This world is just THE most random place sometimes, innit? I was sitting here trying to think up a suitably pithy title for a post about this blog’s eighth birthday when the phrase “Eight arms to hold you” popped into my head. I know that as the title of a Veruca Salt album from the late ’90s, but just in case I was wrong (I rarely am about grunge era music) I thought I’d run it through the old Wiki machine all the same. That’s where I learned that Eight Arms to Hold You was actually the working title of the Beatles’ 1965 film Help, and in addition to being the title of a pretty dynamite Veruca Salt album, it’s also the name of a song on the soundtrack to one of my favourite movies of all time, The Goonies.
So in keeping with the theme of complete happen randomstance and the number 8, I ditched the anniversary nails I had planned (eh, you know, pink, glittery and invoking various sweet foodstuffs) and did a simple mani using Enchanted Polish’s Octopus’s Garden (jeepers, what was up with the Beatles and cephalopods?) a lacquer that, as one of the first ones to hit my collection, is also celebrating its eighth birthday. Cheers to you, tiny everlasting bottle of noxious chemicals!
And cheers to you, Finger Candy, for limping along through these last two years of massive change. I know I’ve neglected you terribly, old friend, but I hope that one day soon we’ll be seeing more of one another.
Yo, check it – Finger Candy is six years old today! That, according to my site analytics, translates to 70,000 views of 1,634 POSTS (wow, really?) across 37,000 visitors. Which is actually nothing terribly impressive, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. I wish I had a count on the total number of words; now, THAT would be impressive, ’cause I be wordy. Not bad for the little blog that just sort of sprang up out of nothing. Good on you, Finger Candy, I’m proud of you. And proud of me, too.
And while we’re at it, proud of you as well, dear reader or occasional dropper-byer! You’re fun, thoughtful, witty folks, and it’s been a blast getting to know you through this platform. You’re the audience I always have in mind when I come up with a new idea and think to myself, “Is anyone even going to know what this is?” Because the answer nearly always is, “Aw yeah, X will TOTALLY know what this is!” Which really makes it all the sweeter. So thank you, as always, for being a good neighbour. I endeavor to continue respecting my side of our shared (Internet) fence to promote harmony in the blogisphood. 😉 To the next six!
And what good times are we celebrating with this very inedible scented wax sheet cake? Just that my blog no longer looks and behaves like a sack of ad-laden crap. Break out the plastic forks before Marjorie nabs the last corner piece! Or not, because, you know, wax.
It recently came to my attention that my blog – particularly the mobile aspect thereof – was looking, to put it delicately, like a bag of hot buttered ass. I rarely check on the functionality of Finger Candy’s mobile side, naively assuming that everything is hunky dory. And you know what happens when you assume – your blog looks like utter shite. Ads EVERYWHERE – sometimes two or three peppered throughout one post – for creepy pop-up things like how to melt your belly fat using this one! easy! trick! and more distressingly, for items like holographic, enamel-plated gun scopes. I’m not down with fraudy, click bait ads, and I’m not down AT ALL with WordPress inserting multiple advertisements for gun paraphernalia into my blog posts. That one actually made me quite ragey, and spurred me into action. As in I ponied up for a premium-er plan, one that will shelve the irksome ads and other visual obstacles, particularly on the mobile side of things.
So going forward, you hopefully won’t be driven off by a top-down drop menu, a minimum of two mid-body ads, and two back-to-back footnotes per post. And I apologize for the prior state of Finger Candy – it was well nigh unreadable, and if you found yourself just rage-closing mid-way through a post, I understand. It looked and behaved like every blog I’ve ever abandoned because the navigation became a burden. So consider the burden lifted, and please return for more meandering non-sequiturs about nail polish, pop culture, Disney, cats, smelly things, smelly cats and more. I’ve missed you, and please won’t you be my neighbour? We have cake! It’s beyond inedible*, but still, cake. 😉
*an SMT creation from my customs order last year, it smells like Willow’s Cuppy Cake, Marshmallow Noel and Vanilla Bean Noel, and it is nuh-ummy.
If you follow this blog with any sort of regularity (and thank you for that, by the way, that’s very kind of you!) you know my 2018 is ending on a real down note. At the beginning of the month we rather unexpectedly had to have our absolutely adored kitty, Weegie, put down. The fallout from that was that Mr. Finger Candy and I just sort of drifted through the Christmas season, present in body, but nearly totally absent in soul. For someone who never shuts up, I’ve had a hard time articulating why this particular death has hit me so hard. I’ve lost quite a few beloved pets over my lifetime, and even more adored people, and yet this is the one that’s broken me. I suppose this is what some well-meaning dumbass would optimistically term a formative event, and I’d begrudgingly have to agree – I certainly don’t feel like the same person I was at the beginning of the month, a change not necessarily for the positive.
But there’s no better time than the start of a new year to hit the reset button, and I’m looking forward to trying, trying again in 2019. Because even without the heartbreaking events of the last month, 2018 was a wild roller coaster of big ups and bigger downs. Sometimes actual roller coasters, even! It just didn’t feel like the most cohesive of years, and I flubbed quite a few personal goals.
But supposedly we learn from our mistakes and all that good stuff, so I thought it might be helpful to look back over the hills and valleys of 2018 and take note of the things that worked, the things that didn’t, and hopefully find a path through 2019 that’s a lot less fraught with grief than 2018’s. To a better year for all of us.
The Good
I started off the year on a positive note, promising myself that I’d limit my wax and beauty purchases to a small handful of orders from favourite vendors. My discretionary spending was quite out of control, and my scented wax stores were fit to bursting. So I put myself on a casual low buy, which though no real direction on my part morphed into a regimented no buy; there were a few months there where our financial behaviour could best be deemed as stupidly tightfisted. But there just didn’t seem to be anything I wanted to buy, and besides, saving money felt better than buying stuff, which was kind of the point of reining in my spending in the first place, no? Anyhow, this one was a proper New Years resolution, the kind you make with every intention of breaking, but somehow, I held fast. Now, with three lovely, highly anticipated orders in my hot little hands (and hot little warmers) I’m set for another year of waiting and watching and planning and melting. 🙂
2018 is also the year I taught myself a video editing program, upped my photography and video game and started our YouTube channel, Park or Perish! Amusingly enough, I can lay all three of these newly acquired skills at the tender little furry paws of our cat, Weegie. There was a time (oh, just the last four or so years) when our sweet baby beast would NOT abide by either her fur mama or papa sleeping for any longer than it took for her soft food dish to run dry (roughly every hour and 45 minutes.) So I’d find myself awake at all inhospitable hours of the very early morning, with precious little to do.
Then one morning as I sat there just staring at the sky, literally trying to will the sun into cresting the horizon, I suddenly thought about all of the photos and video I had shot of our Disney vacations, and wondered what more I could do with them (other than drive you lovely readers bonkers, that is.) 😉 And so that morning I downloaded a little iPhone-based editing program called iMovie and edited together my first project (a collection of photos of Weegie looking unbelievably saucy, of course, backed by Tom Jones’ What’s New Pussycat?) Since then I’ve produced 27 videos for Park or Perish!, and some of them aren’t even all that bad! I particularly like sound editing – it’s incredibly satisfying when two tonally disparate clips finally snap into place (nearly) seamlessly. This is a major milestone for me; as I’ve mentioned a time or 20, I am unbelievably tech-unfriendly. That I could even find the program in the App Store in the first place was something of a miracle. Here’s the most recent video I posted, a fun round-up of our adventures at Disney this past year. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
Speaking of Disney vacations and saving money (now there’s a couple of antithetical concepts) we were able to enjoy two of the former this year precisely because we prioritized the heck out of the latter. We eased up a bit on our “Disney or death!” approach to discretionary income as the year wore on, but generally, if we had two cents to scrape together, we’d throw them into the vacation pot. It was through this kind of financial nit-pickery that we were able to take two Disney vacations in 2018, both fully (and reassuringly) paid off before we had even stepped foot in a park. We also became Disney annual passholders this year, because it made the most financial sense given the extent of our plans. Every little bit helps, and I was incredibly proud of us for hitting this Disney financial goal.
And speaking of those two vacations, they were wonderful; some of the best moments of my year were had at Disney World. It’s just where we go to cut loose, explore and have an awesome (frequently margarita-enabled) good time. We are so fortunate to be able to enjoy such incredible vacations – some people can’t swing a single lifetime trip to Disney, let alone two in one year (actually four in 365 days, but who’s counting besides ourselves and every single one of our friends who has jokingly enquired as to whether we plan on just moving into Cinderella Castle full time (dare to dream!)
Just about my favourite moment of the year was spending Halloween, our 14th wedding anniversary, bombing around the Magic Kingdom rock star cosplaying as two different video versions of Tyler Joseph, the lead singer of twenty one pilots (the October release of Trench was another neon yellow bright spot in an otherwise pretty gloomy year.) I can’t speak for Mr. Finger Candy (who was the recipient of most of the delighted compliments, including a number of longing and appreciative glances from one very interested lady and a couple of even more interested dudes) but I loved playing rock star for the day, even with that black gunk smeared about my neck and hands (black stage makeup, by the way, and no, it wasn’t difficult to take off at the end of the night. Messy? Yes! Sooty black water droplets allllll over the bathroom. But not difficult.) Also, my man looked hella hot in his meggings and shorts combo, and no, I’m not remotely joking.
The Bad
Losing our beloved cat. Taking her to the vet one snowy Monday morning, knowing in my already breaking heart that we wouldn’t be bringing her home again. Holding her paw until the very end. Lots of uncontrollable sobbing. That was my December. I don’t wish to ever experience another one like it (oh, that we could control such things!) But isn’t she adorable? Gosh, at one point she was a complete LARD; look at that tummy! That’s some serious Weege the Hutt action right there.
Losing Weegie also brought into sharp focus the good relationships in our lives – the people who have been there for us at this awful time, in supportive ways big, small and occasionally virtual – and those that are no longer worth our precious, middle aged time. It was really its own special kind of compounding heartbreak to realize that with some people, we just didn’t rank, not even in the midst of our grief.
On the other, infinitely more positive hand, this event clarified the truly excellent relationships we do have in our lives, people we are so profoundly grateful to call our friends. They are such fantastic humans, a realization ultimately worth so much more than the one about the social boobs. I actually feel sort of hashtag-blessed. 😉
But getting back to the crap, after making incredible strides towards improving my health in 2017, I backslid in 2018 HARD, maintaining my diet and exercise regimen for most of the year before apparently just giving up altogether in the last three months and gaining 25 pounds. I apparently like to eat my stress and grief. And everyone else’s as well. I aim to jump back aboard the treadmill express in the new year, and overhaul our diets while I’m at it. Please stop the rich holiday food, I want to get off!
And this blog? My beloved Finger Candy, which turned five impressive years old this year with nary a whisper of fanfare? I have no idea what this blog is even about any more; I’m not even sure if nail art is my preferred focus. I’m in a state of blogging flux; I hope to find some solid ground soon.
Okay, that’s it, 2018 – you’re drunk, go home. Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out. And cheers to 2019 as it makes its hopefully spectacular way in. Happy New Years, friends.
Good morning, friends, and welcome to another beautiful autumn Friday! As of late, the weather around my neck of the global woods has been quite uneven – one moment it’s so cold, we’re all breaking out our toques and parkas, and the next it’s so dank and humid, we’re firing up the air conditioners for one last summery go-round. But there’s only one way this all ends, and that’s with snow. I suppose that’ll be here soon enough.
So being the end of the work week and all, it’s time for another edition of Fall Fun Fridays, the casual little blogging challenge I’ve been, let’s face it, whiffing hardcore with my friends Jay of The Scented Library and Julie of The Redolent Mermaid, who are decidedly not whiffing it. Excuses, excuses, but my Fall has been rather disrupted by ongoing renovations to our apartment. They’re not going super well, I keep injuring myself (I’m looking down at a throbbing cut on my thumb right now for which I probably should have sought stitches) and I haven’t been able to put out any of my usual decorations, including my beloved Halloween town. Here, let’s take a peek at it from two seasons ago; that’ll make me feel peppier.
Anyhow, all that to say I haven’t exactly been feeling the Fall this year, as the kids might say. Looks like it’ll take another emergency infusion of Disney’s absolutely bonkers approach to the season to set things right – fortunate, since we’ll be back in about two weeks’ time. 🙂
This week’s prompt contemplated hands-on activities – your favourite Fall recipe, craft or some other DIY-able. I’m actually right in the midst of putting together some fortifying chicken stew for dinner tonight with my parents – that seems like a very autumn dish. But it won’t be ready for – *checks time* – oh, another five or so hours! So until the timer goes off, I’d kindly direct you on over to my friends’ blogs, where they’re sure to have pulled out all the seasonal stops. Happy weekend, friends; hope you get a few moments to get out there and enjoy all it has to offer.
So many ellipses! But that’s this blog, isn’t it, thoughts within thoughts within thoughts? With the occasional bit of nail art. You know, when I’m not yakking on about Disney or The Lost Boys. 😉
This blog recently celebrated its fifth anniversary! In celebration, I went through just a little over 1,500 published posts and pulled a large assortment of food-related manicures – the candy (and cocktails, and baked goods, and turkey legs) of Finger Candy.
Some things I learned from this forensic examination of my blog? I REALLY like painting my nails to look like food; 152 chow-related manis bear out that assertion. Also, while I’m very fond of and actually prefer the free-handed approach to nail art, I have leaned on my food-shaped nail charms time and time again, particularly the multi-coloured lollipop charms. They were a great investment. Also-also, the further back you go in my blogging timeline, the dodgier my nail art becomes. In those early days I just had no idea how to compose or properly light a photo, or even how to hold my hand! It’s not a problem if I just hold it upside down, right?
Below you’ll find a number of collages I created highlighting many – but not all – of the food-related manicures I’ve done over five years of blogging, divided by theme. Or in this case, divided by grocery department. I hope you enjoy this look into a huge, happy part of my life! And if you’d like to take a closer peek at any of these posts, please just click on the “Food and Candy Designs” tag on the right-hand side of the page. Now someone break out the cake to celebrate this thing so I can eat it…and then paint it on my nails. 😉 To another five years!
Good morning, friends! If you’ve followed along with my last couple of posts, you know I started off the week with a power outage, and am now ending it with a cold. In between I sneezed a lot, and re-bought the entire contents of my refrigerator. Every part of my body aches today, but my heart aches the most for Ottawa’s small business owners and restaurateurs – anyone who deals in perishable goods, really – who lost tens of thousands of dollars in spoiled stock over the weekend. Food waste makes me feel punchy; that we were all, to various degrees, subjected to this little (or not so little) indecency is just compounding my poor, sickly mood. It’s been a weird week.
Today’s Fall Fun Friday prompt – that’s the little blogging collective I’m part of – was to discuss the books, movies and television programs you’re anticipating this Fall. I’m pretty well ride-or-die for only one show, and that’s The Good Place, which premiered last night (no spoilers, please, it’s sitting on Apple TV waiting for one sneeze-free hour!) Aside from that, I’m looking forward to Brooklyn 9-9’s move to NBC (their Halloween episodes are wonderful, and build off the previous seasons’ episodes, if you’re into that kind of tightly knit continuity, which I am.) I’ve got one more episode of Castle Rock to tackle, if I can just get over the “WHAT IN SWEET, FROSTING-COVERED HELL IS GOING ON HERE?” of it all (what’s going on is I could stare at Bill Skarsgard’s cut glass cheekbones and giant, wounded eyes all. day. long, and yes, I’m totally that pervy old lady; my favourite headline about the guy is from a Mashable article titled “It’s not Bill Skarsgard’s fault that he looks like hot Satan,” heh.)
On the cinema side of things, I’m quite pumped for Wreck-It Ralph 2; Vanellope Von Schweetz is a mouthy little heroine of mine. Hmm, that’s about it for movies, or at least new movies. If we’re talking the things I watch every Fall and Halloween, we could be here for a while (The Nightmare Before Christmas, of course, Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, a weird new obsession with Hocus Pocus because I can’t get away from it at Disney.)
As for books, get back to me when I’ve finished Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, a dense (in terms of writing and subject matter) examination of the collapse and subsequent bailout of the American banking industry in 2008. I won’t be enjoying anything until I have that craven lot of greedy ghouls out of my head. It’s been an incredibly frustrating and eye-opening read.
My blogging friends Jay of The Scented Library and Julie of The Redolent Mermaid are sure to have some great recommendations of their own, so I’d implore – implore! – you to pop on over and check out their autumn picks.
And now I’m going back to bed with a box of tissues.
Riveting, to be sure! But actually, yes, I just spent quite a bit of time updating my About page so it reads less like a bulleted ransom note and more like an invitation to explore this blog’s offerings and the blogger behind the babble. 🙂 Metaphorical exploration, that is! Trust me, this is definitely NOT me setting out my cybersex shingle. Hmm, I think this paragraph might have gotten away from me a bit. 😦
Anyhow, if you’re at all interested in getting to know the mind behind the manis, I offer myself up. Ack, but not like that! Not like offer-offer, just that — actually, you know what? I think this is just going to be one of those days when everything that comes out of my mouth is loaded sexual innuendo designed to get a rise out of someone, so I’m just going to choke this off right now and — dammit.
As in Polish Me Silly’s fun Mr. Bubble glitter bomb over top of my frozen, lacquered fingertips. ‘Cause it never stops snowing. As I may have mentioned once or twice or 20 times over the past two days. Fur real, though, it’s the middle of MARCH. Time to wrap this up for the year, Earth! Besides, there’s only so much time left before we all switch over to griping about the heat and humidity (also a thing in my in-a-valley city.)
Heh, that reminds me of a cute interaction I had with a reader years ago. I had mentioned in a post at the time that my city sits in a valley, as in the Ottawa Valley. If you’ve been to Ottawa, you know it has its lovely qualities, but it’s also a major (bureaucratic) city, with all the attendant ugliness that goes along with that descriptor – old, crap, perpetually breaking infrastructure (sinkholes!), sprawling, high density suburbs (vinyl!) and a death trap of a 400 series highway that cuts through the entire city like a gaping, infected wound (but tell us how you really feel, Sandra.) Anyhow, this reader, who I believe hailed from the Philippines, left a sweet comment on my post to the effect of “You live in a valley?! How wonderful, it must be so beautiful and magical!” It was adorable, and I laughed for about five solid minutes afterwards at the thought of this girl thinking that I lived in freakin’ Fern Gully. I tried to be as gentle as possible as I explained that no, Ottawa was your pretty typical metropolitan mess, and how its valley-ness manifested itself was mostly in poor weather conditions that would settle into the divot and then not move off for the next 10 days. That’s kind of what we’re in right now – a snow cycle that’s trapped down here “in the Valley.” No place like home, eh? 😉
There’s at least one posting prompt I whiff every year in whatever blogging challenge I’m participating in at the time, and it looks as though 2017’s will be today’s theme of fashion in the Fall Fun Series. I’m just not a very fashionable person. Oh, I can turn it on – and out – when the occasion arises, but I’m a real jeans and t-shirt kind of lady, and I’ve got zero problems if those jeans and t-shirts come from Target. Or Torrid, because I apparently have the fashion sense of a 13-year-old girl.
More than that, though, this year in particular, as I continue down this path of increased exercise, weight loss and general health betterment, I’ve found that I can barely keep a handle on my sizing from week to week, let alone season to season. On average, I’ve dropped about five sizes in seven months, but there are aggravating outfit outliers (among them the American-made swing dress I purchased for a special Halloween event, only to heartbreakingly discover that I could lose another 50 pounds and still not fit into the damn thing.) Clothing sizes are a giant crap shoot under the very best of circumstances; when you factor in weight loss that drops your boobs two cup sizes in a month while your tummy resolutely remains the size and shape of the Pillsbury Doughboy’s, you question the utility of trying to maintain a nice wardrobe in the midst of such bodily chaos.
Well, okay, I may have something to show you, an ensemble I sport when I want to take awkward arabesque gym selfies – neon accessories (shoes, iPhone case blocking out my face) and my favourite black and white (and red, and grey, and blue) striped leggings. I think they look like Tim Burton workout wear (hmm, interesting collaboration possibility there.) I spend time down in my building’s gym every day, and I at least attempt to look cute while I’m there (admittedly difficult when you’re sweating like some sort of livestock.)
Anyhow, for those two reasons, I have no (real) Fall fashion to share with you today. No fashion for me, so NO FASHION FOR YOU! But my fellow blogger friends will undoubtedly have some fun looks to show you; please do check out their posts by clicking on the links below. 🙂
Finger Candy 