The Day

(I got 40 pageviews today so far. I feel like a surprise party was organised while I was napping, and I've walked into the living room in my underwear.

Also, most of you are from the States. I know like five people there. Who are the other twenty-nine of you interested in someone who gifts things which might be interpreted along the lines of 'I think your daughter should come with a warning symbol of some kind'?)

I haven't been talking about my days a lot lately. Not that nothing's been happening. I just have paperwork to do, J. had me working extra while Boyfriend and I talked until deep into the night for the past four nights, people want my Christmas wish list yesterday and I'm preparing for an invasion visit from my parents.

Monday was fairly uneventful, apart from doing J.'s nails. I'll be filing off the loud pattern and doing the green-red one on there on Friday, so the boss has two identical hands and a pattern more suitable to her stage in life. J. God has decided, and so it shall be.

Tuesday, Sis was alone in the studio, with back-to-back appointments from nine am until four pm. I was there for helping out, by which is meant scavenging for colors, refilling containers and helping discover that the phone has broken down to the point where it might hurt business. I talked way too much, but neither customers nor Sis seemed to mind.

Today, J. was running behind on her appointments by about twenty minutes. Not all customers appreciate that, but it's not something you can magically undo. I could make footbaths to shave off a few minutes, I could fetch drinks to placate customers and, at some point, I was promoted to toddler entertainment system due to a cute little baby requesting some visual and auditory stimulation as politely as all children below twelve months old can.

Language didn't matter, the person didn't matter, as long as they had a pulse, made eye contact and could make funny noises and gestures and pick up dropped shoes. I got told I'm great with kids and should get some. I pointed out that I eat pig-shaped candy and potato chips for dinner on some weekends. It only swayed them slightly. I do not want kids. I can barely handle Iggy.

Then J. wanted a set of shelves cleaned out, the contents moved to a smaller shelf, and all nail polish collected in a box. There was about two and a half liters of nail polish, all in glass containers of about eight mils. Yes, I'm aware that's over three hundred bottles of nail polish. J. made me count them. There's still about a hundred other ones in the studio, which is about fifty more than is warranted for the studio's size, in my opinion, but I'm not in charge.

Next, we cleaned the shelf out, got out the loose parts and put it to the side. Then a sofa was dragged down from the most unsafe staircase in the history of stair cases (Please note: the landlord of the studio does not care about regulations much, to the point where there's a biohazard in the basement and Sis' apartment has no insulation to speak of. The stairs haven't even made the list so far.), cleaned and put in the hall. It takes up more floorspace, but the room feels roomier without fifteen kilograms of beauty products in different colors, brands and functionalities screaming at you as soon as you come in.

Boyfriend was called in at this point to move the shelf to a different building, with me there to open doors. We moved the shelf, the loose bits and the nail polish to J.'s house and I got back to business of pouring drinks and hatching a devious plan as S. kept saying she should really stop smoking before the year is out.

The problem with delays is, they get bigger if they're big enough. Sort of how a snowball that's projectile size has more chances of staying on a slope than a twenty kilo ball of ice and slush. Eventually, the delay gets noticeable.

J.'s customer before the last one came in exactly when she had an appointment. J., at that point, was just done with building gel on a customer that wants a certain wow factor in her nails, rather than just a white tip. I. had gone home, Sis and S. had customers of their own. At which point I thought I'd be funny and offered to file off the gel for the waiting customer. J. actually asked this sweet, young woman if she was okay with the rookie coming at her with a file. She was fine with it. I refrained from asking if she was on crack only because I don't know how to politely phrase that in German.

It was quite possibly the most terrifying thing I've done all month.

I know how to file nails. Theoretically. I'm not fast at it, and sometimes I take a while to get the positioning right, but there's professional nail artists who do more damage than me at this point.

I asked at least three times to please tell me if I hurt her. I had a near heart attack when I noticed I'd rubbed a certain spot to redness. The skin was still there, but it wasn't happy skin. There was a square millimeter of pure anger and dustlessness, which is the filing equivalent of a flashing light and a siren before you risk being sued for bodily harm.

Okay, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten there, but I was extra special careful when filing. I checked for air under the edges of the gel (you can be an artist of epic proportions, after a few weeks the gel will slowly start to lose the fight against showers and handwashing), filed it away when it was there and realised that when J. was ready to take over that I'd rubbed the file against my own thumb nail until it felt brittle and thin. Yes, I'll put nail hardener on later and try and remember to wear file protection next time.

On a happier note, the mailman came a day early with my order of fifty fish eye buttons. Also, Boyfriend is working extra days this week as well, due to skivving at the casino. This means I got to knit his birthday hat to completion without him noticing, so there's at least a small element of surprise. I've hidden it somewhere in the apartment where he rarely looks. And since he reads this blog, I feel compelled to say, "It's not the dishwasher, babe. Stop searching."

I also put eyes on the hat for I.'s grandchild, but then decided it needed something extra. Raging pink and supersonic orange aren't enough to communicate screaming prepubescent femininity. So I knitted a tiny bow and stuck it on with a safety pin. The bow can be repositioned, removed, put on a bobby pin and worn... Whatever is needed. At the moment, the fish is a girl fish. I don't think five-year-olds care much about what their fashion choices say about their views on gender emancipation. I'm pretty sure Barbie would have been taken off the shelves if it were the case.

But the arrival of the buttons/eyes means I've run out of knitting projects. I want to knit hats for Christmas for everyone except Boyfriend, proper hats out of superwash merino, as said before, but it makes me want to limit my knitting for now a bit. Also, my yarn choices are getting limited. I've got a truckload of dark colored Bravo, but don't want to make boring hats out of cheap yarn. There's still quite a lot of fingering weight yarn (I know it when you're giggling, people, but it's the technical term for it) that Boyfriend gave me for my last birthday, but the sock-and-glove mood hasn't struck so far.

So I browsed the internet for horrific and socially unacceptable side effects of smoking. I can't bother people who don't want to stop smoking, but S. admitted she needs some kind of push to start the stopping process, and she's friended me on Facebook. So I found a Youtube video of how much tar gets sucked into your lungs over the course of 400 cigarettes. S. smokes about three to five a day, I believe, so that's three, four months' worth of cigarettes, reduced to a bubbling black sludge hardening inside your lungs and causing all kinds of diseases. Hmmm, delicious. I shared it with S.

But tar is mentioned on the package. I went on Wikipedia and discovered that there's a German page for hairy black tongue. This happens to (some) smokers with their oral immune system compromised. S. happens to care about her appearance, as all people working with the general public tend to do. Your tongue developing some chest hair for a few months seemed like the right thing to tell her about a few hours before bedtime. So I did.

Now, I'm not completely evil. And I know shock is hard to induce in smokers. Smokers who don't know about the risks are practically nonexistant. So I also shared a website with slightly less known little factoids. I got on a trusted German health website and shared the page on how your body detoxifies after your last cigarette when you're a regular smoker. It starts after twenty minutes, and then gets rid of the most immediate dangers in your body in the first forty-eight hours. On a purely physical level, quitting smoking is something your body is hugely in favor of. Brain chemistry usually makes it hard, but it's hard to sell 'kick your addiction' when everyone is like 'once you start, stopping will be pure misery'. No one mentions that your breathing is noticeably better by day three. You're not back at full lung capacity, but most if not all people agree that better breathing is a good thing.

Then I stopped terrorising her, since there's a fine line between ribbing and digitally shaking someone by the shirt and demanding they stop their wicked, filthy ways. I said goodnight and got a message back that I am liked. Yay.

And if the smoking thing didn't work, the hats get thrown out, J's furniture falls over and kills Cindy... Well, I made one person smile today. The fact that she couldn't yet successfully operate a sippy cup is irrelevant.

The Knitting Crazies

I've been knitting more lately. As a matter of fact, I might have gone a bit knitting crazy.

First there was the hat Iggy chewed on, just because I wanted to knit something. Except the pattern, while deceptively simple, was frustrating. I had it memorised witin minutes, but it still was very unforgiving towards mistakes. One stitch missing, one too much, and it broke down completely.

So I asked I. if her granddaughter needed a hat for autumn, got a yes, and made a fish hat that's even louder than the one I have. Mine is blue, green and neon orange. I.'s granddaughter, should she choose to wear it, will be rocking fluorescent pink, sunny yellow and neon orange. I showed it to I's daughter, who looked a bit intimidated. Then again, I'd be intimidated if someone asked if they could put an eyeless fish on my daughter's head. On the other hand, Boyfriend wants a fish hat for his birthday, please. In my trademark screaming color scheme.We must be terribly in love.

I couldn't find the right buttons, though. I found the perfect ones way, way back in Brussels, so I knew that somewhere out there, stores could theoretically stock 38 mm, white clown suit buttons. I just couldn't find any. I combed through the German Amazon. Zipp. The British Amazon, however, had exactly my buttons. For a higher price and eight pounds sterling in shipping, no matter how many I bought. Some quick calculations showed I could get them cheaper than even the prices in Brussels if I bougt what can be kindly described as 'a few more'. My shipment of fifty fish-hat-eye buttons should be arriving around Thursday. Buttony perfection.

During the fish hat and normal hat time, Sis teased me mercilessly. I mostly wear silly hats I've knit myself. Some people smoke, I appear in public with a stocking cap with over a dozen 3D eyeballs on it. My quirk is less harmful to others. I've got a fish hat, and a normal knitted hat on which I've grafted two little knitted horns. I've got my merino leftover hat, which is stripy, with tasseled ties and has a color scheme best described as 'ecclectic'. So I get some people who are amused, out loud, at what's on my head.

Except Sis' birthday was coming up (it was last Thursday) and she'd dropped the words 'owl hat'. The owl thing is a bit of a running gag. She'd like some owl plugs she couldn't find anywhere in her size, which I just stumbled across available in pretty much every size, then she got a ring, and her birthday card had cute little cartoony owls on it. Her gift was a gift certificate, which I thought was boring. It needed some original wrapping.

So I knitted a purple-with-bright-green hat with a cute, if slightly large owl worked in in stranded colorwork. Chances of her wearing it are small, since she likes having big hair and works from home, but she got a kick out of it. J. stole it for a moment, tried it on and loved it.

I've learned a long time ago to knit whimsical hats out of cheap yarn, in case the whimsy wore off. Then I learned that, if the whimsy doesn't wear off and the yarn is too cheap, and thus too low quality, it causes sadness, because the hat frizzles up, gets little clumps of worn off yarn material and gets all ugly. It took me not very long to find a compromise. If anyone else is struggling with the same problem, go for a good-quality acrylic from a good company. I use Bravo from Schachenmayr. It comes in a myriad of colors, has multi-colored, self-striping and even thicker varieties available, and it will stand up to a few washings. It's not the cheapest of cheap yarns, but it's definitely below 'reasonably priced' on the yarn cost totem pole.

Also, and I know this makes me sound stingy, some people are genuinely happy with an easy-to-maintain hat in bright colors and a slightly whacky pattern. I actually knit a few people things for under five euros, gifted them due to no time to go shopping, and gotten happier responses than people who shelled out fifteen or twenty euros. I've had people pay me to knit them things out of cheap yarn, admitting I only wanted the yarn cost, which was usually about two or three euros. Some of them paid five. One person, who got two children's hats, paid fifteen. (Small disclaimer: I didn't accept the extra money if I was using a pattern someone else released. The fifteen euros were way too much in my opinion, for a pattern I'd doctored out myself, but they were wired to me under the guise of I-insist-on-delivering-you-your-€-3.40-but-never-get-to-see-you and didn't know how to wire money over my eBanking at the time)

Also, remember the pizza episode? Yeah, I got annoyed with our pot holders. I've been annoyed with them for a long while, but the discovery of easy to make homemade pizza sealed the deal. I wanted an oven mitt. A thick, nice oven mitt. A big one, that protected me further than my wrist. I wanted one this weekend. So I took the yarn I won (I've still got some left), which, as mentioned before, is 100% wool, which doesn't melt the way acrylic will. Also, it's feltable. Felting seals up all those nasty little holes thick knits tend to have, and which are safety hazards on oven mitts. But there were several patterns to choose from. I went for the big, manly oven mitt, knitted in less than three hours, threw it in a washing bag and tossed it in with the laundry.

Have I mentioned how much I love my new washing machine? The mitt felted beautifully in two cycles, one of which was at a relatively low temperature. I know the friction from the other washing helped the felting process, but I'm still happy.

And the mitt works. We tried it out before it was completely dry (important safety tip: wait until all felted oven mitts are completely dry before bringing near heat, as the water will get hot and hurty within 30 seconds), and it worked, provided we didn't hold the baking tray for too long. I'm pretty sure it's fine now. And, unlike pot holders, it protects the entire hand from all of the oven, not just the palm of the hand from what you're trying to move.

Now all I have to do is knit Boyfriend's birthday gift while he's not looking. And I think J. and W. are getting hats for Christmas from me, too. Merino hats, in at least partly sensible designs. Because I realise some gifts need some investment other than just time and love and laughter.

The Urge to Cook

J. kind of called me out on something a few weeks back. I was baking a lot. And then wondering why I got fatter.

Now, I love to bake. It's a fantastic way to spend some time and end up with way too much sugary goodness than you could feasibly eat in a short timespan.

Over the summer, it were flourless peanut butter cookies. Then I tried cupcakes in September. When I came to brownies that were so dense and sticky, they wouldn't come from the pan, J. pulled the emergency brake and I didn't bake anymore.

Which doesn't take away that the dishwasher is an amazing tool in making cooking less of a hassle.

I like making things in the kitchen (except frying, I have an irrational fear of spraying cooking fat) and not baking sort of put a crimp on that.

We order out. One of my non-baking kitchen creations is a little binder with all take-out menus, which we can hang on the fridge. Ever since I bought the little paper thing, perforated it and stuck some pictures on there, we haven't had to look for the Chinese menu anymore. We'd gotten so used to having the menues scattered merrily across the apartment and disappearing when we tidied that Boyfriend actually went 'Have you seen the menu for the Itali--Wait, nevermind' the first time we ordered after I made it.

Which doesn't mean we don't cook.

There were bean burgers. They didn't taste like beans, but they had the structure of papier maché when you bit through their exterior baked shell. They were tasty, but I'm a horribly picky eater. It doesn't just have to taste good. It has to has the right structure, too. There's a reason I don't eat nutella straight from the jar, and it has nothing to do with nutella's tastiness.

Now, there's recipes I tried that tasted plain nasty. I checked to see if wholewheat flour porridge with raspberry coulis tasted nice. It very much did not. The hint of raspberry did not distract from the fact that I was shoveling paper-flavored paste into my mouth. With pips in there. 'Ew' didn't quite cover it.

But I discovered a few, non-sweet recipes that work. I also discovered spices and tomato paste.

There's the baked mushroom risotto that Boyfriend will eat and I think I already talked about. It tastes of mushrooms, but also of thyme. The combination is quite nice.

If I need garlic for something (and sometimes if I don't) I turn to dried garlic. The main reason for that is that I know myself. I'll buy fresh, use a few cloves and then find the bulb remainder all fuzzy and blue a few weeks later. Dried garlic is less risky. Also, less washing up to do.

There's my spaghetti sauce, which works quite easily since the recipe's instructions basically come down to 'fry, dump, stir, simmer'. A five-year-old with adequate common sense and a supervising adult could pull it off. Also, the recipe's customisable. We can make it a meat bonanza, with a token chopped up carrot, or we can admit we should be healthier and chuck in vegetables.

Speaking of which, I've looked in three major supermarkets so far for soup vegetables. Only two of them stocked any, and both only had one kind. I did not want brussels sprouts, so I ended up with a bio mix of 'chuck every available vegetable in there and freeze'. I used some in the spaghetti sauce. It was tasty, but the combination was downright weird.

And then there's soup. Soup, I've discovered, is even more foolproof than spaghetti sauce. Fry two onions per liter of stock, add veggies, add stock and spices (and tomato paste, hmmmm), let simmer until tender and blitz. If you can fry onions without burning them too horribly, you can make soup. I've let it simmer for half an hour, I've let it simmer for one hour. There is no discernable difference. The soup made from my soup vegetables is weird. First it was transparent and orange, then green, then yellowish... It's rainbow soup in natural tones. Looks weird, tastes great. I've made pea soup with bacon, throwing in the bacon before blenderising the whole. This was the first time I thought 'I've got a stick blender, I don't need to chop up the onions finely'. Strangely enough, the bacon had turned invisible after blending, but there's still that hint of dead pig that makes pea soup awesome.

I freeze what I can, too. It's saved us once or twice from I-don't-wanna-go-to-Mc-Do-but-we-don't-have-anything-in-the-house syndrome. What really annoyed me, though, was how inhumanly long it took to defrost on the stove. Soup, spaghetti sauce, creamed spinach... Turning the heat on high means burned things, turning it on a setting which defrosts is agonisingly slow. And then Boyfriend proposed we froze what we made ourselves in small chunks, in ice cube trays.

I was skeptical, but the internet said it was possible. So I sent Boyfriend to find some cheap ice cube trays, made some soup and froze it. Well, I waited for it to cool down. I doubt ice cube trays like hot fluids, to be honest, so I thought I wouldn't risk it. Also, we only had two trays for the experiment, and my smallest soup pot makes four trays and a plate of soup. It took the better part of the day to freeze it all, unmold it and put it in the freezer.

But it works. I made a bowl of soup by going to the freezer, filling my bowl with frozen soup cubes and nuking it for five minutes. Lo and behold, I had soup. The cubes are an awkward shape, so a full bowl of soup cubes only makes half a bowl of actual soup, but I can have soup without waiting for half an hour. Amazement.

Oh, and I'm making vanilla extract. The price of the stuff in Germany is, like most places I've visited in my life 'one firstborn child for three teaspoons'. Then one supermarket offered vanilla pods for ridiculously low prices, so I thought I'd make some sugar free extract rather than use vanilla sugar in my baking, on top of my actual sugar. It's a small step, but it's a step.

So I got eighteen vanilla pods, scraped them out, and put the seeds and husks in a bottle of vodka. Then I wallpapered the bottle in stickers with happy, cheerful messages like 'drink this and die', 'poison', 'danger' and a skull and crossbones. Oh, and one that says 'shake me'. If I shake it daily, and I worked cleanly enough, I'll have about 7 deciliters of pure vanilla extract by early December. For under fifteen euros, mind you.

When last weekend turned around, I wanted to bake again. Or cook. Or justify eating junk food without wondering how much trans fat had been pumped into my meal. We had tomato paste. We had a few pizza toppings. I theorized there must be recipes for pizza dough without yeast and rising times. Then I sent a passive agressive text to Boyfriend. Something along the lines of 'If only we had cheese and salami, then we could have fresh pizza tonight'. It worked.

The internet provided me with a pretty straightforward recipe for baking powder pizza dough. A bit of searching later, I'd tweaked it a bit to not include oil and instead have herbs baked into the crust. Basil pizza base is delicious, by the way. 600 mils of flour, a teaspoon of salt, a packet of baking powder (15 gr), however much dried herbs tickle your fancy, 200 mils of water. Make base (or little bread balls) and bake for 15-25 minutes at 200°C, depending on toppings, thickness and ovens. My ham-and-salami creation was done quicker than Boyfriend's salami-and-fresh-bacon extravaganza. I didn't have to worry about salmonella as much, and the oven I used was still hot from Boyfriend's pizza.

I rolled out the dough between two sheets of baking paper with my bottle of what at the moment is heavily vanilla infused liquor. Surprisingly effective. Who needs rolling pins, anyway?

Oh, and since it takes less than five minutes to make the dough, we checked if we could make little pizza dough bread balls from the stuff. We could. They're amazing.

The Youtube Subscriptions

I've been watching more Youtube videos lately.

Not randomly (much), but I have, after a few months of inactivity, started rummaging through my subscriptions and deciding to watch some stuff again. Most of it's science, cooking and philosophising about the 'now' in the life of two brothers. It sounds sophisticated until you realise it's things like why your mother could be carrying DNA of several other people inside her, how to cook an omelette from food scavenged from a forest where dogs are walked frequently and, at some point, playing hungry hungry hippos in honor of the Hunger Games movie. And there's a channel with hairstyles that make me itch to get long hair again. Maybe in six more months or so, but it's not happening right now. In the mean while, I salivate.

Some of what I watch is serious, but there's very few channels in my subscription list that are purely business. Even TEDtalks occasionally have titles like 'Why chickens are dinosaurs' (spoiler alert: because scientist say so).

I haven't started watching TEDtalks again, mostly because I got very tired of being reminded every other day that the planet was dying, politics are horribly inefficient and people get tortured. I know all that without someone demanding I watch ten to twenty minutes of someone drilling the point home. Again. Maybe I'll go over it one of these days, but so far, I can't be bothered unless the title is really catchy.

I also haven't started watching the channel offering sexual advice. Before you run screaming, I subscribed before they went totally off the rails and started insisting they had revolutionary ideas twice a week about what I should do in the bedroom and how I could seduce truckloads of women by parting my hair a certain way. Right now, if what they say wasn't obvious to non-psychopaths, it's downright creepy advice. The only reason I don't unsubscribe is because I like the earlier videos, dealing with the problems of actual people, finding the right kind of condom and things like not using butter as a lubricant. Mistakes you can see actual people make. I want to review those videos once in a while. The ones about how anal sex should be loved by all and will improve my relationship because their new sponsor asked them to do so are less interesting.

Epic Meal Time, while excellent in its own right, is another channel I only sporadically watch. Most of the time when it updates, I don't want to be yelled at with the curse words bleeped out by bird cries. I'll watch little packets of updates as the mood strikes, but apart from that, I let it be.

What I do watch is British comedy. There's a few shows out there which are updating weekly and which are easiest hunted down and watched on Youtube. For some reason, Germany doesn't block me from watching them (and Germany loves it some Youtube video blocking, oh yes), so I watch shamelessly. Then there's David Mitchell's Soap Box, tiny little blurbs of life made amusing for the promotion of a product. Books, soap, a computer... So far, I haven't bought any of them, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying a five minute exposition on marmite.

The Canine Update Report

First of all, it appears Boyfriend is allergic to dogs. Not Iggy. No, he's allergic to short-haired dogs and their shedding ways. Basically, he's allergic to his mother's love puppy and got told to buck up. It's not manly to admit you get sniffles and pressure headaches from four pounds of ego with a glittery collar.

Iggy, on the other hand, appears to be a type of dog that doesn't shed. His dandelion fluff just gets longer. J. occasionally manages to clip the hair around his face for hygienic reasons, but apart from that he's unaltered. He's a fuzzy, fuzzy thing.

And he's making progress.

He's still cautious as a shell-shocked veteran, but he forgets when he's in J. and W.'s apartment. There he goes crazy as only a puppy can. He annoys cats, dogs, steals food and is very aware that J. will allow him to do anything on account of his cuteness. He's squeaky and fast and not always house-trained.

In our apartment, he's house-trained. Most of the time. Accidents are few and far inbetween.

He is very much aware of who wears the canine pants in our household. Turns out, it's me.

He walks on a leash. With a fitting harness, it took fifty yards of dragging before he gave up and walked and found out that it was easier. He freaks out when strangers pass by, bouncing out of the way with all the calculability of a squirt of lemon juice, but apart from that, he's a dream dog to walk. He rarely if ever pulls on the leash, keeps up and enjoys the journey rather than sniffing at every other lamppost.

At first, he tried resisting Boyfriend's attempts at walking him. Boyfriend is more lenient with him, which means Iggy is more playful around him and raises a racket whenever Boyfriend leaves him alone or comes home. It also means Iggy was fairly sure, and correct, in his assumption, that Boyfriend would be reluctant to pull and walk on the leash if our bundle of joy decided to dig in his heels. He was right for the first trip. The second one, Boyfriend realised that Iggy was perfectly unharmed by walking on a leash and if he decided to pull, he only had himself to blame for having to catch up.

If we had to wait, Iggy, who has what J. kindly calls 'a deep respect' for me, even goes so far as to realize people don't bother him when I make him sit between my legs. When he's put there, he lies down and watches the world go by. No one messes with a fat girl wearing stomping boots hiking shoes.

We thought Iggy was coming along nicely.

And then he started teething.

It started with my knitting. I was making a hat, just for the sake of hatness. I was making this on needles from the States that come from a 72 euro set that takes ages to arrive and might be taxed by customs. Then I come home and find it my knitting in the hall, on the floor, covered in dog hair, with the ball tangled beyond rescue and reeking of dog spit. The needles were fine, but it took some self-control to not yell at the dog who was so happy so see me come home. I cut off the tangled mess, attached a new ball, finished the hat, washed it, washed my needles and made note to leave my knitting out of canine reach.

Next were the treadmill and a plush toy. The frog plushy, with its pupils worn out of the safety eyes, looked positively demonic with half its head missing. The treadmill lost resale value due to Iggy trying to find release from teething by chewing off the handle's foam. He didn't eat it, just tore it up.

We put up the treadmill so no chewables were near and thought that solved it.

Then Iggy started chewing the wallpaper. Lady tried this once, making the fatal mistake of doing it within sight of my mother, who'd spent a week wallpapering the kitchen and living room. Lady did not try a second time. Iggy, however, gets his freak on in private. We couldn't catch him right away.

We cleaned up the mess and vowed to get chew toys.

The wall-chewing continued to the point where I stopped waiting until someone with a car had time to drive us to the affordable pet supermarket. I got up early one Saturday, ran some errands, and went into the horse equipment store that also stocks some cat and dog paraphenalia, buying everything chewable in Iggy's weight class. Luckily, Iggy is in the rare weight class of 'Are you feeding this dog?' and I only had two options, paying almost double the worth of what I was buying. A chew rope, for soft chews, and a cow hide bone, should he desire some hard things.

Being home had the added advantage of hearing him if we were in the bedroom and he decided to savage the walls further. It took a few tries, but the threat of me popping up going 'BAD, EVIL DOG, GET OUT OF THERE!!' out of nowhere seems to work.

I thought that was it with the shenanigans. Silly me, forgetting we have a dog and not a video game character that doesn't learn new things when left alone.

Next trick: the sofa.

We have a Wii, as said. Wii games have starting screens, which get left on for whimsical reasons like finding out what someone is doing in the bedroom for so long (I was organising Boyfriend's part of the wardrobe) or taking a toilet break. Lately, if we dare leave it on, Iggy jumps on the couch, gets comfy and watches television. It's not a vacuum tube screen, so I think he can actually see what's happening rather than that he's just listening to the repetitive tune of Animal Crossing. He'll even jump on the couch next to Boyfriend if he thinks he can get away with it. That's how he learned that, when pushed and encouraged by me, even Boyfriend can tell him no.

At the moment, he isn't on the couch when we're around. But Iggy's a dog and the sofa is comfortable. I have no illusions about what he's doing when we're out.

And then he discovered laundry with silly things like ties and trouser legs. He hasn't done anything to it, just like he wasn't much into the actual knitted part of my hat, or the T-shirts he slept on as a scared little Iggy. He just seems to enjoy winning tug-o-war from my good shirt and Boyfriend's jammies.

To end with a positive notes, there's treats. Iggy is starting to realise treats are better than fear.

And I use the term 'treats' loosely.

Okay, that's not fair.

Boyfriend wants to give Iggy only dog treats. Then I show up with ham about to go bad and give half a package to Iggy. Or give him a piece of my apple. Or sandwich. A leftover, cold hamburger patty. Or, in my last particularly decadent mood, three rashers of bacon.

Iggy has understood this quite well. What he also learned was that I give treats in handy-dandy mouthfuls. If he eats it, and comes back, there's a fair chance there will be a new, tasty piece waiting.

Yes, I'm bribing my dog to feel appreciated by him. That, and if he gets a bit fatter/bigger, we can fit him with a harness meant for dogs rather than cats and bunny rabbits.

The Sinusitis

Remember how I inhaled nail polish remover in the last post?

My only advice is that I do not recommend it. Not ever, but especially not when it's germ season.

It started with an understandably sore throat. Then my nose clogged up, my body temperature spiked enough to make customers worry about my dress sense, but not enough to trigger a fever alarm, and I got a pressure headache. Everything above my shoulders that wasn't hair was feeling awful.

I don't know what possessed me not to call in sick on Friday. Friday did not help at all. I blame my upbringing. Unless a medical professional says you can't go, you go. That's how I was raised. My hands functioned, I wasn't actively dripping (yet), I didn't feel too faint. So I went.

The rest of the weekend was spent in a glorious pity party focused on rest and healing. This morning, I felt great. Seriously. Awesome.

I've now spent a day in dust, evaporated cleaner, nail polish remover and disinfectant, and I feel slightly bad again. So far, I've popped two aspirin. I either have a migraine on top of whatever possessed my cranial orifices, or I wasn't quite better and should have pretended to have the plague for another day.

Can't recover tomorrow either, because Sis is spending the day alone in the studio (no one else has appointments) with back-to-back customers, and needs me to come in. And I still feel better than on Friday, and I'm not sure I can provide her with a doctor's note for under fifty euros or more. And that's a bit steep for what's probably a head cold. And I've already said I'd be there.

The Work

Officially, I'm employed as a busybody in the casino.

Practically, I'm the busybody at the nail studio. Which means I do dishes, clean a bit, fetch drinks, check the planner, organise gels and answer the phone with 'Nail Studio, please hold' as I sprint to someone better on the phone as me.

I also practice nails.

I've done some crude 3D nail art, which everyone thought was cute. My tips have been stolen by someone more in need of them. I've scrounged up more.

At least one storage room has been cleared out by I., uncovering many, many treasures.

And I work on people.

Now, don't get excited. I've done two customers so far, because S. got sick and the schedule went totally wonky. I. was working on a customer, J. was working on a customer, and J.'s actual customer was waiting. I'd just fixed one customer's single nail. I remembered the woman as being a nice customer, with understanding for my learning status.

Then J. just said 'Here's some liner, you finish this customer'.

I had never worked with liner before. I tried for ten minutes before giving up and finishing with gel. It was still slow going, but there was actual going involved rather than just sliding aimlessly across the nail. Liner is the work of Satan, I've decided. But I got the ten nails done eventually, and either they held or the customer isn't risking coming back until she's sure I won't be doing her nails again. Since there have been no angry phone calls involving me, I'm guessing the first.

My other working on people is basically J. I find a pattern on her iPad, which has a great many patterns of varying difficulty, and I do five nails in that pattern. I've done two patterns of the iPad so far. One was three weeks ago, and lots of people loved it. The other was this afternoon, and I'm not sure if J. is putting it onto Facebook. I get the feeling I could have done better on some parts, but then again, I was using the 17 euro brush, with which I'd had a grand total of one hour's practice.

In my opinion, if you sell a brush called a swirl brush and demand more than ten euros for it, it either has to be easy to maintain or self-swirling. The brush is extremely hard to clean, can only be used for one color, one specific type of paint (liquid air brush paint), is relatively fragile on the brush part, messy to work with and has a steep learning curve if you want to do crazy things like move over curved surfaces, paint curvy designs or want a perfectly even line. Oh, and since it's air brush paint, you usually have to apply the same line twice.

The pattern was all circles and curves. Circles are easy, once you get a hold of them, but curves are not. I'd prepped the colorwork underneath last Friday and left the swirling for today. J. and I had even discussed on how to do the swirls. There's the swirl tool which goes for about one millimeter before demanding more gel. Or the thin brush, which hates anything that isn't straight. There's liner, which I can't work with. There's stamps, but not in our shape. You can, technically, use some pens on gel nails, but sealing it is hard. Which left the swirl brush.

If you can use a swirl brush, curves are only as much of a pain as using, say, a calligraphy pen is. The strokes aren't unlike Asian calligraphy, even. But it's sensitive to pressure, levelness of both brush and surface, movement and if the cleaner on the gel has evaporated or not.

So when I was done and J. told me I'd be doing her other hand soon, I hoped she was kidding.

She wasn't. We looked through the iPad, but there was nothing inspiring there. There's only so much crayola bright dots and glittery white you can plonk on a grown woman's fingernails before she looks desperate to cling to the first half of her life. J. wanted sophistication, and I, quite frankly, wanted to use the season gels, meant for autumn, to make Christmas nails.

We went back and forth a bit, until J. basically let me do as I pleased.

Now, last week, I was on a stamping spree. I didn't stamp much myself in a permanent kind of way. Creatively, I was very much in a non-stamping kind of zone.

I'd cleaned the stamping plates, because not everyone cleans the top of them and almost no one thinks to clean the bottoms full of wet stamping polish. Note to the general population: inhaling nail polish remover through the mouth for fifteen minutes is not a good plan.

Then J. asked me to find some silver polish. There were six bottles of silver, one gold and then there was light blue, which you can play off as light grey with the right underground. I tested them all. It took too long for the customer to get any benefit from it, but I discovered that the metallic colors, mostly, sucked.

Five bottles of silver were called 'sterling silver'. They showed up the same way steam shows up. It's visible, but it does little to hide what's behind it.

The gold did even less.

The blue, on white, was very blue.

And one was called 'silber' and actually worked. I demonstrated the difference to J. on a dark underground. She was alone in the studio and promptly stole the bottle for herself.

So I finally came to the conclusion I wanted to do a french manicure in mature dark green and deep red, with a subtle shimmer, with a silver stamp on it. Because in about one week, customers are going to want christmassy. Some of them have already started, the weirdoes. I took one of the big stamping plates, looked around them, and went for a tip pattern rather than snowflakes or christmas trees or little angel wings or stars. The nails were done in about an hour and half.

Most of it was spent filing off my first design, because I'd tried to put the design under building gel, which, admittedly, last longer, but takes ages to file off. In the end, I had to use the power-file.

Stamping, for once, went swimmingly. I didn't have to redo every nail five times. There were a few false starts with the new stamping tool (another gift of the antichrist, quickly replaced by the old one), getting the right amount of polish on the plate and then getting it on without smudging, but after that, it went great. Sealed it and voilà! Done.

J.'s right hand looks like it was stolen off a tween. But her left... Her left looks classy. Not too christmassy for November, but definitely pointing out that the festive season is coming.