Catchy Name Needed

I didn't get around to writing an entry on the 3rd, mostly because I spent way too long playing with the new nail polish that showed up from a Black Friday sale and then writing an entry in my nail blog about it. (That's here.) I've resisted the impulse to use my nail polish blog for Holidailies - somehow it doesn't feel right - but I have been really, really steadily posting there for most of this year. I started this project where I talk about my polishes a couple at a time. I went all the way around the nail wheel by color, posting once or often twice a day, and now I'm working on the things I missed the first time and re-doing pictures I wasn't happy with and things like that. There were a lot of pictures I wasn't happy with so that may occupy me for a good while longer at this rate.

I got a new iPhone for my birthday, back in April. It's my second one and I had the first one for five years - man, that's forever in internet time. It was an iPhone 4 and it was seriously getting unusable by the end - like, most of the apps were refusing to update and stuff like that. I justified the new one (mostly to myself, although of course theoretically since it was a gift it came from Rob) because I also had an even older camera that had also crapped out. It was a 10-year-old Canon and I figured by getting the iPhone it was killing two birds with one stone, since I'd heard how much better the cameras are in the new generation. It was effectively a new phone and a new camera in one.

What I got was an iPhone SE, which in case you're not already aware is basically the guts of an iPhone 6 stuffed somehow into the case of an iPhone 5. I didn't really want the bigger footprint of the 6 so it seemed like a good compromise, and it was quite a lot cheaper. Of course now there's the 7 and all that is theoretically obsolete anyway, but I don't care. It's a helluva big upgrade from the 4 and the 10-year-old camera, let me tell you. And we've recently put daylight bulbs in our living room (they're so bright Rob doesn't even like to turn them on) and I discovered that if I turn all of those lights on and take my pictures in the living room, they come out really well - or well, much, much better than my old ones, anyway. I don't spend enough time futzing around with my pictures to get anything like professional-quality pictures, but at least I'm up to "decent amateur" status now.


(Hmm, I don't even have a nail polish icon. That seems like a significant oversight.)

From nonelvis :

1. Stop talking about politics for a moment or two.
2. Post a reasonably-sized picture in your LJ, NOT under a cut tag, of something pleasant, such as an adorable kitten, or a fluffy white cloud, or a bottle of booze. Something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS.
3. Include these instructions, and share the love.




I think I posted this one last year sometime, but I don't care, because I like it. And, kittens! And also because I posted about my grandma yesterday and that made me all nostalgic again.

My grandma's name was Maedelle. I am not completely sure if it was originally Mae Dell, and it just got squished together over the years, or if they named her that from the beginning. That name definitely belongs to that East Texas school of double names, in any case, which has mostly vanished nowadays. (I always remember that for years she had a hairdresser, a woman, whose name was Cecil Rae.)

Maedelle was a bit of a character. When she died, in 2000 - age 89 - my cousin Pat wrote a piece for the local paper detailing some of her eccentricities. One was their house, which rambled all over - you had to go down a few stairs, for example, to get to what Grandma called the "sleeping porch" - which may have originally been a regular porch, but by the time I became old enough to remember had been enclosed. Come to think of it, I'm sure it was originally outside, because I remember that for a long time there were still windows on the inside. My grandfather was (a) very low-key and (b) adored her, and so he pretty much let her do whatever she wanted. Later the porch my sister and I are standing on here also got enclosed, as an add-on to the kitchen.

She loved to cook. She was a great cook, in a very country, fried-food-heavy sort of way. At my grandparents' house, the big meal of the day was what they called dinner and which was at what most people nowadays would call lunchtime. I remember "the men" coming home at noon for dinner - I guess it must have been the men who worked for Papa selling tractors. Then Grandma put the leftovers in the oven where they stayed all afternoon (yeah, I know, botulism and all that, but I don't remember anybody ever getting sick) until they were warmed up again for supper.

I suppose the meals when we were there were probably bigger than usual, but what I remember was that there was always a helluva lot of food. More than one meat, several vegetables, rolls, dessert. Usually there was this thing called "congealed salad" which I always hated, but which was jello mixed with whipped cream or sour cream and fruit or nuts and then refrigerated until it, well, congealed. And, oh yeah, cakes and pies and cookies, always. She always left batter in the bottom of the bowl for us when she made cakes. And I still can't see a chocolate meringue pie without thinking of her, to this day.