it. I filed it down past the chip so I can keep wearing it until the new one comes. 

They emailed me back right away the next morning, and I'm happy to report that they are fine with that. They'll be sending me a replacement. I'll give them a big A+ for how quickly they responded. Rumor has it the pink material for the nails is on backorder, but I'm in no hurry. Nobody but me would ever know my thumb nail is shorter.

Whew!!

I thought I'd try something a little different than I would usually do the other night. I have mixed feelings on this one. In person, this polish is more purple, but for some reason it wouldn't photograph, not even in the bathroom where I usually have to photograph purples.

I wasn't sure how this would go as far as stamping with a holo over holo. The base is a really pretty one from ILNP, Cygnus Loop, the holo version.

My goal for the stamping was to use a silver holo, but my only true silver holo is an Nfu Oh, and from past attempts I knew that it doesn't work at all for stamping.

After digging through the Helmers, I decided to try OPI DS Sapphire, which is more of a silver with a hint of blue.

The pattern from the Ali Express 12-51 plate actually stamped really well, much better than can be seen in the pictures. What I could not do was topcoat. It made the stamp almost completely disappear. I decided to see how it would go leaving it without topcoat.

It didn't go particularly well. I put this mani on Tuesday night, and by yesterday the stamping was virtually invisible, especially on my left hand.

This is something I think I'll try again, but maybe next time I'll stamp dark over light. I'll also assume it won't be something I'll wear for very long.

Now I'm off to search the interwebs for inspiration. I'm kind of in the mood to play with my nails, and it's been awhile since I did more than one on a weekend.

Having the time to do it is nice; finding the ambition to actually start is where I'm running into a problem.

Or maybe I'll just take a nap first.

FAIR WARNING - YOU NEED THIS!!

I'm not even sure where I first saw a pic of any polishes by Parrot Polish.  I'm thinking it might have been on Instagram. It doesn't really matter. Bottom line is I saw a swatch and sped over to their website immediately to check them out.

My interest was piqued because they had some with Romanian names, which reminded me of my 23 days there when I was 17. I remembered that "frumose" means beautiful. I digress.

Normally I am not so willing to pay 12 bucks for a polish, but I threw 2 in my cart and didn't buy. A week later I wondered why I hadn't gotten them yet. Once I remembered that I hadn't actually purchased them, I did. For the record, they are based in Florida, and they have free shipping!

Let me say this before you look at the 8,000 pictures I've posted. Within a few hours I received tracking info with a very nice note from Dave, the owner. That was four days ago, and I got the polish today.

Once I got them opened, I was so excited by them that I swatched them immediately.  Then I was even more impressed and decided I wanted to email Dave and tell him what I thought. I logged into my email and found an email from him, just checking in to see if I had received them.  Pretty damn good customer relations.

My plan then was to do a blog post with a review of both polishes. Once I started taking pictures of this one, I knew that wasn't going to happen. I really don't normally like pic-heavy posts so there was no way I could do both polishes on the same day.

Without further ado, feast your eyes on Curcubeu, which means rainbow in Romanian.

Ya' know how sometimes holo or multi-chrome polishes need a couple of coats to look good? Or how they are best over black?  Not so with this. I did swatch over black, too, but it really made no difference in the look.  These first three pictures are ONE coat.

I'd say it's pretty amazing in one coat.

This next shot is taken with flash, and the rest have no flash.

I think this is one fantastic polish. It flashes strong green, aqua, silver, blue and quite a strong purple, but as with all things purple, I wasn't really able to capture it. I was also just looking at it as I sit here in the living room, and it also flashes that "not quite black" black color that you get with black holos. Suffice it to say it is striking. Each color that comes through is gorgeous.

This is one of those rare treats of a polish that exceeded my expectations by a mile. Their own pictures don't do this one justice. I love a strong holo, and anything that shifts colors automatically becomes one of my faves.

You can look forward (or not) to a similar post on the other one I bought, Arco Iris, which coincidentally also means rainbow, but in Spanish. I didn't know that until just now. lol

They also included a mini of Emerald Sand which is a green/blue holo and 2 of their homemade soaps which they sell for a buck.

Overall, if this is any indication of how this little company is run, they deserve the business. For the record, this rather strong opinion you're getting right now is strictly my own. They've offered me nothing, promised me nothing; I'm raving because it's just.that.good.

And in case you haven't noticed over the time period of this blog, I'm a smidge picky.

If you haven't checked out Parrot Polish before, I think it's pretty apparent that you should.

RED MEANS HOT, NERDS.

As I told you in my last post, Kev managed to fix the hot and cold water problem in the new shower. Supposedly.

On Thursday morning I got up for work, and okay, I'll admit it....I was a smidge excited to step into that shiny new shower.  As I always do, I turned the water to hot to let it warm up while I put in my contacts, brushed my hair, yada yada. 

At this point I'm damn near giddy with excitement. I reach in to feel the water. ICE cold. What the what??? I thought it was fixed! So I waited and waited and waited. The water just stayed cold. Oh, fantabulous. Now what the hell happened?

Just for shits and giggles, I turned it to cold. Yup. Hot water. Evidently they mixed up that minor detail when they hooked up the water supply. You know, that thing where you hook the hot up to hot and cold up to cold. Plumber style. 

Oh, wait....they are plumbers. Jeebus H. Doesn't anybody ever get anything right?  I texted Kev to ask if he failed to notice that the hot and cold were backwards. His response, "Well, it depends on how you look at the handle." Um, okay. Every shower with a circular handle I've ever been in has to be turned all the way over to hot. Like where that little red symbol is that indicates hot unless you happen to be colorblind. He had me so confused that I left a note for Tyler to go in my bathroom and call me before heading back to Illinois. I'm sure she thought I was cray-cray. But good daughter that she is, she did as I asked. I asked her to turn the water on to hot and let me know what happens. As I expected, I'm not crazy. It's backwards.

Now, I can learn to live with this even though it's gnawing at the inside of my brain. I can practically feel myself losing brain cells as it eats away in there. I mentioned it to the furnace guy since it was his subcontractors that did that. He also agreed with me and said he would have them come back to fix it.  Two hours later he also decided that it "all depends on how you look at the handle" and said if I really wanted him to, he'd call the guy back or give me 50 bucks off the bill. Since they would have to crawl in through the laundry room wall to do it, I took the damn 50 bucks. 

I'm regretting that now. I may just ask Kev to do it. lol

Meanwhile, the new furnace was just a-humming along nicely. But for some weird reason, every time the new furnace kicks on, every bit of cold air from outside is coming inside through my fireplace. This is not a very good thing at all. I happen to be a smoker, and for the past 12 years, I sit in that fireplace and smoke so that no smoke gets into the actual house. I know that this works well because my mom can't smell smoke. And trust me when I tell you, if my house smelled even the tiniest bit of smoke, she would smell it from her house 10 miles away and then call me up to bitch me out.

So now if I'm in the fireplace and the furnace kicks on, the smoke blows right into the living room. Not cool. As I'm sitting in my recliner across the room that night, pouting about how I'm going to have to learn to speed smoke outside in 20 below weather in the winter, the furnace kicks on, and all I feels is all that cold air blowing into the room. I fail to see the benefit of a new energy efficient furnace if cold air comes in every time it goes on. Doesn't that kind of cancel out the whole energy efficient thing?

On Friday they came out to install the air conditioner. All of that went according to plan, believe it or not. Now we just need the electrician to come out and finish it up. No rush....it's still only in the 40's here.  While they were there, I mentioned the cold air through the fireplace thing because of the new furnace.  The guy looked at me like I had grown a second head and two extra noses.  He said there was no way that was possible.  Um, okay. I guess I was imagining it.  Turns out it was a good thing I mentioned it. He decided to go under the house just to see and noticed it was awfully warm under there. For some reason there was an entire section of duct work that wasn't connected. Once he hooked that back up, the problem was solved. Yay!!

Their bossman came to check out what was done and said he'd be back later to collect his money.  I had cleaned the entire house that morning but hadn't done my floors since they were coming in and out of the house. The laundry room floor was a disaster from all the work they had been doing so before using my steam cleaner, I got down on my hands and knees to clean up the worst of it.

Sweet Jesus....they did a teensie bit of damage to two of my floor tiles. Kill me. Kill me now. It's not major, and only I would notice such a thing. One is a little nick where the color is gone so it's now a white spot. I'd say it's about the size of a nail head. The one that concerns me is the next tile over where there's a weird round raised spot. It almost feels like a nail poking through except there are no nails. I feel like that one could for sure get worse just from people walking over it.

When my guy came to get his money, I mentioned it and showed him. Now, obvi I can't prove they did it or whether it was bathroom guys or furnace guys, but I know that one of them did it. He wanted to know what I thought he could do about it. I just told him I didn't necessarily think there was anything he could do, but he should for sure tell his workers to put down blankets or something to protect people's floors in the future. He gave me another 50 bucks. Even though he said his wife would notice something like that, too, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks I'm a complete raving, nitpicky psycho bitch even though I honestly was super nice about it all.  I do have extra tiles in the garage, so hopefully when they come to do the bathroom flooring, I can have them just replace those 2 tiles.

Like I say, it's always something! Just a non-stop comedy of errors every time we do something.  Whew!! Sorry that was so long, but I'm trying to tell these ever-so-funtastic stories as they relate to each other.

A few weeks ago one of my trouble-making nail friends posted on Facebook that Above the Curve was running a sale on one of their holo polishes. It's a gorgeous deep purple holo from their Doctor Who collection, and it's called The Silence. Since I made the mistake of looking at it, I decided to buy it since I've been such a good girl about not buying polish. And while I was buying that one, I noticed this one, "Slitheen". It is absolutely to.die.for.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is one spectacular green holo. As always, the pics just can't do it justice. I loved it so much I never even did anything else to it. That is a very rare thing for me.  I wore it all by its lonesome for several days and never got tired of looking at it.

I haven't worn the purple one yet, but I have a feeling that will be one I wear all on its own, too. The formula on these polishes is great and even after wearing it for a few days, I had no tip wear at all.

If you don't have any Above the Curve polishes, I can safely say that you should rush right over to check them out on Facebook and then get your buying finger ready to add things to your cart. 

If you can get off of their page without buying more than one, I'll be surprised. 

ANOTHER UNDER-RATED....HAVE YOU EVER SEEN IT?

Holidays are exhausting. Tyler and the fam have been here since Wednesday, and as usual, we are staying up until the weeeeeee hours. It's ridiculous. As if my lack of sleep wasn't already messing with me enough. At this stage of the game, my body isn't sure when it's night or when it's day. I'm sleepy at 4 p.m. and wide awake at 4 a.m. Last night Tyler got back here around 1:30, I think. After we sat and watched some tv, she decided to do a bit of cleaning for me so I stayed up to keep her company. I think it was almost 6 when I finally went to bed. So yup, I is tired.

The other day when I took off Grey's Anatomy I was just looking through ye' ol' polish stash for something to throw on. It's still not easy for me to do my nails, so I'm trying to stick to plain. I completely forgot I had this. I don't think I've ever used it. I'm sure it was a random "wander through Walmart" grab.

This black is Sally Hansen Night Lights, and it is seriously a nice holo in person. And it probs cost me around $2 instead of the $8-$15 I usually pay for a holo.  Is it as striking as something like the Color Club Halo's or by an indie polish maker? Nope! But if you want to just walk into a store and pay a normal amount for a "fancier" polish, I suggest this one.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. If you braved Black Friday, hopefully you came out with no bruises or broken bones. Personally I don't go out shopping during that mess. I tend to sit home and see what great deals I can snag on the interwebs. 

And snag I did. I also found myself buying for myself because some of the deals were just too good to pass up. I think at last count I had bought myself 4 or 5 new sweaters. Shameful!!

I still have quite a few people to buy for, and writing this was a nice, much needed little break. Time to eat some dinner and perhaps try to finish up a few more people. 

I'll be glad when I'm done shopping and when life in general goes back to normal. Maybe then I can get back to tending the blog like I was before. I hate that I'm not getting as many entries in as before.

A blog without new entries just isn't any fun!

AN "IN THE MEANTIME" MANI

Humpa-hump day. I really need it to be Friday. Seriously. I mean it. This will be the first weekend free I've had in what seems like forever. In actuality, I've only had two busy ones in a row, but that's enough to really screw up my dvr catch-up time. I foresee 3:30-4:00 a.m. staying up even though I know I honestly do need to get some extra sleep to recharge.

So last night I received the list of manicures that are needed per yesterday's post. Luckily I had a few in my stash of pics that they might be able to use. I do have my work cut out for me over the next couple of nights. With a couple of the descriptions, I'm not even sure I know what they are. Luckily there are a bunch listed, but I don't have to do all of them. I usually just try to do as many as I can so hopefully I'll make them happy. 

I waited as long as I could last night for directions, and when I hadn't gotten them due to some glitch with my Facebook messages, I went ahead and just did something simple to get me through the day today. It isn't exciting, and I am pretty annoyed with how it turned out. As usual, it look WAY better in my head. Hmmm...does that mean I'm delusional? It's possible that I am. But I digress; on to the mani.

As you can see, I did not put a whole lot of work into this. I bought some new polishes while I was in Illinois over the weekend and since they were sitting on the table next to me after being swatched, I just grabbed two and did what you see here.  The basecoat is a Color Club Halo Hue, Cloud Nine. Then I grabbed my trusty little fan brush and went over that with Color Club Port-Folio. One thing I do like is that some of the holo shows up even with the purple over it.

I had been thinking about doing a fan brush mani for awhile. Now I wish I had waited until I had more time to choose colors. This one does nothing for me. No great loss when I remove it after work.

I'm hoping these mani's I'm doing for Custom Nails are something cute. Of course, you'll be seeing them even if I don't like them. 

  

CUTEST BLOGPOST. EVER.

It's Thursday, and jeebus, I am exhausted!! I'm looking forward to my half day of work tomorrow; then off to Chi-Town we go. I'm not a fan of the 6 hours in the car, but thankfully the hubby drives. That, in case you're wondering, means nappy-nap time for me. Once we get there, we'll be going to my daughter's after which we are heading into the city to see funny man extraordinaire, Jim Gaffigan. Can't wait. He slays me. (Hot Pockets)

Not sure what I'm doing on the Custom nails, but I am considering a msmd butterfly mani I saw on Pinterest. That's assuming I'm awake enough to try something I haven't done before that will require some freehand work. Not really my strong suit. I just know I want something that I'm happy to live with until probably next Tuesday night. Damn, that is a long time for me to wear the same thing on my nails. Not gonna' lie; I don't like that much.

I didn't even decide to do my nails last night until almost 11:00. Idiot.  After all was said and done and put away, I went to get ready for bed and noticed that I had really messed up on my right ring finger. Well, "I" thought it was messed up. Nobody else probably would have even noticed.  It was already after 1 by the time I noticed it so I went to bed disgusted. After I was ready for work this morning, I took everything out again and redid it. Kind of redonk since I think besides family, only two people even saw my hands today. lol

This one was done specifically for Pamela H. who in a recent comment had said she wanted to see some more stamping with DRK-B over a holo. So here you go-go, Pam....it's your ho-lo. (That was so weak I should unfollow myself)

All in all, I rather like this one. I used OPI DS Sapphire for the base and then stamped with China Glaze Hologlam Strap on Your Moonboots. The China Glaze Hologlams stamp really well, and not all holo's do. Since I have 5 of these suckers, I'm betting I'll be using more of them for stamping. 

So that "might" be it for the week. I'm really hoping that I'll still be posting while we're out of town. I always bring my laptop and have a ton of pics from the past I can use; mabes I just won't talk (type) as much. Some of you might actually prefer that. ;)

And just because I can, this is some of my fave fam cuteness. My heart bursts.

If I don't see you, have a fantabulous weekend!! Please make sure to like Polish Sickness on FB, follow PolishSickness on Instagram and drag your friends kicking and screaming over here to follow me. I am officially a social media ho. *sigh*