Here's me!

Intro time!  Again, I'm Amanda.  I'm 29, with that first scary birthday coming early this autumn.  I live in an odd rural patch surrounded by Philadelphia suburbs.  I'm 35 min or less from several big shopping areas (only 20 min from an Ulta!) and about an hour from Philly, but many of my neighbors have livestock.  It's kinda awesome...and cheaper than a lot of the more suburban places around it.  I share a townhouse with my SO (the grown-up version of "BF"), Stewart, Zeus who's a wonderfully quirky combination roommate/adult stepkid/trans-female brother-in-law, and one of the loudest cats I've ever known, Saya.

I'm a science nerd, but I work as a security guard.  Go to college, kids.  Really.  I might try college, if I can ever work up the nerve.  There are two other women on the security staff where I work, but it really is a guy job.  My uniform (which you'll see in my first post about clothes) is horrid.  It's an object lesson in how important the fit of clothes can be.  It needs to be seen.

My clothing and makeup styles are simple, with a dark touch and a bit of glitter.  I've been accused since 16 of being a goth, but I'm not.  I swear I'm not.  My hair was a bit dark and severe for years, which was part of the goth accusation.  Waist-length, contoured blunt bangs, blunt ends, dyed somewhere between a deep aubergine, rich auburn, or soft black much of the time.  Think Morticia Addams with bangs...or....um...a Halloween wig.  Now I get softer fringed bangs, but still contoured and I color it golden brown, dark in the winter, light in the summer.  That's another post you'll see soon.  I'm always tempted to go red sometime, just for the hell of it...but that would mean dyeing my brows (a post about them soon too) and....I'm too lazy.  My hair also clings to red dye and it shifts later dyes to red for ages after.

I call myself a secret ginger, because I have coloring that suggests red hair.  It's only red at my temples, which are graying quickly.  Well...the *right* one is.  I have a bit of a stripe.  Early gray runs in my father's family, so I hold no illusions.  I've been dyeing my hair since I was 12 anyway.

My love of makeup started really early.  When I was two I went to the ER with a bean stuck up my nose.  The nurses liked my nail polish.  I asked Santa for makeup, pantyhose, and crayons.  I've also always been a nerd.  I wanted to be "a scientific".  I have vivid early memories of nail polish, especially a Coty (I think) pale yellow cream called something like "Go Bananas".  I still remember how grown up I felt when I was 8 and Mom let me paint my own nails....with supervision.  I'm not 100% sure I was the one who painted part of her exercise bike with bright, shimmery magenta polish the year before...but it was probably me.

One more major thing about me...I'm cheap.  I could be generous and call myself frugal, but that would be a lie.  Cheap really is the right word.  I mentioned my $8 upper limit for polish in the last post.  I'll go maybe $9 for lipstick, $6 for gloss, etc...but if I can get things on clearance I'm ecstatic.  As much as I am a makeup junkie, I'm even more of a clearance junkie.  If I see an OPI polish in a non-gross color for less than $4 it takes effort to avoid drooling.  If something is 75% off I'll probably buy like 5.  Post about this soon too.  There's a lot of stuff I've got planned for future posts....see you then!

[There were gonna be photos...there aren't.  Clearly.]