Moving on, it’s Monday! You know what that means! Today is week two for Hard Candy, with “Mushroom”. This is a colour I would probably never purchase myself, but apparently I will swap for it. I’m quite glad I did. This will be a great polish to fall back on for Fall and even Winter.

Now, I noticed last week that “Beetle” did not offer to chip even once. There was your usual edge wear, but other than that, the polish held up like a champ. My only complaint would be the size of the brush. Boy howdy, their brushes are tiny-sauce…

In a final spot of news, Artfire have finally made a statement regarding their security hole, and have sent emails out to users that may have been affected. Some folk are still waiting for emails with an explanation regarding why their privacy was breached. But hopefully, the worst of it is over, and these problems will not continue. Personally, however, the lack of professionalism from Artfire has killed any chance of me using that site to purchase from artisans again. Quite sad – they’ve lost some fantastic business, and customers over this debacle as well.

Last night, quite a few people noticed that when placing an order, their shipping info was being pre-filled with other people’s information. This morning, people woke up to find random items in their shopping carts which they did not place there. Others still had received email notifications that their order was being processed (or had shipped), when they hadn’t made an order at all. In a word: clusterfuck. So please, stay away from Artfire until they get this horrible security issue resolved.

Edit to Add: One Artfire shopper shares her perspective and experience in this whole mess: [link]

Also, the Paris Amour Giveaway is still open! Be sure to pop over and put in your entry before Monday, August 22nd at 11:59PM EST!

This hair mask normally retails for $6.29 at CVS, but I do believe it was three dollars less at the time when I bought it. The front label touts that the product “resists breakage for longer hair”. This claim is echoed on the back label, where it reads: “Helps restore moisture and prevent breakage, so you can grow hair longer”.

Once I cracked the jar open and got a good look at the product, I was disappointed. This did not have the thickness of a heavy mask. It didn’t even have the thickness of your average “three minute miracle” conditioner. It looked and felt like your average, run of the mill conditioner. But hey, it smelled nice.

My hair certainly felt softer, and smelled awesome after using this product. I was feeling good about my purchase until I noticed something: Its primary claim was not being met. At all. I still had the same amount of breakage-frizz, and my split ends actually seemed to be getting worse. Replenishing mask, my ass. If you’re so replenishing, why is my hair the same as it was before?

Well… remember what I said about its disappointing consistency? Turn the bottle around again, and you’ll see a footnote for the “makes hair grow longer” claim:

Mask vs. non-conditiong shampoo

What is this I don’t even. Do you see this? Do you see what this jar is telling you? It’s saying that using this product will get you better results than not using a conditioning product at all. At first glance, it claims to be a replenishing mask that prevents breakage. But one you get to the fine print, they claim that it will only perform better than shampoo alone. Which makes me consider this as nothing more than regular conditioner, packaged in a bloody freakin’ jar to look “different”.

Well. At least I can reuse the jar. And it did smell nice. But am I buying this again? Absolutely not. Not only does it not do what it claims to do, it isn’t at all what it claims to be. I’d much rather give my support to companies who don’t resort to lies in order to sell their product.

I like to haunt Dusty’s youtube channel (and new blog), and his review of the L’Oreal “One Sweep” eyeshadow concept was too beautiful not to share:

It’s a right horrible ordeal to go through.

But I think it should be noted, right here, right now, that the almost zenlike feeling of finally making it to your personal potty party is really, very worth the wait.

I feel like I could solve some problems now. I feel like I could save some people now. I feel… like I could change the world. I really, honestly, truly could. One poo at a time.

Thank you and God Bless.

How long will the good times roll?  Some things do reach their high point too early on… and it’s all downhill from there.  But hell, who wants to worry about that?  Not me.  Not you.  Let’s just enjoy the good times while they’re going in a circular motion.  Barack Obacca commands it.

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ETA: Oh, snap!  They took it down.  Conspiracy!  CONSPIRACY!
Sorry if you missed it, folks.  Especially sorry that she still exists, somewhere in the wilds of Virginia…

I smile and say “yup”, which was a big mistake, because her two sisters proceeded to come over and talk my hind leg off for the next half hour.  Well, the one talked the most, in fucking spanglish, so I just kind of nodded and smiled when she rattled on about how my hair is a boy’s haircut, my pants are for boys, my shoes are for boys, and don’t I like being a girl? and do I have a Mom and do I have a Dad and do I have a boyfriend and what’s his name and does he have hair on his face and do you have a pool and and and and…

Kept trying the “it’s late, I need to go home” line (and all that accomplished was her telling me which ways NOT to go on my way home, because there’s “alligators and (spanish for spiders) and vampires”).  Which then drifted off into a one-sided conversation about dogs and cats.  And then, to top it all off, little miss spanglish belches some god-awful rankness riiiiiight in my face.

And the littlest one nicks my rubber duckie.  Now I have no duckie in my car

And strangely… when I DID finally escape… I just felt sort of lonely.  Got bummed about it for about two minutes before I realized that I should celebrate the lack of screaming hellians instead… and enjoyed a nice long drive home.  Just the smell of night, the haze and the lightning flashing ahead.  Uber Groovy.

So we spent the rest of the night doing energy work.  Sylver had the idea of working with vortices, so we grounded and drew up a basic energy vortex.  Dropped it, and started drawing elemental vortices, and we both found a very strange thing… our weakest elements were the easiest to draw, and our strongest elements were the hardest.  I can draw water and fire very easily, but when I drew a fire vortex, it was very, very hard to control.  Water didn’t want to come up at all… one side kept falling, so I had to strain to pull it up and keep it all level and cycling.  So it was very interesting, but very frustrating to have my “easiest” elements be such a bitch to control.  But rather cool that ones I have the hardest time connecting with were the easiest to work with.  I’d always been kind of skittish with air energy, and earth was next to impossible to tap… now that I know how to tap them, I feel much better about them.

There are more parts to the exercise that we didn’t even get to try… gonna have to keep working with those difficult vortices before we even dare attempt step-two or step-three.

Now that we have a newer level of work, I really need to finish writing up our first set of exercises.  I’ve had step-one of exercise-one written up for months now, but never started writing step-two, or exercise two.  Work work work.  I might have to consider putting those up here somewhere, once I get them finished.