Red Dash Pink

This one's a rather simple one to make: a stripe of light colour crossing your dark coloured nails.

1. First step of all, as always, apply basecoat.

2. Apply the light coloured polish - in this case it's nudish pink. Always apply the light colours first to contrast with the darker colours. This time I chose a colour that's very close to my natural nail colours so that in a glimpse it'd give the effect that my red polish had been smeared off in the middle.

3. After the light layer is reasonably dry, apply the dark layer. First, apply the part that's wider at the bottom and polish diagonally all the way to the edge of your nail. It takes focus and accuracy to run the brush straight, so take your time. Avoid metallic textured colours that show your brush strokes; choose plain or finely glittered [dusty glitter kind]. With these you can polish slowly and carefully with smooth result. Also, don't use too much polish on the brush - just use a little to create the diagonal line. You can always fill the rest later if it ends up being too transparent.

4. Using the dark diagonal layer as guide, apply the other dark layer side, running the brush parallel with the slant of the first dark layer side. As in the first layer, take the time to create straight lines first, then filling the rest afterwards.

5. Let dry. If possible, use only 1 coat of dark layer, but most likely the nail surface would still look uneven - the dark layer would naturally look raised. So take the light coloured polish again, and run lightly once between the dark layers - just to even out the surface.

6. Apply top coat.

It's really not that difficult!

Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate

Aside from The Sims, my other favourite game series would have to be Mystery Case Files. The basic idea of the series is to find hidden objects in a picture of a scene, which is not as easy as it may sound.

The Madame Fate game is the fourth release of the series, which I just finished tonight, and thought was worth sharing/recommending here. It has improved a lot compared to the previous releases [Huntsville, Prime Suspects, and Ravenhearst] - the pictures are more beautiful, the items are harder to find with some extra twists, and the puzzles are more insanely mind boggling. I guarantee it will keep you playing for hours out of curiosity! It does also make you feel challenged to do your best to solve every puzzle and find every object. With the previous games, I could play casually while eating chips and listening to music - but with this one, it takes extra concentration. As soon as I get sleepy or tired, even the slightest lack of concentration already results in failure to play the game 'properly'.

This is definitely one good game to exercise your brain, you can almost feel it spinning while you play - and I can't wait to play it for the second time, even if only to beat my previous time.

London Skyline Time-Slip Photos

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7355753.stm

This fascinates me for more than one reason: It's a neat and original idea, it's in my dream city, and looking at it makes me love life. I'm loving life so much right now to the point of regretting not savouring every minute more intensely, although I already fairly do day by day.

Time-slip. That's a fact that we take so much for granted, since time is always slipping away. When you look at these kinds of time-slip photos, fast forwarded ones, it makes you realise that life is indeed too short.

So the idea of the project is that it takes pictures of London skyline every 5 seconds from a few angles, which results then can be viewed from inside the 'drum' that houses the cameras. You basically can rewind through the photos by walking around in the drum - around the available monitors, or just closer and further from them, to change the image. I SO hope to visit it, but well, I guess I must make do with watching the video above.

What you DON'T do

We may feel that we'd never do anything to hurt anyone... But, the scary thing is, we can hurt people by something we don't do!

My friend is hurt because of things her friend didn't do. That friend of hers doesn't even think that he's wrong. I got hurt because my colleagues forgot to include me in an admittedly trivial thing. A lot of us hurt our secret admirers - or even our steady partner - without even knowing it. We might hurt a kid by spontaneously showing more affection towards her cuter sister. We might make someone doubt themselves by not giving compliments to their artwork. We might dampen our inferior's spirits by only correcting their mistakes and never praising their jobs well done.

Hurting people is easier than we might think, and we've got to be careful.

Green Festival

Today I visited the Green Festival, an event to raise awareness regarding our suffering Earth. The overall event, design and management were quite pleasant, as hinted by the entrance gate:

It was however Benny & Mice that attracted my attention in the first place. They were in the main picture of the festival's headline reportage in Kompas, our nation's leading [and my personal favourite] newspaper. I never miss the cartoon every Sunday! They're pretty much the only Indonesian I'm a fan of. Witty, wacky, and funny, they poke fun on anything in Indonesian culture. And they do it oh so precisely!! They're the epitome of Sunday morning to me - still hazy eyed, sipping warm coffee and unshowered, reading Benny & Mice before everything else on Sunday edition of Kompas. Here I am with my heroes:

The green exhibition itself is arranged in a one-way multiple rooms, divided in sections as a house would. Each room describes things we could do to save energy in our bedroom, bathroom, etc. It's all neat and interesting:

Finally, I of course HAD to take a picture with the mascot, despite having to wait in line with just about everyone else:

There's even Starbucks there!

Graduation Day

I feel really overwhelmed about my students' Graduation Day right now. It's 7 weeks away, and I feel like I'm not going to finish the preparations on time. Everytime I finish something, something else would come up for me to worry about. Right now I'm really nervous about the decoration. What would I do to spice up the plain multifunction hall? It seems like a lot of work, and quite frankly I didn't think much about it before. I was too busy preparing the ceremony, music, photo slideshows, souvenirs, costumes, and it scares me because new things keep popping up!! Is this a kind of a panic attack? Not to mention that I actually don't want to let them go, since I've come to love them so much!

If any of you knows any good, fun, or unique graduation ideas/songs/whatever, please don't hesitate to comment here!

Work Hard, Play Harder

Everyday I feel tired and worn out at the end of the day. Weekend's my time to relax and rejuvenate, so that I can come back fresh on Monday. Right?

Wrong! Every weekend's end I feel that I've wronged my body. Today was the worst - I still felt exhausted when time forced me to leave my bed and go to school. I barely could open my eyes, let alone concentrate on anything. Hangover from the weekend is a killer! I was literally dying, I could just drop and fall asleep in the middle of the school. My kids gave me energy to go on, but my whole body complained. My legs hurt - that uncomfortable feeling that doesn't get better even when you relax your legs - I lacked of focus, having headache, and longing for a nap so badly.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, or getting overboard... well what can I do? I've only got 2 weekend days in a week!

Mallhopping

There's a plethora of malls in Jakarta. In fact, we don't seem to have much choice to spend our holidays! Want to eat? Go to the mall. The cinema's in the mall. Shop, in the mall, obviously. There are even play arenas and art exhibitions in the mall. Everything you want, conveniently located in 1 luxurious building.

I went with my family to the newly opened Pacific Place, to make use of their 25% off food promotion [with ANZ card, until early May]. The design is much like Senayan City, some corners look exactly the same, I felt like I was lost in a fabricated heaven. I mean I love these places for being so comfortable and luxurious, but with malls popping up here and there looking identical, I feel like I'm being swept away in an uncontrollable spiral downward the hedonistically consumptive lifestyle.

Then we went to Citraland to find a new faucet. That's right, our kitchen sink's faucet was broken this morning. It's also packed, I couldn't believe that there are so many people in each mall every weekend! Not much else to do - no nice parks to stroll through, no stylish museums to visit, no public libraries to enjoy... there's virtually nothing to do. Nothing nice anyway.

Then off with my friends, to eat dinner and watch Three Kingdoms. We went to eX and it's crowded once again! We almost didn't get seats for the show, but managed - although it was a bit too close to the screen for comfort. Luckily the film was enjoyable.

But hell, I spent the day mallhopping.

Seinfeld

I never get the jokes of stand-up comics, hence I don't really find Seinfeld funny. But it's on every weeknight right at the time I need to relax [i.e. just finished working], so inevitably I often end up watching it.

I still don't laugh much, but a striking thought hit me - their group is exactly like my own group of friends! Elaine with her 3 male friends - how they tend to take care of her, how laid back and relaxed their friendship is without any politics and hidden agendas attached, and - oh dearie me, the whole thing just resembles our group so much!! Except that we're not that crazy. Perhaps.

Fasting

Fasting does our body good in so many ways. I actually feel better for eating less, and I feel lighter. It saves lunch money. It gives much more time to do things instead of eating. [I always multitask while I eat anyway]. I feel so much grateful for my food when it's time to break the fast, instead of taking them for granted. It's all good.