Since I started writing blueshelled.com, I have been very lucky to have the support of some excellent people. One of those companies is SkincareRx.com. For the last six months, they have been a proud sponsor of my site and have been quietly working behind the scenes to support me in any way possible. They are one of the companies that make it possible for me to write here and I want to say thank you.
Besides being awesome and supporting unknown bloggers, they also do fun things such as giveaways to the faithful readers of said unknown blogs. It is another way of supporting this blog and rewarding the people who spend time here and I am incredibly grateful for their support. As such, I’d like to direct you back to their amazing home page and ask you to give them a whirl.
They are offering a great line of Skinceutical Advanced Brightening products, as well as all of the amazing skincare stuff you love. The Advanced Brightening products are particularly good for damaged skin, as they decrease the effects of that damage as well as protect your skin. If you aren’t using skincare, now is a good time to get started. I can tell the difference in my skin on the days that I use skincare versus the days I don’t. Soap and water isn’t enough, especially with the pollution we encounter daily in the air around us. I’m a fan of even toned skin, as mine tends to be blotchy, and this particular set helps even out the skin tone, as well.
My favorite product in the set is the sunscreen. I hate sunscreen. I hate the way it feels. I hate applying it. I hate having it on my face and stinging my eyes. I actually tried this brand a couple of years ago and it’s the only sunscreen I’ll use on my face because I can apply it with a makeup sponge and it feels like there is nothing there. Ok, enough gushing about the skincare. You want to know about the prize, right?
You don’t have the money to invest in skincare? This is where I come in and SkincareRx.com helps you out. We’re offering a giveaway for my readers! It is the largest prize I have ever offered and I’m thankful to them for sponsoring it. A gift card to SkincareRx.com is up for grabs in the amount of $150! This is NOT just for women. Men have skin, too, that needs protection. Even if you aren’t into your skin, I’m sure you know someone who is. Mother’s Day is coming up. What better gift than a $150 gift card to a great site? It’s pretty easy to enter, too. Here’s what you do:
As the sponsoring blog I will track and validate all entries. So when you post here that you posted or retweeted. I will check to see if you did. The winner MUST provide me with their full name, email address and a mailing address. Those are the rules. If you can’t do it, you can’t win.
That’s up to 11 entries! Post here when you have completed all of the entries you’d like to complete and I will keep track of them. The contest will run for 2 weeks and the winner will be posted March 22, 2010. Good luck everyone!
Our cat, Francis, is nuts. She acts like a dog by following Leon around where ever he might go. When she’s mad she will pummel the garage door and yell what sounds like “Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeon! Leeeeeeeeeeeeeon!” She will also rub on your like you have scent of kitteh all over your body. She’s a little freaky. I’m thinking she might need whatever this cat is having to chill.
My friend Natalie, over at Boingerhead, has been one of my very best friends (and favorite people) for over 10 years now. You can see her over at the post I wrote about our kids growing up too fast. She and I have supported each other through everything and there isn’t anything she could say or do that I don’t have her back.
When she decided to start her blog, I was incredibly excited. I love her children desperately and couldn’t wait to hear about her life on a regular basis. She and I don’t get to talk enough and this was a great way for me to stay in touch when we don’t get to talk on the phone. She has awarded me the Sugar Doll award that I now get to pass on to some ladies who make me happy! As part of the award, I have to tell you 10 things you don’t know about me. Eep!
I’m passing the award onto two of the first bloggers I read. I don’t do favoritism, but these two have kept me in stitches for almost a year now, so it’s only fair that I send it their way. So, to Barefoot Foodie and Happy Meals and Happy Hour, thank you for making me so happy. I am passing on the torch. Thanks, again!
10 things you don’t know about me:
1/There are times my eyes look green, even though they are clearly brown. It is because the iris is green surrounded by brown. My mom’s eyes are greenish.
2/I hate to have lotion on the palms of my hands. I hate the way it feels and would rather have nasty, ashy, flakey skin than apply lotion.
3/I also hate to have anything on the pads of my feet. I wear socks almost constantly because we have wood floors in our house.
4/I met Bryan, my male best friend, in my masters degree program. We look like siblings, are both German, brown hair, brown curly haired and grew up 90 minutes apart. There is no way that we know of that we are related. However, we can sit in a room with each other quietly for hours and just chill and be happy. Friendships should all be like that.
5/I can’t grow out my fingernails. I bite them when I’m nervous AND when I’m happy AND when I’m thoughtful. They have no shot.
6/I have played instruments including the flute, piano, trumpet and trombone. I have played none of them very well.
7/I don’t have any tattoos, but I think they are incredibly sexy-hot.
8/When I was little, I had a dream about a house with small pond and a weeping willow tree. I have it in my head and I want to live there someday. I have no doubt it is in the town where I live now, I just have to find it.
9/Fall is my favorite season mainly because the trees in Nashville are amazing in the fall. I love Halloween, I love the scents of the season and I love the way everything seems to come together in the fall.
10/Fart jokes make me laugh. Harder than anything else. But I refuse to fart in front of others. Including my husband.
When we last left our heroine, she was at an Irish pub in the awful land of Washington, D.C.: a land full of people with agendas and horribly arranged streets…
We’d moved to a larger room in the back of The Dubliner and our group was gaining people like crazy. By this time, many in the group were inebriated. I was drinking my Coca-Cola (yeah, yeah, I’m drinking caffeine again–I’ll pay for it later) and enjoying the show.
It’s not my job to tell you everything that they did or said. It’s really not fair to them. Truly. They desperately need to be tattled on, but they all have their own blogs and if they can remember, more power to them. What I remember most keenly was our waiter. In an Irish pub, anyone with any kind of European accent sounds Irish. This is particularly true when everyone in the room is inebriated. What happens is that everything is much funnier than it really is.
Because of this situation, when it came to conversing with the waiter, I thought that it was hysterical that he wasn’t really Irish (look, he SOUNDED IRISH–if it looks like a Lucky Charm and walks like a Lucky Charm–yep, I’m kidding and yep, someone is gonna take that personally and yep, someone is gonna call me names). If you’d like to call me sauerkraut, go ahead.
Anyway, I made it my mission to discover the heritage of our waiter. As such, I refused to give him my order until he would disclose. What? I was in Washington. Disclosure is the name of the game. You can’t live there and not carry around your birth certificate, right?
Eventually, he gave it up to me and my friend Sarah that he was English and French. Sarah is French so this was an incredibly delightful conversation that ended with us holding our waiter up for ten minutes while we compared family histories and had a new best friend who was now required to serve all of our food “with love” because it was inevitable that we were somehow related (me being 1/4 English and Sarah being French).
And yes, I required him to say that everything had love in it.
This was much better than the experience we had at a bar later in the week where they wouldn’t allow us in because Caleb’s license had expired and they refused to believe he was over 21 even though he was supporting a full logger beard and it was clearly him on the license. And then when the guy who refused to let us in mouthed off to Caleb and Ben and made the situation ten times worse… Oh, you want to hear about that, too?
It was a long weekend. And I met a girl named Beer.
As an introvert, I just don’t travel well. I need a lot of sleep and a lot of time to myself. By that, I mean I need copious amounts of quiet time or I turn into a raging witch who will poke your eyes out if she doesn’t eat on time or stay warm or get enough entertainment…you get the picture.
However, there are times that even the thought of travel isn’t so daunting that I feel like I need to avoid trips. This is especially true when I know that I will see many of my friends and that the people I’m spending time with are those that have similar belief systems to mine. Well, that and I LOVE a good hotel room. Don’t you? All the little soaps and clean towels and beds that are made and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Leon and I had been looking forward to our trip last weekend for months. We were heading to CPAC and it was our first real trip ever without AJ. The plan was to be gone for 5 days and to leave AJ with our friend Bryan. AJ was thrilled because for him this meant: No bedtime, all the soda he could drink, video games and hanging out with the coolest person he knows. For me this meant: coming home to a spoiled child, worrying about whether he was getting enough to eat and wondering if his eyes were going to rot out of his head from playing video games.
I got over it and we went to D.C. There are so many things to blog about and they overrun everything I truly want to say. What this means is that you are going to have to deal with me blogging about it in spurts, as it comes to me, instead of a nice block of cohesive posts.
Washington D.C., from the point of view of someone whose city has little traffic issue, is a beast. I have never had to pay so much money to go such a little distance in my life. I will never, ever live there. Luckily, both Leon and I decided that there will be no politicians in this family. For the first two nights, we stayed outside of the city in a complicated little place called Silver Spring, Maryland. It was full of older homes and streets that are similar to something a 12-year old Sims player might put together. The goal was to make it to the Dubliner in D.C. Even the Jesus phone that our friend Allen had was confused as to how to get there from where we were. The miles of snow piled upon the cars and on the sides of the street didn’t aid in getting us to food any faster.
Remember when I said I don’t travel well and I get angry like the Hulk if things aren’t perfect? I was hungry. And I’d just realized I left my phone charger at home. My driving companions were fearful, but Allen is very laid back and Leon was looking forward to seeing his friends at The Dubliner. I’m pretty certain both of them were ignoring me because I was in the back seat, too, but neither would cop to this.
When we arrived, around 8pm on a Wednesday night, the place was packed. Luckily, a friend of ours thinks ahead and had reserved a whole area for our large group. Unfortunately, the staff at the Dubliner didn’t take us seriously because we had about 5 stools for 20 or so people. This led to copious time at the bar.
Which means no one remembers what happened the rest of the night.
Life is like a game. We all have challenges, thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Often, it feels like something out there, life, karma, catty people, or blue shells (for the Kart lovers), seeks to bring us down. Luckily, we always get up. This is where I wear my heart on my sleeve and my foot in my mouth.
You may also leave a voicemail at (615) 807-0376. I do not return voicemail, but I sure like hearing from you.
We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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Life is like a game. We all have challenges, thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Often, it feels like something out there, life, karma, catty people, or blue shells (for the Kart lovers), seeks to bring us down. Luckily, we always get up. This is where I wear my heart on my sleeve and my foot in my mouth.
