Really?

I get 2/3 of the way through NaBloPoMo and then forget to post? Really? Oh well. With my new goals of practicing for The Messiah and getting to bed on time, there wasn't much time for blogging/internetting anyway!

A hippo? With Noodles?

I know this is a total cop out, but in case I don't have time for a real post later, I'll leave you with this. My kids absolutely love this. I have never figured out if it supposed to be about something (probably something inappropriate, as most humor is). But in the meantime, I think it's really funny.

Heels Experiment

I wrote about wanting to try to wear high heels a while back. I did wear heels every day for a week and continue to wear the brown ones occasionally. They only hurt 65% of the time instead of 100%.

However, I declare the heels experiment a failure. There are several reasons:

1) Discomfort. I refuse to be that uncomfortable. Someday if I get some better shoes maybe I can overcome this problem, but in the meantime I am not willing to sacrifice comfort for (theoretical) looks.

2) Health. I am not interested in ending up with deformed feet/legs/back due to heels.

3) This is the most important of all -- loss of stealth capabilities! You might not realize this, but I am a ninja. Now, they say that a REAL ninja wouldn't tell anyone they are a ninja. Whatever; that's a total myth. (I will likely have incontrovertible proof that I am a ninja soon.) It's very difficult to be all stealthy and ninja-like if you are wearing loud high heels. In addition to being a stealthy ninja, I am a total INTROVERT. I sneak around silently so as not to draw any attention to myself. Heels have the opposite effect - usually they are very loud (my brown ones have rubber soles, so they aren't as bad). Also, I would be the only one at my company wearing them, so they draw undue attention. Drawing attention to myself is rarely on my list of goals for the day. Avoiding everyone is more like it. Remember the engineering.com swine flu video? Engineers despise public. So true.

Whoops!

16 days into NaBloPoMo, and I almost forgot to post today.

I'll tell you about my budgeting fail. One of my major rules for following a budget needs to be "only go to the store once a week, and FOLLOW the list." Tonight we stopped by the store to get milk, bread, eggs, and raisins. The milk was the most important thing we needed. I exited the store $51 lighter. How did that happen?!?

When we walked in, I saw the Rice Chex, on sale for cheaper than the generic brand. That's YoungestSon's favorite cereal, so I stocked up. Then I remembered that I want to make my sister some cookies (sssshhh, she reads this blog and it's a secret, so I have to whisper), so I bought some good chocolate chips and some hopefully non-rancid walnuts. Then on the way to the bread, I saw the Hickory Farms display including Summer Sausage and mustard. It's my dad's birthday, so I picked up some of those. Then, bread was on sale, so we got 3 loaves. On the way to the dairy case, I made the brilliant decision to go down the toy aisle. I've been wanting some more dice, so I grabbed a pack of those for $2. The kids saw some sticker books for $1.25 each, and I was feeling very generous, so I got 3. Finally we got to the eggs, and of course I had to add in some butter for the cookies. But I forgot the milk.

Whoops.

Fortunately the budget isn't totally blown. I still have $16 for the rest of the week and plenty of stuff to cook with here at home. Except no milk for the kids. I have homemade almond milk for myself, but they're too chicken to drink it.

30 by 30

I'm pretty bad at goal-setting. I have all these fairly nebulous ideas of what I want out of life (loving husband, being a stay at home mom, house with white picket fence, financial freedom, etc.) but I'm scared to commit it to paper and determine the actual steps I will need to take to reach these goals. There's a pretty obvious explanation -- if I never actually set the goal, there's no sense of failure or disappointment if I don't achieve it. I am realizing that I am very scared of failure, and that in some areas of life, I set the bar as low as I need to in order to ensure that I don't fail. It's honestly pretty sad.

I thought that putting together a list of 30 Goals by Age 30 might help kick-start me into a goal-setting and achieving mindset. I have just over one year to complete all of these, so they are fairly simple, nothing dramatic or crazy.

1) Make Nie Nie's Mud Cake Magnifique (I wanted to make this for my birthday this year but didn't get around to it. I'll make this version.)
2) Begin a set community service time at least twice monthly with the kids, such as visiting a nursing home
3) Complete all 30 days of the 30-Day Shred
4) Run a 5K race
5) Run a mile in under 10 minutes
6) Read 6 books (I used to read about that many in a week or two)
7) Go on a date
8) Take the kids sledding (I avoid being cold as much as possible)
9) Systematically declutter the entire house
10) Take a family vacation
11) Make a treasure map/vision board (astrologists say the best time to do it is Aries New Moon, not January 1st)
12) Make plans for my life on paper
13) Learn how to knit in a relaxing manner (it tenses my shoulders up badly)
14) Have a Lord of the Rings marathon (or Star Wars could be substituted if I wnt to involve the kids and they can't handle LOTR)
15) Give blood twice
16) Go to a country dance
17) Have a (pint or larger) green smoothie every day for a month
18) Clean the house and stick to a program/method of keeping it relatively clean and clutter free (probably Flylady or some variation thereof)
19) Maintain an Emergency Fund savings account of $1000 and replenish it each time any is used (I wanted to do a debt-reduction goal, but this area of my life is SO up in the air right now)
20) Take the kids on a picnic
21) Get a house/dwelling with a backyard and have a successful garden
22) Organize my recipes
23) Go to a concert, opera, or play
24) Start digital scrapbooking (I have software, lessons, tutorials, kits, and Quick Albums already)
25) Start a business
26) Avoid getting married (I have nothing against getting married eventually but I need to be smart about it and not rush into things this time)
27) Determine, accept, and move forward courageously with my religious/spiritual beliefs
28) Become licensed as a professional engineer
29) Make friends with a real-live woman (not just on the internet), including actually doing something with her face to face (outside of Visiting Teaching, Relief Society Meetings [fka "Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment", fka "Homemaking Night"], etc.)
30) Get my kids in bed by 8:30 for 30 days, use the time in the evening to work on these goals or do something for myself (NOT including mindlessly wasting time on the internet), and go to bed early enough to get 8 hours of sleep (this goal might directly conflict with #25)

Can You See Me Now?

Sometimes I attempt to wear makeup. I am never consistent about it though. I think when I worked in Houston for 2 years, I wore it the whole time, but that's probably my longest run since age 14. I had to wear makeup for an interview on September 30th of this year, and I decided to keep wearing it afterward. So I've worn it every week day since, except the day I had that big 8-hour test. That day, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought "Wow, I look SO different without makeup. I look sickly and pale."

Now, it's entirely possible that the makeup had nothing to do with it, and I did look sickly and pale, because that was an awful day and the bathroom had very unflattering lighting, and on average I've been getting about 5 hours sleep per night. But I was a little annoyed that after just a month of wearing makeup, I already felt like I had to have it to look decent. I have decided to continue wearing it, because I do work in a professional world, and statistically, women wearing makeup get a better response professionally, including in their amount of pay. I know a lot of women think makeup is really fun, and I TOTALLY get that (that link takes you to Wisely Chosen's absolutely fabulous and gorgeous makeup pictures), but it's just not me. Stuff like that just doesn't come naturally to me. I'd rather spend my time doing other things, and keep life as simple as possible. Buying makeup, learning how to use it, maintaining it, keeping it out of the kids' reach (or helping them use it safely), and spending the time to use it and remove it each day is NOT simplifying my life.

Darn it, I meant this to be a lighthearted picture post, not a rant about society and makeup. Oh well. Writing is therapeutic for me, so I just go with what comes out my fingers.

The mascara is the main feature for me. My eyelashes are pretty much invisible without it. I wear brown-black mascara. I sometimes wear brown eyeliner, but lately I've been leaving it out because I just can't get it right, even after attempting it for 14+ years. My eyebrows are also mostly invisible (as far as I can see), and someday I intend to learn how to put some color on them, but I don't do that now. I have never, ever in my entire life, plucked my eyebrows, since I think they're invisible. I hope I'm right!!! I did get them waxed once before my sister's wedding.

I own four colors of eyeshadow - white, tan, brown, and pink (not like this). I do know how to use it, kind of, because I had my makeup done professionally by a salon owner/artist when I was 14, and she showed me how to do it. But the high-quality brushes don't work with crappy grocery store makeup, so I just muddle through and hope it doesn't look too bad.

In the past I've attempted wearing blush, lip liner, and lipstick, but that's long in the past. I did buy some pale/nude lip gloss a while ago. I really don't know how to wear lipstick/lip gloss. It's always gone within minutes. I always bite it off. I have never worn foundation or concealer, and hope to not have to. But if my face doesn't get the memo that we are no longer 15 years old, I may have to think about it. But I DO NOT WANT to cover up my freckles AT ALL, and I am not sure that's possible unless I wear an extremely sheer foundation, and then what's the point of wearing one? I do need to get some moisturizer or start using coconut oil or something. I am going to have fabulous wrinkles when I am old, and I am not interested in doing anything other than wearing moisturizer to stop that process.

----> OK, this is where the post was SUPPOSED to start. My coworkers the other day were talking about makeup. I said that my sister says my makeup is too light to see. My coworker said she couldn't see mine! So I took some close up pictures to see if she was right. I guess she was!

Sorry that some of these are so blurry -- I wanted them to be done without a flash, and it's difficult to get good pictures that way, and I'm too lazy to redo it.

No makeup:




Wow, with all that purple under my eyes, people probably think I'm a vampire or something!

With all my makeup (there's even eyeliner):




You can definitely tell a huge difference with the mascara, but the rest isn't all that different.

I decided to do one with the flash. The difference in what shows up is amazing. I wonder which picture is more accurate to what people see in real life, indoors or out?:

Again

I posted almost the exact same thing 2 months ago, but this one is even better:

What happens when people with curly hair brush their hair:



I had several inches trimmed (at the longest point), and here's what it looks like now:



It looks SO short to me!

Also, looking at that picture is driving me crazy -- it's so uneven on the right side! The problem is that it was trimmed while pulled straight, and the curls all shrink up differently when dry. It should be trimmed curly, not straight. Which is why curly girls need to pay $$$$ for special hairdressers trained in curly haircutting techniques.