Nice err Gloves

I'm still wearing the gold nail polish that I applied for last Saturday's family Christmas in July get together.

I took my wife and son out for dinner last night, at a restaurant that we frequently go to. I've gone there many times with my nails painted light brown and once with them painted bronze and had no comments. Last night, as I paid the bill, the waitress (who we've seen there many times before) glanced at my hands. She said "Nice... err...", then paused. She glanced at my son, who was putting on gloves and said "Gloves".

I didn't laugh at the time, but I'm quite amused at the number of people who clearly see my nails but go out of their way to pretend not to have noticed. It's almost an "elephant in the room" type of effect. :)

To date, I've only ever had 2 comments that weren't complimentary of my nails. I mentioned one last month, but I don't think that I mentioned the other one. Neither was specifically negative or insulting, more just a comment to say that they had noticed.

When I decided to keep my nails long, I was genuinely expecting some negative comments. I'm really enjoying having my nails how they are, and even more so given the absence of those anticipated comments!

Fixed nail and a distinct lack of comments

I was able to get an appointment to get my broken nail fixed on Monday afternoon. The remains of the gel was buffed off so that the remains of the acrylic could be soaked off. A plastic false tip was glued on, then the acrylic and gel re-done, along with 2 coats of the same gold polish as I already had on the rest and a top coat.

The net result is that unless you look at the underside of the repaired nail, you can't tell the difference between it and the rest, so they're back to looking like they did on Saturday.

Which of course puts me back to having all of my nails quite long and painted a rather obvious shade of gold. Having had no comment or even any obvious sign of anybody paying undue attention to my nails while in boy mode, I've decided to leave them this colour until I feel like a change, or my next infill in 2 weeks time, whichever comes first. :)

Snap

Yesterday afternoon, I walked away from the computer part way through typing yesterday's blog post to help sort and put away some clothes. While I was hanging up a shirt, my wife handed me something gold that she'd found in the washing basket that I'd been taking the clothes out of...

BUGGER!

(For those of you not in Australia, that's a mild expletive, on par with oh crap or damn!, not an invitation. :p )

Realistically, with my work being so busy, unless I can get a late appointment today, it'll be at least Wednesday before I can get this fixed. I've stuck with the colour for work though... :)

Christmas in July

Have you ever tried to get an extended family group together at Christmas? Some of my relatives, and some of my wife's relatives try it every year. There are always people who can't make it, so last Christmas, someone suggested organising a Christmas in July get-together. This was for the same family group as we spent the evening with last Christmas, but with a different combination of people absent.

I gave some serious consideration to going to this event en femme, but knew that there was a lot of potential for problems if I did, so I compromised and went with a fairly subtle combination of jeans with yellow and orange tops and shoes chosen to complement my gold nail polish. As with Christmas, nobody said anything. Pretty much what I expected.

I've just about decided that I'll leave the gold polish on my nails until at least Tuesday for the cafe night. :)

Another thing about last week

I knew that there was something else that I intended to mention about last Tuesday night's cafe night. Because it was the 200th, and my wife had gone to the 100th with me, I had hoped that my inlaws would take our son overnight so that my wife could go with me. My wife appeared to also like the idea, and seemed to want to go.

On the Sunday before, my sister in law (wife's sister) came up from Sydney to visit her parents for a few days, bringing her toddler (our son's cousin) with her. While our son was welcome to go and visit during the day, we were assured that his presence would guarantee that his cousin would be too hyped up to go to sleep, and therefore the option of having him stay there overnight on the Tuesday night no longer existed.

I commented to my wife that every time I ask our son if he wants to go somewhere with me when I'm in girl mode, he says no. With nobody to take him for the night, the options were that she stay home with him as usual, or that they both go with me. It was school holidays, so it wouldn't matter too much if he was up late, but I didn't want to pressure him, so it was her decision.

My wife's decision was that we all went. She told our son of her decision, and he didn't argue. When it was time for him to get ready (when I was mostly ready), I told him that it was time to get ready and he changed clothes and got ready without any fuss.

Aside from being bored (I only remember one other person going out of her way to talk to him while we were there) and tired because we were out later than he was accustomed to, he coped quite well.

I'm not sure whether it was a good result in terms of him being more prepared to go out with me when I'm en femme in the future or not, but it didn't appear to be a bad result.

Bright red nails at work - part 2

A couple of months ago, I mentioned going to see a work client with bright red nail polish on my nails, which were, even then, quite a bit too long to be normal for a male.

Because last Tuesday night was the 200th Newcastle cafe night, we had a few girls from Sydney who hadn't been for some time make the trip up to for the special event. One of those was the friend that I mentioned that my client knows is transitioning. In conversation, I discovered that she had visited that client for a couple of hours, and that after about an hour and a half, he asked her directly what the story was with my nails. I think she said that he had described them as "very long and very red". Her answer was to tell him that she knows me as Alice.

While most people would see that as a betrayal of trust because she had outed me to someone I know, in this particular case it was not. I don't remember whether I had explicitly given her permission to do so, but I know that had certainly given her implicit permission. The client in question has known me for several years, but has known my friend for decades. She knows him better than I do, so when he asked that question of her rather than of me, she knew that the answer that she gave was the right thing to do.

She also mentioned to him that it isn't generally appropriate for her to tell him what she had, or for him to say anything to me about it unless I volunteer information myself. In this particular case, that wouldn't have bothered me.

The red nails incident occurred over 3 months ago, and I believe that her visit and conversation with him occurred within a few days afterwards. Not only has my client said nothing to me about it, there has not been the slightest indication of a change in his attitude towards me in that time.

Next time I see him I might mention that I had dinner with her and that she told me about their conversation. :)

frequent wiglessness

I forgot to mention in my last post that, following on from the outings on the Central Coast and in Sydney early last month, I wore my blonde wig for both of the outings closer to home, then, after missing out on a week, I decided to challenge myself and go out to a Newcastle cafe night sans wig.

I'm honestly not sure whether that's a bigger deal than using a lift in a shopping centre or catching a train to Sydney and back, but I know that until recently, I've always feared recognition. It wasn't until I was typing this blog post that I realised that the reason why going out locally in girl mode wigless doesn't bother me as much as it used to is that I no longer fear that recognition anywhere nearly as much as I used to.

Plenty of people (including quite a few work clients) know that I am a crossdresser even if they've never said anything or even seen photos. With my long nails, long hair with fringe, shaped brows, pierced ears and general lack of facial and body hair, I look somewhat feminine even as a guy. Even though few people comment, I'm fairly confident that a lot of people guess from just my nails.

After that one local cafe night outing, the obvious question was why would I bother with a wig unless I wanted to change my colouring. And so it was that the two outings so far this month have also been wigless. I expect that I'll probably go wigless again this Tuesday night, but I'm unsure whether I want to go wigless to my nail appointment that is so close to home. Then again, I might not even get there en femme. I'll have to make a decision before Wednesday.

Over run

I mentioned in January that I knew that my work commitments were going to get a lot busier than they were last year, but I underestimated the extent, because I had no way of knowing that there would be even fewer people available to do the work than there were even a couple of months ago.

With the massive influx of work has come a number of missed outings. Not only was there the Tuesday cafe night that I previously mentioned that I'd missed, but I got to one Tuesday cafe night then missed the following two and the Seahorse meeting, and my last nail appointment was done in boy mode. I'm happy to say that I did manage to get to the Central Coast cafe night on Wednesday last week and the 200th Newcastle Cafe night this week, so hopefully I'm getting back on track.

It remains to be seen whether I manage to keep my workload under control or whether I end up being over run again.