Catchy Name Needed

 I was mentioning that I'm having trouble juggling everything this month - part of that was sleep deprivation, so I'm not making any hasty decisions - but I'm thinking at the moment that it may be Holidailies that are going to go. Or at least, worrying about regular posting there is going to go. We'll see.

(One of these days I'm going to lose momentum on the nail blog and never post to it again, based on past history. But I've been posting practically every day for a couple of years now, so we'll see about that, too. Right now I'm still enjoying it.)

 I've just washed my hair, and I've got bare nails and I think I've decided what polish is going on. Tuesday is the start of my work-week, or at least this week it is. And I have to go in relatively early, too, so there's no question of me being able to do some of this when I get up. So expect a rambly entry here, between coats of nail polish.

I know some of you guys know already, and I'm sure others don't, that I have a nail blog. (It's called "Delicious Color" which was a play on mellicious/delicious, see, although "mellicious" itself was just a silly pun in the first place. I increasingly wish I'd thought up a better name, but eh.) I started out just putting up the occasional entry, but for the last year or more I've been posting really regularly, practically every day. Most posts are just a picture of a polish and a swatch, and I talk a little (or occasionally a lot) about the polish in question. I have a really large number of nail polishes - like, many hundreds - so basically the blog has just become my personal reference work so I can remember what's what. I do have some readers but I've never particularly sought them out, and I don't do fancy swatches or try to get PR merchandise or anything. Sometimes I talk about makeup and stuff like that - the last post yesterday was about eyeshadow, which is probably a first.

I've been gradually slowing down on nail polish purchases, since I already have more than I can possibly wear, but I've made up for it by really being obsessed with (mostly expensive) moisturizers for the last couple of years. My latest obsession seems to be fancy (and also expensive) hair products. I bought some Bumble and Bumble stuff and then Sephora had $20 off a $50 purchase for VIBs (which is, like, their frequent buyer program - I hardly ever go into a Sephora store but I do buy far too much online) so I bought some Briogeo scalp stuff that Kathleen Lights was talking about. (That's here, and it's a sponsored post, for the record. I had used Briogeo products before so I didn't care, but I don't want to link to that without saying so!)

I don't remember Sephora doing that $20 off $50 thing before, but it's actually a really smart thing to do this time of year, now that I think about it, because you could use it on a gift or you could use it for a gift for yourself like I did! I don't think I would have bought what I bought at full price. Kathleen had a code, too, and I was looking at that but then I remembered the Sephora promo and I realized that that was going to end up being cheaper from Sephora, even though what I bought was less than $50. (I added a sale item to get it up to $50.)

I keep my nails cut pretty short these days but I still wear whatever crazy nail polish I want. My employer does not judge my choice of nail polish! I took a shoebox-sized box of nail polish with me when I went up to my aunt's a couple of weeks ago - I figured my cousins would be around, and they were - and got them to take most of it off my hands (figuratively speaking). I forget that a lot of the nail polish I have is what other people would consider "out there" - some of my cousins were like, "Oh, I would never wear blue" - or purple, for god's sake, I think of purple as being middle of the road. (I think I'm about to put Zoya Carter on, actually, which is purple and glittery and probably they would think is out there, too.)

I've just put base-coat on so far. I noticed as I did that that my nails are stained pretty badly - it probably has to do with all the orange polish I wore all during October while the playoffs were going on. (Or maybe it was something else - blue is usually the worst staining culprit.)

(If I get a decent picture of Carter, I'll put it up later.) (Later: that's here.)

P.S. I just realized that my fifth blogiversary went by on the nail blog without me thinking to say anything about it. Not that it's a big deal, but I have kept up with it for a pretty long time!

It's already the last day of Holidailies - Epiphany. Not being of a religious persuasion, I have nothing particular to say about Epiphany itself. However, I like the idea of the 12 days of Christmas and I sort of wish more people would extend the celebration of Christmas after Christmas, rather than before. But I know that's probably a vain wish. A lot of Americans seem to think that "Boxing Day" means "the day you box up all your Christmas stuff for next year" and for some reason I find that depressing. I took all my decorations down gradually and I think I have them all down now (unlike a couple of years when my tree has still been up well into January) but I didn't even start taking them down until several days after Christmas, just on general principle.

Holidailies was pretty easy for me this year. The things I wrote may not have been the most fascinating in the world, but at least I didn't agonize over what to write like I have some years. And while I was a reader again this year - after skipping last year - Jette and Chip have gotten the process where it's pretty painless, too. I like doing it because I always find some journals I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Sue of My Incredibly Unremarkable Life wrote today about the importance of people detailing their everyday lives, and I agree with that. In fact, she says she was the person who wrote Dear Abby and fussed at her about telling somebody to throw away their grandmother's diary, which I remember reading at the time and really appreciating! (Dear Abby - who I think is actually Abby's daughter nowadays, isn't she? - frequently has her head up her ass, quite frankly, as far as I can tell, but she still has quite a lot of readers, presumably, in that ever-shrinking group of People Who Still Read Newspapers.)


Oh, speaking of People Who Still Read Newspapers, I have rejoined that group to some extent, after a very long hiatus. I gave up trying to read the newspaper (offline) years ago because I just ended up with lots of mostly-unread newsprint cluttering up my house. I say "to some extent" I rejoined because I got a Sunday-only subscription. I don't do very well about reading day-to-day but I do seem to like to read the Sunday paper, still. Even if it's Wednesday or so before I get around to reading some of it. (Besides, the Sunday paper has all the good ads and things.)

OK, I have to go be useful now. Holidailies people, stop by and visit once in a while!

I wrote in the paper journal while I was gone, and I'm going to transcribe this just as I wrote it, and probably make it a "friends-only" entry so I won't have to worry about if I wrote anything bad about my aunt, or whether people want their names online, or whatever. So all (three) of my LJ friends will get the pleasure of reading the unedited version, I guess. (Not that I probably wrote anything very bad about my aunt anyway. At the moment I'm more pissed off at my mother.)

( There's more! )

I've been trying to figure out what to do with my various "web presences" - I really didn't intend to do anything with this one, originally, but I think I'm going to use it to just talk about my day when I'm in the mood to. I've been doing that some in my Diary-X journal, but somehow it doesn't feel right. My brain seems to think that "real" journal entries are supposed to be a little more organized than that. So, fine, I'll do it here.

Then I also have a couple of weblogs, now - one which is political, which I've been keeping for several months, and a brand-new one devoted to quilting (because I was complaining about there not being enough quilting blogs - see the latest journal entry - so I figured I ought to start one, right?) - it has exactly one entry at the moment. Don't expect too much there for a while.

So... well, today I worked. That was very exciting. It was slow, naturally, being the Friday before a holiday, but since I'm only working two days next week I need to be caught up. (I did manage to spend some time in chat, up in the afternoon. I am the Chat Princess, after all; I have an image to keep up.)

After some, um, time alone with my husband after work (if you know what I mean)... well, I haven't done much, really. I've been surfing around and reading the board and watching baseball (the Astros won again! yay!) and drinking sangria. A very unexciting evening (other than the sex, at least), which is okay with me. And I have absolutely nothing out of the ordinary planned for the weekend. Sounds kind of fabulous. Next weekend I'm going to be gone the whole weekend-plus (Thursday to Sunday) so a little time at home is a good thing.