Hi everyone!
Yeah, I’ve been gone for a really, really, REALLY long time. Given that my last blog post was in February, I haven’t been back here in almost a year – and I thought my LAST absence was long! While I have continually been mulling over when I should write another post, a recent comment prompted me to write this update now.
Anyways, I’m fine overall, nothing especially bad in my life has been keeping me from blogging. On the contrary, I’ve been pretty occupied with a bunch of work stuff, plus I’ve been having more fun this year! I can really tell based on the number of phone pictures I’ve taken in the past few years: this year I already took triple the number of photos than in 2014, and double than in 2015. I’ve been lucky enough to go on some trips this year: Las Vegas, Israel, Washington D.C., Disneyland, and planned holiday travel. Despite some unpleasantness at work earlier this year, things overall have been looking up. If you guys are curious about life stuff, I’ll tuck the highlights towards the end of my post.
But of course I’ve still been painting my nails! Just less elaborately than before. Since I haven’t had a lot of time or energy for nail art (although I did a few designs this year), I’ve mostly been sticking to single colors or layered combinations. Here’s a grid of all the non-nail art photos I could find; I’ll post the individual photos in another post with info about the polish(es) and my thoughts. Probably I’ll tuck the nail art into other posts too, since otherwise this one would be too long.
Anyways, since this blog is about nails, I suppose I should talk about them first. As I’ve mentioned before, I moved into a new apartment last July that was much further away from my workplace; this lengthened my commute from about 2 minutes to 45 min-1 hour each way. While I like my apartment, the long commute means I have significantly less time in the evenings to paint my nails at all, let alone do some elaborate nail art. Ultimately, this means that I primarily paint single colors. From the grid above, it’s pretty obvious that the main colors I’ve been using have been red or neutral; recently, I’ve been on a gold/green kick, adding some variety to my usual favorites. Also, my nails are now a bit shorter than before for practicality reasons. Longer nails looked nice, but their damage-prone nature always made me nervous.
Also, in the past year I’ve been exploring other creative pursuits than nail art, directing my creative energy away from my nails. I have this fun laser cutter project, which is currently sitting on my desk:
This small bowl from my ceramics class:
And memories of many delicious baking adventures:
While some things have been difficult this year, I’m optimistic that things will continue to look up if I work hard at it. The more time passes, the more I can become aware of the things that make me happy and invest in them. Hopefully the next year will bring even more delights along with the challenges – focus on the positives 🙂
Although I can’t guarantee that I’ll keep painting my nails and producing nail art, it’s plenty possible that I’ll publish blog posts on an infrequent basis. I wish I had more time to dedicate to making this blog because I truly enjoyed it, especially engaging with my readers. One thing I probably will not be doing in the future, though, is subscription box posts. I still take subscription boxes sometimes, but swatches plus nail art is more than I want to do on a regular basis. Still, blog posts might be a thing in the future. I’ll definitely write a few after this one to recap swatches and nail art over the past year.
Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this update, and that all of my readers have been well this year. I look forward to posting again soon with all of the swatches above, plus nail art. Thanks for reading!
– Emi
Emi's Manis 