Old NOTD: Hard Candy Stop

I'm baaaaaaaack!

(And dude, we're nearly at 500 followers! Damn, when did that happen? The response to this blog in the last half year or so has been incredible: sometimes, it's amazing to me that so many people voluntarily take the time out of their day to check out what we're up to. Thank you so much!)

Anyway... today, I have a polish for you that I had lemminged forever. FOR-EVER.

The first time I wore it was my senior year of college. I was in the Vagina Monologues (I was the Vagina Happy Fact) and someone had this backstage. All of us in the production put it on right before our first performance. It just seemed perfect then.

I don't think I properly remembered it on my nails, because I remembered primarily the bottle color:

Hard Candy Stop (in bottle)

Look at the gold! Just look at it!

So I yearned for the polish for a year or two. Then I discovered Makeup Alley and swapping. Sometime within my first hundred swaps, I enthusiastically swapped for Stop. And then being underwhelmed with it, I swapped it away a few months later.

Well, fast forward three years and I again seemed to only remember the bottle color. Gorgeous red with vibrant gold. Ahhh! Why did I ever swap it away? What folly was that, that made me swap it away... etc, etc, etc.

Some lovely Polish or Perish reader sent me an RAOK of a Stop mini (for which I am everlastingly grateful). But it was different than the one I remembered: instead of crazy gold shimmer, it had red shimmer. Huh. Weird.

A month later, I spot it on eBay and swoop it up (not for an exorbitant price, thankfully). It came in a good amount of time for a purchase from the UK and I see the pretty, pretty bottle and oh-so-happily apply it... and... I remember why I swapped it away.

Where did the shimmer go??

Hard Candy Stop, close-up on nail:

Hard Candy Stop

It applied gorgeously in two coats, is a lovely matte-looking (but not matte) metallic red with subtle yellow specks that I suppose is the gold shimmer. I'm not swapping it away again because I'll probably forget why I swapped it away to begin with then buy it again in a few years.

Argh. None of my lemmings seem to lead me anywhere good lately.

Anyhow, my brief vacation from the blog was good for me, although most of it was spent tearing my hair out over my work. ...actually, I also spent some time swatching polishes because next month will be an extremely busy month and I wanted to be able to post stuff through May. What is happening in May?

1. It's the last month of my academic year so... crunchtime, all around.
2. My birthday is on the ninth and I'm not celebrating it because...
3. Ten days after that, I have to present the sum total of the past nine month's worth of work to my department for my formal second-year talk. (Let's talk about how much I sucked at research this year some other time.) I'm actually giving my talk a week EARLY because...
4. I'm leaving for Boston the day my classmates are giving their talks. Why Boston (again)? I am presenting my first ever poster at the Association for Psychological Science's annual convention. Normally, I wouldn't bother at all with APS but it's in Boston. So if I can get a line in my CV and see my friends at the same time, dude, that's a good day's work right there. Also, the SO is accompanying me to Boston and we'll be staying there through Memorial Day weekend. AND I'm super excited that I'll get to meet up with my unofficial undergrad advisor while there as I haven't seen her in years. The SO is flying back home right after the weekend but...
5. I'll be going down to NYC for a few days after Boston but then coming right back up again for my first college Reunion. I'll be sleeping in dorms and eating dining hall food. Awesome possum. No, seriously, it will be a blast. I plan on spending a lot of quality time with one of my best friends from college and we'll be "reuning" (not a word) with a TON of people from our dorm our first year. And a lot of old, wise, spunky alumnae who are, like, 87 but can beat 19-year-olds at tennis. When I'm that old, I want to be that amazing. It's my life's goal to be like them.

So all in all, that's almost two weeks of travel. And kind of resembles the three-leg trip I did in November that I needed most of December to recover from. And the week I get back, I will have a ton of writing to do for my classes and my second-year paper... but then, it is summer vacation! ...where I will be doing a ton of research and even more writing. But still, it'll be "vacation" and I won't have classes for a couple of months. WOOOHOOO!

Of course, right now, looking at my coming six weeks, all I want to do is go *splat*.

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