So then she said...

It's time for poor financial decisions with Impy! I'll be your host, Impy, as we walk through how I caved for the HT advent calendar and the sale. To be fair, I had set aside funds for both of these things, so it wasn't a surprise beyond being surprised they were doing a calendar to begin with.

It's now since sold out, but I want to ramble on about it and the various nail spaces are being predictably grrr, argh about it and I'm not really into that right now.

We'll begin with my biggest gripe (beyond the price, we shall not speak of that), which is that they didn't offer the option of spoilers before it dropped. HT has gotten much better this year at offering full 'spoilers' for their new releases prior to their official drop, but the one time I think it was totally required, they were still in their playing coy about what you were getting. Look, I get it, people want to be surprised, but at the same time, I want to be an informed customer (a phrase they used repeatedly) and it's really fucking hard to do that when you don't share what's in the box until after it's for sale and the site is on the verge of crashing AND there's a race to check out because everyone and their hamster knew this wasn't going to make it through the weekend (I'm not sure it made it through the day?). THIS is what people who complain about FOMO marketing mean, HT.

It did not help that their spoiler page was half broken, with the zoom function not working. But like, save that shit to Pinterest and we're golden. (The zoom does work now, but it absolutely did not for launch.)

( Spoilers, Damn. )
Overall, I'm pretty happy with snagging this. I realize it's stupidly expensive for what it is, but I love the packaging, like or love nearly all the polishes, and the non-polish stuff will actually be useful, plus the minis will encourage me to actually USE the damn stuff. I hope. I'm trying to be better about that. I also don't remember the last non-cheap candy advent calendar I bought myself, so there's that. I figure once every twenty years I can splurge?

I'll have to try to remember to edit this if more dupes are found. You know, for science.

I did also partake in the sale, though I did rein myself in a little since the sale pricing on the stuff I was most interested in wasn't as good as the sale they do in the spring. I picked up a few polishes I didn't want to roll the dice on being discontinued first. I specifically caved and bought Beach Please because there's no world in which this survives the next culling unless it's because they decide they really, really want to keep a sandy beach color in stock. I'm not sure anything else in my order was an obvious "this is not long for this world" polish though. Oh, I grabbed Rainbow Snow as a backup since I've been meaning to do that for awhile and I also grabbed Camera Shy since that one is being discontinued. Everything else was just stuff I'd wanted when it first came out but didn't want to wait anymore to get. I did forget to pick up a few others (Cardinal Sins for one), but figure since the sale is ongoing and there were three Rewards changes in there (now it's two since they updated today), it gave me time for them to be in the Rewards switch and thus freebies. This week's Rewards has some I would've redeemed over the weekend if they'd been available, but I'm not sure I'd want to place an order specifically to redeem them.

Essentially, I scooped up most of the Renaissance collection, parts of the Pixel collection (rolling the dice on those being rewards), and Stop Buggin' because green flakies? Yes, please. Lest you think this is insane (it is), please consider that Impy of a year ago would've just bought these collections as they came out. This year's Impy waited to get them ON SALE.

Now I've got to curl up in a ball and convince myself that Peri-Social is only on such a deep discount because they just have a lot of her and not because they're going to discontinue her.

My plans on catching up with replies for you all has been waylaid by a few things. One of which is the fact that despite the fact that we're not even halfway through November, we already dipped below freezing and all the way to the teens for the "feels like" temps, which meant I had the joy of running around trying to make sure all the To Do stuff got to-done. :P

Also, my time to do this was delayed by needing to slam my head into a wall (luckily not literally) after interacting with the property management go between for the HOA. You probably don't remember, but in 2022 (after months of delays) they painted the outside of our unit. Badly, I might add (my current favorite is them painting OVER a razorblade they left on the porch). When they did this, the front porch light fixture stopped working. We alerted them ASAP and after trying to fix it (making sure the lightbulb wasn't just blown, or that the fixture hadn't been put back on wrong), they said they'd be back to fix it.

It's still broken. I got tired of waiting last year when our shed had the issue, so in July 2024 I spoke to the guy I was told could get things done. He basically said that the HOA would present the homeowners with their fixture options (because HOAs gotta HOA), HO's would pick, and then we'd get our light fixed. He implied it wouldn't take all that long since he was going to personally bring it up with them (along with the shed thing) and would ABSOLUTELY be done well before it started getting dark early. That was clearly not true.

After my Halloween time off, I went ahead and emailed the new (dunno if the other dude is still there) property management go-between and pointed out that it's a safety hazard, has been one for THREE YEARS (almost four!) and that if someone falls, they're gonna get sued so fucking fast. (I believe I phrased it as a serious liability.) Got a reply that said she'd talk to the board and get back to me. A week later, I get this yesterday afternoon:
Good morning,

I have followed up with the board. The board has let me know that the light fixture is part of the homeowner's responsibility to replace it if it is not working.

Are.
You.
FUCKING!
KIDDING!
ME?!?!?!!!!!!!


I replied that this is absolute BS and goes against LITERALLY everything they've said previously and also they broke it, they should fix it and even if this happened to be true, it should have been mentioned THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO.

Politely with an undercurrent of please, please let me tag someone in who is far more litigious than I am.

I'm not so thrilled with the landlord's reply as it seems on the verge of "welp, if we choose something, they'll just say we chose wrong, so we won't" but I'm giving them both time to reply otherwise because dude, I am NOT IN THE MOOD.

Or maybe I am in the mood. To fight.


Because I also went ahead and did my open enrollment insurance duty today and other than one of my add-on things being twice as much for less, it's pretty much the same as last year. Like I don't think I changed anything at all because the options were all very underwhelming. I considered swapping something but it's one of those where you get screwed one way or the other and I decided to just keep the current devil I know. It was probably the least painful one I've done, other than having a momentary freakout when I thought they hadn't been funding my HSA account. (They had; it's just you had to click through to find that.)

But since I was logged in anyway, I went ahead and poked around to see if I could find out about whether I got a raise this year.

tl;dr- I did not. I am apparently capped again.

Longer version: I suspected they'd either reinstated my cap or I'd hit it after last year when I tried looking to see if there was the wage change notification along with my performance review info and couldn't find anything. To be fair, they frequently do keep that blacked out until the first check the raise and backpay go into effect, so I was mostly just biding my time til tomorrow anyway. Until I checked my bank yesterday and saw that the pending amount was much larger than I expected, given that I was missing two days due to my vacation. Then I started to really wonder because either I got a fantastic raise (doubtful), there was a fuckup somewhere (entirely possible), or I was getting lump summed.

Ding ding ding.

Any other year, I'd probably go and ask the SM what the actual fuck, but I'm going to wait on that for two reasons.
1) I don't know any of the CSAs well enough to ask them what they make currently, or I do, but one should make more than me and the other I might ask now that I think about it. Anyway, if they ever hire another overnight CSA, or if I see A2, I'll ask 'em so I know how upset I need to be.
2) Pretty sure our DM is looking for reasons to fight with the SM, so there's no way she'd be able to properly go to bat for me anyway at this point. It's a real shame the next in command got her own store because if she was actually coming back to our store like she said she was (prior to her promotion), I'd ask her what to do. She's straightforward enough that she'd level with me on whether it's a total lost cause or not.


Anyway, fuck them and fuck Widget's employers too.

Today's word of the day is the same as the feeling of the day:
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I hope your day is much, much better.

On the flipside, I got to see one of those fireball shooting stars last night. :D Pretty sure I also saw one last week, too.