Duane - You make some good points and it is nice to have a male weigh in. I think you represent a lot of guys who prefer to see women looking natural. My DH's reaction to my vibrant polish was, "Whoa! You have girl toes!" From what I've gleaned from the posts on this forum, more women here would prefer a good chef's knife to an expensive designer bag and spend more time making breads and jams than fussing with elaborate beauty regimes. I think this post got so many replies because it is timely - it's summer, meaning for most of us our toes are just coming out of hiding - and it's just fun to hear about what other women do. I wrote about my DD who finds it relaxing to give herself a weekly pedicure. Fact is, other than that, sunscreen and lip gloss are the only "makeup" she wears. I think many of us perform some of these beauty routines less to impress men, but as a little indulgence.

My nail salon recently changed their practice and charges $1 per transaction. It is annoying as I do most of my transactions by credit card and I do not want to pay an extra dollar. Using a credit card helps me easily track my spending and of course, I love those points. When the salon moved to adding a charge they started out treating it as if it was a punishment for using a credit card, all the signs in the salon were based on them charging a fee - $1 fee for credit card use. The nail techs became very negative about customers using their credit card. I considered changing salons over this. Although there are many nail salons finding a good one can be a challenge so I kept going to them. Trying to remember to bring cash. Someone obviously helped them change their presentation of the charge, now the signs indicate that a discount is given for cash and all the nail techs make sure to mention the discount in a positive light. They did up their price so it evens out to an additional dollar for credit cards but it a much more positive method of making the additional charge. If they had used this approach in the beginning I probably would have not felt so negatively about it. Amazing what a diiference the presentation will make. Do I think the change was related to underreporting their income, no. Could it be happening, of course. A lot of people paid cash before the change, so I am guessing this change was driven by the credit card fees.

With the amount of lotion moisturizing my feet receive post-showering, I'm not sure it would be terribly safe to go without socks and slippers, even if my feet didn't get terribly cold without them. @watchmelol Makes sense that you and DD would have similar habits for keeping your toenails as short as possible due to skating and the footwear requirements. My ballet instructors always told us these horrific stories, I'm guessing because they thought that it would ensure nobody took class or performed wearing pointe shoes with the ribbons safety pinned on, or without making sure they cut their toenails brutally short...unfortunately there were a few people who had to learn through experience. And I thought the blisters were bad enough, I have vivid memories of daily rehearsals for two weeks and after the final one before the weekend performance everyone was packing up to go home and get a good nights sleep...then seeing another dancer had been bleeding through her shoes; later the same year a different dancer ended up with the giant safety pin she'd used to attach the ribbons to her point shoe stuck into the Achilles tendon area. That was ample motivation to not follow that route, and why our teachers had told us those awful stories in the first place - they did have our best interests in mind. I'm certain that a major part of why I don't have much feeling in my feet (haven't had much for most of my adulthood either) is because of the pointe shoes. Even if I could go back and do things over I'd still get involved in ballet, but my feet have definitely been affected in not-so-awesome ways. :P

Hi Joseph, I'm hoping you would answer. If we had 63" wide slab with a 24" base cabinet on one side, a knee wall, and 12" base cabinet and then a 17"-18" overhang would we need support? It fits the 1/3 rule, but would support needed vary differently between a 2 cm vs 3 cm slab? Should we have brackets or plywood installed? Because our fabricator is really not wanting any overhang over 12".