Zoya has had a few REALLY great online deals lately. The first one was three free polishes so having never purchased Zoya before, I got three and have not looked back since then.

Then they had the Go Green sale for St. Patrick’s Day. 3 polishes for $5.00 so I got those and LOVED ALL THREE. I got a ton of compliments on my nails that week.

They are without a doubt the BEST polish I’ve used in a LONG time. The color payoff is amazing, two coats is all I’ve needed in most cases, they last REALLY well on my nails which are generally weak and chip SO EASY but not with Zoya!

Two weeks ago they had a BOGO sale so I got 6 polishes for the price of 3, plus they had $2.00 shipping so it was about $20 for all 6 polishes! I ordered the entire Sunshine collection and they came in the mail today and they are SO CUTE! I can’t wait to try them all out.

*This is NOT a paid post. 100% my idea, my opinions and I paid for all the products. I just wanted to share because I have been so impressed with them and all my girlfriends should know.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Cassidy has been begging me to dye her hair blue for about two years now but I’ve been hesitant to do it. When she asked me this weekend I really couldn’t think of a good reason NOT to allow her to so on a whim we picked up a package of Splat Hair Dye in “Blue Envy” for $10.99 at our local Walgreens (they have it for $9.99 online!).

The box instructions give you the option of bleaching the hair first or not but states that for a more vibrant blue they recommend it so we did. Here is a progress shot after we had bleached the hair and before applying the blue:

After we washed out the bleach and completely dried it, we added the blue. The squeeze bottles they included made it very easy to apply both the bleach and then the blue coloring although they only provided one pair of gloves and it would have been more convenient to have one new set for each of the two steps.

After letting the blue sit for 30 minutes she washed then conditioned her hair and I was surprised at how great it felt. I thought for sure that the bleach would leave her hair feeling damaged but it didn’t at all. It still had the same soft texture as the rest of her hair.

After blow drying I took a few more shots so you could see just how blue this dye really is.

I’ve always heard that you need to buy expensive dyes to get color like this but I don’t see how her hair could be any more blue at this point! Of course, the real test will come when we see how long the color lasts but after reading online we added some dye to conditioner to use on her hair once a week to keep the color looking fresh. In a week or two I’ll do a follow up post and let you know how it’s looking!

For now, I have one happy blue haired girl!

So my game plan for the first month or two is going to be a simple on: Get up one review a week. I really think that once a week is a reasonable goal for now and I have a feeling that once I start I’ll WANT to start putting up more. The good thing is that I already have a ton of things I’ve been thinking “I should review this!” so I have a list of things to choose from!

And so it begins!

OH! Also, I’m probably going to do a bit of a redesign and I want to get some other review sites plugged so if you have one either drop me an email or leave a comment and I’ll check your site out!

First up: bit.ly

Bit.ly is a great little web app similar to tinyurl. Only on steroids. When you create an account and log in, it does cool stuff like keep track of your most recent shortened urls so that you can go back and easily find them to post other places.

That’s not really what I’m wanting to tell you about. I know that a lot of my readers are really into twitter and THANK GOD because how else am I supposed to stalk you all?! Well, bit.ly had this awesome FireFox plugin that makes surfing twitter so much more fantastic.

Here are three of the many reasons it rocks hardcore.

#1 – Follow conversations! It makes following conversation much easier. When you see that somebody has “in reply to *username*” at the bottom of their tweet you can mouse over it and it will pop up a little box that shows you the tweet it’s in reply to. See the screenshot below:

#2 – Picture preview! If you upload a picture to any of the most popular twitter image apps, like twitpic then then when you mouse over the link it pops up a thumbnail preview of the image before you click on it. This is especially great if NSFW images are a problem. Not that they necessarily would be since SURELY you wouldn’t follow anybody that would do that!

#3 – Information overload! This is actually a pretty dang cool feature. When you mouseover any bit.ly link (and some other tiny links) then the box pops up and gives you some pretty cool information. Mainly, it shows the number of time that the link has been clicked. But it goes further! If you click the more information button it redirects you to a page on the bit.ly site that has a wealth of information about your link including where the clicks are happening, the country and if it’s a blog post, it will even list comment responses to the blog and any other backlinks to the post. Here is an example from a tweet I made earlier today about a techcrunch article.

By clicking the “more information” link I can see that it’s been clicked 55 times, 3 other people on twitter tweeted the same link, 0 people posted it on friendfeed and a short preview of all the comments on the techcruch article.

Here is an example of a tweet that ijustine made earlier today:

So, if you use Firefox (YOU SHOULD) and twitter (YOU BETTER*) then bit.ly is just something you are going to have to have. So go get it now!

*And also, if I’m not following you already, leave me your username so I can.

When I first heard about Etsy I wasn’t thinking it would be quite as GODDAMN FABULOUS as it is. Seriously. I pictured a bunch of old ladies posting the scarves and mittens they’d made while sitting in a retirement home sipping tea. I. WAS. SO. WRONG.

When I had finally heard about it more times than I could stand I went to check it out for myself… and four hour later I woke up in a pool of drool and shaking a little. It’s addicting. Seriously, try going to that site and spending less than an hour browsing at all of the amazing stuff. It’s IMPOSSIBLE. It’s an endless pool of awesome creations and originality and a simple search for “scarf” will turn up 1261 pages of scarves. 1261! I’m pretty sure that I’ve looked at EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE.

That first time, when I woke up in a pool of drool, the first thing I thought to do was check my PayPal account to see how much damage I had done and, thankfully, I only managed to buy one scarf in my binge. It was the scarf you see in the picture there from Sweetcheex76′s shop. When it came in the mail it was even better than the description had made it out to be. It’s SO SOFT and thick and I every single time I wear it out in public I get a compliment on it. Actually, I can’t wait till it gets cool enough to start wearing again. Not only that, but it’s the first item I bought that made me want to learn to knit myself which has become a hobby I’ve really found myself loving.

I’m going to start posting more of my awesome Etsy finds here. I’ve honestly never ordered something I didn’t absolutely love and would recommend ANY of the shops I’ve purchased from and thought that I should share that with the world so you too can surround yourselves with all the pretty handmade goodies your Paypal account can handle.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

When we moved into the NEW HOUSE we realized that we were seriously lacking in some very necessary tools. Things like lawn mowers and garden sheers and my favorite so far: the ever popular wet/dry vac. Ben did some research but we decided to just head on down to Home Depot to take a look at some of them first hand. We’re on a first name basis now with the folks in the Tool Corral at our local Home Depot.

We were originally going to get the 12 gallon version of this vac for around $80 but the awesome gentleman in the Tool Corral pointed us to the RIDGID 16 Gallon Detachable Blower Wet/Dry Vac that is also a blower for just $90! I was really glad later that day as we sucked the pond in our back yard dry that we had gone with the 16 gallon version. We had the entire thing emptied in about an hour and BOY CAN THIS THING SUCK UP SOME WATER. It was amazing. And it wasn’t just water, it was three week old, uncirculated, stagnant, awful smelling water that was full of muck and grime and other scary living things I won’t be mentioning… all without a single hiccup.

The next day I used it to start sucking up the BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of tiny yellow flowers that have dropped every day from the tree in the back yard. The entire yard has been blanketed in them and it had absolutely no problem sucking them off the ground and between the rocks of the pond. Ben also used the detachable blower to move some of the other yard clippings into more manageable piles. The blower is very easy to use and can be detached and reattached with a single hand and once reattached turns immediately back into a vac. The 20 foot cord allowed him to work a pretty good portion of our smaller backyard but he did need an extension cord to get into the side yards.

Wet or dry, there was nothing that the vac COULDN’T do for us. I’m sure that it will get weekly use in projects as we work to fix up the house.

The only reason I’m giving it 4.5 stars out of 5 is because the wheels make it a bit of a pain to move around our back yard’s stone walkway. I think that a beefier wheel, like something you’d find on a razer scooter or rollerblades, would make it much more manageable over a more bumpy terrain.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Like most good geeks I downloaded and installed the iPhone 2.0 software yesterday and then downloaded EVERY SINGLE FREE APP AVAILABLE (and one paid app). Special thanks to TechCrunch for being on top of things and posting all downloads and links early. The app store is awesome. So far I’m pretty happy with most apps, especially the AIM, Twitterific, and the Faceobook app.

AND!

[StarWarsGeekGirl]

PhoneSaber! That was the first app I showed Ben. I’ve played with this app far too much. I can’t help it. I chased the cat around this morning and it was an epic battle that ended with him fleeing with his tail between his legs. HA!

Okay, I’ll stop now.

[/StarWarsGeekGirl]

The Facebook app is CRAZY fantastic and the developers should be very proud. It’s like a contact list on steroids. From now on instead of asking for a phone number to put into my phone I’m just gonna say “Add me on Facebook!” I’ve never really gotten fully into the Facebook craze even though I have a lot of friends that use it. Having to log in EVERY TIME I visit and the cluttered feeling have kept me away. Now that this is available, I expect that I’ll be much more active in that community… because, you know, what I really need is ANOTHER online community to become addicted to.

One thing I’d really love to see is a way to push info from Facebook to our contact lists, that would be the ultimate in coolness. GET ON THAT DEVELOPERS! kthxbye.

Twitterific is SO VERY PRETTY. I felt kind of bad for ditching Hahlo so quickly (for about 2.4 seconds) then The Pretty won me over. Twitterific is so easy to read and very well laid out for @replies and the integrated Safari browser with the option to also open in the browser for bookmarking was GENIUS. They really captured what twitter users want, I’d say better than even twitter does.

Now, if WordPress can just get it’s app out, I’ll be the happiest little blogger geek. From what I’ve seen though it will be awesome too. Easy to post, integrate pictures from the iPhone gallery on the fly, etc. It, combined with Typepad’s already available app, will take mobile blogging to the next level. It will be cool to see people doing more real time blogging of events.

I won’t be getting a 3G anytime soon because we close on the house today and we can’t really afford to be spending the money on new toys but a little part of me is happy that I got the App Store 24 hours before the 3G users. And my phone will always have the pretty metal back that I’ll flash around like a badge of geeky honor.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I bought this laptop November of 2007. I hit refresh on the refurbished Dell website about 562,226,529,526 times and there was ONE laptop that met all the requirements I had. As soon as it popped up I called Ben and tried to act like my brain was not in the process of exploding RIGHT THEN AND THERE because OH MY GOD I WANT THIS LAPTOP and he ordered it for me right away. *swoon*

First things first! Lets get the specifications out there:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0GHz/800Mhz FSB/4MB cache)
• 160 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• 15.4 inch WSXGA+ Notebook Screen with TrueLife (1680 x 1050)
• 8X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability
• 9 Cell Primary Battery
• Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
• 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM 677MHz (2 DIMMs)
• Intel 4965 802.11a/g/n Dual-Band Mini Card

I seriously love this laptop. So far there hasn’t been a single program I’ve thrown at it that it hasn’t been able to handle. Graphic intensive games like World of Warcraft, Sims2 and City of Heroes play with no problem at all. PhotpshopCS3 loads quickly and even with 3-5 rather large RAW images open at the same time, there are little to no hangups. The only program I’ve run into that causes a bit of lag has been DxO Optics Pro but that is a REALLY memory and processing intensive program.

I wasn’t too sure about the glossy screen at first but for game play and photo manipulation, it’s absolutely perfect and even in outside sunny environments it’s brightness has been enough to allowe me to browse and watch movies.

Of course, this decreases battery life but I opted for the larger 9-cell battery for that reason. I sat at an America’s Tire for THREE HOURS while they worked on my car and played games with Cassidy and surfed the internet at full brightness before I started to get low. The batter does stick out a bit in the back but I’ve not had a problem getting it to fit into a standard 14 inch bag or backpack.

With the 160GB hard drive, DVD read/writer and built in wireless it’s been everything I wanted and MORE. As a matter of fact, it’s been so awesome, that we bought Ben one in black. His and hers.

The best part was that because I got a refurbished laptop, I save over $600 when compared to the same machine built on Dell’s main website. Several people have been surprised to learn that its a refurb because there’s not a scratch or mark on it anywhere. It looks like a brand new unit.

So if you are in the market for a new laptop (or monitor, or desktop, or printer for that matter) anytime soon, I HIGHLY recommend checking out the refurbished Dell website before you make your final purchase.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Many people have different opinions on when Summer starts. For some, it’s when you have to break out the shorts and tank tops. For some it’s when you have to put away the knee high socks for the year. For many, many kids all across the country it’s the last day of school.

For me? It’s when I start noticing softball size clumps of hair in every corner and crevice of the house. Every. Single. Crevice.

Fighting the fur is something that I’ve been doing for, well, for the 29 years I’ve been alive because that’s how long I’ve been in love with my kitties. When we had carpet in the house I used to think that hardwood floors would be SO MUCH BETTER for cats. Now that we have hard wood floors, I realize that the cat fur is just more noticeable now! There isn’t any mat and thread to hide it. It sits there in front of the TV, staring at you, mocking you. You get up to clean it and before you can sit back down there are three more clumps, each one bigger than the last.

NOT THIS YEAR THOUGH! I was reading Dooce awhile back and she linked to a fabulous devise called The Furminator. I don’t know what makes this brush so damn awesome and I can’t explain to you at all how it works, but I can tell you that’s it’s the BEST DAMN FUR BRUSH EVER. On the website it says that is grabs the undercoat which is what makes it so effective since it the undercoat that cats shed in the warmer months.

In one five minute session I can pull more hair off the cats then I would in days and days and hours and hours of brushing with any of the hundreds of brushes I’ve owned before. Seriously, that picture there was the result of about 6 minutes of brushing and that was before I really had the hang of using it. Now that I’ve taken the time to watch the video on the website, I’m much more efficient and get loads more hair each time I use it.

It’s absolutely amazing to me how much fur there is hiding in that undercoat. It’s endless. It’s enough to knit my entire extended family scarves for the winter. The nice thing is that as long as I brush them each once a week, the fur that moocks me from all the little crevices of the house has been greatly reduced. When they start showing back up again, I grab the brush and attack each one of them and they go away again.

If you have a cat, and it has fur, then this brush is something you simply MUST own. Go get one, NOW. They’re a bit more expensive then the standard brush but after one use you’ll gladly have paid twice the amount.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Awhile ago, Caitlin started a thread over on Lavish about how people drink their tea and me, being kind of a n00b to the tea scene was like, uhh… In a glass?!

Oh how little I knew back then (like two weeks ago). But seriously, that was before I discovered Adagio and my life at this point could end and I’d be completely content because dude, I have drank the Elixir of Everlasting Happiness and it is lemon grass looseleaf tea.

After I received my order I vowed to try at least one new tea a day and this was REALLY EASY because I found myself making at least three glasses a day. Each flavor was like a whole new fabulous discover. Each very different but VERY VERY good. So far the herbal tea’s have been my favorite. The peppermint makes me really unproductive at work because I keep sticking my nose above my mug to breathe in it’s wonderfulness.

I very big part of this process and getting the teas to steep as perfectly as they do is the IngenuiTEA steeper but that’s a product that deserves it’s own review because I could go on and on about JUST the steeper. I might eventually end up doing a review on the individual tea types but for now I just had to get the secret out there.

You can pick up the steeper and a starter set of teas (GET THE HERBAL! TRUST M!) for $20 and both times I’ve ordered I received my tea a day later! If you decide to try it out, drop me an an email and I’ll forward you a $5 coupon making your initial purchase of the steeper and the tea only $15. Now you have no reason NOT to try it.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars