I had the extreme pleasure of interviewing Katie Cazorla on Wednesday. Katie is the owner of a Los Angeles nail salon called The Painted Nail and the star of TV Guide Network’s reality show “Nail Files”. She is also hilarious. You know I don’t normally write a feeder post on my home page that leads you to a post on my sponsored posts page unless it’s something I absolutely know you should not miss. As in, your life might not feel complete unless you experience this piece of writing from me. (Not that my interview post is sponsored technically because I was not compensated in any way for writing it…
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Chatting With Katie Cazorla About Nail Files Season 2!
I had so much fun on Wednesday. I know, you’re all like, “You seem to have fun all the time, Melisa! Geez!” Or something like that. But for real, I had so much fun on Wednesday because I got the opportunity to interview Katie Cazorla, owner of The Painted Nail salon in Los Angeles and the star of “Nail Files”, a reality tv show on the TV Guide network. When I received an invitation to interview Katie during her media tour stop in Chicago this week (to promote the second season of “Nail Files”), I couldn’t believe what a great fit this was. They approached me because of my blog,…
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A Visit To Perry’s Victory and International Peace Memorial
Like most others, my family has a bunch of different interests. Take television, for example. I love sitcoms and a little bit of reality tv (don’t judge). Jim loves anything on the History channel. D loves to watch shows like “Storage Wars” with a little bit of “Mythbusters” on the side. J overlaps all of us, but his go-to show as of late is “Friends”. My sister likes all kinds of tv, from British shows to reality to documentaries to sitcoms. That’s just one example…don’t even get me started on music, sports teams, food, or any other category (times of day, even!) because all five of us run the gamut.…
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Retired.
I have been alluding to some changes as of late, and one of them happens today. This evening I will be teaching my last spin class, ever. I have been thinking about retiring for months now (after teaching for more than nine years!) for many reasons. Just a few of them are: 1. The reason I started teaching in the first place was because I loved taking group fitness classes and thought A) I’d be good at teaching and B) Why not get paid to do something I really enjoy, but once I started teaching I mostly stopped TAKING classes and as I got further from that part of it,…
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DJ J, Revisited
It’s interesting how life works. While contemplating how my life has taken some pretty cool twists and turns over the past couple of years, I have discovered that often we end up doing things we never set out to do, ever. These new activities, pastimes, or even career changes come in the form of a natural progression, sometimes when you least expect it and often before you realize it. As it turns out, I’m not the only one in our house experiencing this sort of thing. I have written before about how J, my 17-year-old guitar-loving son who has always had a wide range of musical interests thanks to his…
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Princess and Knight Training at Medieval Times: A Giveaway, Too!
With all of the things my family has ever done in the Chicago area, believe it or not we’ve never been to Medieval Times. Correction: We HAD never been to Medieval Times until just weeks ago. The Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament has always been on our to-do list, and why not? Horses! Battles! Colorful characters! Jousting! Eating food without utensils! My family was invited to check out the show as well as the Princess Training (we just watched, of course, having not brought a young girl with us, though I tweeted at the time that I probably could have taught the course…) and so we headed to the castle.…
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Go Ahead Punk, Make My Day.
Jim is watching “The Enforcer”, and after watching a scene which contained some very unexpected dialogue (I’ve never seen the movie before), I sat here for five whole minutes doing my best “Dirty Harry” impression in J’s face, finger-pointing and all. “There’s a lot of shooting in this movie, PUNK.” “Hey, he just shot a nun, PUNK. A NUN.” “That wasn’t very nice of him, was it, PUNK?” “Hey, that woman was in a very popular television show in the 80s called ‘Cagney & Lacey’, PUNK.” “As a matter of fact, that was a show about two lady cops, and it was awesome, PUNK.” “Hey PUNK, you’re not even listening…
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It’s Not How You Start, It’s How You Finish.
Anything, really, but in this case? It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish…the day. I felt the need to post a second time today because although my day started with the annoyance over the textbook situation, overall my day was really good and I can’t stand seeing an icky negative post on top of my little old’ blog here. So much happened today, and I can’t write about any of it in detail. Or at all. What I CAN do is be very vague and philosophical about life. You’re welcome. The thing is, life is full of changes…but I despise change. I always have. Like, I can’t even…
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It’s Not Us, It’s You.
There are so many choices these days regarding college textbooks: you can buy used or new anywhere (even Amazon!) (not sponsored) and you can also rent from several different websites as well as—thank goodness they got with the program—the actual college bookstores. What we have done up to this point is rent from one of two textbook rental websites and then buy any books that we couldn’t rent, used if possible, from his college bookstore. Now that D’s college bookstore is offering rentals (yay!), because he was away all summer (I didn’t know what his classes would be so I couldn’t order books while he was gone), and because he’s…
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Back-To-School Fashion: This Time, It’s All About Attitude And Seniority.
I hope you enjoy this month’s contribution to Hallmark’s “Life Is A Special Occasion” campaign! (I bet you’ll love it. It’s got funny pictures, even!) Today is a very special day. It’s not just the first day of school in our district. It’s the first day of J’s SENIOR YEAR. Let THAT absorb for a moment. I know from experience that this year is going to fly by for all of us, what with all of the special activities crammed into a final year of high school education combined with the college search, his girlfriend, his job, his car, and all of the other things he’s got going on. (Related:…