My Canadian Roots

Here on the final evening of the Canada Day long weekend, I wanted to do a manicure inspired by Canadian manufacturer Roots, designers of one of my favourite items of clothing of all time, my pink Roots Athletics sweatshirt.  Considering there was not a Canadian kid alive in the mid-1980s who didn’t have one of these sweatshirts (including yours truly!) there are no photos of me in my beloved baby pink, mint green and white pullover, because we didn’t run around with cameras all jacked up in our faces at all hours of the day.  So I have no “adorable” throwback photos to share with you, just my nostalgic memories of an iconic Canadian trend (really, everyone had a Roots sweatshirt; they came in an assortment of bright rainbow hues – my best friend’s was a gorgeous indigo blue – and some people had one in every colour.  And they were not exactly inexpensive either.  Not bad for a sweatshirt bearing the silhouette of a chunka-butt beaver.) 😉

Gallery of Canadiana

I popped over to the Weather Network for a moment to check on tomorrow’s forecast for Canada Day. I live in the nation’s capital, and as such, there’s always tons of patriotic parties and one huge blowout of music and fireworks on Parliament Hill, seat of our good nation’s government. It’s quite the event if you’re into crowds, heat, road closures, Blue Rodeo, sunburns and moderate public intoxication. I’m actually not into any of those things (Blue Rodeo excepted; 5 Days in May is a favourite song) so I tend to stick pretty close to home come Canada Day, but it still bums me out to see that tomorrow’s forecast is calling for thunder storms and rain. Take it from a person who may have spent a bit of time doing precisely this, but there’s nothing worse than trying to get your public drink and sun stroke on in a humid downpour. Heh, although one year when Mr. Finger Candy and I lived just a few blocks away from Parliament Hill, we stood on our balcony and laughed uproariously at all the red and white-clad tourists ineffectually pelting down the street to avoid a massive rainstorm that just sort of spun itself out of nothingness. I’m not sure we come out looking so well in that story, but at least we stopped short of taunting, right? Because we’re polite Canadians like that.

This little gallery encompasses some of my more patriotic posts and manis, from the traditional (redwhitemapleleaf) to the not-so traditional (Mr. Dressup’s Tickle Trunk and the Trailer Park Boys.) There’s also a bit of nail art that never fails to make me laugh, last year’s attempt at beaver nails, which I joked at the time really came out looking more like dogs with conjunctivitis. And indeed they still do!

The Beave (OMD2)

Day 29’s theme in the Oh Mon Dieu nail art challenge was national pride, which is a fitting one for me seeing as in the past week, I’ve crossed four provinces in this true north strong and free, eventually landing on Canada’s smallest provincial landmass, Prince Edward Island. PEI is gorgeous – green and verdant, with a whiff of saltwater in the air and beautiful, rolling fields of red earth stretching for as far as the eye can see (although not stretching that far, as PEI at its very widest point is only 140 miles across.)

But sadly for me and these nails, which draw inspiration from one of Canada’s more iconic, tree-biting critters, there are no beavers on the Island. Or if there are, I certainly haven’t seen them. But do you know what there are in droves? Foxes. Slim, rust-coloured foxes with bushy tails and prancing gaits that lounge around the backyard like dogs on a hot summer day. Except they move like cats and seem weirdly unperturbed by the presence of humans (of course, I just found out that one of the neighbours has been feeding them weiners, so no wonder they’re just this side of domesticated. I’d hang around any place that was throwing free processed meat at me, too!) It’s bad enough that while I was outside snapping this photo, taking advantage of the early morning natural light, I kept throwing glances over my shoulder to make sure Mr. Fox wasn’t sneaking up to take a bite out of my hide.

But I don’t know how to draw a fox, and so I went with this beave-tastic design instead (although one could argue that I also don’t know how to draw a beaver, particularly that one on my ring finger that looks like a dog with conjunctivitis.)