My plan to feed Cindy dog biscuits and buy her love that way was thwarted before I even got to the store. The dogs are going on holiday, so today was the day they got anesthesised and had their plaque removed and shots given. Oh, and Cindy got chipped. I thought this was obligatory all over Europe for at least the last five years, but apparently, not everyone does it. It seems stupid, but that's probably just me.
So now I have a big pile of dog treats. The urge to lay some kind of elaborate trail of canine goodness through the city towards our house and see what shows up is almost irresistible.
The studio was its usual fun self today. I got to see the first male manicure client (a doctor, who I guess you want to have nice, even, strong nails rather than torn and brittle ones with spikes sticking out) and shortly afterwards helped a client towards his first time in the pedicure, thinking he had a very peculiar accents and where in Germany could he be from? Yeah, two minutes later, the man was panicking and trying to find J. Turns out, he was deaf. I'm sensitive that way. Anyway, after a bit of strained communications, I got him in a foot bath and was allowed to go back to watching nails being done.
Later, J. allowed me to put gel on my nails to make them a bit stronger. No tips ('for the love of God' was implied), though. I. told me to take some stencils technically meant to build tips out of gel with and put them under my nails to avoid getting gel all over my fingertips. It worked beautifully. The fact that I was really careful helped, too. It's amazing how much patience you can have when you don't spend the first two and a half hours of a manicure filing something to what you hope is perfection, and have it turn out 'meh'. I knew my nail shape was far, far below 'meh', but filing would end with my fingers bleeding, so only my gelling was on the line here. The gelling got the compliment of being 'super', so I was happy.
And since just shiny nails look so plain, and it's been on my mind a lot lately, I cracked out the duck stamp.
Stamping is hard. First I tried with white (I'd stolen Sis' stamping polishes) but concluded there was too little in there to work for rookie me. Next, I tried black. It took seven tries and a lot of nail polish remover to get the duck on the stamp. Then I put the stamp to my thumb, pressed and--I forgot to wipe off the excess gel of my nail. I'd effectively varnished the stamping pad.
Not a problem, wipe down, ink plate, put on pad, try again.
It turns out, the seventeenth time is the charm sometimes.
I sealed the duck up with gel, then gelled my right hand. Trying to stamp this one was impossible with my fingers trapped in stencils, and very hard indeed without them. Oh, and my thumb nail's gel had a little dent in it where I wanted the duck's beak to go. So now I had two ducks... But not very much in the same spot.
Then I decided that just two duck outlines looked a bit plain...
Long story short, I ended up with two ducks on my nails, in glittery yellow swimming trunks and goggles, done reasonably well. Because I can.
And this took me less than one hour. Is this called progress?
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