The Ear Infection, The Bathroom Reno, The Fumigation and the Colour Red

Pictured: What My Infected Ear Would Say: If Only It Could Scream.

Lucky Me!  Not only did our new building superintendent make good on her promise to fix our collapsing bathroom and spray our apartment for bugs, she made it happen within the same three days. So now, I have pretty much a day and a half to pack up a 2 bedroom apartment as if for a move with the dizzying pain of an ear infection to slow me down just enough to make me pray for death...  Don't get me wrong, my new super is awesome!!! She makes things happen!  If those things happened a few days apart from one another, that would make me fell physically better. The contractors drills and hammers are making my ear twitch in pain. But in the long run, we'll have a better pad to live in and that's what counts.

When the contractors went on their break, my good ear picked up on the sound of this little guy shouting it out from the treetops at my window:

 

 

Wassup Mama!

Hello to you too Little Red Guy! Look at him singing and standing out against this crummy grey day.  With all this grey clouds in the air, its time to share a little colour.  Namely, Madison Avenue from the NYC Quick Dry line.  It's an older colour but a good, simple red never goes out of style.

I can't speak for other nail bloggers,  but I am getter increasingly fond of NYC's quick dry polishes and personally, NYC beats Revlon's Top Speed hands down because NYC just chips less in my experience.  It's just that simple.  Yeah, their core colours are a bit limited, but they have been branching out with seasonal collections lately, so that will keep me coming back again.  And now, back to packing!

Spring Colours to Fight Off the Blahs

I have got a serious case of the blahs...I don't know what it is.  Maybe it's the gloomy weather we've been having in T.O. or maybe I'm stressed out about school with a group project and final exam looming on the horizen plus being sick with I don't know what, but I'm just in a funk!  So I thought I'd try to liven things up a little bit with some spring-like colours to try to cheer myself up:

Flamingo

 I think I might have bought Gosh's Flamingo 2 years ago but didn't get around to wearing it until the constant rain and grey skies just wore me out.  I'd call it a candy pink, like strawberry saltwater taffy...mmm, taffy!  It was good in two coats, ended up applying very smoothly and went chip free for 3 days.

One afternoon after being dismissed for the day from jury selection, I stopped by a Toronto institution for salon supplies, Toronto Barber and Beauty Supply, a store that has been in operation since 1937 to check them out since I hadn't shopped there in a few years.  I'm glad I did go back, because even though the only polish lines they carry are OPI, Essie & China Glaze they are priced for a $1 less than other retailers and a lot of polish from their recent lines were discounted too.   I was able to pick up Life Preserver and Lighthouse from China Glaze's Anchors Away Collection for Spring 2011 for $4 CDN.  So if you live in the GTA and haven't visited this store before, I would recommend that you give them a try.

Life Preserver

 Life Preserver is a slightly muted orange creme that I like so much, I was half tempted to chuck out the rest of my orange polishes for being to loud.  Orange is fine but it's actually my least favourite of all colours. But I have a fair amount of cosmetics in orange because it really suits me well and I like how this polish isn't shrieky.  It was good in two coats but there was some rather long lint that was already in the polish which hampered the application.  It's not the first time, I've had lint problems with China Glaze.  It's gotten to the point that I just expect that some straggler is going to be hiding in the bottle just waiting to drag across my nail and muck things up!

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is also from China Glaze's Anchors Away Collection and it's a super shimmery bright yellow that took 3 coats to get it to the opacity that you see in the photo.  Not that it's a complaint from me but it may not suit other peoples tastes.  I find it suits my skin tone well but I also could see that, perhaps if you are more fair skinned, it might make your fingers look a little washed out.  Surprisingly, there was no lint in this polish!

 

I guess one of the things I like about these two polishes is that when I see the two colours together it makes me think of my canaries, Patches & Sherbert:

Awwwww!

Now they brighten a day!

Jury Duty with Sidewalkers by NYC

Jury Duty...it’s more than just the thing that’s keeping me away from posting in the last few days, it’s my “civic duty” people!  It’s more fun than:

• ·         Waiting for a train for 3 months
• ·         Waiting for a bad breakup haircut to grow out
• ·         Talking about the weather
• ·         Driving to an airport in a foreign country for 5 hours only to find that you’ve been going the wrong way the whole time!

Ummm, You Guys...It's The Other Way!

But I digress, nothing says “civic duty” like sitting in a huge room with 300 other bored-ass people waiting to see if your name will be called so you can sit through a trial and decide the fates of all the parties involved...Wooooo! I figured that an appropriate nail colour to go along with bureaucracy would be Sidewalkers from NYC's Quick Dry line:

The price was right for this polish, under $3 CDN so no complaints from me about that.  I also have nothing to complain about in terms of the polish either.  It applies well and dries quickly and colour is a very neutral light grey that goes with everything.  If you're going to spend $3 on a polish, spend it on this one.