No poo? Not for me, thanks

Have you heard about no poo? No, I’m not referring to toilet habits but to shampooing. Some folks are forgoing shampoo or switching to specialized hair cleaning products that aren't shampoo, either for the environment or to improve the condition of their hair.

I could never see myself embracing this idea entirely because I’ve got oily hair. As oily hair goes, mine’s not the worst case in the world—you wouldn’t look at my hair at the end of the day and think “gee, let’s harvest that to solve the world’s oil crisis.” But it’s meant I need to wash my hair every day. I have some friends, including my best friend Kerry, who have dry hair and can gleefully skip washing their hair for days on end. Or at least they can skip a day. I’ve always been a little wistful about that because washing and drying my hair takes more time than the rest of my morning routine put together. I have a lot of hair and even though each piece isn’t thick, there’s so much of it that drying it generally takes about 20 minutes.

Recently I’ve been on a big kick to get out of self-imposed ruts. These ruts include things like only wearing super bright pink polish on my toes, wearing my hair only parted on the right, or not trying on clothing I’ve decided will look horrible on me while it’s still on the hanger. So this fall I’ve bought and used a dark purple nail polish (still not entirely comfortable with that color yet), and I’ve tried on a cowl neck shirt even though I was positive it would look awful on me (I was wrong and I got the shirt). Yesterday I decided I would try not shampooing my hair.

I put my hair up in a clip, took an otherwise normal shower and followed the rest of my morning routine regarding clothes, make up and so on. I was tickled to gain the extra time normally devoted to fixing my hair.

And that’s the end of the positive report. Even though every other bit of me was entirely clean, I felt ultra greasy all day long. Plus my hair, which normally looks good when it’s put up, just looked nasty. Or maybe that's the greasy feeling affecting me. All I know is that this morning’s shampoo never felt so good.

Can you skip days for hair washing? If you can, then know I’m a tiny bit jealous. But I’m not jealous enough to try that again. At least not for another 10 years or so.

76 Trombones

Well no, actually it’s 76 sewing patterns. I took an inventory of my patterns so I could sort them out and know exactly what I had. I even created a spreadsheet that contains the pattern company name, pattern number, a brief description and whether or not I’d made it.

First, I don’t need any more skirt patterns in my life ever. Second, I have more than a few patterns I haven’t sewn yet. Shame on me. Third, I do not know what I was thinking when I bought the stuffed animal patterns. I hate making those.

Finally here’s the sorting/inventory mess in progress.

Christmas Past

This week I got out our Christmas decorations. As I told Kent in October, I missed having the house decorated last year. Of course last year we were both gone so much, plus we went to Oklahoma for Christmas itself that we really didn’t have an opportunity to decorate. But this year is different. We are staying home.

We need this time together. My previous job’s travel tended to cluster in the spring and summer, while Kent’s job gets crazy starting late summer and continuing through the end of the year. Between work and Thanksgiving, he’s been gone the last three weeks and was home a week before that but gone several weeks before that. So we are looking forward to some quiet together time.

As I unpacked the boxes, I realized we had not really decorated for Christmas since 2006. We had the best house for Christmas decorations in Kansas City but in 2007, the house was on the market so most Christmas decorations weren’t allowed, although I did put some artificial garlands on our mantel. We had Eddie and Wally by then and Wally promptly started eating the garlands so they got put away almost immediately. In 2008, we were here but still had far too many things in the house to put up decorations. The tree had been abandoned before our move as far too large for Boston living (plus Wally would eat it). Without a mantel, I had no place to put stockings. I did put up a wall hanging my mother made for me years ago but that was about it.

Eddie is our present?

2009 was a bust since we’d flooded and the surviving Christmas decorations were at the salvage company. That’s the year we bought our little ornament tree and I cried in Target when Kent said we should get it. And of course last year we were just not around.

Going through the boxes was almost like opening presents. I found a pet collar I really didn’t remember we had. It's the one in the video I posted earlier this week. I think we bought it for poor little Sammie cat. Since he was pure black and the servant stairs in our Kansas City house had no lighting, we had already put a belled collar on him so we’d know where he was. We figured he wouldn’t mind the collar but sadly I have no pictures of him in it.

I know we got this stocking for him, because I remember the conversation Kent and I had about how silly it was to spend $12 on a stocking for a cat. Now I wish I had two more, although I still don’t know where I will put any stockings, let alone stockings for cats.

Do you decorate? If so, how much? When do you take things down? I take our decorations down on New Year’s Day. I also stop listening to Christmas music the day after Christmas.

I'm a mean one

Just ask my cats.

What a nice guy

We frequently go to a restaurant that's about 75 yards from our house--but not because the food is so great. It's fine, don't get me wrong. And it's reasonably priced but that's not the reason we go either. We go because of Kevin. He's the main server there. We've seen a few other servers who've come and gone but mostly it's Kevin. We met him one of our first nights out after we moved into this place and unlike 98% of the rest of the servers in Boston, he was friendly and funny and nice. So we go back because of him. In fact this summer, he was gone from work for over two months with a fairly serious eye infection and we didn't go while he was gone. As I said, the food's OK. Kevin is why we go.

Sunday night as I got out of the taxi after getting back to Boston, I saw Kevin and he said he had something for me. A friend of his knew he sewed and gave him a bunch of sewing patterns. Kevin brought them to me! Isn't that cool?

Here's what I'm keeping and I'll return the rest to him later this week.

Kindle v Kindle

Fire is on the left, 3G on the right

I got my Christmas present from Kent early—in fact I got it before we left for Virginia. That’s because I have zero patience and once he informed me that he would be getting me the new Kindle Fire for Christmas, and I’d made the financial objections only to be overruled, I asked if we could get it Right! Now! So I got my present early. Yes, I know I'm spoiled.

My mother called this morning asking some questions about the difference between the Kindle 3G, which I also own (hey I am Gadget Queen) and this one. We had a good conversation and I told her I’d also post pictures of them both here on my blog plus give a quick assessment on how they compare.

The screen on the Fire is amazing. We watched lots of short videos on You Tube last week and they looked great on the screen. Streaming like that does drain the battery, and I haven’t yet looked at ways to store videos or movies on the device although it can do that.

The touch keypad is fine but I wouldn’t want to type lengthy posts on it. That’s mostly because I prefer keyboards and I'm really fast with them. I’m less speedy with a touchscreen keyboard.

See how well the 3G handles
the light from the flash?

Reading on the Fire is different from reading on my 3G Kindle. First, it’s backlit. Second, instead of buttons on either side of the screen, you tap the right side of the page to advance in your book and the left side to go back. The search function works as well as the 3G search function. I will take my 3G Kindle when we go places where I’ll be reading outside—the e-ink does so well in direct sunlight and doesn’t strain my eyes.

If I get a job where I travel the way I did with the last job, I’d take the Fire. When I travel, I’m generally not creating content while in the air and if I need to do that, I’d use a work laptop.

With my hand as a reference for size.

The Fire is perfect for consuming content which makes sense since that’s what it’s designed to do. If you expect a powerhouse processor, first reexamine why you are considering a Fire—start by asking yourself what problem you are trying to solve.

If you want to create content, get a different device. This isn’t the device for you.

If all you want to do is read, get a plain jane Kindle, which handles that task beautifully.

If you want to keep up on your personal email, check Facebook or Twitter, read your favorite blogs and maybe play games like Angry Birds, then give the Fire a good look.

If you’re an Apple fan, I can’t help you.

My children made me cry

And in this post, I am counting all four of them as my kids (no disrespect intended to the mothers of Jen and Sophie).

We exchanged gifts with Ben, Jen and the kids and Jordan and Sophie on Saturday. The puppets were a huge hit with both children, which really made me happy. I have some great memories of playing puppets first with my little sisters and then later with Jordan and Ben. Seeing Alison and Eliot love the puppets like that brought all those good feelings back.

But I have to say I think that I got the most amazing gift of all. My kids completely surprised me and more than that, they got me something that just overwhelmed my heart. To understand why, I need to give you some back story.

I’ve written here before that as divorces go, mine was pretty civilized. Yes, a marriage ended and yes, dreams we’d both held of beating the odds and living happily ever after also ended, but for the most part, neither of us got nasty or vindictive. One of the few sticking points for me—and let me hasten to say that this wasn’t Rick being nasty or vindictive, I think he was just sort of oblivious—was that I got pretty much no photographs of our 16 years together. That also meant I had almost no pictures of my children as they grew up.

I’ve always felt this loss keenly. The boys loved it when I’d sit down with them and go through all the photo albums and tell them stories about what they were doing in each picture. Our albums weren’t scrapbooks, just the old-fashioned, probably ruin your pictures kind of albums but they held the pictures and we looked through them frequently.

Even this summer, when Rick was in Boston and took us both out to dinner, I mentioned that I had no pictures. He was shocked and promised to get me digital copies. I didn’t hold my breath.

Maybe you can see where this is going. Last year or the year before, Ben and Jen put together a picture book, bound and everything, that contained pictures of us with them and their children. That was a fantastic gift, so Saturday when I felt the texture of the book, I knew what it was.

But I was wrong. They’d gotten their childhood pictures, scanned them all, and had them printed into a book for me. They also burned the pictures onto a disk. It was a complete group effort by all four of them—I cracked up at the account of how Sophie just walked in to Rick’s house and took the pictures (yeah!).

I’m getting teary again just thinking about how much this book means to me. I haven’t looked at the disk yet. I am saving those pictures when maybe I’m having a sad or lonely day, or feel not so great about myself. I know for a fact those pictures will give me a wonderful boost.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I have something in my eye.

Ben is on the left, Jordan is on the right. Cute lil stinkers, huh.