Sore Sunday Summary

7 Mile- Rode my bike 7 miles yesterday, oooooh yeah. I've lost a little weight since my doctor took away milk and vegetables, but I noticed a little bump in my numbers lately and I think it could be Lyrica's weight gain side-effect rearing its ugly head...so now, not only is it not working but it's also making me even bigger. Fantastic.

But my appointment with Dr. S. is coming up, so that will be good.

My legs huuuuurt. My goodness. It was much too far for my first time out in weeks...but I needed to get Herbert's birthday present on the off-chance I ever see him again now that he's at school all the time. Oh, Herbert.

Speaking of Herbert, it's his 25th birthday today. I wish a very merry birthday to a very sweet, and very darling, young man. He's a good boy, and I'm lucky to know him.

And, speaking of weight, now that I think of it, I'd like to be 140 pounds or less for Lisa's wedding next September, so I've got a little less than a year to lose 40 pounds-- which is why I'm instituting Wednesday Weigh-Ins. Wednesday Weigh-Ins will include pictures of both the scale and me to watch the pounds slip off, and information on health and fitness, and I'll try to get some other bloggers in on it as well so it'll be like a...like a blog for health kind of thing. It'll be cute. Maybe we could do like a battle of the sexes-- whichever side loses more weight gets...gets...gets, at the very least, bragging rights.

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Family Fishermen: Today was the annual Governor's Tournament...I think. Anyway, it was some fishing tournament my dad and his brothers and close friends go to every year to lose epic-ly. They did not disappoint this year.

One interesting thing they learned, though, is that not only is there something a seagull won't eat, but that they could also vomit. Who knew? Seagulls eat rotting fish heads and out of garbage cans, but gag after eating kielbasa.

So do I, seagulls...so do I.

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Pants, Pants, Pants, and Pants: Many pants do be dealt with in the household. My parents love having a seamstress in the house, they make me fix everything. I have to let out my dad's pants, I need to hem mine, Mom and I went pants shopping...lots of pants.

Which reminds me, I need to write that letter to the director of my old high school's spring musical to offer my services as a costumer. I figure, why not? It's something to do. Maybe I can even get $20 out of the deal. Shoot.

The thing is, I'm so exhausted after subbing...I'm really, really afraid I won't be able to handle everything...guess I won't know for sure until I try, eh?

Sometimes I wonder what I'd do if I wasn't sick. Like go to school for design, maybe...audition for Project Runway...or textile restoration, I was thinking about that for a little while.

At the very least my kids will have the best Halloween costumes on the block.

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The Great Curl Project: I've made a great stride in the curl project. I'm still overwhelmed with insane amounts of frizz, but Dove's Damage Therapy Daily Moisture shampoo has been a big help in the battle. I've also stopped brushing my hair-- full stop, and I only brush it when it's dripping with conditioner to minimize breakage, damage, and tangles. I shower at about 4 now, then leave my hair in a loose braid until I'm about to go to bed, when I put in 9 foam curlers on the ends of my hair and sleep in a satin cap. My hair's so soft now, and the curls are very pretty and natural looking, I'm pretty happy. I wish there was less frizz, of course, but I think there's been major improvement. I'll include a picture in the Wednesday Weigh-In post.

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Upcoming Posts: The Lion King Review, Actor Analysis: Zooey Deschanel, reviews of Helen Keller's The World I Live In and Phillipa Gregory's The Constant Princess, and the first Wednesday Weigh In.

Hair-Raising, Part I

Internet Explorer is not longer the most common web browser coming to Salami & Orchids! Rock on, Firefox, rock on. Chrome is holding steady at #3, but falling fast...we'll see what happens. 

The Great Curl Project Update: 

Here's a reminder of the before picture (not for the faint of heart): 

And now: 

Not great, but an improvement, I think. Those top few inches won't curl for anything, man...oh well. I think once I figure out how to get the frizz situation under control and get it to dry at a reasonable time (the above picture was taken at 4-ish, so it's been "drying" for over twelve hours there. Not so good.) I might actually look human and not like such a beast. 

The current regime is shampoo, then condition, then comb, then leave-in conditioner and anti-humidity "milk" then I scrunch some of the water out with a t-shirt (because terry cloth supposedly encourages frizz) and then I don't touch it ever again because touching- you guessed it- encourages frizz. Sigh. 

Maybe one day I'll be cute. 

May Contain Spoilers

The number of pageviews I've received from people using Internet Explorer is gross. Do that many people- or that one person?- still use IE? Augh. People. Really. Let's stop. My Firefox was being stupid one day so I had to use IE and I almost threw my laptop out of a window which would have rendered it only slightly more useless. 

It's for your own good, really.   

Just read they're making a movie out of "What To Expect While You're Expecting". After reading my sisters-in-law's copies I've got to say there's isn't a whole lot funny about vaginal discharge. Although, if memory serves, month 5 typically involves digestive upsets and excessive gas, and Lord knows excessive gas is hilarious. I freaking hate Hollywood. 

Just wait until I find an agent that isn't afraid of being excommunicated. I'll show you entertainment, bitches. 

Yeah, I'm still on the agent search. I've sent 10 query letters so far and only got 2 "No"s, which I figure is pretty good, considering. I'd give hints but to put these things out there kind of defeats the purpose of trying to find somebody to pay me to write it. Let's just say some of my ideas are...incendiary. 

Remember my font selection? How do I make it my default font? I really dislike Times New Roman and it grates my eyeballs to look at it. 

UPDATE ON THE GREAT CURL PROJECT: I may have figured out my plan of attack. I'm pretty excited. I'll put up a picture tomorrow if things continue to go well. 

Tomorrow may also be the day I post about the Internship From Hell. I keep dreaming about it...I think I need to purge it so I can move on. Get it all out and leave it here. Blegh. 


I need to stop writing about the things I'm going to write about and actually write those things. I'll work on that. 

All for now. I need to go bake the focaccia I started last night- should be tasty. 

The First-Ever Salami & Orchids "Saturday Summary"!

Discovered where the phantom posts were if, by any chance, anyone was wondering about those phantom posts, which I doubt, but whatever. They were drafts that the nifty blogger editor had saved for me. Nice of it. A little annoying, but nice of it. 


I also discovered the font changer thingy. Not the best selection but I found a good serif that wasn't Times New Roman. I'm a serif kind of girl. Book Antiqua. Garamond. Palatino Linotype. And now Georgia, apparently. 


SO. I made an email address last night to tie to this blog because my only email address is my full name which, while professional, poses certain problems when dealing with strangers. No offense, strangers, I just have a unique name so it wouldn't be hard to track me down and rape me. Not like you would. Or anyone would. Or would want to. But it could be like that scene in The Jerk, where the crazy guy picks Steve Martin's name (well, Navin Johnson's name) out of the phonebook randomly and decides to kill him. It could be like that. ANYWAY, yes, the point of all of this is that I made an email specifically for contacts from this blog so feel free to email me at PlummyJo@gmail.com and I'll get right back to you :)


Oh, and get this. While I was trying to connect my two gmail addresses- which is harder than you might think and I still don't think I did it right- Google was like, "You have suspicious activity on your account. Please verify you're human." Gee, thanks, Google. Make your shit easier to figure out solo and maybe I wouldn't look like a robot. And even if I was, wouldn't I know what I was doing? You could just program me to work and I would instead of screwing everything up. 


So there. 


Changing subject:


I have a one-off comment about Edible Arrangements that's too long for Twitter (LandofGilli) so it's going here. They're really pretty and all, but unless you're having a party you've got a ton of fresh cut fruit that has a very short shelf-life. Recognizing this problem when we got one after my uncle died we came up with the only solution to this problem: Sangria. And it was delicious. It wasn't one of the ones with the chocolate-dipped fruit because whoever sent it to us was cheap (just kidding, I don't even remember who it was or if those were even available at the time, really), but if it had been the chocolaty kind of course you wouldn't put the chocolate in the wine. I'm just saying it's a lot of cut fruit all at once. 


..."Chocolaty" looks wrong but it's right. I hate that. 


What may become a regular feature until it's completed...The Great Room Reorganization!! Seeing as job prospects are...nonexistent...my childhood bedroom is becoming my early adulthood bedroom. The first thing I need to do is put my memory foam pad over my mattress pad because I think the mattress pad is too tight over the memory foam so it's smushing it when I'm supposed to be the one smushing it. But then I want to move my bed and my standing lamp and my TV and my bookcase...I'll have to post before and after pictures because just about everything is going somewhere that it isn't currently.


Another could-be regular feature...The Great Curl Project!! This is a disaster. My hair and I do not get along- its nature is quite unlike mine...I imagine my personality to be less wild than my dark red tangle (speaking of, the new Pixar/Disney Princess is a redheaded curly archer! I'm a reddish headed curly archer! It's called Brave and I'm sure it'll come up again) So I've been reading through and posting in the Long Hair Community's forums (here) and it turns out that part of the reason my hair and I disagree is because I was, essentially, raised to mistreat it. It's not some hippie thing (though be sure you can find it on there), it's just that all of my copious curls come from my father- and men are not generally wealths of information on proper hair care. I imagine my father would use a bar of Irish Spring in his hair without a second thought. My mother's hair is pin straight, so she doesn't know what to do with frizz and ringlets. So, of course she did my hair when I was little- and she did it just like her's, with a brush. Apparently (as my frustrations made abundantly clear) brushes are NOT GOOD for curls, and is the reason why my hair feels like cotton candy every time I run a brush through it. 

                                                                      Brushes are bad. 


So...now I'm learning how to take care of my hair properly. "But Jo!" You say, "Shouldn't you have figured this out, like, a decade ago? You're 23!" To which I say to you, when I was sick and depressed and lying in bed for 10 years I didn't care what my hair looked like. I was too depressed to care and on the odd day that I needed to look nice for something (concert, wedding, funeral, what-have-you) I didn't know how to make it happen and would be miserable and feel hideous which only furthered my determination to not leave my bed ever. 


So, yes. I'm a 23 year-old college graduate learning how to be a teenage girl. And it's not going so well. Granted it's only been 2 days, but those 2 days have been miserable failures. Sigh. Perseverance. 


What a mess this post is. 


*Ting!* Brilliant idea. Saturdays are henceforth to be Saturday Summaries on Salami & Orchids. A round-up of my random thoughts and plans for future posts. I'm awesome. 


And now it's naptime. Have a lovely evening.