Around that time I also cleaned my glasses, and looking in the mirror I could suddenly see that the skin around my eyes was turning into crepe paper! I cursed my newly-discovered wrinkles, and purchased a face lotion that promised to restore my crinkly skin to baby-smoothness. (I only used half-doses, though, because I didn’t want fat baby eyes.)

And then there were my elbows. The ones that had such dry, scaly, weird bumps that they made my dermatologist think I had scabies. (I didn’t, and he was an idiot. Those bumps come back every winter.) I showed them to my regular, non-idiot doctor and he prescribed a cream with steroids to calm my troubled elbows. There there, elbows.

And then….. I tried olive oil.

Yep, the stuff you cook with. I’ve been using it instead of all those lotions for about a month now and I am deeming this experiment a success. Straight out of the shower I pour a little in my hand and slather my legs and elbows, then pat my face with the reside left on my hands. While it hasn’t given me baby eyes – my face doesn’t feel wintery-dry-itchy, my legs aren’t shedding, and my elbows are completely non-scabby!

It soaks in rather quickly and since it’s not the extra-virgin kind, I don’t think I smell like salad dressing, but then again – my nose isn’t the best smeller. Even if I do, I think I’m sticking with it because this stuff is cheeeeeeeeap! Win!

So, if you’re like me and all your shirts come from Target, they are all made mostly of cotton. If you’re like me and obsessively hang up your shirts to dry when still damp, you won’t often have wrinkled shirts. However, once in a while something happens, and there are wrinkles. Drat you, wrinkles.

Hanging stuff up in a bathroom with a steamy shower has never worked for me. (I think because my technique is wrong.) I remembered seeing a commercial along time ago for Downy wrinkle releaser, and thinking that that was a lot of money to pay for a bottle of lazy.

Hmmmm… wouldn’t just plain water work? Water is free, y’know. Steam is made of water, and all those people swear by that.

Well, yes it does! Grab yourself a spray bottle, spritz, snap, done! (You might have to spritz twice, but it’s still faster than getting out the iron. Or taking a shower.)

I have no idea if it works with non-Target shirts, but I would assume it would.

I wanted to show you the super-expensive, uber-technical tripod that I used for this series, but some goofy-haired doofus walked into my shot.

I was looking for some stuff at school and came across the last bit of the stripey contact paper that I love so very much. I initially drooled over it at Target in 2007, put it up in my entryway in 2008, and shortly thereafter put some up at school.

Well, now it’s on my laptop making it all new-looking and incredibly snazzy. Seriously, I can’t stop petting it – which is a little disconcerting. I am saddened that no photograph does this striped wonder justice. Trust me, it’s simply heavenly.

I’m of course excited because it’s so pretty, but mostly because I’ve looked at laptop stickers before and thought they were cool, but wasteful. This way I’ve used up something that needed using, not making new trash! Oh, and it was free!! (Something you purchased 3 1/2 years ago counts as ‘free’ now.)

Love,
Lauren the Stripe-Loving Nut Job.

I could relate to that. I washed my hair everyday, and right after I was done washing it, I would rub some sort of petroleum product back into it. Crew-goo, a very waxy product, on those odd moments when I had a crew-cut. Got-2-Be:Playful, a pomade, during the normal hair cycle.

This did not seem like the sort of thing that you would want to embrace during the school year, so I put it off. During the Summer I started looking for information on this, and was initially stymied. I kept finding results that mentioned “NoPoo”. It turns out that this does not mean what you think it means. Instead, it’s a play on “Shampoo”.

The consensus was that everyone is different, but you can expect your hair to get a lot oilier and then for your scalp to notice that things were really pretty oily now and tone it down. People said that it took from 3-8 weeks for your hair to get to a state of equilibrium.

I began my experiment on June 28th. I told Lauren about 2 weeks later. She was somewhat more fascinated than horrified. It took about 7 weeks for my scalp to come to grips with the new situation. We are on week 10 now, and Lauren has Outed me to two people in the last two weeks. I have taken this to be a subtle way of telling me that we’re done with this now. Surprisingly enough, she doesn’t want me to go back to normal. She wants me to move on to whatever she considers the next stage of the experiment.

So here’s my report on stage one of the experiment:

I decided that I would go through the motion of washing my hair every morning but only use hot water. One nice benefit of this was not getting soap in my eyes. There was some talk near the start of the experiments to gradually ween my head off of shampoo, but I went the cold turkey route instead.

I really figured that I would be in the terminal stages after 2-3 weeks. So I was a little disappointed about that time and seriously thought of giving it up. I don’t think my hair looked much different (than it did after I applied the pomade anyway), and Lauren said it didn’t smell any different. But it felt rather waxy, like I was still using crew-goo.

I kept with it, and by week 7 my hair wasn’t waxy anymore. But it definitely feels different. Oily is probably too strong a word, but it certainly isn’t dry. I’m sure Lauren will add her point of view in the comments. I’ll keep you informed of whatever new direction Lauren decides for stage two of the experiment.

Upon opening, it was a darling package of scratch paper. I adore homemade paper – my sister used to make it, y’know.

Beautiful! Say, they’re recycled! Wow! But…. what’s that…..?

Poo?!?! Poo?!?! (Flip.)

HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!! It’s paper made from elephant poo!!! I burst out laughing. Seriously, after my day, it was hilarious to have something lovely come out of poo.

It says, and I quote,

“With all the concern these days about deforestation and the need to recycle, our products are a fantastic example of sustainability and responsible consumption. We take a material in abundance, ELEPHANT POO, and make functional and completely useful products all the while sparing lots of trees in the process.

That’s right. Here’s the scoop! ELEPHANTS eat lots of grass everyday and they poo almost as much! Since their digestive systems don’t really break down the grass all that well, their poo has plenty of fiber! Seeing as though grass is fiber and fiber is the base material used in making pulp for paper, well, we figured we could probably use it to make our ELEPHANT POOPOOPAPER!

“Two Bums Up!” ”

Peggy, you are more awesome than Brad on his half-birthday!

Lloyd: “I’ll need to get another one, unless you want to refill this one.”

Then he chuckled, like it was funny. Then he got quiet, and looked at me fearfully.

Lloyd: “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

Of course I was going to do it, and I did it.

Let’s all get past the ‘mama bird barfing into the mouth of the baby bird’ imagery that this conjures up, and congratulate me on getting .85 ounces into that little tube without squirting 2.3 ounces all over our hideously pink countertop. It was surprisingly easy, and while I might try it once again, I think that after two refills the integrity of the smaller tube might suffer and burst along one of the sides. Only time will tell.

It’s really quite amazing how one can get completely used to walking by an out-of-context stove everyday and eventually not even see it.

I was excited for this day because 1) I backed the truck up to the steps and didn’t damage anything and 2) we got to use the Forearm Forklifts to load up the stove! (They make me feel so strong.) We also got rid of the giant broken t.v.

The recycling/disposal place was swarming with strong young lads and lasses who just picked up all these heavy things effortlessly and tossed them about. No Forearm Forklifts for them. Yeesh.

Goodbye, stuff. I’m sorry you got broken, and I hope you have fun in China.

Boooo. The bags are as noisy as those stupid little firecrackers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4_ESkVvO70

Wait, maybe that’s another ‘hooray’. It depends on your firecracker-to-joy ratio. (Mine is dangerously low.)

I actually forgot that Saturday was the day, but while StumbleUpon-ing the web, a site came up that reminded me. The gist is – in case you don’t click on the link – is that for one hour [8:30 p.m. (local time) March 27th] you turn off your lights and electrical things. I know that it’s a tiny drop in the bucket, and that my turning off the lights in little old Seward meant absolutely nothing, but when you see the photos of big cities doing it, it makes you think. (I’ve said it before – I’m not so much about climate change, mostly just about being less wasteful.)

Anyway, I turned off all the lights but I made the concession that we could keep the computers on. Mostly because 1) I was in the middle of a movie (and let’s face it, my entertainment is more important than my ethics) and 2) Lloyd was working on his Fantasy Accounting Baseball stuff.

Ironically, people on the webs are debating whether burning all those candles during the hour may have been more wasteful than just using electricity. I don’t know. All I know is – coffee tastes better with sugar and milk.

Really.

That’s all I know.

It’s a win-win all around:
1. It’s cheaper this way.
2. I’m not buying more plastic. (I’ve used the same bottle over & over for almost a year.)
3. I can tweak the recipe. (Add a splash of balsamic vinegar, and use olive oil for half the oil. Don’t try to use ALL olive oil, or it will solidify into a brick when you refrigerate it. Trust me on that one. You shake and shake the bottle but it only separates into fatty globs that melt slightly on your salad and are rather nasty to eat. Hey, haven’t I broken some serious parenthetical rules?).

I’m sure there are good recipes out there for homemade dressings, but I bet you can’t drink them.

It would be cool, and more eco-friendly, to have a tiny, deep bathtub like a Japanese soaking tub, but I’m certainly not going to buy one. I was thinking of how to perhaps prototype one out of a Rubbermaid tub or something, then the ol’ meandering brain started to think that a really tall tub that conformed more to a person’s shape would be cool, and use even less water.

The solution? A spacesuit, filled with hot water! Genius, eh? I bet that would just use a gallon or two of water, and I could refill it from a tea kettle!

What’s the web address for the patent office?

I started to tackle the giant accumulation of cardboard boxes downstairs that just get thrown down the basement steps. If you know anybody who needs some moving boxes, I can hook them up. The other giant pieces got cut up into manageable sizes for the recycling box, and – don’t tell Lloyd – two boxes were cobbled together to make a stray cat shelter for the backyard. (It’s going to be -14 degrees tonight and that freaks me out.)

I was pleasantly surprised by some clever origami by Samsung. Lloyd bought a Blu-Ray player when he got the t.v., and usually those things are packaged with styrofoam end-protectors. This one had protectors that were each made entirely out of a single folded piece of cardboard.

Folded:

Unfolded:

Amazing!

In other news, I have 7 things in the Goodwill give-away bag, so I’m good for this week.

Today I tried an experiment, and labeled my cup and glass with tape. You can see how the ‘y’ is partially marked on the cup in permanent marker, so that was a really, really good plan.

So, will it be possible for me to do this without the help of tape tomorrow? Do other people use new cups for new drinks, or are you better about reusing?

So, to keep Kate happy, let me tell you about the socks. Smartwool socks are the best socks you’ll ever put on your feet. Period. However, they are pricey. At the beginning of the school year, I resolved that I would buy a new pair of wool socks every month until I had 7 pairs. (I already have 3, so this wasn’t such a giant goal.) But, laziness won out, so I waited until last week and bought myself three pair (though I forgot to include a pair in the photo).

I also bought a pair from the clearance section for Lloyd (made specifically for steel-toed boots) because I am love and sunshine rolled into one. He snickered and made some royal fun of me for a long time “You spent how much for one pair?”… until he put them on.

Lloyd: “Oh. Wow! These are really nice.”

Me: “I know. They’re made of sheep.”

Smartwool things are different from cheap wool things. As I said, my Wal*Mart gloves are made from mean, scratchy sheep, but the socks are dreamy – made from Mary’s finest. I’ve actually had a pair of socks for several years that have been wearing out at the heel, but have never broken through. I was showing them to Lloyd and guess what? They turned out to be Smartwool!

P.S. Lloyd just proofread this and said, “You never explained anything about this Smartwool stuff and why it’s special.” I laughed OUT LOUD and said, “Seriously? You want me to write MORE about wool socks and make this post LONGER?”

Ok. Let me tell you a story from my childhood. My sister Keren came home from college, where she was learning about fibers and cloth, and she taught me how to make felt. You take a bunch of wool, put a little soap on it, then wash it in HOT water to open up the fibers. As you scrub it, the little ‘hooks’ on the hairs grab on to each other and connect it into one big mass. The more hot water and agitation, the thicker and denser the mass. That’s why wool things shrink in the wash. Smartwool things are made from magic sheep. Don’t bother fact-checking that.

It was the inaugural use of our Little Giant ladder, too. Lloyd ordered it from Woot a month or so ago and got a super deal. Good thing, too, since our old ladder had disappeared.

Boring story ahead: Years ago I asked Lloyd to go downstairs and get the ladder for something, and he was down there a loooong time. “What’s the holdup?” I hollered. “It’s not here,” he hollered back. (I love to say ‘holler’.) I went downstairs to help him – and there it was, opened up, smack dab in the middle of the basement. Seriously? Now whenever we can’t find something around here we say, “It’s probably by the ladder”.

So, you can see the irony of how the ladder has been really gone. We’ve searched and searched, but no dice. Thus the need for the Little Giant. End boring story.

Boy, this post is really banging on, isn’t it? Cut me some slack, I’ve been sick. Long story short, we took off the fan cover, Lloyd put in the two garbage-bag-covered insulation things, and we put the cover back on using the wing nuts that Lloyd has patented. “Wing nuts are key” – that’s his motto.

(BTW, Lloyd said he saw a ladder at his school that looks suspiciously like our old one.)

They are all the ‘Vita’ size, which are huge! I was smitten by the plaid one, and thought the one with flowers (in the top picture) was cute (but not really me), and the middle one in the photo is from their new made-from-plastic-bottles line, so I had to support that endeavor.

Then, they had some collapsible messanger-bags.. That seemed so cool! I foolishly bought three, and while they are cool, they are of course rather flimsy. (Was I really thinking they’d be like my school bag? Am I crazy?) I think these will be the ones that live in the car all the time for the one time a year I forget to bring one along to the store.

I have an addiction. Please stop me.

I’ve been doing some internet searches for cheap-o winter ideas, and there are several folks out there who say that bubble wrap can significantly increase the R-value of old windows. (‘R’ stands for ‘Ridiculous’, in this case.)

So, I tried a test bit on the lower half of one of our bathroom windows this weekend. I’m not sure about it’s R-value, but it did keep shower steam from condensing on the cold pane and dripping down to the sill. Last year we had an embarrassing mildew problem due to the sheets curtains I hung up. Water would condense, freeze, then drip slowly and wreck the wood. (*sigh* I’d better get rid of this website if we ever decide to sell this house.) I’ve tried running a little fan so far this fall, but it can’t keep up with the moisture.

So I put bubble wrap on the rest of the bathroom windows tonight. Until we can get new windows, this is definitely worth the experiment!

Winter’s coming, and that means I need sweaters.

Admittedly, I have absolutely no sense of style. I’m doing pretty well to leave the house in pants and a shirt – never mind if they ‘go’. I’ve tried to stick with mostly solid colors (which my stylish sister-in-law tells me is a good strategy) but that’s where my knowledge ends. No cool jackets or whatever, very little layering, and I don’t know how to accessorize, except with stains.

Anyhow, I’ve been shopping for sweaters lately, and have limited my one criteria to ‘wool’. To make it more challenging, I’m only looking at thrift stores. That may shock you, but it has really streamlined the process. I go through the rack, and the criteria are:
Wool? No – Go to next sweater. Yes – Stop.
Solid color? No – Go to next sweater. Yes – Stop.
My size? Who cares? It costs four bucks. Get it.

So, I have two sweaters with this system. One that is very cute and one that has a strong 80′s military vibe goin’ on. Should that be a new criteria? “Looks like it could be worn by Joan Jett?”

On Sunday I got up at the crack of night to drive Brad to the airport. (Lloyd was going to go, too, but he hemmed and hawed about getting up, and I finally just left him there in bed saying, “Hmmm….. I don’t know…. should I stay in bed?….. should I go?……” *door slams*.) Of course I was glad to drive with Brad, because Brad Time is like Summer Time, plus there was the added bonus of there being Stuff in Omaha.

At the airport, I had already decided not to resist (as I had in the past) the travel blankets that roll up to an impossibly small size. They were out of every color except yellow, but I got one anyway. (It turns out it was on sale – yay!) Once home, I played with it endlessly – tying in into different sari-inspired styles that will never leave this house.

After dropping Brad off for his (extremely late) flight, I headed over to Whole Foods and napped in their parking lot until they opened. They had some things I needed to buy, plus lots of Stuff that I like to look at. I decided to buy some bars of J.R. Liggett’s bar shampoo. (Less packaging, no plastic and all that.) I had tried a different bar shampoo years ago and wasn’t too impressed, but this stuff is great! I wet my hair down, run the bar over it 3 – 4 times, and that little bit lathers up like mad! I’ll let you know in a few days if I have super hippy-hair or not.

UPDATE: It’s January of 2010, now. I used the original formula first and really didn’t care for how it made my hair feel. I’ve used the herbal formula for a couple of weeks now and really like it! So, Lauren, remember: buy the herbal formula.

It’s a miracle! From little seeds on my windowsill to something that will aggravate my stomach but be so, so worth it.

There’s one that might be ripe enough to taste tomorrow, and another closely behind. Hopefully they won’t taste like compost and old rainwater, but hey – I’ll take what I can get.

They’re doing much better than the cucumbers, which have produced one edible specimen and one that looks like a balloon that a wheezy grandpa gave up trying to inflate. I guess making that gigantic ladder was a bit of wishful thinking, eh?