Nails

 Kathy asked a question about fingernails today, which got me thinking.  And taking a picture.

I polish my nails every day.  (My students were always sort of amazed that I'd change colors overnight.)  It's something I do for myself, like putting on jewelry each day  My mother was a polisher.  She drilled into me that one "polishes" one's nails, one doesn't "paint," as it's called nail polish, not nail paint.

Mama polished her nails down to the little "moons" on each finger.  These aren't her hands, but this is how her nails were shaped, and how they looked:

I've never been able to do this;  my hands aren't that steady.  She never fully got behind the covering-your-whole-nail thing, for whatever reason.  During visitation at the funeral home after she died, more than one person mentioned her nails to me. 

My mother also, when I started shaving my legs, told me to never go higher than my knees.  Not an exact parallel, but another example of line-drawing.

Before I got pregnant, my nails were super strong.  Like, it-was-tough-to-cut my-thumbnails strong.  After both my pregnancies, it took a while for them to get strong again.  There wasn't a whole lot of polishing in those days, due to my nails' weakness and my complete lack of free time.

One thing that has made my polishing life much, MUCH better is UNT Ready for Takeoff.  I may have talked about it here before, but I cannot say how much I love this stuff too much.  It's a coat that goes on under your base coat (or under your polish if you don't use base) and allows you to just peel off your polish when you want to change colors.  It is AMAZING.  Polish remover can be drying and is certainly time-consuming, but this takes care of both those things.  It's absolutely one of my favorite products ever.  And, no, it doesn't flake off at random times.  Well, only very, very rarely, at least with me.

Also, notice in the photo how twisted my index finger is.  Both my index fingers turn toward the middle fingers.  It would take literally breaking and re-setting them to get them to face the same direction as my other fingers.  Just a little trivia about me, as if the whole manicure thing wasn't shallow enough.