I’m going for my first manicure/pedicure on Thursday and I’m a bit nervous.
a) will she judge me for the state that my hands and feet are in?
b) will I be able to deal with someone touching my feet without having a ticklish ‘episode’ and kicking her in the face.
That said I’ve been working really hard, so bring on the pampering!
So it was an interesting weekend. I started off dutifully dragging my achingness off to the gym on Friday, and discovered that I was actually able to run! My family sat me down afterwards and told me that the TOD is psychotic and this is all rubbish and so on and so on. They were somewhat mollified by my promising to avoid exercise for the rest of the weekend as I had a lot of stuff going on...
Saturday was the vet as usual, where I was joined by the very charming seven-year old daughter of my bosses again, who was very cool this time. She made me business cards (my name is "Hellin" now) as well as making me envelopes so that I could write her letters, and a proper 3-dimensional landscape thing of children dancing around a tree next to a tent on a beach. Seriously, for a sever-year old? Impressive. She also gave me outfit advice for the evening which was seen with great amusement by her parents!
In the evening I rushed off (late as usual) to Tamara's birthday thing. I was pretty scared, particularly walking up the road in her complex. It was a beautiful night, the crickets were chirping and I had the awful feeling that it was the opening scene for a slasher-movie. As it happened I made it out alive (not just because of the flat shoes) and although I couldn't stay long, everyone was really nice, they seemed to like my entrance of "Hi, nice mullet!" and by complete coincidence one of my ex-students was there with his wife. By even creepier coincidence I had been thinking of him recently in the "I wonder if he's still alive?" kind of way.
From there it was a sprint to chief-Goth's house, where I had a mild freak-out at my general lack of makeup (as usual. Seriously, I need to start taking eyeliner with me!) I was distracted when I had to do the eyeliner and nail polish on one of the guys. To his credit he sat very still and it looked AWESOME!
From there we went off to Goth-world, which had a surprising number of normal people there, including one of my students of course. Here I am with La trying to pull emo-faces. Well I tried, La is always smiling! I believe we took this photo shortly after the eyelinered-guy tried to set me up with the bouncer (who was gorgeous!) and we had swapped phone numbers. As I said it was interesting...
And of course we had to find people with hats... This guy was quite into the whole photo things... I had just jumped off the dance floor having gone totally ballistic for about 5 songs in a row (including headbanging to Song 2, fending off some dodgy guy and laughing at someone trying to dance with La who didn't even notice he was there) and so I was exhausted and my hair had decided to remodel itself...
I also got to spend a lot of time with one of the people in the social circle who I've never got to know before (beyond the obligatory re-naming and laughing at us when we got a bunch of random strangers to yell at the TV with us one night). The problem is that eyeliner-guy and his girlfriend are trying very hard to be puppet-masters in the whole situation. Seriously, if I want to get to know someone I will do it on MY terms. Don't mess with me, I can make my own decisions! AAARGH!Anyway that's enough for today, I'm off to have lunch with Leia as I think we have a significant amount of news to catch up on!
First things first... oh my word I nearly died! I went to my appointment with the personal trainer of doom this morning, and only finished TWO HOURS later! That's including a lot of painful squats and stretchy-type exercises, 20 minutes of running and a 'cool off' of running for half an hour (well I walked 90 % of it because I honestly thought I was going to die...).
And he wants another session tomorrow. Kill. Me. Now.
To be honest, I asked him to push me, I told him what I wanted and he's basically helping me with the things I struggle with, and as a relatively clueless gym-goer I'm loving having some direction. I just wish it didn't hurt so much. And I have Tai Chi tonight so I might just die.
I went off to get a new hair straightener the other day (Vidal Sassoon is AWESOME!) and ran into a promotion for Victoria Jackson products. Apparently they're launching in South Africa and so they need to get it all hyped and so on. I got an awesome kit of a brush set + carry case, an incredible eyeshadow set (well the box is incredible, you push a button and it opens...), 12 adorable mini-lipglosses and a bronzer.
I usually don't use bronzer because I have never been able to find one that didn't make it look like I'd had a nasty encounter with the self-tan, but this one is fantastic! I used some today and Leia said that the gym nightmare must have worked because I looked all glowy :)
And the lip-glosses are the cutest things ever and they're super-nourishing and I love the colours! Bearing in mind that the single gloss I fell in love with at Bobbi Brown cost something around R200 (and I didn't get it) getting 12 of them as a free gift for getting the set is so much better! 
Cute, no?
And Leia decided that she likes my hair all poofy-curly and she's gone off to a prelab so I'm off to seize the opportunity to plug in my straightener while she's not here to yell at me!
So on Sunday I wound up helping out at the video store and as Josh had his super-stylish netbook with him (I want one!) I got to pick the movie. We wound up watching this:
Josh was quite nice about letting me watch it, and by halfway into it he was watching as much as I was! He explained it in two ways:
Does that mean next time I meet someone I won't: check my phone constantly, worry about missing a call if I'm in the shower and then not answer it if it does ring because I'm too worried about what I might say?
I'll do my best! And at least I know I'm not alone! And if the worst comes to the worst, I have friends who will tell me that he's:
Girls are dangerous friends, but I love them anyway!
Thanks so much those of you who've voted to name the cactus! Please keep voting, the poll is up until Friday!
So anyway after an awesome weekend of braaing, doing yoga on a wiii (videos might follow but I'm not sure how keen the people are to have their hula-hooping broadcast, and it's one of those 'you-had-to-be-there clips), being attacked by a lamp with a necklace doing an impression of a wind-chime at the same time, and spending an awesome evening playing Guitar Hero World tour (that's the one with the microphone and the drums and the two guitars and you play in a band!) after I was invited by telepathy and then yelled at for not RSVPing...
For the record, I really really really want to learn to pay the drums now! It was so much fun! And anyone near me got whacked by my flying drumsticks, so be warned... And of course when I mentioned the yoga to my boss on Saturday he and I ended up practising our yoga stances in the waiting room, between clients! It was bizarre!
Anyway it was also a bit of a weekend to be girly for me. I spent a long time having a chat with Chief-Goth, who's not very happy at the moment, and she's decided to do Pilates with me, so I'm hoping that'll happen. As much as I like gym as 'me' time, I want her to feel better more.
I also got these awesome earrings:
some awesome legwarmers (they're grey and black and I love them! and a pair of Converse-style canvas boots that are pink and black and lace up to just below the knee (hence the legwarmers, having boots on without tights or something makes me feel like I'm wearing shoes with no socks and that's disgusting!) and an amazing shirt that's made out of something called Lenzing-Modal or something, but basically it's made out of cellulose from beech trees! It's really comfortable and it'll be suitable for the goth metal music festival I'm going to in a few weeks!
The boots are amazing, except that I have to lace them up pretty tightly to get the laces the whole way to the top, so I went hunting for shoelaces and ended up buying these ribbons instead:
The laces are white at the moment and I love the look but the super-neon pink (it's brighter than it looks here) is amazing too, so I'm going to have to go home and try it out!
Anyway, after all that, and a relatively quiet Monday, Leia and I went shopping this morning. I've been promising to take her make-up shopping for months and we finally diarised it and went, although it was a bit 11th hour because her car isn't too reliable and I thought I might have to dash off somewhere else halfway through the morning, but as it happens, we made it, albeit about an hour late because I had managed to lose my car keys.
After only a brief stop at Rage and Aldo (who had the most awesome shoes but not in my size, the joy of it being on sale and therefore the last pair) I delivered her to Lizzy, the amazing person at Bobbi Brown. Lizzy recognised me! How scary? I introduced her (as she was kind of sputtering - Leia, not Lizzy) as my friend who needed help, and so Leia sat for about half an hour having her makeup done while Lizzy explained what everything was and how to use it. The only awkward part was when I was bouncing around (I ran off to check out MAC a few times, as well as looking around Red Earth which looked like there had been a tornado through the aisle) she gave us both a lecture on using black eyeliner and black mascara. For the record, my hair is super-dark brown and as much as I like brown eyeliner, it's too much effort maintaining two sets of everything, particularly when mascara goes funny after three months anyway! She also told me that as my eyebrows are basically black and my hair is brown I should TINT my eyebrows to match my hair to match my eyeliner. uh, how about NO?
And we also promised to go through on Saturday when they have a visiting international makeup artist visiting. I'm not sure what to expect, but she said we'd enjoy it and we'd have our makeup done again. I can never say no to free pamperage...
After all that, Leia looked vaguely shell-shocked but also decided that she wanted to check out a dress, so we ended up trying on outfits for a while. I liked a lot of stuff, but I have learned to go away and think for a day or two before committing to clothes, in an effort to avoid my cupboard filling up until the shelves collapse. She got herself a LBD and I was very proud!
I made it up to myself by going past my favourite accessories place and getting these:
I totally fell in love with the penguins! They also came with these:
Sorry for the fuzzy photo, they're tiny! And also perfect for teaching the snail dissection! And these:
so totally adorable!
Anyway after all that I'm totally girlied-out and I feel the need to play paintball or climb rocks or go quad-biking or something. Not that it wasn't awesome fun though!
And it's Tai-Chi tonight! I'm SO excited!
So after all the girly discussions we've been having in the lab, me painting my toenails a scary lumo-pink (which I love, but that's besides the point) and even choosing clothes that had been ironed a few times a week (rather than the usual rolling out of bed and checking to see wat's the least crumpled) it appears that the world still sees me as being male.
During lunch today I got my bag out to get money to give to someone so that they could bring me caffeine (why you can't buy a caffeine IV is still beyond me) I found my insanely bright orange nail poilish that I thought I'd lost. So I got all excited and painted my nails. A few minutes into it Luke walked past, did a double take, blinked a few times and said "Am I seeing things?"
aaaaargh!
I am going to stop talking about life in the lab or a bit, mainly because the girl who tried very hard to wreck the equipment is now being more annoying than ever and I really have no desire to rehash the lecture I just gave her via email.
anyway last night we were chatting to the IT guy about GHD straighteners, and he freaked out at the level of girliness and ran off, and so I was chatting to my labmate, and it became apparent that she had never even seen a hair straightener, does not own a hairdryer and only uses conditioner when the mood hits.
And as much as I tend to climb trees, get covered in dirt and get bitten or crapped on by various animals regularly, I freaked! Life without heat-styling? A day without conditioner? Even if you listen to Oprah and only use shampoo twice a week, you HAVE to condition!
Anyway the IT guy is going overseas and might be able to pick up a GHD for me. I have the good old Toni & Guy which I'm totally fond of, but I'm torn between saving up for a new camera lens, or grabbing the opportunity for the world's most awesome straightener...
Thoughts?
