Okay, I got tired of my mistake and decided to start again with the correct year.  

Here are my current products I'm using:

Treatment: Pantene's Moisture Replenishing Mask.  I used this for the first time today, 30 mins then a CWC, and my hair is soft and behaving.
Light Conditioner: Suave naturals Juicy Green Apple Conditioner
Shampoo: Trader Joe's balanced moisturizing nourish spa (it's mostly organic, cruelty free and has no lauryl/laureth sulfates)
Heavy Conditioner: Patnete Restoratives Breadage Defense Conditioner
Leave in: Pantene's Protecting Damage Defender spray, which I haven't used yet.  I wanted to get a true sense of what the mask did for me first.

DD still uses the Beautiful Lengths shampoo and conditioner; shampoo every other day and conditioner every day.  Her hair looks much shinier and smoother since I started washing it less and conditioning more.  I also gave her a trim yesterday, about two inches.  She's never happy with a trim, she doesn't quite understand the idea of making hair shorter so it will grow longer.  My explanation about damage didn't make her feel any better.

Anyway, I haven't measured her hair in a while, but I'm guessing about 32 inches.

I had a trim on the 9th.  Back in September I started taking my hair vitamins.  Has it been that long?
Goals: This year, 24 inches, next year, 27.

So, yesterday, while I just brushed and put my hair up in a  ponytail for work, I gave myself a manicure, which is something I don't usually do.  My nails are absolutely horrible in the winter.  In the summer, they just grow and get long without my even thinking about them, but in the winter if they get much longer than my finger they crack and break and split and get all nasty and rough and snag my hair and clothes.  So last night I trimmed and filed and buffed them and rubbed lotion into the skin all the way around.  My hands feel much better.  I haven't done nail polish since high school, since it feels heavy and smells funny and just chips off the same day anyway.  I also have been lotioning my feet, another body part I tend to neglect.  The skin's been splitting and peeling and so rough it snags my socks, though, so *shrug* a little TLC seems necesary.

The girls (my pet rats) have taken to sitting on my shoulders and grooming my ears, and now they try to burrow up into my ponytail or braid.  The problem is they get stuck, and I have to pull them out, which is no fun for anybody. I have to have my hair down or up in an updo when they're on my shoulders, because they can't get into the updo, and they don't get stuck when it's down.  Sigh.  I have all these little scratches on the back of my scalp from their little claws.    They're still just babies, so I have some hope that they'll grow out of it.

I woke up with a headache, and coffee didn't help.  After lunch I may take some ibuprophen.  This happens on the weekends sometimes; I get up weekdays at 5am, so I have my coffee a lot earlier than on the weekends when I get up later, at like 8 or 9.  So the caffiene addiction does me ill.  It's only one cup!  Gr.

CWC yesterday, and I used the leave in spray I got last week.  I think I like it; it certainly made my hair easier to finger comb when it was wet.  Problem was I took my shower before I had to take DD to school, so I had to bundle up on top of my wet hair.  The fleece didn't make it too staticky, though, and I wore a ponytail to work and half-up in a clip when I got home.  I wish I could find good scarf fabric.  When I was little my mom just bought lenghts of shiny polyester.  Everything I find these days is too stiff.

I am beginning to think the weather is affecting my moods.  It's been sunny for a week and I was starting to feel optimistic and very happy, Monday and yesterday, and today it's cloudy and rainy and I'm all depressed again.  

Course, it could just be PMS.    

And we need the rain, so I refuse to complain.  I rhyme!

I did a CWC on friday, and used my spray.  IDK.  My scalp is pretty greasy by the third day.  I'll try just putting the spray on the very ends next time.  Otherwise, it might be too heavy for my every third day washing technique.  Or else maybe the shampoo isn't powerful enough.  The last time I tried washing every other day it didn't go well.  I hate that the top is greasy but the ends are dry.  It's very inconvenient.  Maybe every other day is ok with this shampoo, or I might alternate it with a CO.  I think i'd rather try that than every other day shampoo.  But in any event, today is a CWC day, and maybe I'll treat the ends and do a vinegar rinse.

I added a no wash day to DD's wash schedule.  Hers is now: WC, CO, NW.  The more I condidtion and the less I wash her hair the shinier it seems to get.

My bank did a bad thing.  They put DH's paycheck into someone else's account.  I didn't catch it until Saturday night because the account balance it said on the reciept was about what it should have been, and it was a joint account with our same last name.  I'm going to go down there today as soon as they open and lay down the law.

Smokey's foot is a lot better.  She's scratching with it and putting a little weight on it.  I tied their wheel to the side of the cage to keep it from spinning, and covered their wire levels with fleece to make her a little more comfortable.  The rescue told me it's probably a sprain or a break, and just leaving it alone to let it heal is best.  I won't feel better til she starts spreading her toes again.

I honestly think there's something wrong with the water heater.  There's only two apartments in our little complex, and we share a huge water heater, but in the almost three years we've been here, we've never run out of hot water until just recently.  DH says that it's because we've never had two young women living next door (the first set of neighbors was two young men, the next one man, one woman), but I just don't see how they're using more water than the others did.  I talked with one yesterday in the laundry room last night.  She'd been doing a warm water load, but in the past that had only made the water run a little cooler in the shower, not ice cold like it was last night.  DH wants to wait til the water runs cold all the time before we call the landlord.  I am all for waiting until rent's paid, but I do not want to take cold showers waiting for him to fix it.

In other news, it's sunny again, hooray!!  I wish it would rain hard and fast at night and be sunny during the day.  Then we could have all the rain we needed and still have nice, cool, sunny days to run around in.

Not much to say today.  My hair feels nice and looks better than yesterday.  Maybe this routine is a keeper. We'll see how it looks tomorrow, and the next day.  It sure looks and feels cleaner longer when I do an ACV rinse, and perhaps treating the ends first helped.  I mean...I don't think ACV rinses are supposed to be drying, but removing the cones may reveal the dryer hair beneath.  Put in cones, take out cones...it doesn't have to make perfect sense.  It's really more about what makes the hair healthiest in the long run.  At least I've stopped rubbing it roughly with a towel.  That was doing the most damage before I started posting here, that and the snaggly comb and un-careful brushing, and the tight ponytails.

yeah.  I don't wonder why I had so much damage.  I was lucky to only loose a couple inches.