I wanna girl with a mind like a diamond...

Now those are awesome nails.

My kids don't look at all like me. Oh, sure, they have bits and pieces of me. Becky and Karen have my eyes (green, with an orange circle around them), Karen has my boobs (only a handful), Becky has my hair color, and...hm...Jody and Amy really don't have anything whatsoever that in any way, shape or form resembles me! Double-hm...

None of them, however, have my nails, more's the pity because I have fairly decent nails. Even my hairdresser says so. And how I manage to have them is a mystery.

Nails are the product of good nutrition. One of the worst things you can do for your nails and bones is drink carbonated beverages. I drink diet coke morning, noon and night. I drank 16 cans of diet coke one day last week and that was just what I drank at work.

I've been told that one of the ingredients in carbonated beverages is the same ingredient that eats holes in limestone. First, pish-tosh. Second, it takes thousands of years for phosphorus to eat through limestone to any significant degree. If I live to be one thousand years old, I don't think anyone will be making a fuss over the holes in my bones.

Still, doing a quick check on the Brinell hardness of my fingernails, I suspect that at one thousand years old, I will still have uncommonly hard nails.

I do my own nails every single weekend. It takes two days to paint them - I believe in allowing each coat significant drying time. I paint, I settle down on my favorite bathroom counter and I read. I repeat this process until the color is consistent and the gloss mirror-like. Vanity is time-consuming, what can I say?

The color above is, of course, my favorite. It is not currently what I am wearing. I occassionally think I should vary the color. At the moment, they are sort of coppery to celebrate the seasonal change that is supposed to be occurring but hasn't actually done so. Well, ok, Spring did finally arrive, then Winter took control again, then Spring wrestled control out of Winter's frigid hands, and now they say Summer is supposed to hit on Saturday and last for 7 hours. God, my nails are gonna be soooooo confused if I try to keep up with that.

My nail ritual can be a little boring, so I try to spice it up every once in a while. This week, I thought I would add a little excitement to the whole process by squirting a good steady stream of acetone-based nail polish remover directly into my eye. Since there was no polish in my eye, the acetone went straight to work removing a layer of the cornea.

I always wonder if, in the case of an emergency, one is really capable of recalling specific instructions on how to deal with said emergency in the heat of the moment, and guess what? One does! My head was under the faucet in a fraction of a second. Once the acetone was sufficiently flushed from the outer lid, I managed to pry my eye open enough for water to flush the inner lid. Once the burning had stopped, I decided I should likely read the bottle to see if there was something other than water I should be using.

I'm not entirely certain what the smallest font available in blogger is, but the font size of the writing on that bottle was, I swear, not even .01. It was the smallest frikkin' print I've ever seen. Now, how much sense does it make to put a warning label on a bottle if the print is so tiny that no one can read it, especially not someone whose eye is in the process of melting? Hm????

I would call the person who designed that warning label a moron but, since I'm the one that shot acetone into my eye, I'm pretty sure he would just say, "Right back atcha."

Speaking of moron vs. moron, later in the ER, the doc told me she'd seen three cases of eyes being glued shut the previous week. One woman, who'd glued both eyes shut, claimed she kept prescription eye drops by the side of her bed. On the night preceding her trip to the ER, she'd rolled over in the middle of the night, reached out to grab her eye drops, and grabbed the super glue by mistake. Sure. Whatevs. Who keeps a bottle of super glue on their nightstand???

That's so dumb! Yeah, yeah, I know, right back atcha.