Can I just say that I have been absolutely loving my hair lately? Because I have been, and it's kinda weird because that is not something I ever thought I'd say. Let me explain...
I have naturally curly hair and ever since I can remember I thought of it as a curse. I longed for long locks that hung straight and shiny down my back, and instead I was stuck with a tangled dry mess of knots that usually ended up pulled back into a ponytail. And don't even get me started about what a complete and utter disaster my hair was when it rained. Then in middle school I discovered the straightening iron and my world was changed. I straightened my hair everyday, and when my straightener broke I used a real iron (yes, I was that obsessed with having perfectly straight hair). I was finally happy with my hair except for one small problem...straighteners are extremely damaging and the sheer number of split ends on my head was astounding. My hair never looked shiny and healthy, just straight and dull.
Fast forward to college, I became a bit more carefree and lazy and on occasion I would just smoosh some gel in my hair and let it dry naturally...it wasn't the cutest but it wasn't awful and I got myself a husband looking like that. So yeah it worked.
Fast forward to the day after David and I returned from our honeymoon. David returned to work, and I was jobless with a lot of spare time on my hands and I discovered a website called naturallycurly.com. Through that site I learned a lot about curly hair...what kinds of products to use, what ingredients to avoid, the science of curly hair, how to scrunch for optimal curl formation, etc. It was a goldmine of information and I spent the next few months testing different products and methods until I finally found myself a job and could no longer play with my hair all day long (darn).
Fast forward to today. I've got my method down, I've got my products down, my hair is super healthy and soft, and I got an awesome haircut about a month ago that I am still thrilled with...complete with side swept bangs and super short layers on top while keeping my length on the bottom. It is a great cut for giving my hair volume and keeping my curls more defined (which usually only happens when I chop most of my length off), while still being long and lovely. I can't remember a time when I was happy with my hair all the time except for when I was frying the crap out of it...and this is much less work.
(Now, I feel like I should note that on occasion I do still straighten my hair. Especially when I'm on vacation because, let's face it, you can't sleep only curly hair and have it look half-way decent in the morning, but you (or I) certainly can with straight hair. Hence the picture of my husband and I in front of the pineapple fountain...we were on vacation, and the next day I had to wake up super-early to walk to the starting line of his marathon so I straightened my hair the day before, slept on it, and didn't have to mess with my hair at all the morning of the race...just in case anyone was wondering, which I'm sure they were not.)
God made me a curly head for a reason, and doggone it, it's about time I started embracing my true beauty instead of trying to conform to what hair product commercials tell me is beautiful!
Have I mentioned how much I love my curls?
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Let's play catch up...
So here's a brief update on my life since my last post...
David and I had a nice Valentine's Day...we were both finally healthy enough to leave the house after 2 weeks of quarantining ourselves from the rest of the world. We originally wanted to go somewhere a little more fancy for our Valentine's day lunch, but two things held us back...1) Every nice restaurant nearby had a special Valentine's menu that included oysters, which I understand is supposed to be an aphrodisiac but makes David and I want to vomit (not romantic) and 2) we are still broke from buying Christmas presents and having to do major repairs to both of our cars in the past 2 months. So we ate a DELICIOUS meal at P.F. Chang's instead. I love that restaurant, it has the BEST egg drop soup I've ever tasted and the fried green beans are to die for. Also because of the brokeness, we didn't buy each other big gifts this year. So I designed and purchased a photo book of David's marathon for him, and he bought me an assortment of my favorite chocolates and a book of Sudoku puzzles. Funny story about the Sudoku puzzles, a few days earlier I was complaining that my job wasn't mentally challenging and I felt like I was getting more stupider every day as a result...to which David replied, "actually the grammatically correct thing to say is 'more stupid'"...to which I stuck my tongue out at him and then said "maybe I need to start doing Sudoku puzzles to exercise my brain". Hence the thoughtful gift...
My puppy Gambit turned two, and we took him to a dog park where he proceeded to hump every dog that would let him get close enough. We have taken him to the dog park several times, and this is the first time we've had this problem with him. It got so bad that at one point we walked away, pretending that we didn't know who's dog THAT was. But he had fun and was completely wiped out for the rest of the day which was good because usually our dog is super energetic and wants to play all the time, which is just exhausting.
I started doing Zumba. I have always been curious about it, and have been invited to come to a class several times, but $5 a class is just a little steep and I was afraid I would like it enough to spend waaaaay too much money. So when my church started offering classes for free I was so there! So I've Zumbaed (can that be used as a verb?) three times now. And it's awesome. The first night I felt so white, trying to move my hips and my feet at the same time like the Latin women on the DVD did. But I was not the most uncoordinated one there, so that was comforting. That and there was a 71 year old woman who must have thought that Zumba was a Bible study of some kind, because she showed up in a sweater and khakis...she hasn't been back since. Anyhoo, I danced tap and ballet for like 10 years so I picked up the moves pretty quickly, and by night two I was feeling confident enough to stand in the front row and shake my booty to the music. By night three, the girl who is going to be the instructor (once she gets her certification next month) asked me to stand up in front of the class with her because I was really "dance-y" and she was too nervous to teach the group alone. Sah-weet...the kid's still got it!
And my job...well I still hate it and what little respect I have left for my boss he grinds away at a little each day.
So that about covers all of the recent events of my life to this point. It feels good to be all caught up!
So...I don't know how to end this, so I'll go the traditional route...
The End
David and I had a nice Valentine's Day...we were both finally healthy enough to leave the house after 2 weeks of quarantining ourselves from the rest of the world. We originally wanted to go somewhere a little more fancy for our Valentine's day lunch, but two things held us back...1) Every nice restaurant nearby had a special Valentine's menu that included oysters, which I understand is supposed to be an aphrodisiac but makes David and I want to vomit (not romantic) and 2) we are still broke from buying Christmas presents and having to do major repairs to both of our cars in the past 2 months. So we ate a DELICIOUS meal at P.F. Chang's instead. I love that restaurant, it has the BEST egg drop soup I've ever tasted and the fried green beans are to die for. Also because of the brokeness, we didn't buy each other big gifts this year. So I designed and purchased a photo book of David's marathon for him, and he bought me an assortment of my favorite chocolates and a book of Sudoku puzzles. Funny story about the Sudoku puzzles, a few days earlier I was complaining that my job wasn't mentally challenging and I felt like I was getting more stupider every day as a result...to which David replied, "actually the grammatically correct thing to say is 'more stupid'"...to which I stuck my tongue out at him and then said "maybe I need to start doing Sudoku puzzles to exercise my brain". Hence the thoughtful gift...
My puppy Gambit turned two, and we took him to a dog park where he proceeded to hump every dog that would let him get close enough. We have taken him to the dog park several times, and this is the first time we've had this problem with him. It got so bad that at one point we walked away, pretending that we didn't know who's dog THAT was. But he had fun and was completely wiped out for the rest of the day which was good because usually our dog is super energetic and wants to play all the time, which is just exhausting.
I started doing Zumba. I have always been curious about it, and have been invited to come to a class several times, but $5 a class is just a little steep and I was afraid I would like it enough to spend waaaaay too much money. So when my church started offering classes for free I was so there! So I've Zumbaed (can that be used as a verb?) three times now. And it's awesome. The first night I felt so white, trying to move my hips and my feet at the same time like the Latin women on the DVD did. But I was not the most uncoordinated one there, so that was comforting. That and there was a 71 year old woman who must have thought that Zumba was a Bible study of some kind, because she showed up in a sweater and khakis...she hasn't been back since. Anyhoo, I danced tap and ballet for like 10 years so I picked up the moves pretty quickly, and by night two I was feeling confident enough to stand in the front row and shake my booty to the music. By night three, the girl who is going to be the instructor (once she gets her certification next month) asked me to stand up in front of the class with her because I was really "dance-y" and she was too nervous to teach the group alone. Sah-weet...the kid's still got it!
And my job...well I still hate it and what little respect I have left for my boss he grinds away at a little each day.
So that about covers all of the recent events of my life to this point. It feels good to be all caught up!
So...I don't know how to end this, so I'll go the traditional route...
The End
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The Ramblings of a Morning Person
Something awful and humiliating has happened to me ever since I became a "real" grown-up with a "real" job and "real" responsibilities...apparently I have become a morning person. Honestly, I've always shown signs of being this way in that I always preferred waking up at the crack of dawn to take an early college class over sleeping all day and then going to a night class. But for crying out loud, I'm only 25 and the fact that almost every night I go to bed at around 9 and if I don't I start to get a little cranky is just sad. It helps that my husband shares this affliction of early to bed early to rise, but he is definitely still a night owl. Take last night for instance, we both stayed up until 1:30am which is just ridiculously late for us and we were gloating about the fact that we would most certainly sleep in this morning. And yet here I am, pounding away at my keyboard at 7:30am, while he is so dead to the world that he didn't even hear me get up. And I'm not even upset by the fact that the sun still rising rapidly in the sky. No, I'm anxious to catch up on all the makeup videos I've missed on YouTube and to paint ridiculous lovey hearts on my already pink fingernails for Valentine's day. It makes me feel so...old.
Speaking of feeling old, I stayed home sick from work on Thursday. I have never once in the 2 1/2 years I have worked in that office called in sick, but on that day David gave me an ultimatum..."either you call in sick or I'm calling for you". So I put on my big girl pants and called in my own sick day (by leaving a message on the answering machine at 7:30, knowing full well that no one would be around to answer the phone and the messages wouldn't be checked until everyone got to work at 9). I felt really guilty about taking a day off for about a second, then I fell asleep for 6 hours. And it wasn't even a chemically enhanced sleep, as no medicine had been introduced to my system at all that day. The only thing that interrupted my slumber was my dang office calling me 4 times...4 TIMES!?!? It was insulting and complementary at the same time. Complimentary in that clearly they cannot survive a whole day of work without me and if that's not job security I don't know what is. Insulting in that it made me feel like they thought I was faking the whole sick thing and would be more than happy to chat on the phone about something stupid like "what the password is for the OCT machine and oh yeah, you know all that complicated training you went through to learn how to use it, can you give me a brief summary over the phone so I can preform one unsuccessfully and basically steal someones money for doing so?" That made me a little angry, and I marched into work the next day ready to give the girl who's job I basically do a piece of my mind for forcing another inexperienced coworker to call me in the middle of my sleep to ask questions about a machine that she went through the same rigorous training for...and then I found out that she had called in sick for work that day too...as did another girl who is partially cross-trained in my job. So to sum up, three of our staff members were at work and three were sick, and unfortunately the half who actually know how to do what I do were the ones who were gone.
Whoops.
Essie Ballet Slippers w/ Konad Red
Speaking of feeling old, I stayed home sick from work on Thursday. I have never once in the 2 1/2 years I have worked in that office called in sick, but on that day David gave me an ultimatum..."either you call in sick or I'm calling for you". So I put on my big girl pants and called in my own sick day (by leaving a message on the answering machine at 7:30, knowing full well that no one would be around to answer the phone and the messages wouldn't be checked until everyone got to work at 9). I felt really guilty about taking a day off for about a second, then I fell asleep for 6 hours. And it wasn't even a chemically enhanced sleep, as no medicine had been introduced to my system at all that day. The only thing that interrupted my slumber was my dang office calling me 4 times...4 TIMES!?!? It was insulting and complementary at the same time. Complimentary in that clearly they cannot survive a whole day of work without me and if that's not job security I don't know what is. Insulting in that it made me feel like they thought I was faking the whole sick thing and would be more than happy to chat on the phone about something stupid like "what the password is for the OCT machine and oh yeah, you know all that complicated training you went through to learn how to use it, can you give me a brief summary over the phone so I can preform one unsuccessfully and basically steal someones money for doing so?" That made me a little angry, and I marched into work the next day ready to give the girl who's job I basically do a piece of my mind for forcing another inexperienced coworker to call me in the middle of my sleep to ask questions about a machine that she went through the same rigorous training for...and then I found out that she had called in sick for work that day too...as did another girl who is partially cross-trained in my job. So to sum up, three of our staff members were at work and three were sick, and unfortunately the half who actually know how to do what I do were the ones who were gone.
Whoops.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Is that...wing-dings?!?!
Super-wife ended up crash landing in mucousville...my head is so congested I can feel every beat of my heart through the throbbing in my head. I took a half-day off of work today and slept for 4 hours, and I still feel icky. In fact I am so weak and exhausted I am writing this blogpost from my couch on my iPhone (which is not easy at all, although it is exciting as this is the most technologically advanced thing I own.)
Why take the time to write when my time could be better spent looking up cold remedies? Because this morning one of my coworkers computers decided to run all of it's programs in wing-dings. It looked like aliens had taken over her screen and were plotting to take over the office. And it reminded me of a joke my friends and I had in high school about wing-dings...although I can't remember what's the joke was, just that we had one.
I think the cold medicine is messing with my head...
Why take the time to write when my time could be better spent looking up cold remedies? Because this morning one of my coworkers computers decided to run all of it's programs in wing-dings. It looked like aliens had taken over her screen and were plotting to take over the office. And it reminded me of a joke my friends and I had in high school about wing-dings...although I can't remember what's the joke was, just that we had one.
I think the cold medicine is messing with my head...
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Influenza
So I've already gone a whole week without blogging and there is a reason behind it...it's not that I'm giving up on this New Year's resolution after only a week (although I now realize that I never did post the rest of my resolutions so anyone who might stumble upon this blog won't even know that I promised myself that I would write more this year). It's that my hubby has been sick with the flu, and I have been busy being an optical technician by day and Super-Wife at night. And let me tell you, this gig is exhausting...one night I scoured the whole county in search of soy sauce in order to prepare what David decided was his favorite comfort food, chicken fried rice (and when I say scoured the county I mean that the first store I went to didn't have it and I had to drive like 3 miles to another one...it was just annoying).
Anyways, having David so incredibly sick and unable to go to work or do any of the other things he normally does during the week helped me to realize just how much he DOES during the week. Let's be honest, I have it really awesome. He is not opposed to doing housework (cleaning is cathartic for him), we take turns cooking and cleaning up, we always do the grocery shopping together (because if I went by myself I'd fill the cart with chocolate, and if he went by himself he'd fill the cart with Doritos) and he doesn't even mind folding the laundry when it comes out of the dryer. And these are all things I had to handle by myself this week, in addition to my 40 hours a week job. It's been exhausting. We're a team, and when we work together as a team we get things done in no time with about half the exhaustion...how many wives can truly say that about their husbands?
If we lived in a what we have discussed would be a "perfect world" I wouldn't have to work and would be more than happy to make my home my job...but unfortunately we're not there yet.
I am so blessed to have found a man like him, and I am so glad that he is finally starting to feel a little better because to be honest I don't think Super-Wife could make it through another week.
Anyways, having David so incredibly sick and unable to go to work or do any of the other things he normally does during the week helped me to realize just how much he DOES during the week. Let's be honest, I have it really awesome. He is not opposed to doing housework (cleaning is cathartic for him), we take turns cooking and cleaning up, we always do the grocery shopping together (because if I went by myself I'd fill the cart with chocolate, and if he went by himself he'd fill the cart with Doritos) and he doesn't even mind folding the laundry when it comes out of the dryer. And these are all things I had to handle by myself this week, in addition to my 40 hours a week job. It's been exhausting. We're a team, and when we work together as a team we get things done in no time with about half the exhaustion...how many wives can truly say that about their husbands?
If we lived in a what we have discussed would be a "perfect world" I wouldn't have to work and would be more than happy to make my home my job...but unfortunately we're not there yet.
I am so blessed to have found a man like him, and I am so glad that he is finally starting to feel a little better because to be honest I don't think Super-Wife could make it through another week.
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