urocyon

The Sainsbury's grocery delivery came, and I was glad to see it. They made an interesting substitution again.

What I ordered: Genius GF brown bread (amazingly good stuff, for commercial GF bread). What they claimed to have substituted: store brand GF part-baked baguettes (OK, not what I wanted, but edible). What they really sent: a big loaf of in-store bakery wholemeal bread (which also costs less than any of the GF stuff).

I forgot to add bread for Ingvar to the order, but it looks like he has some anyway. *shakes head* Ah well.

ETA : OK, now I'm less irked and more baffled. I also found the baguette in a bag. The rest of the stuff seems to be what I ordered, so they didn't just mix up bags or anything.

Further ETA: Tonight's fairly easy supper plans: an adobo-seasoned baked chicken with potatoes crammed in the pan around it. And probably more frozen veggies.

I am also hoping to do a coconut milk amla treatment on my head, in the meantime. (Mixing it with coconut milk keeps it from drying my hair out.) I absolutely love the results, but keep putting off sitting for half an hour with muddy stuff and a plastic bag on my head. *g* It might give my mood a boost.

I got brave, and trimmed my own hair a little while ago. It's really been needing it, since it's gone from a #4 buzz cut to shoulder length without one. (The ends just don't seem to split, even when I was abusing my hair, so it was a lot less pressing than it could have been.)

I really don't like other people messing with my head--a combo of sensory issues, feeling uncomfortable with the usual salon chattiness expectation (especially without my mom there to take up the slack!), and a lot of crying-level bad haircuts. Since I was keeping it buzzed for several years, I don't know any good stylists locally, and one fairly close salon with good reviews is nigh-impossible to get to without a car. So I'd been avoiding going, and the ends were starting to look really straggly and uneven. I also have a history of trying to cut my own hair with pretty horrific results, starting from the age of three with my Daffy Duck scissors, trying to preempt my Nana cutting it! My technique really hasn't gotten much better as an adult, not knowing what the hell I'm doing, and my last lopsided attempt prompted another buzz cut. So I've also been pretty wary of the DIY approach.

But, after a raid on Google and YouTube for some ideas on how to do this reasonably, I decided to risk it, figuring that it couldn't turn out much worse than the usual salon trip or the current straggly woolybooger look. Just trying to even up the ends some--erring on the side of not taking enough off!--seemed like the best plan, and well within my competence level. ;) Adding a little in the way of layering didn't look like a bad plan, since my bushel of really fine hair is extremely good at weighting itself down, and the curls have been sort of intertwining so the bottom of my hair has mostly been moving in one big section lately! Not ideal.

( Videos I found helpful, for the curious )

It's still wet, but the results don't seem bad at all. I went back and cleaned up the ends on sections I could tell didn't get trimmed properly while it was clipped up, and then after the post-cut wash got the few looser curls in the back which have been hanging a lot lower and making me not want to wear my hair down. It must not be weighting itself down as much, with the shrinkage factor; the longest pieces I took off were maybe 1.5"--most closer to 0.5"--and it's a good 3" shorter while still damp. It's back up just above my shoulders. The canopy doesn't seem to be wanting to flatten out as much from getting snagged on the hair underneath, either, as I was hoping.

The verdict, at this point? I'll do it again. :)

No wonder I was feeling grouchy, depressed, and a bit out of it last night and (especially) today: a migraine kicked in while I was out getting some Nurofen Plus for my back and antihistamines. The timing could have been worse, at least. ;)

The prodrome and aura were harder to spot because it was really easy to put feeling crappy off on a combination of allergies and my back acting up, which can be pretty overloading on its own--and it kept me from sleeping well, which also makes me feel generally crappy and prone to overload. (And then I didn't remember to eat lunch. Bleh.) Since the visual snow effect got a lot worse about an hour before the pain hit, and it's done that before, I'm wondering if that's an aura thing too. My visual processing goes screwy that way when I'm overloaded--and prone to straightforward tension headaches--so it's kind of hard to sort things out!

But, I was more than a little relieved when the headache started, and provided a pretty straightforward explanation for the way I'd been feeling. I may not like them, but migraines I can deal with. Disappointed as I was not to get to see people I haven't seen in a long while, it was probably a really excellent thing that I hadn't bulled through and headed for a night out at a pub in Central London after all!

We only live about a mile outside the town centre, but I was so not going to lurch down there today. So traffic heading that way was clogged almost to our bus stop. Stubbornly, I climbed on the bus anyway, and still ended up lurching farther than intended so that I had a hope of getting to Boots before it closed. It did get me at least three quarters of the way closer.

While I was out, I stopped by Sainsbury's in the same shopping centre, and got some easy food, including some frozen chicken and mushroom pies out of the Free From section--junky, but oddly satisfying when you're not feeling great. :) Also some GF bread and sandwich fixings.

By that point, my blood sugar was getting pretty low (stress didn't help!), so I also wolfed down a pretty tasty pseudo-Asian salad with black rice, veggies, edamame, shrimp, and ginger-lime dressing. Convenient, decently balanced, and GF except for the soy sauce in the dressing, which is usually OK--and I was past worrying about it. Sometimes I do get tired of having to think about what and when I eat. I used to be a bit self-conscious about perching on benches in busy areas to light into food like a ravening beast, but needs must. Finally getting some food in helped some.

I also picked up some ground cloves and allspice while I was there, for the Great Henna Experiment. I've been pretty much addicted to blatantly unnatural permanent hair dye for 20+ years, but went off it when I decided to try to let my hair grow out--trying to avoid the eventual "matting frizzy straw" effect--but lately I've been eyeballing the couple of boxes of (ruby) red and purple still in the house. ;) I was even becoming tempted to try really saturated shades of SFX or similar on unbleached hair; maybe Candy Apple Red or Deep Purple, which should still give a decent undertone. This has been on my mind even more lately, since I wasn't entirely pleased in spite of myself to find some silver starting to come in at the temples.

So, I was pleased to find out that henna does not necessarily give you Lucille Ball orangey-red, but it's very possible to get the kinds of colors I want anyway out of it with the right mix and base color. I've probably actually seen people with similar shades from henna, but assumed it was something else. Something that's actually good for your hair and can give you the colors you want? Sounds close to perfect.

I ordered some ostensibly body art quality henna and some indigo from an Indian grocery (could have made a trip into Ilford, but didn't feel like it), but neglected the spice additions--to help with more burgundy tones--while I was at it. So, instead of busing it into Ilford after all, I sucked it up and paid supermarket prices. Which still just about brings the ingredients per batch close to the price of the dye I'd been using, so it's not too bad. :) That will probably wait until tomorrow night.

The bus ride home was a bit surreal. There was the visual snow and sense that things were moving strangely. There was also another (Black) passenger about 20 who, judging from his mannerisms and pretty severe tardive dyskinesia, I'd guess was autistic and on neuroleptics. That made me more than a little sad and frustrated for him. Even the way I was feeling, I made sure to smile in his direction and basically try to acknowledge his humanity; the bus was pretty full, and other passengers were acting like they'd get ebola from sitting anywhere near him. That's gotta hurt. Grrr. Then there was a priest who looked like he felt sorry for me, with my cane and whatever expression was on my face right then. *shakes head* I was glad to get off before someone started into a bizarre monologue nobody else seemed to hear, and it really started to remind me of the kind of Italian film I avoid. It was that kind of bus trip.

Now I'm slurping a big cup of coffee and waiting for the pain relief to kick in. I'll probably stick my pies in the oven and lie down for a while.

I am sitting here with my head slathered in goop made of egg, mayonnaise, and olive oil for an hour. Topped off with a plastic produce baggie held in place by a rubber band (who needs processing caps? ;) ) and a towel. Some kind of distraction is welcome. *g*

Lately, I've been a lot happier with my hair, since I've been trying to work with it. It's rarely tangling much, and I've been finding maybe one fairy knot a week--rather than multiple a day, when I realized what I was doing was just not working. At all.

The best thing I ever did for it? Only using a wide-toothed wooden comb to untangle it before washing, instead of combing and brushing it multiple times a day to make it look less "stringy". *headdesk*

What I'm doing to it now has been a huge improvement over the purposely drying stuff I thought it needed before#, but it's still too harsh. My crown, especially, is getting a bit crispity and flyaway, and flattening out. Not nearly as unpleasant as before, but it's still time for some deep conditioning/protein treatment and a change in routine.

It's time to cave in and buy some products, other than baking soda, vinegar, and coconut oil. :) I ordered some Darcy's Botanicals Natural Coils Curling Jelly last night, hoping it will double as leave-in conditioner and lightweight gel for curl definition. Running across the excellent site, Live Curly, Live Free was a good bonus. Heck, I hadn't even thought of the perils of the "wet cut, with no regard for how the hair lies dry, then try to whip it into shape with products and heat" hair styling approach--which is the only one I've ever gotten!

Between the info there and this amazing before and after thread at naturallycurly.com, some version of the Curly Girl method seems well worth trying. Just the second photo set on that thread was enough. :/ Yeah, my hair used to look like the before picture pretty much all the time.## Eeek.

In a while, I'm planning a trip to the local Sally's. Initially, I was thinking of getting some flat clips and no-snag mini elastics, since I want to try some flat twists at the front of my head to keep the hair out of my face without having to slap on headbands or clip it back. (I finally figured that just because you don't usually see that done with hair the texture of mine, that doesn't mean it's not worth a try. With elastics, since there's no chance in hell the twists will hold themselves.) Now I also want to look for some non-scary conditioner, hopefully unlikely to break my head out, to try conditioner-only washing.

I did consider the idea before, but it scared me initially, just starting out of the "must strip my hair within an inch of its life" mentality. Only washing it with something other than water once a week or so--and oiling it!--has worked out great. Since it's still kinda dry, the CO is not looking like a bad option at all now. And I've had long enough with the minimal intervention, basically benign neglect approach, not to mind adding some slightly more complicated care back in. That's still a lot less than I was doing to it when it was longer before. :-|

BTW, the "hair reflecting mental state/abilities" metaphor also seems to apply here. Treating myself decently and trying to figure out what my strengths are--rather than trying to force my mind to do what other people tell me it should--has also led to much better results. (Not to mention getting away from the "better living through socially acceptable/mandated chemistry" approach to the point that I had no reasonable baseline, in both cases.) And metaphorically combing out some of the snakes has let me treat both my mind and my hair (and probably other people!) more kindly. Imagine that.

That's probably enough hair care geekery for the moment. It's just about time to get the goop rinsed out, anyway. Yay!
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# Much in the way of conditioning made it "stringy" and "dirty-looking"--i.e., with the beginnings of some curl definition!

## So, ironically, one time I tried a spiral perm to try to make it "behave". Then kept using permanent dyes on top of that. Within a year, it started breaking off and eventually matted to the scalp--with daily sulphate washing and light conditioning thrown in the mix. I'm still impressed at how tough my hair is, to be super-fine. *facepalm*