Actual NOTD and a Meetup

I meant to write and post this entry on Monday; in retrospect, that was a nonsensical expectation, as this week at work we have visitors from Belarus and Ukraine, two of whom are my responsibility to meet with for some hours every day and make sure they are adequately fed and entertained as well. It's all good stuff, but just has taken up so much time and energy that I have little left for blogging, especially since I'm doing Holidailies on my online journal this month. But today someone else took charge of the whole group for lunch and despite having a long list of work stuff I should be doing before they get back, I'm giving myself permission to take some time out from that. In addition to all the work stress (the big project our visitors are working on with us is at a critical stage and deadlines are being missed and more tasks are being piled on and so on and so on), there was some family stress when we got the news a few days ago that Mr. Karen's dad had passsed away after his long decline. It wasn't a huge shock, and the memorial service won't happen for a while, and other relatives were able to be with his mom immediately after, so I felt okay being at work, but at times my mind and heart were not all here.

But I am here now, with my actual nails of the day, which I put on for an event this past Saturday and haven't had any time to change. The event was a Michigan Nail Girls meetup, organized on Instagram (which I barely know how to find my way around, so much so that I would have missed the meetup if my friend Tracey hadn't sent me a Facebook message about it). There were eight of us there; here's the group hand shot:



My hand is there in the bottom middle; going around clockwise, it's (by their IG names) honeybee_nails, nailsbyerock, traceyloveslacquer,steeple329, liquid_afterglow_lacquer, er_in_m, and nailsbymercedes. (I'm thekarend.) It was a fun afternoon, with lots of chat and of course many bottles of nail polish made their way out onto the table before we were done. I think I came home with a slightly smaller number of bottles than I'd come with, so I call that a destash success.

You might have noticed some similarities between my nails up there and Tracey's; that's not a coincidence. She'd posted her mani the night before the meeting, and I shamelessly copied some elements, like the light index and middle fingers and the red pinky. I was inspired to do a mani with more elements than I've been incorporating lately. Originally, since I've been doing strips, strips, and more strips for my weekly polish changes, I'd planned to just wear these Incoco Nail Polish Appliques in the Santa's Forest design, which I picked up with they were discontinued to make way for new designs.



Those strips went on my index and middle fingers, and this time I tried the silver sticker in the package to seal up the unused ones; we'll have to see if that keeps them usable.



In addition to nail strips, I used five polishes (and a topcoat I hadn't tried before).



My thumb got two (or maybe three) coats of Catrice Luxury Lacquers in My Big Green Wedding, which has various sizes of spring green metallic glitter in a golden green flecked shimmer base. I used one layer of topcoat but it really could have used another, as it's still slightly bumpy. (This polish was part of a big swap I did recently with my friend from Portugal; look for much more about that after I get a big more caught up with my life outside work.)



My first two fingers didn't just get the strips, they also got a coat of Wet Paint Stardust on top for some added sparkles. My ring finger was adorned in a jelly sandwich with Wet Paint Nails Go Fly a Malachite layered under and over Wet 'n' Wild MegaRocks Rebel Wihtout a Claus. My pinky has Deborah Lippmann Looks Like We Made It from the music box set. All nails got topped with Sally Hansen Diamond Flash Topcoat, which I picked up on clearance when the Diamond Strength bottle style changed some time back but I'd never used it. It was quite nice; thin but not runny, and it did dry fast.



I like all of these colors and combinations, but I think my favorite is the jelly sandwich just look at the squish:



I took so many photos trying to get all my fingers and my thumb in the same shot; this is the best I managed:



As of right now, almost five full days after I put this on, it's still in pretty good shape. I have slight tipwear and a couple chips at the corners, mostly on my thumbs because no matter how I try, I can't keep myself from using my thumbnails as tools. But overall, it looks good enough that I haven't wanted to attack it with remover yet. I haven't gotten a lot of comments on it, maybe because I've mostly been spending time with guys at work and Belarusians, both of which groups probably either don't notice or don't know what to say if they do. A couple of nearly six year old girls I rode in an elevator with over the weekend really liked it, though, so I've got that going for me.

The Wet Paint polishes shown in this entry were provided free for review purposes. The others were purchased by me or swapped for.