A Long, Rambling, Personal Post...

(**Warning....long, personal post...may be too boring so I won't be offended if you just skip the words and look at the pictures!!)

Unfortunately, I haven't posted in a day or five...about two hours after my last post on Saturday, I received a call that my Grandmother had passed away so I immediately headed to my hometown which was a few hours away. I didn't return home until Monday so I wasn't even home for Mother's Day to spend with my kids but was with my parents instead. My parents and I went for dinner on Sunday and my mom and I exchanged Mother's Day gifts, which was nice. I did speak to my kids on the telephone on Mother's Day and they texted Mother's Day wishes as well. I returned home Monday and spent the evening with my family; we went out for dinner for our Mother's Day and was pleasantly surprised to find my husband and kids had included a gift card amoungst their 4 cards (one from each of them and one from hubby) to a local salon for Mother's Day. (I guess all my not-so-subtle hints had been heard!) This was put to good use on Tuesday morning as I treated myself to highlights and a cut which was long overdue.



Monday evening I did my nails with the thought that I'd be attending visitations and the funeral service over the upcoming days and while my first thought was do go with neutral nails, I remembered that the last three times I had visited my Grandma, each time she noticed and had complimented my nails so I knew that regardless what I did, she'd be OK with it. In fact, my last visit with her on Easter Sunday, I hadn't been in the room at the nursing home more than a couple minutes and she had noticed my mani which was this one and we were talking nail polishes and doing our nails. She had been commenting how some of the other ladies at the nursing home paint their nails in bright red and she was amazed how some of them had reallllly long nails and didn't know how they could live with them! I also wanted to stamp with some flowers as she did love gardening and ultimately decided on nails that were relatively subdued with some muted stamping.



This is SpaRitual Solitude, stamped with Konad special polish in light grey using IP Konad m67. The picture below is the most colour accurate but the lighting still makes the polish and stamping brighter than it is in real life. In fact, the stamping was barely visible.



Solitude before stamping...its not really this bright at all; certainly not like the second pix, in fact, many of my friends who noticed my mani thought the polish was black.





I was very close to my Grandma...learned how to bake in her kitchen and spent many a Saturday morning making cookies, learned to make homemade pickles and pickled beets and the like as well as doing vegetable canning; learned to plant and grow a vegetable garden and tons of info about flowers and gardening (my grandparents composted well before composting and being green was "in"), lots of time playing cards, etc etc. I was fortunate to be able to have spent a whole bunch of time with my Grandparents when I was a child and teen and even as I got older when I had my own house, I'd collect my grandma from her house and she'd spend the night with my family. My grandmother lived to 85 and actually lived on her own up til January 2011; it amazes me quite frankly that she lived as long as she did considering that life for her was not easy as a child or even as an adult. I try to remember that as difficult as my life may seem, the reality is that I have never lived through the depression nor walked for miles to go to school like she did and many other childhood traumas that could not be fathomed today. The changes in technology that she has lived thru is staggering....she never rode in a car until after she was married and having a telephone put in was a luxury indulged in after she had been married many many years. And even then, it was a party line (in fact, I remember my parents phone having a party line....a destinctive ring meant the call was for your house; another distrinctive ring was for a neighbourning house....makes me feel really old now!) She never owned or used a computer or cell phone or even a calculator...never had lasagne or pizza in her life (which is just so hard for me to believe), nor traveled more than 5 hours from her place of birth her entire life. When I was in my early 20's, I had offered to take her travelling (at my cost even!) but she declined saying she never had any desire to travel or see parts of the world other than where she grew up and what she was familiar with. My mother and uncle were born on the family farm and just hours before they were born, she had been in the fields on the tractor plowing. She never owned a credit card in her life; if it wasn't paid for in cash, it wasn't purchased. She never forgot the hardships she endured as a child in the depression and often laminated about the foods she couldn't stomach as an adult as there were some foods that they ate day after day after day, when they even had food, and it was only what they were able to grow or raise or found wild. But she was blessed with good health up to the last few days of her life and a lot of it I believe was attributed to her healthy eating.

I was very fortunate to have spent so much time with her and have her in my life as long as I did as well as heard of a life in a different era that I was lucky to have never endured; as my three kids were able to spent good quality time with their Great-Grandma so those memories will not be forgotten. (I'm sorry to have gotten so personal but at the end of the day, this is my blog and the point of starting it was to keep track of my mani's as I did them so I'm sorry for anyone who thinks this is over sharing.)
On a more positive note, I noticed that while I was MIA, my followers surpassed 300 and I sincerely thank you so much for checking out my little blog! I'll be putting together another giveaway in the next little while when I have a bit of time to get my life together again!