I should know...

Ah, winter. There's a chilly wind and my ears are red and my nose is running. I know it seems weird to be happy about such a thing, but it makes me feel more at home. As any regular reader knows, I still miss Chicago every day and one of the things I miss, oddly enough, is the wicked bad weather. God is almost always smiling on Virginia, it seems.

It would seem that my company has been sued by the landlord of the adjacent strip mall. This is not the same landlord as our building, which is bigger than the whole other strip mall. See, we had been using most of the parking lot for parking.

For some reason, we rented space in two other buildings nearby that are both 5? 6? floors and do not have parking garages. These are NEW buildings in Fairfax County that hold hundreds of people. They have about 50 parking spaces a piece. There is no garage under construction, so they were accepted by the zoning board with insufficient parking. The metro is not just around the corner either -- it's at least a mile of walking up Gallows Rd, which is heavily trafficed and unpleasant, so that can't be the rationale.

My co-worker M. went on his rant regarding said zoning board, and I am in total agreement with him. You should simply not be building new office buildings here with NO GODDAMN PARKING.

So, anyway, there is now about 3 acres of empty parking lot out there because we aren't allowed to use it. There is no way in hell that strip mall would use all that parking, so our facilities guy is taking pictures of the vast empty parking lot to attempt to get the judge to remove the injunction.

Oh. I didn't explain. We run a shuttle van between the buildings-with-no-parking and this lot. I would imagine they found this out and decided it was unfair. I agree that it sounds unfair, but we weren't hurting anything and we weren't causing any problems at all. That strip mall had three rows (of about 35-50 cars each) to itself already and it was never, ever full. Now they have 6 rows all to themselves and it looks totally ridiculous.

In the spirit of catiecake and Amanda, I will now review my recent make-up purchases. First, I needed a new bottle of the Clinique Yellow Stuff. It's moisturizer and it's one of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it things" or WFM things. You can tell me trere is better moisturizer made by someone more trendy, but I don't care. I like this stuff and it's never done me wrong. I did try Philosphy's "Hope In A Jar", but it actually burned when used in my eye area. I find most other moisturizers to not be scent free or to be too oily. The Clinique stuff smells like NOTHING and it's not oily. So There.

I also went shopping for a better lip pencil match to the Stila 'Piaf' lipstick. Didn't find one. Maybe the lipstick itself is too dark for me -- I have to save it for my more goth outfits because it looks very goth on me with my lily-white skin. Speaking of, my daily lipstick is currently Stila's 'Lily', which is sort of brown. I'd have never in a million years have thought that would look good on me, but the Barney's girl actually applied it to my face, and hell if it didn't. If the Nordstrom girl had offerred to put that 'Piaf' on me, I'd have never bought it. When I'm tired of 'Lily', I wear a Prescriptives pinkish color whose name I can't recall.

I replaced my tin of Mac's 'Fake' with Philosophy's 'Royalty'. The Mac color is a great color, but I don't like the way it applies (Note to Koog: you told me you broke metal on this eye shadow...want mine?) because I can't move it around once it's down and I'm an apply-with-brush-smudge-with-finger person. Philosphy and Stila eye shadows meet my criteria. I own a Clinique cream color called 'Bluesicle' that I really like, but you can't move that around without REmoving it, so I don't use it much. All the ones I actually use are Philosophy and Stila. Current Rotation: P's Stability and Royalty, S's Salsa, Cassatt and Dahlia (for liner, usually)

Now wasn't that exciting?

I'm also having thoughts about cutting all my hair off once my current color starts to grow out a bit. I didn't used to color my hair blond (it was very blond all by itself and still is if I get sun exposure) and it's only a slight change of color (my hair is still quite light, but it's very beige. I'd like it to be more golden, thus the dye), but it does show at the roots, as does any dye job. So, I was thinking about cutting the color off once I had about 1/2" of hair to work with. Since my face is de-pudged, I think the super short hair would be cute. Especially now that I'm also a make-up wearer. When I had my hair that short before, I was fatter and not a make-up wearer. If you saw me in a public place, you'd be thinking I played for the Other Team.[1] But as long as I was having those thoughts...why not go red first? Red hair is FUN. As a natural blond, I should know.[2]