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Tomorrow is my last day at the Children’s Hospital. The kids were pretty fun in general but I don’t know if I could ever work there. It is so incredibly sad and depressing seeing the sick kids. Cute kids with bathing suit tans but crappy organs or Stage 4 cancer, kids with horrible infections. It just sucks. Children should not be allowed to get that sick. I got all tear-y eyed if I looked at them too long.

Dad says that maybe working there would be the most rewarding, but I dunno. I dunno if I could/want to handle sick kids every single day.

Anyway.

Scott and I got to have dinner with a friend from Ottawa and her son the other night. (Hi Jane!) She was in town visiting her family and emailed me out of the blue inviting us out for dinner. We had a tasty dinner at Trilussa on Main Street. We ordered a whole bunch of the pizzas and shared them all. The best part was the strawberry and nutella dessert pizza. Mmmm.

So looking forward to this long weekend. I’ve got VGH work drinks tomorrow, I’m visiting one of my classmates at her family house on the Sunshine Coast, and then Scott and I are renting a car and going shopping in the US as well the day before school starts! Fun times ahead!!

Oh lastly, here are my Children’s Hospital inspired nails. I haven’t been painting my nails lately because of work and my weird hand skin problem, but the latter is getting a little better now and I figured this rotation was my chance to wear a little colour on my nails for once. Excuse the wear and tear, I have to wash my hands a lot, and I did this manicure last Sunday!!

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Today was a good day of work. My patients were mostly young and easy to deal with. I wrote down my first D’s (for DID, instead of WATCHED or HELPED) in my daily log. I feel a bit behind compared to my classmates, but I think it’s because the camera I am on sees so much variety… it is pretty hard to get to the D level when I see the same scans so sporadically, unlike on some of the other cameras where they just do heart scans non-stop. I’m sure it will even out over the span of the summer.

I painted my nails on the weekend with Rosemarie.

We were experimenting with my new nails painting stickers that I bought off Ebay for cheap. I’ll try it again sometime and show you how they work.

That’s Joe Fresh in Oyster, and Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in Green With Envy.

Scott was supposed to come home tomorrow, but things went wrong at his work and now he’s stuck in Edmonton until the end of the week. :( I don’t mind being alone, but he’s been gone for a long time.

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Here we go… another nail tutorial! DIY nail decals this time.

I first tried this DIY nail decal technique a couple weeks ago, with not very much success. ATTEMPT #1. EW SO UGLY. Since then I’ve tried the technique three more times and have come up with a few tips and tricks for you.

ATTEMPT #2

I painted a huge thick gradient of three colours onto a Ziploc bag. It was very smelly. I let it dry overnight.

I then cut out ten pieces, one for each nail. One nail at a time, I painted on base coat, let it dry for 10 seconds, then peeled my DIY nail decal off the plastic bag and stuck it on to my nail. I used my thumb of my other hand to smooth out the part that was actually touching my nail as much as I could.

Here’s where things started to get difficult: the decals were far too big for my nails. Ripping off the edges did not work, so I used nail clippers to trim off all the extras, but that was not very successful either. Probably those small nail scissors would work the best, but I don’t have any. Once I got all the major flaps off I used a q-tip with nail polish remover to dissolve the rest and clean up the edges as best I could.

Two coats of top coat later, that’s what I ended up with.

Oh by the way, I use Essie’s Good To Go top coat now because my Seche Vite has thickened up wayyy too much. Rip off. Anyway Essie’s isn’t AS super fast drying, but it’s still pretty good and it’s not becoming thick. I like to do one very quick coat of top coat, very light and gentle so nothing gets smeared underneath, and then after that has dried, a second coat just to make sure everything has been covered. This makes my nails extra extra shiny and incredibly durable.

Well anyway that manicure looked pretty cool but it took a long long time, and getting rid of the extra bits around the edges was super hard and I wasn’t pleased at how jagged some of them ended up.

ATTEMPT #3

My nails still looked fine, so I got Rosemarie to come over so I could try another idea out on her nails.

The night before, I painted 30 hearts on a ziploc bag (so she could choose what she wanted).   Overnight drying seems to be good. If not overnight, at least let it dry for several hours!

She chose rainbow hearts, with gold underneath. I used pretty much the same technique as before: painted one nail at a time with the gold nail polish, then peeled off a little heart decal and carefully stuck it on her nail. I used a toothpick to push the edges of the hearts down gently. Once I finished all of the nails on one hand I went back and used my thumb to press the hearts down better.

Excuse her lizard skin please.

Two coats of top coat later she was done. There was much less clean up to do afterwards, no trimming necessary.

ATTEMPT #4

Rainbow nails, rainbow hearts + topcoat. I love it, I think it turned out pretty well!

It’s pretty neat how the two layers of nail polish end up fusing into one smooth layer. I haven’t had any cases of peeling whatsoever. The gradient manicure stayed on my nails for two full weeks, so it’s obviously nice and strong even considering you just stick it on to the nail as opposed to painting it on.

Tips & Tricks

– Thick is better than thin. Paint the nail polish on fairly thick on the Ziploc bag. I have not had any issues of the decals being too thick, but I HAVE had issues where the polish was too thin and the decal ripped.

– Probably best to just do little designs instead of the entire nail (the big decals were too much work, considering the results). Designs that have skinny or pointy parts (ie. stars) are going to be harder to peel off the bag than designs that are rounded (ie. hearts or circles).

– Do one quick light coat of top coat, then when dry do another coat, so you have less chance of smudging your hard work.

– You can use scissors to trim up your decals on the plastic bags after they are dry if you didn’t do a nice job of painting the designs.

– Let the decals dry for a while. At least a few hours! Also leaving my heart decals on the bag for a week did not seem to affect them at all.

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I painted my nails last night for the first time in a while. I actually have a brief reprieve from school work right now since I finished my last midterm and presentation, and finals are still two-ish weeks away. By “brief” I mean last night and today…. tomorrow I have to start studying for chemistry.

Anyway I think they turned out pretty horrible. I was trying a new technique called “dry water marbling”. Basically you paint nail polish onto a ziplock bag, smear it around a bit, let it dry, then cut out pieces and peel them off the plastic and stick them onto your nails.

It was easy enough to get the pieces stuck on to my nails, but it was hard to get rid of the extra bits around the edges. Plus my colour choices were pretty bad. I like both my index fingers and pinky fingers that are blending two similar colours together, but the other ones just look like messy lines. Blech.

I’ll try it once more and see if it turns out better next time.

We’re going out for the free dinner I won last week and I’m very excited for 7 courses of Indian food. I’ll write about it this weekend.

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I think my allergies are over. I did not have any symptoms for the last three days. Woohoo! Maybe I’ll have the same issues next year but at least now I know what to do (DRUGS!!).

I water marbled my nails last night while watching Jaws with Scott. I like the patterns I made but I think the colours are ugmo. I didn’t get to use the colours I wanted because all of my cheapo nail polish has become quite globby. Globular. Glob-tastic. It’s over a year old now, I guess that’s what you get for $2/bottle.

I’ll probably remove it pretty soon. Long weekend coming up so maybe I’ll try again then. Can I thin nail polish? They’re pretty much garbage at this point so I might as well try.