Winners, Losers, and Pedicures

Above & Below: I couldn't publish a post about Winners & Losers without having some kind of pictures to add, so this is the Pedicure part of my post title! Yesterday I had my first ever professional pedicure, can you believe that? My hair salon recently built a new building, so when I was getting my hair cut last week, I thought I'd make an appointment for a pedicure. This is their new pedicure room--I would love to have a little corner room like this in my house! The soaking bowls are plumbed right into the floor, and I just love the colors they chose. I'm not too big on posting pictures of my toes, but I took along Rescue Beauty Lounge Chinoise and my feet look very nice now and are ready for Spring/Summer!

I have lots of winners to announce today, so let's get started! The winners of last week's FFF were: Stephanie, Tierney, Augusta, Peripatetic33, and Nihrida! I use Random.org to pick the winners of all of my contests because it's quick, easy, and involves little imagination on my part! The winner of yesterday's Luck O' the Irish pressed mineral eye shadow giveaway, which was done in conjunction with Bella Sugar Cosmetics, was: Sarah! And our Grand Prize winner today of my March St. Patrick's Day Greens Monthly Contest, is none other than Gildedangel! Wow, that's a lot of links, isn't it? I tried to link to the blogs of the winners if it looked like they had active ones, otherwise I linked to their profile. I'll be eMailing you all later requesting your shipping addresses, but please feel free to eMail me that information now if you'd prefer. Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who entered.

Now we'll move to the 'losers' portion of my post. I know many of you are aware of the recent eBay scam by one of our own, so to speak. I'm very sorry to hear that something like that took place, and it shakes the foundation of trust that we all have in one another. I hope that those involved are somehow able to recoup their loss and I imagine that one day, the person whose behavior instigated the whole mess, will have to face the music. I had a little ordeal with eBay earlier this week that I would like to briefly recount, and that involved the all to common stealing of pictures. I get eMails from some of my readers alerting me that they've seen a picture of mine being used on eBay and in the past, I've simply sent the seller an eMail asking them to please remove my photo. This has always worked, so when I was told that an Australian eBay listing had some of my photos, I followed the same procedure. Only this time, it didn't work out the way it always has before. She eMailed me back and said "Your pictures? You have no idea where I got my pictures and I have never even been to your site. No, I will not." I never mentioned that I had a site, I simply said "Please remove my pictures from your auction. ~Mary". Now I'm usually a very non-confrontational person and I realize that the Internet is folly for all sorts of activities, both good and bad. But this person was so rude and how dare she attempt to make a profit off of my efforts! I wanted to get into a war of words with her, but I thought that probably wasn't my best option. My reader that contacted me sent me a link to file a complaint, which only took me about 5 minutes to fill out and fax (to Australia, mind you, so this person is costing me money now on top of being completely rude). I'm happy to report that eBay handled the situation very well and sent me an eMail a day later stating that they had contacted the seller and the photos--which she added her store name to after I asked her to remove the photos--had been removed. Actually, the entire listings are gone. She also had one of Kelly's pictures from VampyVarnish up, so I let Kelly know and she is in the process of receiving even ruder eMails than mine from this seller. Hopefully, Kelly will succeed in getting her photos removed also. Like I said, had she not been so rude and simply removed my images, it wouldn't have bothered me that much. I don't watermark my photos, and that wouldn't necessarily stop the theft anyway, but perhaps in the future I'll start doing that.

Posted in Body and Soul Contests