the teal nail project

This Sunday is Feral Cat Day, and to raise awareness, the Teal Cat Project started The Teal NAIL project. Paint your nails teal, and then when people comment on the lovely color gracing the tips of your fingers, you have an opening to tell them about feral cat awareness and trap-neuter-release programs. It's a genius idea, and hopefully it will help spread the word about how necessary TNR programs are and how many cat lives they could save.

So many cats are euthanized each year in animal shelters because of our archaic programs for dealing with overrun feral cat communities. Killing cats is never okay. It's never a solution, and in this case it doesn't even remotely solve the feral cat problem. When animal control rounds up a bunch of feral cats and euthanizes them, the ones that evaded capture will reproduce until the community is the same size it was before. The only way to really approach this issue is to capture cats, spay and neuter, and then release them back to live their lives in peace. They won't be able to reproduce, so the feral cat communities will decrease. Less cats will then be brought into shelters, so less cats will be killed.

For more information about TNR you can visit the about page on The Teal Cat Project's website, here.

ps! To create the cat on my nail, I just painted a little half-circle at the bottom of my nail and used a thin paintbrush (or you could use a sharpie or black nail art pen!) to draw the ears. Then I used the tip of a straight pin to do the eyes and whiskers in white =^..^=

cheapsKATE

(image via lovelyish)

I went to Sally's Beauty Supply last week to get some pink hair color for a touch up, and my mom and I thought it would be fun to peruse the nail polish section (actually, I thought it would be fun.. my mom just wanted to go home, but she humored me). Anyway, my eyes were scanning all the pretty colors looking for one to take home when I spotted the price tag. They were like $8 a bottle! Hmph. We moved on to the hair dye, and proceeded to check out. THEN! At the cash register I saw a little display with 99 cent nail polishes, and my heart went all a-flutter. I picked out five and to my mom's delight, we headed home.

I like changing the color on my nails every few days, and with the amount of drawing, order packing and excessive typing I do on a daily basis even the most high quality color starts chipping off within 3-4 days anyway. So 99 cent polish is the polish for me! This little (kind of stupid) experience got me to thinking how many things there are for which I have trouble spending more than a dollar or so.

Broccoli!! It's delicious but if it's the least bit over the normal 99 cent/lb price I usually say "skip it." Will I pay $4.19 a bottle for grapefruit juice? Heck yeah! Will I fork over a good $20 for pizza and fries on a Friday night? You bet. But you just try to get me to pay more than one dollar for AA batteries. You will fail.

There's no rhyme or reason; it's like I have a genetic predisposition to being a cheapskate when it comes to a few select products. A pound of pasta. An itunes download ($1.29? haha, no.) Scotch tape (dollar store or bust.) Bobby pins. A package of drinking straws (Why do the $4 ones look like and work just as well as the $1 ones?) A candy bar (even 99 cents is stretching it there.) Sure, I'll splurge on a nice winter coat or a fun day trip but $8 for a bottle of nail polish? Over my dead body.

ps. This is totally a just-for-fun-in-good-humor post... I already know the saying "buy cheap, buy twice" so please please don't leave any "you get what you pay for" comments, okay? Thank you! :)