Happy Anniversary!

...To Lacquer Laine! Today my blog turns 1 year old! Can you believe it!?

I wanted to do a few things for my blog for it's anniversary. The first is that I wanted to finally show my face. I didn't upload a picture of myself to my profile when I started and after a little while I realized I like the faceless attribute of my blog. The anonymity was... nice. You guys were reading for the nails! Not my face. I really like this especially since I am typically the type to be in front of a camera as well as behind it and post tons of pictures of myself on other internet media outlets. I don't always look "nice" in my pictures... I actually look like a goofball most of the time. But either way, I love pictures and always have and I have thousands from every year since I was in middle school. Thank goodness for the digital age! Now they are all stored on my external drive. Saves space! Anyway, I love to take pics and have taken a few photography classes. I am always the unofficial photographer for gatherings and parties. I don't even go anywhere without a camera. Ever.

The second thing I wanted to do for today was feature a particular nail polish, which I am wearing, because I credit it with leading me to blogging. It's NYC - Chinatown from the In a New York Minute line. It may seem like an odd choice. It may seem more likely that I'd wear one of my top 20 shades, or something really fabulous like a Lippmann glitter, or something high end like RBL, but no. My $2 drugstore polish is my anniversary shade.

I have always had a thing for my nails. And I have loved to do them. And I have also always loved bizarre shades. I just always had a very controlled, small sized stash with interesting shades. Well about Thanksgiving/Christmastime 2008 I started picking more and more shades, and when I graduated and realized I would have full time work, I let the buying go completely full on and kept picking up more and more shades with no cap on what I bought. And I was happy about it! I did not know about nails blogs, or Makeup Alley, or discount NP e-tailers. I was just browsing in stores and ebay.

Well one day in the early spring last year we had an unusually warm day so I rode my bike to an out of the way Target. I spotted the whole new line of NYC polishes and immediately picked the must unique, interesting shade. This ended up being Chinatown. The story doesn't end here, though. There was only one bottle left, and the brush was broken off. I kept looking for it in drugstores and other Targets to no avail. Finally I turned to the internet to help. Well what are you going to find if you search "NYC Chinatown"?! The wrong Chinatown, that's for sure. After some manipulating with the words "NYC", "Chinatown", "nail polish" and whatever else I did, I had a match. It led me to Steph's Closet. A beauty blog. And mostly devoted to NP. And guess what? She had swatches of all the shades! This opened the door. Nail blogs? I surfed and surfed finding more and more nail blogs. This upped my hunting game drastically. I had so many new things to look for! And now I knew about e-tailers like TransDesign and Head2ToeBeauty. Whoa boy! Then I got a Konad set. Then I learned how to water marble. My head was spinning. My collection was growing. And one day I realized that I had so much I could share, I thought it would be awesome to start my own blog. That was one year ago.

Thanks Chinatown. :c)

Now back to the other piece of business. My face. I wanted to find a good pic that I looked "normal" in and that I took fairly recently to give you the best representation of me. Not that there is much variation in how I have looked over the past decade. I still have my picture on my license that I took when I was 16 and now I am 24 and look exactly the same!!!! I say "normal" because when I take pictures it is rare for me to just look straight at the camera, and smile nice and say "cheese". I am usually making some sort of face, or dancing or I look like I have had one too many cocktails (not that I had too many cocktails....haha). I would have loved to had a photo shoot with myself yesterday and take some pics but I have a ginormous pimple on my chin. Gross. So I found some other nice recent ones. Are you ready?!

This picture I actually took last week at the White Sox opener. A beer or two in, but I look alright!

The other shots I have are from February at the Chicago Auto Show. Yes February. March only has "maniac Elaine" in its pictures.

Me in something... maybe a Honda?

I NEED THIS NOW!!! Oh the giant wheels! Dream car...

Me and Mustang GT 500. OOooohh

Okay. Do you want a maniac picture? I am sure you are curious. I would be! I'll give you one of me from Madi Gras... with my face painted...





READY?

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I told you! This is what I look like in most pictures. A lush. A doofus lush. HAHA! On the left is my friend Kate. I would have "smiley faced" her, but the mask she did on herself looked so cool I had to share!

Thank you so much for reading and supporting Lacquer Laine the blog and Laine the person for the past year. It means so much to me that my little blog has just kept growing and growing thanks to my readers. I really wanted to do a giveaway for my anniversary too, but I have so much going on with the move I really couldn't add one more thing to my to-do list. I'll do one soon, I promise!

Have a wonderful weekend!