"...not actually quite as wild and wicked as they are painted...?" pout the ravens

A bit of astrological analysis found via pickledginger:

Muninn Huginn--A very special Scorpio

Muninn Huginn is mysterious and enigmatic; deep, perceptive, powerful, passionate and terribly, terribly sexy! The sentence above must be true because Muninn is a Scorpio and Scorpios as we all know are infamous for their interest in... well now, here's a funny thing. Despite what they say, Scorpios are not actually quite as wild and wicked as they are painted. Muninn has, it must be said, a very hypnotic appeal but what's truly mesmerising about Muninn is not her pout but her perspicacity. Muninn has an uncanny, almost spooky to see right through you. She can make you feel naked and exposed just by casting one meaningful glance in your direction. What she is looking at though, when she peers below the surface, is not your underwear but your underlying intention! "Where are you coming from? What are you up to? Can you be trusted? Are you going to tell the truth?" These are the questions that Muninn subconsciously fires out as soon as she sees you. Her inner radar never fails to provide her with the right answer. She is sensitive beyond measure, and it is partly to protect her own sensitivity that she scrutinises people so thoroughly.

There is another reason why Muninn Huginn is so keen to see into your soul: she needs to know how sensitive you are. She knows from long, bitter experience that not many people can take the kind of candour that she cannot help but dispense. Muninn is not a person to mince her words, hold back her opinions or shy away from taboo topics. She doesn't want to cause offence, nor does she want to waste her time, so she picks her confidantes carefully. All of which brings us back to where we began. If you are sensitive enough to appreciate Muninn's special qualities you will consider that there is something exceptionally sexy about her and she will feel the same way about you. So perhaps Muninn Huginn is living proof that it is true what they say about Scorpios after all.

Nails, Varnishing of

Just before LL and M headed out to a very pleasant party on Saturday, the ravens slightly tiredly trailed along later, LL admired the ravens' choice of polish for their toenails. Bearing in mind LL's age (4 1/2) and sex (very f), it'll come as little surprise that we'd opted for pink. (Having found the one bottle of pink nail varnish we'd thought we'd lost five year ago, we're going to use it sometime. For variety's sake, if nowt else.) She proceeded to ask if she could wear it too. To which we said no. She hasn't stopped biting her nails completely. (To be quite honest, her nails are still small enough they'd be hard to get much varnish on if she grew them long, anyway.) She wasn't too disappointed.

The incident led to an odd train of thought. First, that in a similar being "encouraged" not to bite our nails situation the ravens had been (1) threatened with the application of Friar's Balsam or similar to said nibbled (OK, almost chewed right off) nails, (2) told if we didn't stop chewing our nails we wouldn't grow up to marry a prince. We tried the second tactic on LL, the fairy princess of fairy princesses, but she doesn't care. We're not trying the first method, instead promising her her very own sparkly pink nail varnish if she stops (bribery, yes, indulging her, yes, and we're completely unrepentant about both).

The Friars' Balsam threat backfired, anyway, we've finally realised. Although we have in the past possessed bright red polish and we do have the one bottle of pink, we have to confess that for the most part if our nails have been painted at all, it's been black or silver closely followed by green or purple, preferably with metallic content. True, we mainly paint our fingernails with a clear varnish to stop the ends splitting, but the toenails are always a deep and distinctive colour.

And we swear by Friar's Balsam for congested noses.

And, yes, apparently, in our case, the second threat did cause us to stop biting our nails, which led to... years and years of complaints about our talons being too long (you weren't expecting a fariy tale ending were you?). But we were only six.