CHRISTMAS EVE SHENANIGANS

This year for sure will go down in our family as having the most interesting Christmas Eve. For one thing, we still have NO snow. Like not even a speck. Evidently that is going to change sometime today, as we are under the threat of a pretty huge storm starting this afternoon and extending into tomorrow afternoon.

My bossman was very nice and let me stay home on the 23rd so that I could get ready for the family Christmas Eve. All day Wednesday I cleaned and baked, making sure I had everything done so that all that would need doing on the 24th was the actual cooking of the dinner.

Around midnight, Tyler and I were just hanging out watching tv, and I decided I would actually do a holiday mani that took some actual effort. While I was doing that, Tyler started doing her gift wrapping. All was going great, and I was in the middle of putting rhinestones on my 6th nail, when we heard a loud "pop" outside, the lights flickered, and then the  entire neighborhood went black. A few minutes later we heard another pop, this crazy-ass wind kicked up and we had a downpour of what sounded like hail that lasted for probably 30 seconds.

I immediately grabbed my phone to go to the power company website to report the outage. It was 2:45 a.m. At that point their website gave an estimated time of 3:45 a.m. for the power to come back on. We saw the power company's truck go up and down the street a few times during the next half hour. My battery operated holiday lighted items were still on, of course, and I grabbed the one battery lantern I own so we weren't in complete darkness. Kev woke up when the power shut off, and he went out to the garage and came back in with a propane lantern he had picked up when he went downstate during hunting season. That thing was super bright, and I sat with that and finished the rest of my rhinestones while Tyler wrapped by the light of the smaller lantern.

I've never had the power be out for more than a couple of hours, and I had no reason to believe this time would be any different.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

When we finally wandered off to bed at 7 a.m., the lights were still out, and the website gave no indication as to when they'd return. I got out of bed right before 11 a.m. because I was freezing and got up to find still no power, which in my house also means no running water because there's no power to the pump.

The power was out in quite a few places throughout the Upper Peninsula due to high winds, but ours was the first to go. Unfortunately we were not the first to be fixed. I called my sister to let her know what was happening and to find out if we could move the festivities to her house since I obviously couldn't cook without power. We saw a truck head down our road with a new power line pole on it at about 2:30 p.m., so Kev hopped in the car to go see what was up. A ginormous tree had split in half and fallen on the power line, snapping the pole. Since they had to remove the old pole, put up a new one and then reattach everything, it was pretty obvious our power wasn't going to be back on anytime soon. We loaded up all of the food and headed to my sister's house where we were both able to take showers.

After dinner, we let my grandkids open their gifts from everyone, and by the time we got home at 7:30, power had been restored. It hadn't been on for very long because it was still only 62 degrees in the house, but at least life was back to normal, and my daughters and their hubbies were able to come over at 9 p.m. to open gifts with us before heading over to my mom's at 11 p.m. for more food and more giftage. We got home from there about 2:30 a.m. and finally got to bed around 3:00.

Christmas Day was nice and normal; dinner at mom's and present opening and then home at a normal hour. As usual, by then I was tired of all the running around and just happy to be home.

So here's my done-in-the-dark Christmas mani.

The green is a lovely holo I got from Anonymous Lacquer, Baby Vamp. I did the light strand with my Uber Chic Christmas 01 stamping plate and then used rhinestones for the lights.

I'm pretty amazed at how well this one lasted. I lost only one rhinestone, and that was when I was rough-housing with Seven who came to play with Zero on Saturday. I finally took it off yesterday.

I hope your holiday was merry and bright, and I wish for you all nothing but great things in the upcoming new year.

LABOR INTENSIVE "BLING"!!!!!!

This winter weather is crazy! Today is in the high 30's, which is awesome for my roof sitch. It's melting like mad out there. Tomorrow is going to be pretty warm, too. And then on Thursday we are expecting rain/sleet/freezing rain before it starts getting cold all over again. Kev comes home on Thursday, and I'm hoping that freezing rain doesn't make that 2 hour drive too awful. 

Lately I've been obsessed with acquiring rhinestones. No idea why, but I've gotten a LOT of them lately. I did have a plan for the diamond shaped ones, though. I've had it in my mind for quite some time to do solid stones on every nail, and on Monday I actually took the time to do it.

OMG, it took forever! It was so time consuming that I only managed to do the one hand. My real plan was to do my left hand on Monday, take a break and then do my right hand on Tuesday. Once the doc's office called and wanted me to come in on Tuesday, that plan went out the window. Since I didn't want to spend the entire night doing my right hand, I did the left, took pics and an hour later removed it so I could do something else to wear when I was out and about yesterday.

That's depressing to take all that time painstakingly applying one stone at a time only to take it off the same day. Lamers.

I'm also ridiculous enough to try to save the little bastards when I take them off. Nuts. I think I paid $2.49 for 1200, and I'm trying to save them? Seriously? I think I managed to salvage about 50 of them before I pulled my head out of my ass, smacked myself and gave up.

Personally, I think it looks amazing. It was a real glitter-fest in person. I took the pic a smidge closer than usual just trying to capture all that blinginess.

As much as I loved it, I don't know if I'd attempt to do full coverage with the rhinestones again. It just takes way too long to do. 

At some point tonight I need to do a soakoff and reapplication of my nails. Last night I spent a couple of hours playing with foils, once again trying to get the damn things to not get ruined by topcoat. I had bought one of the gel topcoats that need light curing awhile back because somebody said those work on the foils. Um, no, they don't. I also tried some DuBonne gel that I got years ago for doing gel nail extensions, but that didn't work either. So now I'm sitting with partially scraped off gold foil on 2 nails with the other 8 nekkid. Super attractive.

If any of you know what actually works on foils without ruining them, please speak up!! I've been trying for over a year with the damn things without success.

Color me foiled (pun intended) and frustrated.

 

RHINESTONED IT UP!

I'm happy to report that the cold snap has ended, at least for now. It's always funny how balmy 32 feels after a week of subzero. Of course then it snowed about 5 inches, but even that is better than the cold.

Kev is on his way home after being gone for 10 days. He isn't usually gone for such a long stretch so I'm looking forward to having him back. Poor guy won't get much of a chance to be lazy, though.....that Christmas tree needs to come down. While I do like my tree up until the week after New Year's, even I'm starting to get tired of looking at it. There isn't much I can accomplish on my own because I can't carry the storage bins in from the garage. 

For some reason I just started cleaning/rearranging random things the past few days.  I cleaned out and organized under the spare bathroom sink, cleaned out and rearranged the pots, pans and plastics in the kitchen. Today I decided to clean out the closet in the hallway, my bathroom and the spare bedroom.  I also went through my jeans and pulled some for Goodwill and rearranged all of my shoes. Just a weird, random bunch of cleaning for no apparent reason. I do feel accomplished, though!

My motivation seems to have returned. My inspiration is on the rise, too. I can thank my CNS contact person Shannah for that. I was starting to think they weren't going to use me anymore, but I got a message the other night asking for some specific designs for a print magazine I've never heard of. I'm assuming it's an industry magazine and won't mention its name for now.

It felt really good to have to do more than one mani at a time. I did have a few things already on file that I sent along, but here's one I did for them. 

I had a lot of fun doing this. Unfortunately I wasn't clever enough to make it the last mani of the night or I would have left it on. I have pretty good luck with rhinestones staying on, and it would have been fun to wear this to work tomorrow.

I forgot I had this pink, Essie Muchi Muchi. I love a good baby pink. In my stash, this one is actually the first one I numbered and swatched in my Helmer. Then I just used topcoat and applied pink and clear rhinestones. 

Super cute, I think. This is def something I'll try again, probably with different colors or maybe more rows or something. I don't know. It won't be anytime soon, but I'll keep it in mind.

I wish I had been smart enough to do a picture tutorial for it. NailIt magazine has told me to submit any tutorials I do, and I never think of it until I'm done. 

Sometimes I swear my fake blonde has gone to my real brain.