Maggie Rants [and Raves]

What I Do Every Summer Vacation

by Maggie Franklin | June 26, 2012 | Bookmark +

The time of year has come when I spend too much time fixing nails and looking at green spots under nails that should have been tended to a week ago.

 

Part of the problem is that I live in the country — surrounded by rural agricultural areas and the summer lifestyle that goes with it.

 

Just like those country-western songs with parties in corn fields and drinking beer while tubing down the local river — life is pretty much actually like that around here.

 

For the most part, many of my clients have no problem going three weeks between fills, but this is summer; the season when nails grow so much faster, combined with the season for making the 113-degree summers livable by living in the water — in an area where people really play in irrigation ditches, lakes, and rivers.

 

Explaining that nails grow faster in the summer is easy. Explaining that faster nail growth means that waiting three weeks for a fill will mean your nails have four weeks of growth on them, and that four weeks of growth is too much growth to hold up to the constant water-logged nail beds and additional stresses on the nails from rope swings and wet, drunken river wrestling matches with all those adorable shirtless boys is considerably more difficult.

 

Explaining that outgrown nails, drunken, waterlogged wrestling matches, and natural water sources that contain 600 billion micro-organisms that could get underneath a lifted nail and make a new home there and that you shouldn't just go home and seal that burgeoning new ecosystem into its own little biosphere under your lifted nail with gobs of Superglue is the step where most people’s brains apparently shut down in a desperate, self-preservational attempt to avoid spontaneous combustion from information overload.

 

The cuticle oil mantra is in full swing and the "peroxide before glue" speech has been perfected.

 

You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I just find myself shaking my head through another summer... I'm probably just jealous of the river wrestling with shirtless guys.

 

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