the_oracle

Oh how I hate it when I wake up feeling fine and then slowly develop a headache. I'd normally think it's a lack of caffeine, but *gestures to drink* or weather, but I'm pretty sure we're currently not in the impending rain situation that would normally create such joy. So... dunno. Just lucky, I guess. Or waited a smidge too long before eating.


Anyway, I spent my weekend alternating between being a lump (sometimes for fun, sometimes because I felt like crap) and cleaning/pulling out the Halloween stuff that lives inside instead of in the storage shed. I did the writing desk a couple of weeks ago and it still makes me happy to look over and see it. I might add some lights at some point and maybe just leave as it is, but I might also add some JOLs or something. We'll see.

Yesterday the cat and I worked on two of the three pieces of furniture in the hallway that I decorate. Dusted and straightened the bookcase by the bathroom (Adora hopped up on the shelf I cleared off to inspect my work), then put some of the stuff from the tower on top. This isn't done by any means but I do dig the look for now.

Then I learned that Mums has changed her opinion on the little chest of drawers in the hallway. Once upon a time she loathed it nearly as much as I did, but for whatever reason we didn't get rid of it. Yesterday I argued that the home owners didn't care about it, but now I wonder if maybe I'm misremembering and we kept it because they played the "we understand if you HAVE to get rid of it but if you don't, we'd appreciate it" card. But I still think it was basically just really fucking heavy and we didn't have anything else that worked as a good place to drop mail, keep towels for the downstairs bathroom, etc.

For the last couple of weeks I've been lowkey plotting to replace it but haven't found anything suitable because I am not a farmhouse girly and I don't particularly like overly modern/plain shit. Gimme some personality, dammit. In a perfect, non bed bug worrying world, I'd go secondhand and find something that way. But fuck bedbugs, man. Not going through that shit.

Anyway, I asked Mums whether she'd given any thought to it as a what if scenario. Blank stare. Tried again. Multiple ways. Eventually I thought to ask if she even wanted it replaced anymore. No, she likes it. It grew on her over time.


Nooooooooooooooooooo.... this little bastard weighs a ton, has three drawers that hold absolutely nothing (two thin towels and they're done! Poof! Outta room!), and if you don't have it positioned just right, the front door slams into it OR you just know if you fall down the stairs you will hit your head on the corner and die.


I hate it. I didn't even realize how much I'd grown to hate it until recently when it finally occurred to me that I could replace it. UGH.

So for now, I've replaced the sheet that covers the box of books that haven't made it to proper shelving (we've got a lot of books, dude, I don't know what to tell you) and the random box of holiday lights, popped my trio of ghosts on top and then immediately groaned when Widget put his stuff on it after work. My art, man. Which is another reason I want to replace this thing. So I can decorate and still have it be useful. We shall see what I find, I guess. Maybe I'll find something that we both (all?) love.

For now I shall seethe in silence.

Anyone else sit down to do something and wind up unexpectedly falling into a pit of fandom scrolling? It's not doomscrolling, it's realizing people have basically been screenshotting tumblr/twitter/wherever and uploading that to Pinterest and then discussing things there. I didn't realize how much of a thing this was until recently, and even then I don't think it fully set in until this morning when I sat down for my morning flip through the emails, landed on a Pinterest one, and fell down a three hour long rabbit hole of my fandoms co-mingling there.

Mostly it was Yellowjackets stuff, including the original pitch deck for the show and boy howdy was that a fun thing to flip through, but occasionally, as Pinterest likes to do, it'd remember that I will also lose entire hours to Interview with the Vampire fanart/stuff, so it decided to COMBINE them. Because of course there's gonna be crossover beyond just me.

So the first two hours involved me telling myself the lie that I was just gonna look at these three open tabs and not click anything else (liiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeessssssssss), and then just as I was actually closing the extra tabs, Pinterest's like, "sooooooooo... how 'bout some vampires?" and once I indulged them on that, suddenly it was like, "hey, what about Monster High and a crossover with MLP?" and I spent a good solid four minutes wondering why, in an otherwise YJ feed, there was an Apple White (from Ever After High) meme. Like it was a solid choice, but it was also very much missing the opportunity to put Jackie (from YJ) in it and I spent those four minutes wondering if I was just somehow missing her.

Post-work me is not the smartest, ok?

I'd probably have been there longer had I actual snacks to consume at the time, so there's that.

What rabbit holes do you fall down? Tell me so I feel less alone. I know you've done it at least occasionally!

It's a freakin' miracle, baby. I went through last night, on a whim, and sorted my swatch sticks. Finally. I can't say they're 100% done because they aren't ~perfect~, but they're all on rings with their friends in approximate color groups. I'd been making little steps forward on this, as I went through every couple of months and would tackle a color group and then add in any of the swatch sticks I had from my latest round of swatching.

Problem is, I mostly had left my purples til the end. Do you know what my favorite color is? What polish color I will buy, knowing full well I have eleventy-billion at home but who cares because this one is just so pretty?

FUCKING. PURPLE.

*cries*

I did learn that for someone who leans really hard into the blue leaning purples, the colors that gave me the biggest jolt of serotonin were bright purples with a reddish shimmer.

I also re-learned that I don't like certain things in polish, but I'm too lazy to try and word this properly, so at some point I'll either take pictures or look up examples of what I mean. Thankfully, some of these I have remembered over the past year or two, like purples with red/blue glitter or shimmer particles that are big enough to make out each piece. I just don't like it and I dunno why.

There was also a moment when I feared I'd lost most of my blue swatch sticks and would have to re-swatch all of them and nearly freaked out because blue is my second biggest color group. Luckily, I remembered I'd put them someplace "safe" since I'd mostly finished sorting them earlier this year.


If memory serves, so long as you don't count black/white/grey, or metallics like bronze/gold, my smallest color group is yellow by a laaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge margin. Even if you added the golds and other similar metallics, yellow is still the smallest group. This makes total sense because I look like ass in yellow and yellow polishes are notorious for having terrible formulas, or at least requiring three coats minimum, and while I'm no longer requiring one coat wonders, I do not have the patience for three coats of a color that's gonna look like shit on me from the jump.

Pinks are the next smallest and only as large as they are because I lump in pinky reds and pinky purples, and also because for a short period of time I told myself I could buy any pink I wanted, within reason, because I KNEW I didn't have very many pinks at all. Orange used to be until I realized I do, in fact, love certain shades of orange. I do not like oranges with pink shimmers though, and when I told Mums, she cheerfully said, "Peach!" and then we both mentioned corals. I buy corals and peaches for Mums and because the color reminds me of her, but most of the time I don't wear them because they look like ass on me. But circling back to the pink shimmer oranges, I really did mean a good orange polish with a pink shimmer. I have a couple I either bought before I realized this or without realizing it had a pink shimmer in the first place. Booooo.


Reds and greens are in the middle for different reasons. Reds probably have a higher percentage than they would normally because red is a color I've been gifted a few times, or it'll be part of a collection and if I'm buying the whole collection, I'm gonna wind up with a red, and reds pop up in pretty much every season because reds sell. I don't wear a ton of reds though, but the ones I love, I love HARD.

Greens I allow myself a decent amount of leeway with because green polishes are harder to come by and I like to encourage brands to freakin' release them. They're also the one color I can almost always guarantee I'll kick myself for not buying later (Talking about you, Essie's Sweater Weather). Greens also have a bigger array of color variations than reds, and there are some I don't mess with much (so sorry, Swampy Greens), and there are some you can guarantee I'll be diving into with wild abandonment (hello, blue leaning green glitters) so that helps things.

In general, the easiest/happiest ones to sort were the blacks (huzzah!) and the silvers, as both provided me a happy little selection of pretties that at some point I know full well my dumbass is gonna swatch on a wheel and then stare at it happily.



At this point, this is what I have left to do:

- Figure out which polishes haven't been swatched at all.
   I *think* this is just my last two Holo Taco orders, so that shouldn't be terrible. eta: yup, just the last two HT orders.

- Figure out which polishes need to be re-swatched.
   Apparently some Revlon polishes and topcoats have a chemical reaction with certain swatch sticks, so that sometime later they get this white film on them and it's annoying as shit. I need to go through and figure out which ones are affected by the topcoat issue and also see if just putting another brand of topcoat over will work (eta: iffy) or if that'll just be a waste of time, either because the film will get stuck between layers and ruin everything or just go through the new topcoat anyway.
   Also, some polishes in general kind of eat away at the swatch sticks but if you do a gel layer on the stick first, it'll negate that. I need to see if it's something I can do after the fact (doubtful) or if I just need to re-swatch the toppers and any unfortunate others. (gonna need to just flat out redo these, using the gel topcoat first, then painting)
   Finally, any polishes I painted on the underside of the swatch sticks probably just need to be redone in general because of either the aforementioned problems or humidity made them bubble. There's a polish that also turned funky on the swatch stick and I need to redo that one or see if the polish itself turned. Like a blue turned browny-orange. It's ugly as hell and the only reason I haven't gone hunting for it already is because it's from a brand I don't fuck with anymore so it's low on the priority list.

- Acquire more rings of the correct size.
  As it is, I have some on really big, too thick rings and a lot of the smaller rings are too full to add anything. Whenever I do go back through and fix things, I do think I will just go ahead and sort out polishes by finish types for the most part with the exceptions being any where I specifically want to keep similar colors together so I can compare them, regardless of finish.

- Figure out how to store/display them properly.
  This'll be easier once I get them on proper rings but I'd kinda like to figure this one out sooner rather than later.

- Figure out storage for the collection proper.
  I still think the various Helmers/not!Helmers aren't all that pretty but I don't really want to find a piece of furniture I love only to realize the hard way that the drawers cannot hold the polish. That would just not be a fun day. I suppose if I do go the Helmer route, I can just put the swatch sticks in the top drawer.


I figure my next polish play day that isn't swatching the HT polishes (I might do that today), will either be going through the sticks and writing down which polishes to yoink for re-swatching purposes, or just grabbing the toppers in general and going in on that, though that'll depend on whether I've got a gel TC for this.