Hi There!

Oops!  I forgot I was doing this blogging thing AGAIN.  It's hard to remember to write up a blog post when I already post every thought I have on facebook...

FAIL!

Oops!  I forgot I was doing this whole blogging thing again.  Well, you haven't really missed much in my absence.  I'm just doin' what I do.

Peace out.  I'll check in later when I think of something interesting to say....

Gelish Manicure: Undone

I decided to remove the gelish finger nails on Tuesday and replace them with some patriotic nail art instead.

Here is how you remove gelish nails:

Method 1: Soak a cotton ball in nail polish remover, hold it on your nail, then wrap the whole thing in foil and wait ten minutes.  I did it this way over the weekend to remove a troublesome peeling thumb nail.  Works well, though I can't imagine doing all ten fingers this way.  Once you foiled one hand, you would never have the dexterity left to foil the other hand... right?  (Umm... yes, I realize I probably put way too much foil on that finger, but whatever).

Method 2:  I bought these nifty finger wraps that look sort of like bandaids - they have a pad that you soak in nail polish remover and the wrappy part is made out of that medical tape material that doesn't stick to anything but itself.  These worked well, and I was able to do both hands at one time, so I think it was worth the expense.  The only down side is that it didn't soak the tips of my nails very well and I ended up having to scrape the polish off those parts.  I think this may be operator error.  Next time I will wrap them over the tips more.  If if still have the problem, I may need to to resort to doing one hand at a time with the foil method.

So, after I removed the nails, I did a coat of the gelish foundation and two coats of the top coat, with no color in between.  This gave me a really good foundation for my nail art, featured below.

I'm taking the flags off tonight and I will paint them a different color, but this shouldn't effect the gelish foundation underneath.  I'm curious to see how long it will last??  (And will I leave it on long enough to find out, or will I redo everything once again??)

Gelish Manicure: Day Five

It's been five days and the gelish manicure is holding up well. In fact, it has proven to be nearly indestructible, with just a few exceptions:

1. It cannot withstand nail biting... but, it makes nail biting significantly harder so hopefully it will help me break that nasty habit.

 2. It cannot withstand actively trying to scrape it off. (I got mod podge on my nails on Saturday and was trying to scrape the dried podge off my thumb and ended up popping the nail right off!)

 3. A couple of nails are starting to peel up on the edges where the gelish "bonded" to the skin surrounding my nail instead of the nail itself.

So, right now there are three nails that need to be redone (the bitten nail and two peely nails). I plan to redo those tonight, but I'm tempted to remove the whole manicure and paint my nails red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July tomorrow. Or, I could potentially do another gelish mani with the lighter color nail polish I bought and then go red, white, and blue on top. (Or, I wonder if I could do clear nails with just the foundation gel and top coat??) I'm hesitant to take off the polish early because I really wanted to give it a full two-week test drive. I guess I have all day to make the decision. Yes, ALL DAY. The day is going by s-l-o-w-l-y.

Gelish Manicure: Day One

I'm super excited about my new beauty endeavor: soak off manicures!  Yay!  A soak off is basically the same thing as a shellac, except you use special nail polish that cures under a lamp.  I got obsessed with interested in the idea when Sephora released its soak off kit a few weeks ago.  I was going to buy it right away, but I did some research (at the urging of my dear friend Sarah) and I discovered a lot of different brands making the same thing.  I decided to go with the gelish system.  It was less expensive than Sephora and there are many more polish colors to choose from.  For my curing lamp, I decided to spend the extra money and spring for an LED lamp instead of a UV lamp.  The LED lamp cures faster and you don't need to worry about getting skin cancer from the UV light.  (Not sure if that's a myth or not, but I don't want to take my chances.  Finger cancer?  No thanks!)

The best thing about the soak off manicure is that it lasts for two weeks, totally chip free.  I was so sick of my nail polish chipping off within a day of painting.  My nails always looked like crap, and I thought it was kind of unprofessional looking.  My mom recently started getting shellac nails and she now swears by them, but I don't want all the hassle of going to the nail salon every three weeks get them.  (Is it just me, or do other people feel really awkward in those places?)  In conclusion, I'm really hoping this works out for me!  The polish was super easy to apply.  The trick is to seal the ends of your nails well so the polish doesn't peel up.  Time will tell if I did that part correctly.  Speaking of time, here is my manicure, day one:

Don't  you love that color!!??  I'll report back on how this works out!  Though easy to apply, they are supposedly a bitch to take off, so I'm really hoping to get a full two weeks out of them.

FYI: I saved a lot of money by buying all the pieces of the system a la cart from Amazon and Sally Beauty Supply.  If you're interested in trying this out, leave a comment and I can tell you what I bought where.  I also discovered that before you order anything from Sally, join their mailing list.  They send out 10-20% off coupons almost weekly.  Oh, and look into joining their customer rewards club.  It cost $5, but it saves a lot of money in the long run if you are buying something expensive like this.

How is it only Thursday?

I need the weekend to come ASAP!  I'm feeling very creative this week, but I'm too exhausted by the time I get home from work to do anything.  I have a feeling it's going to be a very productive weekend!!  Well, I guess that depends on how you define "productive."  I'll probably spend the weekend marathoning season three of Battlestar Galactica while furiously knitting away at my mother's doomed-to-be-belated birthday present... which sounds super productive to me!!

Getting Serious About Romance

As many of you may already know, I have been half-heartedly attempting to write a romance novel for several years now.  It's not a huge secret that my guilty pleasure is reading trashy romance novels, and, every time I finish one I think to myself, "gosh, I could do that!"  Sadly, I can never seem to get out of the outlining phase of the writing process.  Is it possible that writing a novel really is harder than it looks??  ha ha.

So, since I'm not really doing anything else meaningful with my life right now, I think it's time that I get serious about writing this novel.  What do y'all think?  My mom thinks it's a good idea, though I don't think she's exactly thrilled about the idea of her daughter writing erotic fiction...  (Mom, I promise I'll send you a redacted copy when it gets published!!)  There are a bunch of books on Amazon about how to write romance novels (even dirty ones!)  Maybe it will help to read through one of those to get me inspired to really get started?  And maybe I should pick out a basic creative writing book as well?  I once attended a creative writing workshop in high school, but I haven't really had any training for it beyond that.

... or maybe I'm talking crazy and I will just continue to fruitlessly outline for another few years before I finally give this up?

Who Wants to Win a Camera??

So, if you follow me on facebook or twitter, you know I'm obsessed with entering contests to win awesome free stuff!  You can bet that I'm going to be sharing them with you because I want you to win free stuff too.  It so easy to win - usually you just need to like a company on facebook or tweet about the giveaway - simple stuff like that and you can win awesome prizes!  Like this one:

a Rafflecopter giveaway
Good luck!!

p.s. Yes, I did get a whopping 25 entries for sharing this on my blog... but little do they know that I would have shared it for free! Just 'cuz I lov sharing the giveaway love!

A Clean Slate

Welcome (back!) to my blog, friends!  I started blogging here back in 2005 and kept it up for about four or five years, until I finally stopped blogging.  There were two major reasons I stopped blogging.  First, it seemed that all of my blog posts took on a negative tone, and that's not the image that I wanted to project to the world.  Second, I started the blog as a way to keep in touch with family and friends, and when everyone I knew was on facebook, it seemed redundant to keep a blog as well.  (I suppose a third reason is that I also have a second knitting blog, that I have kept up to date with).

So, why am I back?  I've decided there is more I want to share with the world than I can contain in a facebook status update or that I can confine to the themes of a knitting blog.  A lot of what I want to share is semi-domestic stuff like cooking and crafts, so I toyed around with the idea of starting a dedicated crafting blog, but I ultimately decided that would be too much work.  I don't want to feel like I have to do crafts because I need something to blog about.  Conversely, I don't want to feel like I have to blog because I need to maintain my audience and build my SEO and all that crap.  I just want a casual creative outlet that I can share with real life friends and blog-world friends alike.

And why did I delete the old posts?  Trust me, that was so hard to do!  There were some real gems in there!  But I just decided that the past is the past and I wanted a clean slate.  There is really no need for me or my readers to relive the misery of law school, right?  Right.  And I'll try to keep the misery of being a lawyer to a minimum.  Don't want to clog up the new RSS feed with too much angst.  :)

Au Revoir!  (Until I see you again!)