There are a lot of cute/cool shops and restaurants (on Sunday Taylor and I had brunch at a place with MULTIPLE vegetarian options, I felt so spoiled) on Main, although I haven’t often gone out there because taking the bus is a hassle. With the new Canada Line train it’s a lot easier- there are a couple stops where you can just walk over to Main from Cambie. I like to walk on all the side streets and get into a jealous rage about WHY DON’T I HAVE A HOUSE HERE??? Oh, right, because I don’t have any money. There are houses for less than a million though. Like how great is this one???

DAT TURRET. Five bedrooms, three fireplaces, a master wing. SOMEONE BUY ME THIS RN. It’s actually a little further east than I like but whatever, I can live with it. $998,000 is less than a million, right?

Or house about renting a house? Only $2,200 a month for this charmer (not really that charming).

Since I can’t afford to buy or apparently even rent a house in the neighborhood I did the next best thing: I BOUGHT A TICKET IN A CHARITY HOME LOTTERY. The grand prize is 2.4 million dollars in cash (or gold, lol) OR a huge suburban mansion, OR a not-particularly-huge but still nice and well-located house right in the neighborhood I like (plus $200,000 and a couple cars).

The drawing is this Thursday and I’m using all my powers of positive thinking to try and win. Of course now that I’ve found that green turreted house I’ll have to decide if I want the prize home OR the cash. WOW MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

Sooooooo I’ve been busy recently with all kindsa stuff, here’s a small update on a few things.

Crafts
One of the custom banners I sold during my CAT AID sale was this delightful gem.

Last week the woman who bought it posted it on tumblr and it got almsot 2,000 notes. The picture was reblogged by STFU Conservatives and people FREAKED OUT over it. My etsy was blowin’ up, by which I mean I sold two and lots of people added my shop to their favourites. I even got a hater on tumblr saying my work was overpriced and juvenile and everyone should just make it themselves, it’s so easy! lol, whateverrrrrrrrrr fool.

I’m also still working on my resolution to make non-custom banners and over the weekend I finished this one.

C.R.E.A.M. (Cats Rule Everything Around Me) in gold with the same printed cat paper on the back as I used on the Forever Alone banner everyone loves so much. And speaking of cats…

Claire
Last week I took Claire into the vet for a fructosamine test and guess what… she’s great! Her blood sugar levels are good, her diabetes is in control, and her insulin dose (which is HALF what it was before she went into the hospital) is keeping her that way. So like, TAKE THAT, random internet creep who thought I should just let her die/put her down. WHO’S DIGNIFIED NOW???

Life
Life is just happening all the time! Sym is awesome, the dogs are just so doggish all the time (so is Claire, actually), and Taylor is as handsome and amazing as ever. Even when I’m down they all make me feel so much better. I could say more about how much I love my little family but I would probably go on forever and I have to get back to work soon. But first, some fine pet pictures from my phone.

Enjoy the rest of your Monday!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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?