I Like The Way You Do That Right Thurr

I've come upon some cool things online this past week and wanted to share them with you as well. And so to the following bloggers, I'd like to say, "I like the way you do that right thurr."

Elena from 'A Casarella - I like the way you make cupcakes and marshmallows look like tiny buckets of popcorn for your child's Hollywood/Red Carpet-themed birthday party in your Popcorn Cupcakes blog:

Elsie from A Beautiful Mess - I like the way you teach me how to Dougie thrift smartly. This isn't a new blog, but it's new to me! Your Elsie's Thrift Tips blog is definitely one to bookmark!

Sherri from Young House Love - I like the way you figure out a brilliant and screw-up-proof scheme to hang up a collage of wall candy in your A Little Clara Cluster blog. I'm going to be employing this method myself soon to hang up some shit.

Good work everyone. Seriously.

iTunes Genius Playlist: Pop/R&B Soul

I think I'd like to take the occasional day to share a fabulous playlist with you, IF I MAY.

And I may, since it's my blog.

Soo..

Here's a sick playlist that iTunes' Genius feature put together for me recently, based on the song Lost Without You by Robin Thicke. It's a great R&B/Soul playlist with a flare or two of pop:

.  bitches be like..... let's clean some shit to this music  .

1. Lost Without You - Robin Thicke

2. A Long Walk - Jill Scott

3. Shooter - Lil Wayne feat Robin Thicke

4. Nothing Even Matters - Lauryn Hill and D'Angelo

5. Fly Like A Bird - Mariah Carey

6. If I Have My Way - Chrisette Michele

7. I Can Change - John Lengend feat. Snoop Dogg

8. Butterflies (remix) - Michael Jackson feat. Eve

9. I'm Going Down - Mary J. Blige

10. Quickie - Miguel

11. Anytime - Brian McKnight

12. On & On - Erykah Badu

13. Anytime, Anyplace - Janet Jackson

14. We Need A Resolution - Aaliyah

15. Until the End of Time - Justin Timberlake

16. Ex-Factor - Lauryn Hill

17. So High (Cloud 9 Remix) - John Legend and Lauryn Hill

18. Mine Again - Mariah Carey

19. Love Is You - Chrisette Michele

20. I Should've Cheated - Keyshia Cole

21. Weak - SWV

22. I Get Lonely - Janet Jackson

23. Real Love - Mary J. Blige

24. Free Yourself (feat. Missy Elliot) - Fantasia

25. More Than A Woman - Aaliyah

This was a "cleaning my apartment top to bottom with bleach" list. I spent the bulk of this past Saturday removing any trace of stains of any kind from my kitchen countertops and my whole bathroom. Apparently I'd been using bleach incorrectly my entire adult life - I used to just spray then scrub immediately. As it turns out, you should leave the bleach for a few minutes and let it work its crazy stain-eating magic before you give it a good scrub. Now that I know this, I'ma bleach the shit out of everything. No more coffee rings on the counters in this chick's apartment. Plus, it's good for the lungs. Right?

If you own the necessary equipment to operate this playlist, build it on your computer and save it for a cleaning day!

When Music Videos Ruled the World

The other day a random television commercial for a concert performance ended up taking me off on a trip down music video memory lane. The commercial was actually quite sad... because it was an advertisement letting me know that Keith Sweat (yes, your boy, Keith Sweat) would be performing at a casino somewhere on February 8. A casino. Ugh, Keith. What happened buddy? And somewhere in the world, a member of Total dies.

Dave asked me who Keith Sweat was (or maybe that was in my head and I simply imagined Dave asking me to tell him everything about Keith Sweat and list all of his hits and sing through a few lines of Twisted and describe his goatee and reflect on the year 1996 in general), so I obviously ended up pulling up Twisted on YouTube and playing it. Totally for Dave... I swear.

UM. Have YOU watched the video for Twisted recently?? #YOUKIDDINME?? It's action-packed with an actual story line of some sort. It's got murder, luxurious parties, Keith Sweat as the handsome and mysterious detective, a passionate love scene and the unexpected shootout at the end. And of course the strong 90s motifs of all-white outfits, R&B girl groups and torso-dancing on couches.

Well don't just take my word for it!



So the video really got me thinking... music videos used to be so good. SO good. MTV, BET and VH1 used to all take music videos so seriously. Do you remember when a VMA actually meant something, because everyone had actually SEEN the VM's the artists were receiving the A's for??

DO YOU?

Before any of these absolute effin' gems go fading any further from your memory, let's take a moment to reflect on epic music videos of yore:

{If any of these don't play on this site, just click them to watch them on YouTube. Or live with regret for the rest of your life. Totally your choice.}

R. Kelly - Down Low (1995):



And of course, Down Low's sequel of sorts - the lesser-known-but-still-as-boss Isley Brother's Contagious (2001) - also featuring your boy R. Kelly:



Puff Daddy - Victory (1998):



Mariah Carey - Honey (1997):



 Celine Dion - It's All Coming Back to Me Now (1998):



Can't mention awesome, epic music videos without mentioning your boy MJ. You probably think I'd be gushing about Thriller, but all I'm sayin issssss don't sleep on Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal (1987):



Or what about any of the number of insane-o adventures that Alicia Silverstone was going on in all those Aerosmith videos in the mid-90s??





Did you think I was kidding?? And why the crap was it OK for Liv Tyler do be doing any of that stuff in her dad's music video?? BECAUSE IT WAS. Music videos used to make their own rules!

Here are a few more things to reflect on:  Making the Video. Pop-Up Video. TRL.

*Le sigh.*

What were some of your favorite epic music videos? I'd really love to hear them!

Chunky Hearts Club Band: Valentine's Day Nails

I'm going to preface this post by saying, dude - this heart nail polish really sucked to work with!

But, uh... that said... Check out my new Valentine's Day inspired nail polish look - chunky hearts with pink polka dots!

This started out as a great idea. I found this Love & Beauty nail polish sometime within the last 6 months or so - probably while I was living in Portland - and thought to myself, "Oh snap that'll be good to have." Especially for $2.80. Why the hell not?

Fast forward to now and I'm actually trying to use the freaking polish for the first time. As you can see, it's a clear base with pink, heart-shaped confetti pieces in it. Wonderful in theory, but the creators neglected to consider the weight or texture of either of those two components. The base is super, super thin and slippery as shit, and it just runs right off the brush as soon as I raise it out of the bottle. The base is so thin that the heart confetti doesn't stand a chance - trying to get any of the confetti to stay on the brush as I raised it out of the bottle was also near impossible. Oy! So, that said, I wasn't thrilled with how this look came out. BUT let's go over how I did it anyway, #SHALLWE?

Grab some t'ings that look like this:

If you have a heart confetti polish, I hope it's better than mine! I think Revlon just came out with some new cool looking confetti polishes with hearts and stars... but maybe I imagined that.

In addition to nightmare heart polish I'm using Love & Beauty's weird off-white, Jasmine-scented, unnamed polish and a little bit of Milani's Tip Toe Pink. I'm also using my dotting tool for the polka dots.

Step 1: Paint all your nails two coats of white/off-white:

Step 2: With a polish that didn't suck, you'd probably do something totally normal here, like use the polish brush to apply a few coats of your heart confetti polish. Since my heart confetti refused to stay on the brush due to its weight and its base's slippery texture, I had to get a little more... involved. To get the hearts onto my nails, I sort of fished out some of the heart confetti with the polish brush, plucked them off the brush with a toothpick and then applied them to my nails using the toothpick. But the base was so slippery and "flowy" that it still ended up leaving a big dollop of base coat around each of the hearts.

Not the most uncool thing that could have happened. But not the coolest either. Definitely not the coolest.

Step 3: I wasn't stoked about how the hearts looked by themselves on the nails, so I used a dotting tool to add some pink dots around the hearts:

When everything is quite dry - like, really really dry - apply a top coat to the whole thing to make it all less bumpy. I wasn't patient enough for that ;)

There are some things I'd do differently if I were to try this again:

- Pluck out my heart confetti pieces in advance and do whatever needed to be done to get that base polish totally off of them! That stuff was just no help!

- Apply the dry heart confetti right after I finished painting on my white base coat, so the hearts would better adhere to the wet base polish.

- I'd have taken a pic of the nails after I used top coat! DOH!

Well I just checked my calendar and it's still not Valentine's Day yet so I still have more Valentine's Day nail polish looks to show you! Stay tuned.... or stay nail nude. Whichever.

Poppin' Some Tags: The Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge

"THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME."

Hey, Macklemore's words, not mine! Don't shoot the messenger.

Well by now you're surely privy to the po-but-stylish man's anthem: Thrift Shop by Macklemore. If not... I mean, come on. Lift the rock up off of yourself and climb out from beneath it. It's a fresh 'n poppin' world out here!

So you know the song - what the hey does it have to do with me? Well, there's been a Challenge issued in ZEE BLOGOSPHERE (as Dave so refers to anything that takes place on the Internet), tasking bloggers with heading to their fav thrift shop with $20 in our pockets (I actually used my debit card), spending that $20 on our best finds, and sharing our spoils via our blogs. There was also an added "scavenger hunt" angle that challenged us to find an item that Macklemore references in his song and snap a pic of that as well.

I heard about the challenge over on the blog Young House Love and I saw that blogger 'A Casarella had taken them up on it and had scored some pretty sweet shit. That was all the motivation I needed, because as you know, bitches be shoppin' and it's not hard for me to find a reason to head to the thrift shop.

SO I headed out to the 4th Ave Salvation Army right after work on Wednesday. Time to turn that $20 in my pocket into a few good come-ups!

THE SCENE:

.  love that this is a 10-minute walk from my apartment  .

THE SHIT:

I actually went to Salvay with "home decor" and "books/CDs" on my mind, more so than clothing - which is unusual for me. All of this blogging I've been doing lately has led me into some incredibly crafty online circles which has been inspiring me to try to make things look... niftier around our apartment. Dave is nottttt a fan of clutter, and on top of that we don't really have too many "surfaces" on which to put nifty things anyway, so my decorating options are somewhat limited. I am however working on one particular decor project - I'll be blogging about it as its completed - and it involves the use of lots of glass jars, which I've been saving/cleaning/accumulating for a few weeks now at home. Elena, of the aforementioned blog 'A Casarella, actually found a big cardboard box FULL of mason jars at her thrift store... for only $4! Hearing that made me start to drool a little bit, and I was dead-effing-set on finding some jars at my Salvay - mason or otherwise!!

SEW... in the spirit of things, here's a picture of the proverbial "$20 in my pocket" - though as I already mentioned, I really just used my debit card:

Ready to see the FIRST FREAKING THING I saw when I walked into the store??

.  i think it's looking at me  .

YUP.

Pretty sure someone is rocking something that looks just like this jacket in the Thrift Shop music video, so I'm going to count that as something from the song (for the scavenger hunt aspect of this Challenge). Unless you think that this could pass as "fur fox skin." 

In other news, check out its price tag...

YUP. 

The price tag made me instinctively reach out to touch the coat with my fingers (as if I'd really be able to tell if it was "real" or not) and let me tell you... it definitely felt like a carcass.

Mewving on past the bear coat, I headed to the back of the store to look through their shelves of home goodies to see if I could find a jar or two. There were lots of jars like these:

 ... so I grabbed this one for only $1.99! It's about 7" tall and I'll use it as the "centerpiece" of my home decor jar project, because it's much larger and is shaped much differently than the other jars I've collected for the project so far. So in the center it shall go.

Next I found this clothespin...

What you can't tell from the picture is that this clothespin is HUGE! Well maybe not "huge" but it is the most substantial clothespin I've ever come across. It's about 6" long and the side facing us in the picture is about 1.5" tall. Definitely a "jumbo" clothespin. I've already scraped off the "HOLD ME" decal and I think I may paint this whole thing white and use it as a picture-holder. There's a hole in the back of it so I could even hang it up on a wall with a picture clamped inside of it. Basically, when you come upon a jumbo clothespin at a thrift shop and "shit, it was 99 cents!!!" (which it was) then you just have to buy it and find a use for it. 

Also in the home goods area were plenty of little decorative glass dishes - I really liked the etched designs in the glass of this one, so I skewped it up! This was $2.99.

I've already filled this little dish with some of my smaller, more delicate rings, and it's sitting beside all of my perfumes atop my little glass Ikea nightstand in the bedroom. I'm going to do a blog in the future about how I store/display my perfumes, too, if that is of any interest to you!

Another item that will play a part in my jar decor project is a mirror, and I found this one for $6.99. It's a little hard to tell how large it is in the picture, but it's about 15" across and 12" tall, with hooks on the back that will allow me to easily hang it on the wall. Score!

.  hey oooo!!!  .

I'm not a fan of the color gold, so I may end up painting the frame of the mirror a different color. Not sure what color yet though... Suggestions?

Sidebar, check out my sweet fresh 'n crisp white "Canada" sweatshirt!  Dave got that for me while we were in Banff in December.

Lastly, I was totes jazzed to find this really pretty cardigan amongst the women's sweaters:

.  the two pieces of white lint on the sweater in this picture are pissing me off so much  .

I've been going a little nuts for this bright cobalt/royal blue color lately, and on top of that I LOVE cardigans... so this was a double whammy. As you can see, it was only $5.99 and it's in impeccable condition. Even all of the buttons are securely fastened!! I can't wait to wash this, so it doesn't smell like R. Kelly sheets (not that it does in the first place, but that one line in the song has forever solidified the haste with which I'll wash items I've purchased from a thrift shop), and then I'ma wear the shit out of itttttt!

I searched thoroughly through the CD selection at the Salvation Army but didn't come away with anything this time. #Blurgh. 

THE END:

So that was everything I ended up with during this little $20 Challenge. And check it out - I actually came in at $18.95! And that's CANADIAN currency! Hollllla!

I had a blast poking through the 4th Ave Salvation Army for this Thrift Shop Challenge. Let's be honest though... I'll take any excuse to spend $20 at that Salvay, because that place is fucking awesome.

If you do this $20 Thrift Shop Challenge, please come back and post your link here! I'd love to check out what you find!

Check out more of my thrifting hauls here:

• Thrifting in Vancouver
• Went Shopppppin: 4th Ave Salvation Army
• Vancouver Thrifting Haul: Great Finds!

An Awesome Arms Workout for the Ladies!

I did an arm workout the other day that left me feeling jacked... in a sexy type of way, not an "I could lift a car off a man" type of way. The arm/ab workout that I did is outlined below, and all of the exercises are clickable so you can see a demo of the move, if you're interesteddddd!

GET AWESOME ARMS:

30 mins elliptical

12 bent over rows, 15 lbs each hand

40 weighted v-sit twists, holding 15 lbs

.  bent over row  .
.  screenshot from diet.com  .

12 overhead press, 12.5 lbs each hand

50 reverse crunch w/ leg lifts

12 bicep curls, 15 lbs each hand

50 Brazilian crunches

on exercise ball, 12.5 lbs each hand:

   - 12 chest press

   - 12 close grip chest press

30 weighted crunches on exercise ball, holding 15 lbs

15 deltoid fly, 5 lbs each hand

30 lying overhead raise + double crunch, holding 8 lbs

24 alternating medicine ball flys, holding 10 lb medicine ball

- 1:10 plank

- 20 superman on bosu ball

15 deltoid raises, 5 lbs each hand

40 weighted side bends, 15 lbs each hand

5 mins biking

I seriously felt tremendous about my entire life for days after I did this workout. I've been really slacking on my gym-going for the last couple of months, so I've got to work back up to being able to use 15-pound weights comfortably for most of my arm exercises.

What are you favorite online fitness resources? Do you have a favorite workout channel on YouTube? 

Red Hearts & Polka Dots: Valentine's Day Nails

Creating relatively decent looking hearts on my nails is much easier now that I have a dotting tool! "Two dots and tap" and voilà! HEARTS SO REAL YOU CAN PRACTICALLY HEAR THAT SHIT BEATING.

PRACTICALLY.

Here's a new Valentine's Day nail polish look that uses the technique:

The colors I chose to use:

A List by Essie

This off-white, sort-of-unnamed Love & Beauty polish.

Hey here's something that's pretty weird. This off-white nail polish is scented. As if nail polish isn't scented enough, they wanted to try to make this one smell like - if I'm to trust the sticker on top of the bottle - Jasmine. I'm going to be honest and say I don't know what Jasmine is supposed to smell like - unless we're talking about the Disney Princess, because she smells like Arabian nights and centuries-old gold. #Obvi. The polish doesn't smell like gold, but its scent falls somewhere between "This is moderately un-terrible" and "This is full of chemicals. Stop smelling it."

So even though I'm armed with a dotting tool that would make a dalmatian jeally, I still have my Argyle Nails Fail fresh in my head so I'm trying to dial back my instinct to just go straight to my nails with the polish - thus, a few practice runs were required on a piece of paper first:

NO SHAME IN MY PRACTICE GAME. Yours either, I promise. See my attempt at a little red mustache graphic? Good thing I didn't go straight to the nails with that one!!

Alright SEW now we get started!

1. Paint all of your nails 2 coats of white:

2. Use the dotting tool to form a nice big heart in the center of each nail. Place two dots side-by-side, and then use your dotter to drag the dots down diagonally and connect the two sides of the heart. I finished the nails off by using the smaller end of my dotting tool to add some red polka dots around the hearts:

I did 3 small hearts with polka dots on my thumbnails, since I had a little more room to play around with:

If you try this, tweet me a picture @akaBailey!