A six outing month

In amongst the goals I set myself for this year, there was the aim of getting out on average more often than once every 5 days for the year, with at least 6 outings, including at least one daytime outing, every month.

April has been the first month this year where I've achieved the monthly average including a daytime outing. I spent 3 days over the Easter long weekend doing some work around the yard, which did damage to the acrylic overlays on my nails, to the point that I was worried that if I didn't get them fixed up I might break the real nails underneath. Ironically, it was the damaged nails that led to my daytime outing on Wednesday.

I've been getting my nails done every 3 weeks, and had planned on going to get them done next Wednesday, between the Tuesday Newcastle and Wednesday Central Coast cafe nights, and going en femme as I did at the beginning of March. When I got up on Wednesday morning, though, I looked at my nails and realised that they were worse than I had realised the previous night, with one nail having lost a large piece from the side after I'd done the nail polish that I wore out Tuesday night. I rang the salon and was able to move my appointment forward a week, as there had been cancellations. At about 9:30, I'd made a 1pm appointment then fairly suddenly realised that it should be possible to go along en femme. With my wife still in bed asleep, I was somewhat limited on what I could do about choosing an outfit for the day, and effectively lost about half an hour. In the end, I wore a casual top that I hadn't worn since Easter a couple of years ago, cream jeans and mustard joggers with short socks.

I did my makeup in about 50 minutes, which is a fairly good time for me. Then, having heard a weather prediction of rain, I drove to my appointment instead of walking as I had intended. Parking was a big problem, but I ended up getting to the salon about 5 minutes early. After my nails were done, I wandered around the local op shops (including getting rained on) then headed up to Charlestown Square for a while.

In addition to the 5 cafe night outings, Wednesday made 6 outings for the month. I don't really expect to achieve the same every month, nor do I expect to catch up the outings I missed in the previous 3 months, but I'll be really happy (and fairly surprised) if I can maintain that 6 outings per month for the rest of the year.

All in all, it was a fairly uneventful day but it was an outing en femme, and when I stop and think about it now, I didn't even pause heading out of the house, getting out of the car or even getting into the lift from the carpark into the shopping centre. I know that I've come a long way in recent years. :)