hair fret

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Three Things Thursday

I am wearing my hair curly today. I kind of hate it??? “Well, just don’t wear your hair curly, Suzanne,” you might be saying briskly, with a tiny bemused head tilt and mild furrow of your brow. And sure, that SOUNDS simple, but a) my hair is naturally wavy/curly, so it requires blowdrying to jar it out of its natural state, which is not ideal ever but especially awful during the sweatslick of summer, and b) my Instagram feed is full of people who look amazing with curly hair and one of my closest friends sometimes wears her hair curly and it is fabulous, so it should be possible for me to wear my hair curly without hating it. So far, it is not possible. I got a gift card from Ulta for some holiday or other and used it to buy a bunch of sample sizes of curl enhancing products. While they do seem to enhance the curl, they do not enhance my appearance. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just don’t have the face for curly hair? I feel like the curls exacerbate the roundness of my face. And somehow my hair has less volume when curly? Also, it’s very unevenly curly, with tighter coils around the left side of my face and looser/more jagged waves around the back. I don’t know. Perhaps I should have spent the 2020 lockdown pursuing the Curly Girl Method or otherwise figuring out how to like my hair this way. But I did not and so I am going around hating it until it’s time to wash my hair and start fresh. 

Nutrition, always a tricky subject, feels like it’s at an all-time low in our house right now. Carla makes her own lunch for camp, and I have to say that I honestly have no idea what’s in it. She wasn’t eating the well-rounded and nutrient dense lunches I packed for her anyway, and at least now I don’t have the double whammy of packing a lunch (ugh) and then seeing it return home after being unrefrigerated all day and having to dump it in the disposal (double ugh). I think sometimes she packs pickles and pepperoni and I close my eyes and concentrate on the fact that one is a vegetable and the other contains some protein.

The way we live our lives is not conducive to a lot of methods that most people seem to use to enforce proper nutrition. (We don’t eat as a family regularly, so I end up making separate meals for Carla which makes life easier in a lot of ways but doesn’t leave a lot of room for modeling the type of eating I want to promote.) But between the possibly garbage lunches Carla is eating and the presence of way too many sweets in her life (she uses her allowance to buy candy and chips at camp and at the library after camp), I feel a little fretful about the future. She’s eleven now, which means that puberty is around the corner, and I think this is a time in her life when she really needs to focusing on eating nutrient dense foods, both for all the growing she is about to do and for establishing good habits as she gets older and takes on increasing responsibility for her own food choices. 

But I don’t know what to DO. Hire a nutritionist is a possibility, I suppose, and Stephany’s experience has been positive enough that this has potential. But I am wary of the expense and worried about how hard it will be to find a nutritionist whose philosophies about body size and food morality jive with my own. (Also – and this is silly but it IS coloring my thoughts about nutritionists – a friend of mine hired a family nutritionist and her main suggestion seemed to be about making all sorts of “balls” with protein powder and dates and stuff, and I just cannot get behind a ball-centric food solution. This may sound 100% bonkers, but it is nonetheless true: I do not like foods shaped into balls, and I am not going to eat them.) (Cake pops: no. Meatballs: hard pass. Falafel: no thanks. Protein balls: no way.) I have tried making and eating multiple ball-foods, and I can say with confidence they are a no from me dawg. Beyond hiring a nutritionist, what to do? Oh, and I guess I should say that my word alone holds no water with my child. (For proof: We talked to a health professional, who by the way was not being consulted about food/nutrition and who has no expertise in food/nutrition, who told Carla humans should not drink milk outside of infancy, and she instantly grabbed onto this statement as The One Irrefutable Truth despite all the dozens of very reasonable, science-backed arguments my husband and I made to the contrary.) (And listen: I can, in some ways, understand that argument! I can! People can and do live their whole lives without milk! And yet, “you shouldn’t drink milk” is not a good suggestion to make to A CHILD whose parents struggle to get her to take in enough protein or calcium when milk is a perfectly good, legitimate source of both of those things. Also! I do not force my child to drink milk! I simply put it in smoothies, on the rare occasions she allows me to coax her to drink one!)  

Most of that previous paragraph was a parenthetical, and honestly sounds a little crazycakes, so I am going to start fresh. So, options: 1. Nutritionist. 2. Books??? I listened to a pretty decent book called The XX Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi recently. It’s about how the female brain ages and steps we can take to nourish and protect our brains against cognitive decline. A large portion of the book is devoted to the importance of nutrition, and I found it pretty persuasive. However, the book is not something that would resonate with Carla. Maybe I could try Mosconi’s previous book, Brain Food? Carla and I could possibly listen to it together in the car. It would be better, of course, if there were books about the importance of nutrition that were targeted to her age group. This book seems to have a lot of information, and might be easy to pick up and leaf through… but even in the online sample, it struck me as having an anti-fat bias. A book about intuitive eating but geared toward teens might have potential… This one sounds like it offers a good mix of practical tips and evidence based suggestions, although I would want to read the chapters about “healthy weight” before I shared it with Carla.

Option 3. Podcasts??? Are there nutrition podcasts that would be appropriate for tweens? I almost never listen to podcasts, so I have no idea where to even BEGIN, and when I google there are ten million options which is overwhelming. Ideally, I would want a podcast I could listen to WITH Carla. Like I said, she’s much more likely to take advice from someone who is not me. Plus, I would really love advice about nutrition for kids her age or older. My experience with a lot of “kid-based” nutrition resources (like Instagram) is that they are directed at parents of very young children. I love the Kids Eat in Color account and have gleaned some good ideas from it, but I feel like I should have started following it ten years ago. Not a whole lot of it is applicable to an eleven-year-old, you know? As long as I’m making a podcast wishlist, I also want one that isn’t focused on weight gain/loss or being fat. There are plenty of OTHER valid reasons to eat a well-balanced diet, and that’s the message I want to get across to Carla at this very vulnerable stage in her life.

I want someone to tell me what to DO. Someone who understands that it’s not as simple as “just don’t have those things in the house,” because I don’t want to make “those foods” more tantalizing by being forbidden, and because I do think eating is MORE than just nourishing our bodies. Someone who gets kids who are picky. Someone who knows what to do when a kid is fine just not eating if the food on offer is unpalatable to her. Someone who believes in health at every size and who isn’t going to suggest cutting out an entire macronutrient. Someone who has better arguments against candy and chips than “they will make you fat.” Someone who also believes that candy and chips do have a role – if a far, far less frequent one – in a well-rounded diet.

I want to be clear that things aren’t DIRE, or anything. I think Carla eats a decent mix of fruits and veggies and fats and proteins and carbs. Her doctor has never expressed concern with how she is growing. I just wish I could get her to eat a wider variety of things, and that she would be open to eating a wider variety more often, and that I could get her to be less reliant on/interested in snack/junk foods. I just feel like we’re at an inflection point and I want to help her figure out how to eat in a way that is both nourishing and satisfying. Probably I will just keep flailing along as best I can, punctuated by moments of throwing my hands in the air with the impossibility of it all.

Yesterday, I forgot my address. I am putting this in print both because it was hideously embarrassing to the point that I keep going over it and over it in my mind, and committing things to print often allows my brain to stop dwelling on them; and because I want to have a record of it just in case this is the beginning of a steep slide into dementia. This happened during my writing group session. One of the members asked for my address and I could not remember it. At all. I mean, I knew the street name, at least. But I could not think of the street number. Our other member had to look it up in her phone for me. It was so awful! How do you forget your own address?!?!?! Is this a perimenopause thing? Is this a side effect of my ongoing lack of solid sleep? Is there something else at play? Or is it just a memory blip on the wide spectrum of “normal”? I don’t know, but it was alarming. 

What are you thinking about today? Have you ever had such an upsetting memory lapse?

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Thursday Randomosity: Hot Sauce and Gravel Edition

We are cartwheeling down the last grassy hills of summer – exhilarated, off-kilter, trying to soak up as much summertime fun and relaxation as possible before school begins (Fifth grade. FIFTH. GRADE. Eeep.) while also dealing with all the chaos of moving. My mind is going in a million different directions, which calls for some Randomosity.

We finally told our neighbors that we were moving. I don’t know why we waited, but we did. But we thought we should give people a heads up before the realtor stuck the for sale sign in our yard. The ones we told were a gratifying mix of sad that we are leaving and excited for us. One neighbor seemed genuinely distraught, but when I told her that we’ll be moving to a neighborhood where there are other ten-year-olds on all sides, she visibly relaxed. “Oh, I’m so glad,” she told me. “Every time a house on our block went up for sale, I used to pray that the new family would have someone her age to play with.” I found this so touching – that she would not just think about Carla, but that she would go out of her way to pray for her. This is the kind of neighbors we have. This is why I have such mixed feelings about moving away.

Our house has never looked better. We cleaned and tidied our house to the hilt for the realtor photos and it looks SO GOOD. It has never looked this good. It is impossible to keep this way. Poor Carla. She has been enjoying a TON of screen time because she can’t do anything to make a mess. So much of our stuff has been put away for the sake of tidiness, too. Our realtor specified that we needed to clear off the counters as much as possible, so in the kitchen I had to hide my tea kettle away along with the paper towel holder and the dish scraper and the hand towels. In the bathrooms, we have to put all the shower items (shampoo, conditioner, face wash, razors) under the sinks and swap out our normal towels for “pretty towels” (which I interpreted to mean The Guest Towels, because I am not buying new towels for the sake of aesthetics). All of our chargers have been relegated to the nightstand drawers. Makes normal day-to-day living a little awkward. 

Never have I been so thankful for my zooper. It is getting SUCH a workout. Potential buyers seem to completely ignore the sign we put up inside the front door that says “please remove your shoes or wear these foot covers.” I can tell because none of the shoe covers have been used (although I suppose people could be removing their shoes). And there is constantly grass and bits of dirt and other debris all over the floor. I am zooping all the time. Plus, I shed CONSTANTLY. I knew this about myself, but now that I have to tidy everything ALL THE TIME I am newly aware of how hairs seem to leap off of my skull every time I move. Thank goodness that my beloved zooper seems to have no problem sucking up the rogue hairs. 

It is also good at sucking up gravel. Yes, gravel. I picked up our paper towel holder (similar to this one, if you want to picture what it looks like) to move it from the counter into the pantry where all the shameful things go and the bottom sort of dropped out. Later, when I told my husband what happened, he said, “Oh, that’s probably because I dropped it the other day.” The weird thing was: it was full of gravel. GRAVEL. Like, that’s the weight that the manufacturers used to fill the base. I guess it makes a sort of sense? Maybe gravel isn’t particularly expensive, and maybe it’s easy to access, and it is heavy. But what a weird thing to put inside a paper towel holder, amirite?!?!?! And the gravel got all over my kitchen. Everywhere. Fifteen minutes before Carla and I were supposed to leave for a showing. 

One of Carla’s favorite birthday gifts was a dinosaur mask. I can’t remember if I told you this already? If so, you will just smile and nod through the retelling while you think of other things, yes? My husband and I got her these Therzinosaurus claws because she had specifically requested them. I guess a friend of hers had them? And she was excited to have them, but kept asking, “What about the mask?” (This friend apparently had the mask, too.) So we went to Target and she was able to spend some birthday money on the matching mask. The mask and claws come as a set, too; not sure why we didn’t get her the whole set to begin with. To be completely honest with you, I thought it was kind of a dumb present. But she asked for it, and I’m not sure how much longer she will want to play with toys, so we indulged the request. And I was WRONG. It is an awesome gift. The mask attaches to your face in such a way that the jaws open when the wearer’s jaws open. And the claws go on over top of the hands, so your fingers are still free to do things. It is VERY cool and I think any dinosaur loving kiddo would love it. 

I need to find a new favorite hot sauce. There has been a sriracha shortage for more than a year now, and I ordered a few bottles of my favorite sriracha sauce (Huy Fong) every few months while they were still available online, hoping to wait out the weather conditions that devastated chili crops and stopped production. But I am now on my last bottle. I am finally coming to terms with the fact that I will need to find a new favorite hot sauce. It’s sad, because it is really the perfect hot sauce. Sriracha is by far my most-used condiment. I eat it on tacos and salads and put it in stir fry sauce. This doesn’t convey just how dependent I am on sriracha sauce. We eat tacos pretty regularly, and I cannot eat a taco without hot sauce. Hot sauce is an essential ingredient. Although I haven’t been looking very hard for a replacement, I have tried some store brands of sriracha with no luck. Now that I’m on my last bottle of the real thing, I need to step up my search. I think that I need something that is not pretending to be sriracha.  El Yucateco is my go-to hot sauce for enchiladas and nachos, but it’s too intense for me to put on tacos. Cholula is wonderful on burritos and black beans and rice, but I don’t like the way it tastes with ground beef. The Ortega and Old El Paso taco sauces are okay in a pinch, but not my favorite. Before sriracha came into my life, I used La Victoria hot sauce on my tacos. I suppose I could return to that, even though it’s not as spicy. But maybe this is an opportunity to try NEW hot sauces. I have read a few “There’s a sriracha shortage, try these alternatives” articles and none of them has been helpful. (It turns out that I am extremely choosy about hot sauce. Chile crisp and sambal oelek are textured, not smooth; Tabasco is thin and vinegary. None of these are adequate sriracha substitutes, even if they have their place.) But hot sauce is expensive and it’s hard to know where to start. Do you have a favorite hot sauce? 

What non-essential-for-nutrition-or-life food item, if suddenly unavailable, would leave you feeling most bereft? Sriracha is mine, I think. My husband would probably choose peanut butter. My daughter would probably say ketchup – I don’t think she could live without ketchup. Do you have something you use ALL the time, or love so much that you would feel lost without it?

Speaking of food, as I usually am, I have reached the stage of packing where food preparation is becoming slightly tricky. I have been trying to pack away non-essentials, and have already put together several boxes of kitchen items. This came back to bite me this week when I tried to make paprikas and realized that I had packed the potato peeler. Hmm. Why did you do that, Past Suzanne? True, this is probably the one meal (besides Thanksgiving) that requires a potato peeler, but still. So I had to peel potatoes with a knife and it was not nearly so easy. Then I decided I was going to make muffins for my writing group. (One writing friend has moved to the city for the summer, so my regular writing buddy and I invited him to join us.) But… I had already packed away the muffin tins. THEN I looked for Carla’s dinosaur taco holder for taco night, and… I had already packed it. Womp womp. I wonder what essential non-essential cooking item I will need and be unable to use next. 

My hair is driving me bonkers. It’s been nearly four months since I last had my hair colored, and boy can you tell. The grey is really insidious, creeping in around my ears and in patches at the crown of my head. The worst part, for me, is that the way the grey grows in, it makes me look like I am balding. My hair parts naturally on the right side of my head, kind of at the outer edge of my right eyebrow. But the hair on the bottom side of the part is so pale that it looks like scalp. I don’t think it IS scalp, although it could be that my hair is also quite thin in that spot (gulp!), but whatever is going on, it doesn’t look good. I have been increasingly self-conscious in photos, to the point that I have begun parting my hair on the other side of my head. This is WEIRD. It looks weird, it feels weird. My hair flips up where it shouldn’t. But at least I look less bald, I guess. 

In other aging news, I have a new wrinkle. Wrinkle is kind of a charming word – that bright cheery i, the fun tongue-trip of nkle. But the object it refers to is less charming. This one is kind of like a double frown that bridges the inner corner of each eye over the top of my nose. I do not care for it. Also, I can’t figure out what facial expression is CAUSING it. If I knew what face I was making to develop this wrinkle, I would STOP DOING IT. I have sort of decided that it has something to do with my daily 3:00-5:00 am wakeup, because the wrinkle sometimes stretches over my eyelids into the portion that is swollen from lack of sleep. But I can’t correct THAT, lo how I’ve tried.

My husband and I have discovered a sad truth: we should have done a lot of these home improvements EARLIER, so we could ENJOY THEM. We have been enlisting a lot of professional help to get our home into selling shape, but we have also pulled out the old DIY artillery as well. He and I are GOOD at DIYing, and by “he and I” I mean that I am good at persuading him we can do a thing and then he is good at executing it. (DIY projects require a lot of skills that I lack, like patience and the ability to paint/cut/hang a straight line.) (I am, however, extremely good at driving to Home Depot and buying supplies.) One thing we did this weekend was to replace nearly all of our window screens. I am embarrassed to tell you the state of our screens, but they were ROUGH. And I have no idea why we never even EXPLORED the option of fixing them. Never! I mean, four or five years ago when I was determined to replace our windows, I guess I figured we’d replace the screens too… but beyond that, I never once thought about them except to lament the fact that if we wanted cool, fresh air in our bedroom at night we would also have to welcome a few bugs. The thing is, replacing screens is SUPER EASY. And inexpensive! I have gotten many, many quotes for screen replacement and they range from $42 per screen on the high end to $25 per screen on the low end. But we did it ourselves and it took maybe three hours and about $60 to replace seven screens. This has been the case for EVERY IMPROVEMENT we have done. Why did we wait until the literal last minute?!? When we move into the new house, I have vowed – to my husband, and now publicly – that we will fix things right away, not let them fester for a decade or two until we plan to move out. 

Do companies ever listen to their own hold music? This question is brought to you by being on hold for 26 minutes with the electric company as I waited for a human to help me transfer our service to the new house. My local hospital system has a pretty decent hold line – music, regularly interrupted by brief ads for critical health services, like “make sure you get your colonoscopy!” or “regular skin checks are a great way to identify skin cancer early!” That kind of thing. But the electric company’s hold music is NOT good. It vacillated wildly between normal volume and way too loud. When it got loud, it was full of static. And the “song” that kept playing on repeat would stop abruptly as though a customer service agent were finally going to answer my call, and then start playing again from the beginning. 

Have I mentioned how much I hate the idea of strangers TOUCHING my THINGS? Every time we get home after realtor showings, I feel like I should Lysol every possible surface people might have touched. Yuck. 

Okay, that’s it for now I think. What’s on your mind today?

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Grocery Store Report; Doubly Awkward Encounter; Dinners This Week

I don’t have any new shortages to report, although Lunchables, which seemed to recover briefly, are once again non-existent and frozen pancakes remain highly elusive. But I had to rush here immediately to alert you that iceberg lettuce at my grocery store is currently selling for $3.50. That’s U.S. dollars. THREE DOLLARS FIFTY CENTS. Iceberg lettuce. 

I am well aware that prices of many items are creeping ever upward, but this seems like a GIANT LEAP. Usually, a head of iceberg lettuce is somewhere between $0.99 and $1.50. So the increase feels rather dramatic. 

It wasn’t even a particularly large head of lettuce, either. Smaller than usual. 

I find it so curious that the label says “2 for $7” instead of “$3.50 apiece.” Does 2 for $7 sound BETTER? Because it doesn’t sound better to ME. When did ICEBERG LETTUCE become such a hot commodity?!?!

Well. The other types of lettuce seem to be holding steady at their normal egregious pricing, so I’ll just forego my beloved iceberg for something more nutritious and less delightfully crunchy, like romaine. 

I was so gobsmacked that I mentioned the price increase to the checker. He commiserated and said that the shock waves of the pandemic were causing very strange cracks in the system. Even though I haven’t noticed a big difference in staffing – I see the regular staff members I’ve come to know over the past decade – he said they are really struggling with understaffing issues. 

He was the only checker open – which didn’t strike me as too strange; it was eight in the morning after all. But there was a guy behind me with two items to my full cart, so I let him go ahead of me. Then a woman got in line behind me, also with two items. What was I to do in that situation? Let her go ahead of me, too? It would have taken five seconds but then what if the next person showed up and only had two items? Or five items? I told myself that I had done the nice thing, letting the one person jump ahead of me in line, and that I didn’t have to do it again. But she had SEEN him go ahead of me, and I didn’t want her to think I was a jerk. So I told her I thought that the customer service desk would check her out, since she had so few items. She thanked me and headed off to buy her muffin and juice at the customer service desk. 

The whole interaction was super awkward already, but then it became doubly so when I realized she was my old hairdresser. 

I swear to you that I blogged about breaking up with this hairdresser, but I rummaged around in my archives a bit and couldn’t find the post, so you will get a small recap: I went to this hairdresser for several years and liked her. But then she started outsourcing things to others so she could work on other clients. Not just the shampooing. But like… “Oh, I’m going to send you over to Dean to do your color while I cut this other person’s hair.” Or… “Kelly’s going to trim your ends and then I’ll be back to do your color.” I did not care for this. First, it was a salon that charges more based on your stylist’s level of expertise, so I felt a little miffed that I was paying for HER level but getting half of my hair done by Dean or Kelly, and who knows WHAT level they were… plus, I wanted to see HER because a hairdresser/hair-haver relationship is very intimate and based largely on trust. So after this happened a few times, I went elsewhere for my haircare needs. 

It’s so AWKWARD, though, to dump a service provider. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine having an end-of-relationship conversation with a hairdresser. “It’s not you, it’s me” sounds even more insincere when it’s directed at your stylist, right? So I just… ghosted her. (I did the same to the next hairdresser, too, which is even MORE awkward because she remains my husband’s hairdresser.) (Then my next hairdresser ghosted me, but that was because she didn’t return to work after the pandemic and who can blame her.) I have seen the old hairdresser out in the wild a couple of times, but on those occasions I spotted her from a distance and I think I was able to slip away before she saw me. Or if she saw me, it was as I walked speedily away, head down, eyes averted. Yes, I am very mature.  

But this was the first time I have seen her face to face. Not only that, but I SPOKE to her. I was wearing a mask and glasses, and I am several years older by now. Sure, I remember her name and her daughter’s name, and the type of books she likes to read, but I was one of many clients that she’s had over the years. So I’m hoping she didn’t recognize or remember me. 

There’s nothing to be DONE about this very small, very fleetingly awkward interaction. Even if she did recognize me. Even if she did think, “Wow, there’s that person who ghosted me half a decade ago.” Even if she reacted with anger or hurt feelings. I can’t change any of it. It will likely be years before I run into her again in public. And yet I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT IT, and may continue to do so for hours/days, twirling and twirling the interaction around itself, trying to reshape it or make it less awkward by perseverating on it. Why is being a human so rife with these little inescapable twinges and pains? 

Let us now change subjects abruptly to meal planning.

I went to the grocery store with one meal in mind, and while I was there I came up with several possibilities. So now I have a full fridge and a nice list of dinners to make for my family this week.

Dinners for the Week of November 15 to November 22

WAIT A SECOND IS THANKSGIVING NEXT WEEK WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TIME WHERE HAS IT GONE?

  • Fire Fry: We haven’t had this in a long while, and I am craving crunchy veggies in a fiery sauce. My husband made me promise to drastically reduce the amount of spices I add to the yogurt though. He is no fun at all. 
  • Chicken Paprikas: Another meal we haven’t had in far too long. And I have a bunch of cooked, shredded rotisserie chicken in the freezer just waiting to be added to a rich, creamy, potato laced sauce and poured over noodles. 
  • Asian Chicken Salad: I think my husband will appreciate this meal, as it is neither tacos nor chicken/zucchini stir fry, both of which he is tired of. I will probably make some teriyaki dressing as well since I don’t care for the peanut dressing listed in the recipe.
  • Chicken/Zucchini Stir Fry: Oh yes, I love this stir fry. It’s so easy and so tasty and all the zucchini makes me feel so virtuous. And despite my husband feeling like we have it all the time, we do NOT and it has been many weeks since we’ve eaten it and it is time once again. 
  • Thai Red Chicken Curry: Am I in a stir fry mood or what? 
  • Red Wine Braised Short Ribs with Polenta: Why yes, this has been a recurring bullet on my dinner posts since October 25. I STILL have not made this meal, but the short ribs are in the freezer waiting to be immersed in red wine until they collapse in drunken ecstasy and the polenta is very calmly waiting on the shelf and I have a nice package of inexpensive-compared-to-iceberg-lettuce romaine waiting in the crisper, so perhaps THIS is the week it will all come together.

What are you eating this week, the last week before THANKSGIVING, which is somehow nearly upon us?