Author: Tanie

I have been so insanely busy recently (more on that later) that I literally haven’t had the time to paint my nails. Last night I squeeze out a free minute and threw on a couple (okay, 27,000) coats of my newest polish.

OPI Fresh Frog of Bel Air
I was so into this colour when I originally say it that it pains me to say this, but I don’t love it. I mean it’s okay from afar but I’m close I’m not into it. I should have put it over another colour, but I don’t have a green that matches well enough with it, and I didn’t want to put it over black- although after I’d put on the first 3,000 coats I was looking at swatches of it online and I saw it over black and I loved it. OH WELL, I guess I’ll chalk this up as a learning experience.

Last Saturday Sym and I went out shopping and had a mini TREAT YO SELF DAY, except instead of fragrances, mimosas and fine leather goods, it was clothing basics, french fries and one ridiculous item each.

Sym needed some new jeans (in a shocking twist she chose skinny jeans, something she’s been adamantly opposed to for five years) and t-shirt, but what she was really excited about was this…. jumpsuit? onesie? idk what the scientific name is but she calls it her rapping outfit, and while she was trying it on in the change room she threw on her Tokidoki boots and floral fake Raybans and broke it down for me.

I got a bunch of plain, boring clothes- white tee, black leggings, grey tank, grey henley (remember in the summer when I was going to start wearing colours again? HAHAHAHAHAHA). It was all stuff I NEEDED (my old grey tank top had a hole right in the chest) but none of it was very fun. Then I found these Tom Haverford shoes at Winners.

AMAZING. I can’t wait until this godforsaken snow stops so I can wear them (yes, I’m over the snow already). I also found a bunch of OPI polishes from the Muppet collection there, so if you are in Vancouver and looking for discount glitter they have it. I got Fresh Frog of Bel Air, which is great because this is the one I really wanted; in fact, I had been planning to go buy a bottle at full price that day!

For us no trip to the mall is complete without a visit to New York Fries. Sym just gets plain fries but I always get the veggie works- fries with cheese sauce, sour cream, tomatoes and green onion. So delicious! It’s probably a good thing that I don’t go to the mall too often.

This winter had been really unbelievably mild so far, so when I saw that the forecast for this past weekend was all snow snow snow I was a little excited. Unfortunately even though it snowed on Friday night and off and on Saturday, it was also very sunny and by Sunday morning all we had left was a few sad patches of snow.

Not very impressive. However, on Monday Mother Nature stepped up her game.

That’s more like it!! Of course I was working and couldn’t go out and enjoy it but Taylor and the dogs had fun.

It stopped snowing fairly quickly and by the afternoon it already looked mostly like that first picture again, but that didn’t stop every fool in the city from throwing giant handfuls of that horrible blue chemical salt stuff all over the place. That stuff is the worrrrrrrrst, it kills plants and is toxic for pets, I don’t see why people can’t just shovel their walks, especially since we only got like, AN INCH of snow! Two Christmases ago Taylor and I went to Kelowna to visit his family, and there is WAYYYY more snow up there than there ever is here, and yet NO ONE in his moms’ neighbourhood salts, the just shovel and deal with it. I wish people here would do that.

We put booties on the dogs every time we took them out but I still had to wash their little salted feet, and my hands got totally chapped raw just from pulling their boots on and off. In fact, even though I washed my hands every time, at some point I put my fingers in my mouth and I got total salt-mouth and now I have an ulcer on my tongue O___o So gross, and I’m probably poisoned and going to die now.

ANYWAY. At least Kichou enjoyed himself (he looks grumpy here but he’s THRILLED).

Soooo you know how I made pretty romantic Valentine’s Day banners as part of my goal? They’re great and all, but what about the people who frickin’ hate Valentine’s Day? What about the people who thinks is cheesy commercialized crap, or maybe aren’t in a relationship, or think mushy couples are disgusting and want to shout it from the rooftops? Well DON’T WORRY, because I got you covered.

Forever Alone
I knew I wanted to make this banner, but I didn’t know how to make it special. Ombré wasn’t right, some fancy new typeface wasn’t right… but what was??? Last night I was just about to assemble it all plain with black paper on the back when a bolt of inspiration struck me: CATS. I know, it’s amazing.

Love Stinks
This was another experiment that turned out AMAZING. Originally I was just going to do the regular secondary-colour-on-the-bottom ombré, but something about the phrase “love stinks” paired with the acid-y green colour made me think drips.

Well so far it seems like this week is gonna be as much of a butt as last week was, in fact, I’m going to go ahead and say it: 2012 SUCKS. Bring on the end of the world.

I’ve tried everything I can think of to get out of this funk but every day I feel crabbier and more miserable. Too crabby and miserable to blog, even. I have a bunch of real posts percolating in my brain, waiting to get typed up, but instead I’m going to post the only thing that I can: DOG PICTURES.

I was eating cheese popcorn the other night and Dougal was ON BOARD, like he REALLY wanted some. I don’t share people food with dogs though, so he was out of luck.

Georgie has a faux-fur dog bed under my desk but Claire has been hogging it. Cats are no respecters of property ownership.

Finally a picture of Georgie and I in better times, ie New Year’s Eve, before this turd of a year kicked in. God my hair was fantastic that night. WOULD THAT WE COULD GO BACK TO THOSE HALCYON DAYS.

Hey internet, long time no blog. A WHOLE WEEK I KNOW I’M THE WORST. I hope you all were able to get along without me.

Anyway the reason I didn’t post last week is because not to be over dramatic but every day felt like 100 years in hell and the absolute worst day of my life.

It was my first week back at work after my sweet, sweet Christmas vacation, I had my lady time, I was sick and my dog went insane and peed on the hallway carpet 350,000,000 times.

WHY YOU GOTTA PLAY ME LIKE THAT, DOG??? Anyway I’m all resigned to my fate as a working stiff, recovered from my ailments and yesterday I rented a carpet steamer and cleaned the hallway carpet like, SIX TIMES so it should all be okay now.

One thing I DID do while I wasn’t blogging was work on my new year’s resolutions, of which I only made one, and which I made a very concrete, attainable goal instead of something nebulous and easy to fail at. I said I wanted to make at least two non-custom banners for my etsy shop, every month, so I would have things for sale other than just my custom stuff (I think it looks better to have actual, real items for sale somehow). Anyway last week (while finishing up the last of my custom orders, so if you are waiting on one that hasn’t shipped yet it’ll go out today) I made not two but THREE all-new banners!

Since Valentine’s Day is coming up (part of the reason for my goal was I didn’t want to be blind-sided by holidays like I was by Christmas) I decided to make some cheesy yet lovely and romantical banners. Doing non-custom work also gives me the opportunity to try out new ideas, and for each of these I did something I hadn’t before.

True Love
For this banner I used a double-ombré technique. For my other ombré banners I’ve used a single colour/blend of colours, but for this one I did two separate colours. Starting with a white (diamond) glitter base, I did a pale pink (kunzite) glitter to about halfway up each letter, and then I added a deeper pink (tourmaline) to the bottom ¾” to give it more dimension.

Be Mine
This was the third banner I made and the idea for it just popped into my head. I wasn’t sure how (or if) it would turn out but it looks basically how I pictured it. I used ruby (red) glitter for the letters, and added metallic red confetti hearts to the bottom 1½-2″ of each. I tried to make them look like they’d been scattered randomly, but I actually glued each one in place individually, which did not take ten thousand hours at all.

Always
This is my Harry Potter-inspired banner; I’ve made a couple of custom ones before (Mischief Managed and Expecto Patronum) but this one was all my idea. It’s from The Prince’s Tale chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; if you’ve read it you’ll understand the significance, and if you haven’t well then what is wrong with you? I used this weird, pale gold glitter (which I am now out of) and although I’d originally planned on adding a white/silver ombre to it, in the end I decided to leave it simple. What makes this banner different from others I’ve made is the back; instead of using plain paper I used cream paper printed with the text from relevant passages of the book (I scanned it and printed it out; no books were harmed in the making of this banner!).

I haven’t done my nails in a couple of weeks, not since Taylor’s office holiday party. The day after that was the day of Claire’s medical emergency and I’ve had so many banners to make I haven’t had time, plus all the exacto-knifing involved isn’t exactly polish-friendly.

It hasn’t snowed here at all so I had this idea to do a wintry nail with white & white shimmery polish, plus the silver crackle topcoat. Then I recoloured my hair before I had the chance so any plans for easily-stained pale polishes went out the window.

Hard Candy in The End plus Sally Hansen in Hidden Treasure

I know everyone in the world has already done a Hidden Treasure over black, but I’ve only done it over pastels and tbh, I don’t like it over the black as much. Maybe I’ve just seen it too many time? I did two heavy coats of Hidden Treasure to try to make it more interesting to me but I’m still “meh” about it. I do love this black though; it’s one of the polishes I won last summer and it’s a great glossy black with perfect coverage in just two coats.

Also please take a second to appreciate my excellent gloves (there’s no light inside so I had to go out in the cold to photograph my nails).

I got them in my Christmas stocking and they are the perfect blend of gloves and mittens; warm and cozy (and cashmere!) with the tops on, but easy to flip open AND with flip-open thumbs for when I need finger dexterity. Thanks, Santa!

We didn’t do anything. I mean, we did stuff but we didn’t go out to a club or a party or have people over or anything. Last year Sym was home but this year she was at her dad’s so it was just me, Taylor and the pets. I was actually in a really bad mood, I’m in kind of a bad place, physically pain-wise right now and I was not in the mood to have fun.

So grumpy! I wasn’t going to “get ready” or anything but I figured it might pull me out of my New Year’s funk. I curled my hair and put on makeup and BOOM, mood improved.

The only problem was I used this Moroccan Oil Luminous Hairspray when I was a curling my hair and although it worked well as hairspray, it smelled EXACTLY like a Diaper Genie (if you have Diaper Genie experience then you’ll know why this was an unacceptable situation).

Taylor made us a feast of frozen hors d’oeuvres and I made sparkly pipe cleaner crowns for us to wear, as well as one for the pets. I knew none of them would keep it on so I figured they could share.

Normally Taylor and I watch Anchorman on NYE, but we started our evening so early (I had my first glass of wine at about 5) that we decided to watch both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows first. Apparently I felt like spending my evening bawling my eyes out! We finished those at around 11:50 and took the dogs out for a walk, so we were in the park at midnight. People were screaming and setting off fireworks and we kissed on the street corner, it was nice. When we got home we put in Anchorman but both fell asleep on the couch (although I stayed up long enough to guzzle a couple of bottles of water to counteract the couple bottles of wine I polished off) until 2am, when I managed to get us both to bed.

Happy New Year! I hope you all had as wonderful an evening as us!

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions- I think last year I came up with an idea to do mini-resolutions every month that lasted two months before I got bored. This year I have one resolution: to make at least two non-custom banners for my etsy shop each month, so I don’t get caught unprepared for every holiday. I was going to say I should make one a week, so four a month, but that seemed a bit ambitious. Babysteps, right?

Don’t worry; this isn’t going to be one of those endless year-in-review posts where I recap every single thing I did this year and post all the same pictures over again. idk why people even make those posts, like if people wanted to see everything you did they could just look at your old blog posts. I mean, that’s what they’re for, right? I’m just gonna talk about a few memorable things.

1. I Got Bangs
… by which I mean I cut them myself, just like when I was in middle school.

I still love them, I wear my hair up a lot and it’s nice not to have it all scraped back from my forehead.

2. I Visited the South

Before this year, I’d never been to any part of the United States that wasn’t directly adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. Washington, Oregon, California: that’s it. So in March Taylor and I flew to Memphis, Tennessee to spend a week stuffing our faces with meat and booze. We also had connecting flights on this trip (normally the bane of my life) so technically I was in Utah and Minnesota as well.

3. I Quit Eating Meat
This summer I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and I haven’t eaten meat since.

I’ve also been mostly buying local and/or organic dairy products and eggs. It’s been seven months now, and the only time I REALLY crave meat is when I walk past McDonalds. tbh I don’t even think that counts as meat though.

4. I Moved My Blog

Once I realized that there were ads on my blog that I wasn’t benefitting from when I was paying for a ~premium~ account, I was like I’M OUTTA HERE. Moving the blog was an endless nightmare of GoDaddy said/Dreamhost said and it didn’t get resolved until a FREAKED OUT all over the internet about it. I guess it’s true what they say: the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

5. I Dyed My Hair Blue

My hairstylist was P I S S E D. I don’t really know why I did it, I just thought it would be fun? And it is! I just recoloured it a couple of days ago because it was looking very faded and green.

It was actually quite easy being green.

6. I Cooked Christmas Dinner
It seems silly to recap something I just posted about four days ago, but it was SUPER important to me that it be a success.

I’d never done it before and now that I have I think I might be confident to host other family members at Christmas. Maybe. As long as they don’t want any meat.

Soooo that’s my year. Pretty much the only other thing I did was make a ton of glitter banners, especially in the last couple weeks! Today is the last day of the Cat Aid 25% off sale on my etsy, it finishes tonight at midnight Pacific, so if you’ve been thinking about ordering one NOW IS THE TIME.

One other super important thing that happened this year: Sym turned ten.

Double digits! I can’t believe it! 2001 basically seems like yesterday, what happened to my tiny baby??? She’s so grown up now, maybe it’s time I get a new one…

Our official Christmas Eve Family Portrait. For some sweet outtakes check Taylor’s flickr
Eve

No one wanted to cook Christmas Eve so we got Japanese takeout. Ignore these miserable faces; it was delicious. We did bake though, we made gingerbread cookies and mini chocolate donuts (I used a boxed whoopie pie mix and they turned out great).

There were tree shaped gingerbreads as well but I didn’t get a picture before Santa ate them.

We all opened our traditional Christmas pajamas on Christmas Eve.

Sym and Taylor both got red & green plaid and I got red with white snowflakes. I also got a new bathrobe so I wasn’t expecting to get pajamas. Basically I’m spoiled!

After we ate and decorated cookies and opened our pajamas and took our family portrait we all bundled onto the couch to watch A Christmas Story. We also had the NORAD Santa Tracker on my computer and Sym was getting up every two minutes all evening to check where he was. I tell you, that thing almost screwed us! We didn’t get Sym to bed until around 10:30 and Santa hit Vancouver before eleven! It was nerve-wracking, to say the least.

Day
I told Sym that she wasn’t allowed to wake me up on Christmas morning until AT LEAST seven; two years ago she and Taylor woke me up at 5:30 nd I was not pleased. So guess what time I woke up? FIVE-THIRTY. What the eff. Anyway Sym woke up at like, 3:30, and even though I’d told her she could open her stocking if she woke up early, she didn’t. When I asked her why she said it was because she wanted us all to open our stockings together, as a family. CUE WATERWORKS.

She also paused while opening her own presents to watch Taylor and I opening the gifts she got for us, so she could see our faces. So basically she’s the sweetest child in the world.

Taylor slept the latest, so he’s sleepy here, not stoned. Really.

Sym always gets a ton of presents, from me & Taylor and her dad & stepmom, and all her extended family including about six sets of grandparents. It can get out of control and sometimes I worry that I’m getting into a “present off” with her dad to see who can get her the best stuff. To keep myself in control I set two rules this year: everything from Santa had to fit in her stocking (which it did, except for a bunch of socks), and she would get three present from Taylor and I: something to wear, something to read and something to play with. I got that idea off some blog or the other but I can’t remember which one. Taylor took it a step further and decided we should get each other three gifts as well.

Sym got:
1. a pink sweater with swans from Urban Outfitters (her first clothing item NOT from a children’s’ store/department)
2. Wildwood, by Colin Melloy
3. the Calico Critters Buckley Deer Family and Cozy Cottage

This was an emergency replacement gift because the gift I’d originally ordered for her from Build-a-Bear didn’t arrive in time since apparently they use the most inefficient shipping ever and it takes OVER A MONTH for things to get to Canada from OHIO. idgi.

Taylor got:
1. a Burton Groton jacket (full disclosure: I got it for about 80% off)
2. Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
3. DOMINION, which I thought was a board game but is actually some kind of super nerdy card game which I unfortunately already agreed to play with him

I got:
1. tri-blend ~leisure~ pants from American Apparel
2. a new Kindle!!!
3. hot rollers, although he originally bought the wrong kind so yesterday we went and exchanged them for these ones

We also had all our stocking presents and gifts from our families, but I don’t want to list everything since that’d be pretty tacky. Thank you to everyone though; we all appreciate and love everything! Especially Sym, who still got the crud spoiled out of her with clothes and Playmobils.

The dogs also got presents: for Georgie a stuffed Tiki man and makes weird drumming/chanting noises when squeezed, for Kichou a cool tank top, and for Dougal a theoretically indestructible bone for chewing (we’ll have to wait and see how indestructible it is, he just opened it today since he spent Christmas with Clay).

Taylor’s moms sent them edible rawhide Christmas cards. Georgie especially loves them and has been carrying them everywhere and burying them in beanbag chairs and blankets.

After presents I made a delicious brunch of goat cheese and chive mini frittatas, fried potatoes and chia seed toast, plus mimosas. SO MANY MIMOSAS.

I’m not ashamed to say I got trashed and then laid on the couch watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks all afternoon.

Dinner
This year was the first time in my life that I attempted to make a big Christmas dinner. I planned on it two years ago but I was so tired from my 5:30 wake up call that I slept all day and we had potato chips for dinner. This year I was DETERMINED to do it.

the menu:
– a Field Roast celebration roast (I’m so glad I became a vegetarian before I ever had to cook a turkey!) and gravy (from a packet, but it was POUTINE gravy and therefore delicious)

-roasted carrots & broccoli

-pierogis (Taylor is of Ukrainian descent)
-yorkshire puddings (I’m of British descent)

-mashed potatoes

Sooooooo basically everything was PERFECT. Okay, the carrots could have been a little more cooked but they were still good. The celebration roast was delicious and easy to cook; I mean it’s already cooked so I just basted it with some oil and heated it for 35 minutes. There were barely even any leftovers, Taylor ate so much he needed a side plate just for his veggies!

I’m so happy with how everything went this Christmas; I just really wanted it to be fun and amazing for my little family and almost melt-down free, and I think I pulled it off!