Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 62

Eyebrow Gel Discovery

I don't know if everyone knows about this already and I was just living under a rock, but I found a great beauty product. I was going to say new beauty product, but for all I know it's been around for years and I'm the last one to know it exists. I'm talking about eyebrow mascara!

***This post contains affiliate links. All opinions are my own and I paid for this product.***
I had eyebrow gel that I used to keep my brows from making me look like Mr. Spock, but it was clear and didn't do anything to enhance my brows. Recently, I found tinted brow gel! They call it brow mascara, but whatever. :-)

Specifically, I found NYX Professional Makeup Tinted Brow Mascara. I love it!

NYX PROFESSIONAL MAKEUP Tinted Brow MascaraI tweezed my brows within an inch of their lives when I was in my 20s and now they look kind of sad. This tinted brow gel made a huge difference for me and I use it every day. Even if I'm not leaving the house. :-) The picture above is a brunette shade that works perfectly for me, but it comes in other colors.

Seriously, I never thought I'd do a makeup recommendation on my blog because it's just not that big a deal to me, but this product got me all excited. FYI, I will never recommend something here that I don't love wholeheartedly. This brow mascara was something I could post about enthusiastically.

ETA: After writing this post, I went to watch HGTV and saw an ad for tinted eyebrow gel. I will assume that I'm the last person on planet Earth to know about this.

Whisked Memories

It's funny how some things become indelibly imprinted on us.

As a kid, I remember my mom telling me more than once to never let the whisk sit in water or it would rust. I don't know if she didn't have a stainless steel whisk or if she only thought it would rust or if it was something else all together, but to this day, I always rinse off the whisk and then set it on the counter. It makes me wonder how many other things I do without realizing it's from things I heard as a child.

It's also a strange way to remember my mom. Every time I use the whisk, I think of her. I swear that I can even hear her voice in my head reminding me about rusting.

When my mom died, I never thought she'd come back into my thoughts because of such a strange thing. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, memorable moments--yes. Using a whisk? Such an ordinary, mundane thing? It surprised me.

But then maybe it is the ordinary moments that resonate somewhere deep inside us, the unexpected moments. The quiet moments.

Knitting Projects

If you're wondering why I haven't shared any knitting projects lately, it's because I don't have any finished items to post. :-(

I messed up the sleeve on the sweater I was working on and have avoided working back the rows to start over. That's what I should do, but I went a ways before admitting there was a problem and knitting back is tedious.

I tried to start another sweater, but the color work scared me and it was only charted, no written instructions. I'm a fairly new knitter and got intimidated. I ripped out the little bit I'd knitted and rewound the yarn.

Next, I started a shawl. Those are easy enough and usually I learn something new. This one is knit length-wise and it's a lot of knitting side to side. I know it's psychological because I'd be doing the same amount of knitting even if I was knitting width-wise, but there was no possibility of doing a quick row while I had a few minutes. This was time-committed knitting.

This is when I decided I should finish projects in progress, but never finished. The WIP. I immediately dismissed the first shawl because it involved picking up stitches again--my nemesis. The next shawl looked sloppy, and because I wasn't very far along, I decided to start over. Bad decision. I'd forgotten how difficult the start of this piece was to get right and I gave up in frustration. The good news is that it's no longer a WIP because all the yarn is in a ball now.

I eyed the blanket I'd promised my cousin for her son, but gah! So much knitting.

That left one more shawl. The yarn is thin. Not lace weight thin, but extremely thin fingering weight. As I remembered, it was an easy pattern. This sounded like a winner.

As I knit, the reasons why I put it aside came back to me. It's literally the same four rows over and over and over. And because the yarn is so thin, there are a lot of those rows. So many rows. Millions and billions of rows. This is only a slight exaggeration. I finally got to change color. This should be better, I thought. It wasn't. It was still the same four rows.

So I pretty much haven't been knitting. I want to finish one of the projects I've already started, but have reasons I don't want to work on any of them and the new projects I've looked at have seemed daunting. Hopefully, this block ends soon.

Happy Halloween!

Smoky Eyes and Halloween

I usually don't dress up for Halloween, but when I saw a knitting pattern for a witch's hat, I was like, I have to make this! And I did. My hat didn't turn out as perfect as the designer's did, but it's okay. See the picture to the left.

This, of course, meant I must dress up for Halloween this year because when else am I going to wear this hat?

At first I was only going to wear the hat, no other costume pieces, but then I thought what if I bought some kind of wig on Amazon to wear with it. I found a long, white/silver one that would contrast nicely with the hat. And then I started thinking what if I altered my makeup?

I didn't want to do the green makeup that I was seeing all over the internet, but decided to get some white vampire face foundation. I picked up both white and black lipsticks because I don't know which one I'm going to go with and white mascara primer that I plan to use on my eyelashes and on my eyebrows.

And then there's the smoky eye makeup I'm thinking about. Years ago, I bought a smoky eye makeup kit. I'm not even sure that's still popular--probably not--because I don't wear much makeup. Usually just a powder foundation to smooth out my skin tone and I call it good. The times I tried to play with my smoky eye kit... Well, let's just say the results were embarrassing. Clearly, I needed more practice, but didn't put it in and therefore never got it done right.

But my evening, real-life disasters could be Halloween gold! A smoky mess around my eyes with white face makeup would definitely seem like a plan and not an accident. It might come down to how much time I have in the morning to get ready. I get up at a ridiculous time of the morning and I love my snooze option.

Podcast Recommendation

***I received no compensation for this post. The podcast is free and this is my own opinion.***

I'm going to recommend another podcast here. I'm not sure how many people are interested in them, but I enjoy them immensely, although some go in and out of favor and I'll delete them from my app when I'm tired of it. This one, however, is a limited-run podcast and I find it relaxing to listen to.

The podcast I'm recommending is called: Sound Escapes. You can find out more HERE.

This podcast is recordings made by a man called Gordon Hempton who is a sound ecologist. He goes into wilderness areas and records the natural sounds in those locations. The first location is the rainforest in Hawaii. There was also an episode for a river in Ecuador which I'm going to listen to again and incorporate into one of the scenes I wrote in Wicked Intention...if I don't cut the scene.

What I like about the podcasts is how relaxing it is to listen to nature sounds without cars going by. It's like those relaxation tapes where you listen to rain falling only on a larger scale.

Usually, I delete a podcast episode off my phone as soon as I finish listening to it, but I've saved every single one of the Sound Escapes episodes (except for the first one where it was only an introduction and no nature locations were played). This is something I can go back to over and over when I need calmness.

Anyway, I highly recommend Sound Escapes. You can either listen through the link above or search on whatever podcast app you use.

Open Concept Homes

I've thought about blogging about this for a while, but I don't think I have. I did a search of all my posts and nothing turned up, so I'll assume that I thought about this really hard off and on since I read an article about open concept homes and never got around to talking about it.

Many months ago now, I read an article slamming open concept homes. I don't remember the exact article, but an online search showed a bunch of options. Here's one of them. And there's also a Bob Vila article where it mentions decor choices as one of 15 reasons to think twice about open concept homes.

These opinions came as a surprise to me and not only because HGTV is always talking about open concept and how buyers love open concept, etc, etc, etc. It came as a surprise to me because I absolutely love my open concept home. (I've lived in 3 of them now.)

Some of what they cite as issues don't affect me. For one, I'm absolutely anal about things being neat and clean. When I cook, there are no dishes in my sink because I clean up as I go along and everything is in the dishwasher quickly. For another, as the Bob Vila article says, open concept is more for modern style and my personal decor style is 100% modern/contemporary. I'm slowly replacing one light fixture at a time to get rid of the curly, traditional look. I like straight lines, sleek designs.

As for privacy, well, as someone hard over on the introvert side of the scale, no one loves privacy more than I do, but my dad and I really don't have much problem sharing the space. When I really need to be completely alone, I just go to the bedroom and close my door. Problem solved.

The open concept floor plan also forces my clutter-prone dad to put his stuff away. His room and bathroom are full of stuff because they're out of sight and have doors. If I had more walls in my house, I'd have to nag him routinely to put his things away. The way my current house is setup, the dining room feels separate even though it's really not and he's setup his papers over there so he can write his memoirs.

Storage space was an issue in my second open concept home, but I didn't have those problems in my first house (in Minnesota with a basement) or my current home (upstairs bonus room that I use for storage). I will admit that my office is a continual struggle, but again, that's a closed off room that no one else can see.

As for not enough walls to hang artwork? You can see from my picture above that my problem is not enough artwork, not too few walls.

I can see where open concept might not work for some people, but as for me, I'll keep my open concept, thank you very much. I think it makes the home look bigger and it feels less claustrophobic.

Memory Lane

My dad is writing his memoirs, and while he takes a trip down memory lane, he's taking me along with him. Most of what he brings up, I already remember, but there are things that he mentions that brings back my memories of when I was a kid.

For example, he mentioned Camp Christmas Tree. He thought our family had gone camping there. (Ha! Our family only camped a couple of times in my entire life.) I said no, I went to camp there. He then guessed it was a Girl Scout camp. It wasn't. I had to explain to him that it was a day camp and that I went there every day for two weeks (I think it was two weeks). He or Mom would take me to the bus, they'd bring us to camp, and at the end of the day, the bus would bring us back.

I hadn't thought of this place in years, not since I stumbled across the rubberized camp bag I had from when I went there. I think I saw it in 2013 when I was packing up my house to move from Minnesota.

Camp wasn't a lot of fun. I'm a shy introvert and I was even quieter as a kid then I am now. I also wasn't particularly coordinated at sports and this combination didn't help me fit in with the other kids. I remember being picked on, I remember singing songs on the bus, and I know I'm grateful my parents only sent me there once. :-) (I'm sure other kids had a great time there. I didn't.)

There have been other things he's brought up where I had to correct him or remind him of details he'd forgotten. It's amazing how clearly some of these memories come back once he brings them up.

It also makes me twice as sad that I threw my calendars away when I moved from Minnesota. My dad is going back in time by pulling out all his pocket calendars. I had wall calendars filled with what I did and with who. Had being the operative word. Now I only have my planners from the past four years, and without the prompts, that's a ton of my memories gone forever.

Home Office Hell

Can someone please explain to me why I can't keep my home office neat and tidy? I am over-the-top about keeping the rest of the house clutter-free, but I can't manage my office, not even a little bit. It's discouraging.

The picture to the left is how I'd like my office to look, not how it actually looks now.

Recently, I cleaned off the entire desktop. I didn't get the rest of the office done because it took all day for the desk, but hey, it was progress! Today, as I sit here, it's cluttered again. To my left, I have a notebook that I'm not  currently writing in (why isn't it put away!), a book I pulled off the shelves for research (maybe still need it, but I could put it back and grab it again if I need it), information about a master's degree (I don't have time to go back to school), a bill, and a skein of yarn.

To my right, I have a receipt, an enamel pin, three pens and a highlighter, a little container that would be perfect for pushpins, but holds nothing at the moment (it came as a container for something else I bought), and notes for the book I'm working on.

I have the drawer on the right pulled out and my planner rests there along with three headsets--one for the cordless phone, for my laptop (for Dragon or when I did audio blog posts), and one for music. This makes everything in the drawer inaccessible without moving all this crap.

Part of my challenge with the desktop is that I have a Silhouette Cameo 3 cutting machine--I use it to make stickers and cut vinyl, things like that). That's on the right side of my desk and it's huge! It takes up a lot of space. On the left side, I have a scanner. Not a flatbed, so it doesn't take up too much real estate, but it is one more thing. Do I use these things all the time? No, but if I put them away, I'll never use them and I like having them handy when I need them.

The rest of the office? Forget about it!

I don't understand why I can be so OCD in the rest of the house and so lackadaisical in the space where I'm trying to write. When it gets too messy, I can't even focus. Before I did the desktop clean up, I had to take the laptop to my bedroom to work, so clearly this is something I need to get on top of.

Too bad I don't know how.

I Love Notebooks

It might be a writer thing because I'm not the only author I know who has a love affair with notebooks, but do I ever love anything for writing down notes!

I've shared pictures of the junk journals I've setup to make notes for my stories, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. (This blog post shows the steno pads I used to use.)

In the past, I've also used legal pads, and if I need to mind map, I'll pull out an artist's sketchpad. I was supposed to use it for the intro art classes I signed up for online, but hey, whatever works for my writing!

I have bound notebooks in various sizes and colors, but those are so pretty that I hate to use them. I did write in this large pink one, so it's not that I never use them, but well, it's hard to write in them.


And now that I have an Apple Pencil for my iPad, I have an electronic notes program too. I love it so hard, but I'm also like, Yikes! What about all my other notebooks?

It's a pretty sure bet that there will be more notebooks in my future because I simply can't resist the allure.