Congrats M and S!!!

A palladium and diamond knot ring I designed for my younger brother.  He proposed at Disneyland! (Have I mentioned how much I love Disneyland?  Oh, Disneyland.)

I NEED to upgrade to larger diamond!  No! Yes! No! Yes! YES! NO! YES YES! NO! NO!

Sometimes it is hard to have lovely pieces of jewelry passing through and out of one's life all the time.  Makes being satisfied with my boring old jewelry difficult.  It's probably a good thing I'm (ironically) not really a jewelry person.

Recent conversation I had:

Barber: Hello.  Um, what can I do for you?

Me: I would like a haircut.

Barber: We don't do styling...

Me: I want a short, dude haircut.

Barber: Okay....we don't blow dry....

Me: Neither do I.

Barber: Okay. No crying in the chair....

Me: Trust me, I've shaved my own head with clippers.  I'll be fine.

So I'm now sporting a pretty sweet pixie cut.  And I don't even have to brush it.  Best 20 bucks I've ever spent.

Custom, custom orders

Spring is getting away from me.  I want to be out on a nice run in the sunshine, but I'm here blogging instead.  So this will be a short little visit (not like last time.  I'm still loving my hair by the way, but I'm thinking I need to go even shorter.  Really short!).

Just finished this lovely dual tone cushion cut ring.  And, man, and I'm glad that it is finished.  Some projects just make me nervous when I'm working on them, even when everything goes smoothly.  This was one of those times.  I don't know why.  I just felt like I was going to screw it all up.  I need to stop drinking so much coffee.  And this diamond was so lovely in person, hard to capture in a photo.  It is just a scintillating cup of crushed ice.  So much sparkle.  I hope she loves it.

oh, spring....

....when the young man's fancy turns to love.  

And the frantic (and inexperienced) gardener contemplates when she will have the time to plant all of the things she dreams of planting.   (Look at my little coral bells!  They bloomed this year!  And I'm going to have SO MANY DAISIES!)

And now I'm going to veer off the jewelry track EVEN MORE and talk (at length) about my hair.  So if that doesn't interest you, please see yourself out.

I wouldn't normally post selfies since it just seems like a weird thing to do (weirder and weirder as I get older?  I don't know.  I just feel way more self-conscious now about posting "pretty" pictures of myself than when I was in my 20's  I know what I think of people who have tons of artful, flattering photos of themselves on their social media accounts.  And it's nothing good.).  But I got a new haircut!  And I'm really digging the mad-scientist effect.  I think I'm moving closer to being at peace with having curly hair. Growing up, as anyone with curly hair can probably understand, I HATED HAVING CURLY HAIR.  I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATED IT.  It always felt messy, it never felt styled.  It always felt unkempt.  So I cut it extremely short in the 2nd grade, and I kept it short for last 28 years or so.  I would occasionally have longer hair, but I would always end up HATING IT, and I would cut it off.  Then I somehow got it into my head that I NEEDED to have long hair.  That is was a shame that I'd never had long hair in my life.  That if I got my hair long, it would suddenly stop being my hair and be the tousled waves of someone who says they have curly hair when really their hair has a slight wave (yes, I want to punch those people in the mouth.  YOUR HAIR IS NOT CURLY! I want to shout, while shaking them till their teeth clack together.  YOUR HAIR IS NOT CURLY!  IT WON'T FORM DREDS IF YOU DON'T COMB IT FOR A DAY!) That long hair would be the answers to all of my problems.  That long hair would make me glamorous and teach me how to be stylish, and finally when I had long hair I would know how to dress myself and I would suddenly be chic. Obviously, I was deluding myself. And effing Instagram wasn't helping.  I cannot imagine how terrible Instagram would have been for me if it had been around when I was tween/teen.  My 35 year old, fairly grounded psyche can barely handle the onslaught of FOMO (fear of missing out) and evil, evil soul sucking comparison now.  I would have shriveled into a wisp of envy or turned into a soulless self-promotion robot doing duck lips and posing (artfully) with a mixed drink/ice cream cone/latte.

Please witness below how my long hair adventure turned out (but to be fair, I can't really blame my hair for that plaid shirt, haha):

Just a couple examples of the many pictures I've sent to my sister in the last few months.  Moaning and whinging about my hair and how much I hated it.  I'm sure it was awesome to be the recipient of so much hair angst.

Since I've had the twins, I've been STRUGGLING to get my sense of style back (not that it was ever very highly developed), struggling to even just look like myself.  And the long hair (which I've never had in my life) was not helping.  I didn't know what to do with it, and I didn't look like myself with it.  And as always, I HATED IT.  I hated managing it.  I hated the amount of conditioner I needed to use. The time it would take to even get it to the point where I COULD PULL IT BACK.  That was my measure of success....did it look presentable when I managed to pull it back?  Such a low bar.  So I finally woke up and shouted "WHY ARE YOU TORTURING YOURSELF?!?!?!?!?!?!?"  Just give it up.  Some people are not meant to have long hair, and the hair growing out of your head is not meant to be long.  LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH.  FOR CHRIST'S SAKE.  LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH.  

And so I made an appointment with an awesome lady at The Parlour in St. John's who specializes in curly hair and had it cut off. And I like it.

(Why, yes, I did retouch the hyper-pigmentation on my forehead, thanks for asking.)

The red lipstick is to prevent me from feeling like a soccer mom with a bob.  It helps.