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.

Today I'm going to do that W(ACV)C.  I've decided to mix a little bit of DD's Beautiful Lengths shampoo in with my shampoo.  It has ammonium lauryl/eth sulfate, but I've got to do something to get my scalp all the way clean.  I will use a gob of my Trader Joe's shampoo, a drop of the BL shampoo, ACV, and then my Suave Green Apple Conditioner.  There are no cones in any of this.  Then it's updos all weekend.  If the mixture works, I may use it for every CWC in Feb, or even until I'm out of the TJ shampoo.

I think my mistake was getting the moisturizing TJ shampoo.  I should have gotten the normal or clarifying.  Neither of those would have dried out my length in a CWC.  I may try the TJ shampoo on DD as well.  I wash her hair more often than mine because she gets stuff in it.  That way it will be gone faster.

I just don't want to buy anything more until I'm out of what I have, that's all.  My next shampoo will either be one of the other TJ's ones or a Pantene with sodium lauryl/eth sulfate instead of ammonium.

8:45 update
On my way home from taking DD to school I stepped in nasty doggie "don't".    It makes me furious when people don't clean up after their dogs! I was wearing a new pair of walking shoes, too.  I dispair of ever getting all of it out of the treads.

I also have to borrow money from my mom in order to make rent, because of a stupid error from my stupid bank.  I don't think I'll be banking there anymore.  Today is shaping up to be a fun day.  

Now 11:30am

I did the W(ACV)C, mixing plenty of the TJ shampoo with a drop of the BL.  The conditioner I put first on the ends and then swept the rest of it over my head, to get most of my hair but not my scalp.  My hair feels clean, soft and has way more shine.  Maybe I was overdoing the moisture.  We'll see how it behaves tomorrow.

Today was another no wash day.  My hair was a little better for day 3 than it has been, but still too greasy for my taste.  Washed DD's hair with the TJ shampoo yesterday, and today was no wash for her, and so far her hair seems to like it.  Perhaps I will not take it back, but let her use it.

Went to the park today, took a walk around the lake with Odub and DD.  There were the usual Malards and Canada Geese, and gray geese and other ducks.  This is the second time we've seen cormorants there.  There was something wierd, too, what looked like a cross between a gray and a canada goose.  It was white underneath with gray wings and a gray stripe down its head and neck, with a black beak.  It had that forehead bulb that the gray geese have, and orange feet like them.  Its wings were also deformed, turning sharply up in the middle.  I wonder if it can fly?  Probably not.  It swam fine, though, and ate plenty of bread.  Odub called it a mutant, a goose-mule.

Odub looked it up on Wikipedia, and it's a swan goose, likely a domesticated version that went feral.  Its wings were deformed, though.  Hubbout that?

I give mine a year usually, tho I understand six months is about right.  My current crop is coming up on two years old, though.  When you have to start replacing some of the plastic bits with safety pins and key rings, it's time to replace them.

No wash day.  My hair feels clean, but is sticking out every which way.  it's in a braid today.

 

It's raining.

I washed my hair today, CWC with suave, TJ's, panene restoratives.  It is rather stringy now that it has dried.  The ends feel a little dry.  The next time I wash my hair I'll do either an oil or a mask.  My scalp does feel a lot better with the TJ shampoo.  I'm going to keep it for now.

I made a foot scrub out of salt and olive oil.  My feet are in terrible shape, just peeling all over.  So I soaked them, scrubbed them, then slathered them with my cocoa butter lotion.  Maybe if I keep this up they will stop itching and snagging my socks.

No wash today.  My hair is oh never mind.  Odub is standing right behind me reading this and bugging me for the computer.  It's sort of greasy but not as bad as it's been.  Up in a bun today.  Maybe oil tonight.  Undecided.  Fine!  You can have the darn thing!

Did work yesterday and didn't wash until this evening.  My hair didn't seem to absorb much of the oil.  I did a W(ACV)C with the TJ stuff and Suave green apple, and my hair feels light, soft and shiny.

And it's wavy. 

I didn't braid it or anything after my shower, I only let it dry naturally, and it's full of these large waves.  WTF?  I've been noticing, when I do an updo or even just a braid, there's this little bit of hair that hangs down from my neck, and it's a curl.  An actual real round curl.  I just don't understand.  I showed it to my mom, and she nodded.  "You've always had little curls at your nape," she says to me.  And then she described to me that when I was "Mrs. Beasley" (a reference to the glasses I wore when I was only two) I had a perfect ring of curls around my head.  At which I had to roll my eyes.  No one has the same hair when they're an adult as they did when they were two!  But for something that's "always" been there, I'm sure only just now noticing it.

Quote:


That's pretty amazing.  Practically every child I've seen grow from infancy has had a phase where they had a few curls.  My daughter went through that phase when she was quite young, come to think of it.

I'm in an ignore-my-hair mode.  I comb and french braid it in the morning and then forget about it.  This is a good thing, I think.  The less effort it is to deal with the better.  Of course, the most time I ever had to spend on my hair to make it look good was when it was short.  I hated having to style my pixie cut; I could never get it to look just right.

WC yesterday because I forgot the first C.  Used TJ shampoo + Beautiful Lenghts conditioner.  I like it better than the restoratives.

Today I did a CO because yesterday I put my hair up in a scrunchie when it was still damp and ended up with a crease in my hair from it; and I didn't want to do only a WO to get it out.  My hair is almost dry.  I should go take a look at it.  I've a party this evening and I'd like to go to it with my hair down.

I did a WO because I was feeling greasy.  Dunno how much it helped, but psychologically it made me feel cleaner.

I'm going to disneyland on sunday!  It's an 8 hour drive, so we're leaving early sun morn and staying til Wed.  Whee!  I guess that's it for now.

I woke up at 4 am this morning to stare at the dark cieling in my bedroom.  Odub had managed to steal the bottom sheet out from under me.  WTF?  So anyway, I just got up and started my day.  I do like to write early in the morning.  Then Odub got up and joined me in the office, so I quit writing and loaded up a video game and played til he went to work, got DD ready for school.  Then I tried to write more, but found myself falling asleep in front of the comp, so I figured, ok, I'll nap for an hour.

Two hours later, I'm groggy and grumpy.  This happens whenever I lay down abed to nap.  Not so much if I nap sitting in a chair.  That's what I should have done.

I haven't washed my hair yet, but I will and update.

I forgot to update.  I'm going to give my hair a few days, then I'll do an oil and probably an ACV.  It feels a little dry, and the ends are...IDK.  Not crunchy, but they feel heavy, like I didn't wash my conditioner out enough.

Here's a pic of my curl:



Also, there's a strip just behind my right ear that is wavy.  It looks wavier when I put my hair half-up.  I have a picture of myself in my junior year in high school where I have BSL hair my natural color and it's a little wavy, especially on the right side.  I got a home perm that year, but my hair all broke off afterward, so that pic must have been taken before that, and it might actually be my natural wavyness.

In Fia's hair typing system, 1a has no body, and my hair is really quite flat.  1b has a body wave, isn't really wavy.  What does that mean? 1c has one or two S waves in places; well, that's sort of what I have, but not much body.  So what's my type?  And why am I tripping about it?  My hair is my hair.  It has idiosyncrasies and defies typing, just like the rest of me, just like all of us.  Halelujah!

9 am update.  I've found a use for the rest of my sulfate shampoo!    There's a story that goes with it, acually.  When I first moved into my apartment, it was just before valentine's day, and it was pretty rainy.  When the sun started coming out again, these big ants started crawling around in the shower upstairs!  Now I've had it with ants, because in my mom's old place they were a constant problem, even though they were tiny.  The ants in my bathroom were huge, half an inch long plus.  Whenever I'd see one I'd smash it, and that was okay for a while, until aparantly mating season, when they were flying en masse about my bathroom.  Unacceptable.  I called the landlord.  It turned out that there was a whole colony of carpenter ants living in a rotted fencepost in the backyard.  They replaced the fencepost and the problem stopped.  I'd still see one or two now and then, usually when the sun came out after a big rain, but I could deal with that as long as I wasn't mobbed by a flying cloud of them.

So, btw, I hate smashing ants, the crunch bothers me.  I guess I'm sort of squeamish.  So when I saw an ant in the bathroom yesterday, I grabbed the first thing I could reach, which was my spray bottle of diluted sulfate shampoo.  I sprayed the heck out of it, and it died.  Hooray!  Now I'll just keep that stuff around to kill the ants in my shower.

Yeah, this is the first time I've seen the ants since they replaced the fencepost.  Maybe they just moved over to another one!

So I got called in early for work yesterday and worked an extra two hours.  When I came out at 9:30p, it was raining like heck.  I'd ridden my bike.  So I rode home in the rain.  Not a big deal, since I wore my raincoat, which is bright green (visibility, not my favorite shade).  The worst part is because of my glasses.  After a while it's like driving in the rain with no windhield wipers.  I ought to get a ball cap with a brim to wear under my helmet, that might help.  Look funny, but keep the rain off my glasses.  I ended up taking them off, which presents its own hazards.

No wash day today.  I did a new style for work yesterday; it was a french braid, and I looped the braid up and secured it with a bandball, and wore matching barrettes.  It stayed all night, and looked kind of cool.

Today, my right hip has been aching.  When I walk around, occasionally a sharp pain will lance down my ankle.  I wonder if it's sciatica?  I had that when I was pregnant...and I've gained weight this holiday season. 

I may not be around much in the next few weeks.  So much is going on.  Odub might get laid off, we might move out of state to find better work.  Everything is topsy turvy, I don't know what's going to happen next.  My insides are crawly.

I sprained my ankle today. It's all swollen, but not yet purple.  I must have sprained that ankle a dozen times since I was a kid.  It had been three years, which is sort of long for me.  Why, why, why do I keep doing this to myself?  It's almost routine.  Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation...

I have work tonight, which fortunately is inventory, so I shouldn't have to walk around much.  I can't afford to miss it.  Another reason why I should watch how my feet are angled when I step off of curbs. 

CWC today.  Last thursday, too.  I've been mixing my suave and the BL conditioner half and half for my second C, and using the restoratives on DD.  her hair seems to like it better than mine does.  Anyway, my hair has been softer and more responsive since the oiling.

more:
I also wanted to mention the sensitive spot on my scalp around my right 'corner'.  my dad's side of the family has sort of pronounced 'corners' at the swirl--you know, the spot ones hair parts from.  My mom calls us her 'blockheads'.  Fondly.  Anyway, the other night before I washed there was a very sensitive spot, almost like I had whacked my head into something, but there was no bruise or anything and I don't remember whacking my head.  It's gone now, though.

CW(ACV)C today with my usual stuff.  That's it.

CWC today.  I washed the 2nd C out right away instead of leaving it in a while like I usually do, because I was daydreaming.  My hair's not quite dry yet, but it feels like it always does.  I may go back to washing every 3 days instead of 4.

CWC today.

CWC, but only put the first C on the very very ends.  The weather has been dry and sort of windy so I've been doing braids and updos.

CWC with 1st C very very light.

Thanks, ladies!  I am proud, I must admit, but I know it's all the advice and support I've found on this site that's the key.

Definately pat yourself on the back,Sky!   Your hair looks great!

CWC with oil treatment and ACV on Fri.  I've been basically following the CWC every three days, monthly oils, occasional ACVs.  I ought to get a trim in June, I think, and I've been thinking about changing shampoos, but I'm not sure what I should change to.  Something without sulfates.