French Manicures and Cell Phones

My DH and I attended a beautiful beach wedding last weekend... my cousin Kristy was married on the beach near Charleston... Kristy made a beautiful bride... they wore flowing clothes and feet were bare... I loved it!

DH noticed Kristy's French pedicured feet and manicured hands at the wedding and told me he thought my nails would look nice like that... for SOME reason my fingernails have started to grow... they never have before... my lifestyle is generally not conducive to manicured nails... I type for a living, do my own housework, have a large number of hobbies that require the use of my hands, and like to dig in the dirt... I've always kept them neatly and very shortly trimmed, but for whatever reason, they've begun to grow and look pretty nice... my nails tend to be kinda thin and easily broken so since they are growing, I decided to purchase a bottle of nail hardener and see what happens.

When DH made the remark about the French manicure, I thought, "Why not... let's give it a try!" Made a stop at Walgreen's and bought a French manicure kit and headed home to give it a try...

In the meantime... I received my new, upgraded Cosmo cell phone from Verizon and set in to learn all the bells and whistles it offered... the evening before I had downloaded an app that would assist me in transferring all my phone numbers stored in my old phone to my new one when it arrived... didn't work... I did something wrong I think so called technical support... followed their advice... SEVERAL times to no avail, they finally gave up on me and suggested that I go to one of their retail stores and have someone do the transfer for me there... I agreed, gave up on transferring phone numbers and got back to my fingernails...


Taped the little adhesive guides that come in the French manicure kit to the tips of my nails and got out the bottle of white French manicure nail polish to do the tips...

DH became interested in this process and after observing for a few minutes offered to paint my tips... "I'm pretty good at painting model airplanes and stuff, I bet I could do THAT!" he said... I offered him the polish and my taped up hand... half an hour later, my nail tips were white... as were much of the tips of my entire fingers! and a drop or two on one of my knuckles! Q-Tips and nail polish remover cleaned up the excess and the tips were looking pretty good...

Topped the entire nail with the "natural" French translucent polish... lookin' good! Then topped 'em off with a layer of clear top coat...

OK so there's still a little "residue" of white here and there around the nail beds... and the cuticles... and kinda stuck on the little hang nail areas... but it ain't bad!

DH said next time I want a French manicure, he'll just give me the money and let me get a professional to do it!

Meanwhile I transferred those numbers by hand from one cell phone to another in about 45 minutes this morning... after spending two hours on the phone trying to get technology to do it for me... go figure!

Just a Good Ol' Boy

My friend has been battling a difficult employer for years...

The director of the library where she works is an ego-maniac who can do no wrong in his own eyes and has been a thorn in the flesh of many employees for quite some time.

A county library is run by the county commissioners and the county manager and the hiring and firing and employee complaints and such must go through them through a maze of protocol and hierarchy... once you are hired through the maze of red tape in a county government situation it takes almost an act of God to get un-hired!

Employees have complained for years about the mismanagement of the library, but much of their words have fallen on deaf ears... it's a "good ol' boy" way of life and if you're on the "good ol' boy" payroll you can get by with a lot before anybody listens.

Somebody finally listened! Good Ol' Boy library manager has been offered a position as assistant manager at a library halfway across the continent. Apparently not enough "evidence" to out and out fire the man, so he must have been offered an ultimatum... "move on and save face, they've got the goods on you, buddy!"

I'm just speculating here, I have no facts to back up my thoughts, but I've seen how local government can operate, I was in the newspaper business in that town for 10 years... I observed much of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" mentality that exists in a small town... and even in a larger town...

Politics doesn't seem to be much different, whether it's a local school board, a church committee, or a nation... it's not always the most qualified people who run things, it's the ones who kiss the most butts and scratch the most backs! Most of the time it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know that gets you up the political ladder.

Sad really...

Cigarettes and smoking

I smoke, I admit it, I like it...

Kitty doesn't... she hates it for many reasons, the main one being that her mother smoked her whole life and died of emphysema a few years ago, Kitty watched her drown in her own lungs... a horrible thing to see...

She also hates the smell, the nastiness, and more.

I understand that, I generally don't smoke around her, she respects the fact that I do and doesn't preach at me or anything. Another thing we agree to disagree about.

This morning our conversation steered to cigarettes and the way they've changed since their invention years and years ago. We discussed the fact that there are many ingredients in cigarettes nowadays that weren't there years ago, we agree that the additives that tobacco companies add to their product are more likely the causes of most of the cancers and diseases these days rather than the tobacco... years ago, for example everybody smoked, around their children, in their homes, on TV... and you didn't hear much about cancer or breathing problems associated with smoking... it wasn't until "someone" decided they were "bad" for you that a "conspiracy" seemed to be born... and the tobacco companies seemed to be in on the conspiracy of making cigarettes even more addictive and adding poisonous ingredients to harm our health. I'm not kidding... I think it's a conspiracy!

I did a little research on the added ingredients and was not surprised to find some of the things I found... makes me want to grow my own tobacco or at least go to the "natural" forms of the nicotine sticks I love so much.

Here's a small example of some of the things I read:

There are more than 4,000 ingredients in a cigarette other than tobacco. Common additives include yeast, wine, caffeine, beeswax and chocolate. Here are some other ingredients:

Ammonia: Household cleaner
Angelica root extract: Known to cause cancer in animals
Arsenic: Used in rat poisons
Benzene: Used in making dyes, synthetic rubber
Butane: Gas; used in lighter fluid
Carbon monoxide: Poisonous gas
Cadmium: Used in batteries
Cyanide: Deadly poison
DDT: A banned insecticide
Ethyl Furoate: Causes liver damage in animals
Lead: Poisonous in high doses
Formaldehyde: Used to preserve dead specimens
Methoprene: Insecticide
Megastigmatrienone: Chemical naturally found in grapefruit juice
Maltitol: Sweetener for diabetics
Napthalene: Ingredient in mothballs
Methyl isocyanate: Its accidental release killed 2000 people in Bhopal, India in 1984
Polonium: Cancer-causing radioactive element

Why, if there's not some sort of conspiracy, are these things and more, added to a cigarette?

Makes you wonder...