Bring on 2018

Two posts in the same month shut up.  This will happen more often I hope in the new year.  So this is just an end of the year wrap up thing.  I've spent the last few days throwing things away, organizing things, washing things and making plans for a new t-shirt quilt.  That t-shirt quilt planning has opened up a lot of room in my drawers which will help too as I have new t-shirts to replace them with as well as I want to actually get things completely put away after I finish washing them all.  In respect to the myriad of superstitions that surround Southern Black culture after the next load of clothes I'll be on washing hiatus until the 2nd.  We never wash clothes on the 1st of the year.  I think Grandma used to say you don't want to wash away good luck on the first but yeah we just don't do it.  My mother doesn't wash on Sundays but I wasn't in wash mode yesterday so boo we got one or the other.  I'm feeling better about that organizing thing cause really my room was getting a little nuts. 

We're under a wind chill advisory for another two days so not sure the gym will see my cute behind before the 3rd but I am washing new and old clothes for that process.  Found my lock and remember the combination--good looking out random number memory.  Found all of my gym shoes, one pair had been MIA for a minute, and have a bag to pack everything into so I'll be good to go whenever that is at this point.  But this weather is hella disrespectful so I'm glad that I planned well enough to have food ready through the 1st.  Regardless, this year will be on my own again.  I was sad when my trainer announced she was shutting down her online practice but it makes sense.  This isn't away to get rich unless you push more aggressive pricing methods and can attract a continuous client base.  It took me a minute to find her initially and the site that I found her on folded so yeah fitness online is a weird business.  On the other hand I had seen something before I heard from her that seemed intriguing.  I'll tell you more about it if I buy into it fully but give me a month first and we'll see how it goes.  I've done more meal planning as of late just to see if I could.  Honestly, if I cut out the snacking and think like Elizabeth lol this should be the year that Operation Serena Fine stays firmly locked and loaded.  Keep you fingers crossed for me.

OSF may go better with loose curls so I haven't gotten retwisted yet but I may do that just for convenience for a while.  I'm also ready to go get the edges redone about a month in or as needed cause my hair is not trying to leave my head like that anymore. I think I'm rambling now.  Y'all have a good New Year's Eve and I'll see ya next year.

I'm not in Witness Protection I promise

So apparently I was more neglectful than I thought I was with this page.  Y'all the last three months of the year have been high octane hot mess.  I'm going to try to keep these in categories that make sense so I'm not randomly but I can't promise that at the moment.  Let's get into it before I take a nap and say forget it again and boom it will be January.

Work: So in all the ways work can be frustrating and exhilarating it was this year.  I was heavily recruited to do something and after saying no to the first two proposals I negotiated a temporary gain to the salary scale and jumped right on in.  I've in in meetings I wouldn't have been privy to otherwise and have been able to share feedback that wouldn't have come up before either.  Lots of professional development opportunities for me and campus and that is flipping amazing let's just be honest.  It's also meant a crap ton more work and while my classes weren't impacted my normal response time to some things slowed up.  However, I was bright and shiny as much as I needed to be and have a few more major projects to wrap up before I can say I did some great work for you in ten months let's see what to do with it now.  I also got one major project to a point of completion and that ate up literally ten of the twelve months of the year.  It also led to a bit of frustration but hell it's over with in one regard for the moment.  New team is composed to move forward and we'll see how that goes.

Weight: Can technically keep this one short.  I am not back over the start weight but I'm only a few pounds still in the loss category.  The stress of the year meant I dropped the one thing that had been my saving grace over the last two years which had been self-care.  I spoke with my trainer about that  a few months ago and asked for a time out.  We're rebooting next week and I am going to try to spend more time taking care of myself as well.  Everyone is happier when I'm happier.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.  A girl needs some support.

Hair: So this one is weird.  I lost a ton of hair during my last take down but remember how I said I was slipping on the self-care? Well this fell into that realm too.  I'm totally responsible for the dry hair just saying girl please and taking a break.  It's still thick and while no gain was had from the last updo I wasn't bald lol.  The shape is slightly better now.  I may or may not put it back into a protective style before classes start but for now I am leaving it down, going to try to wash and style it for tomorrow so I can be cute on Christmas.  Regardless, this is part of the must do better option for 2018.  To that end I'm going to probably revisit some of the things I was willing to do a while back that I forgot about when I said this makes more sense.  Products are great but there has to be some routine that I'm willing to stick to at this stage.  And I may have to give away some more products and go with a plan B.  My hair dryer is great but my hair is too thick to be functional with that thing.  I need one made for thick hair with wider brush or comb options.  The diffuser is nice by my arm is literally mad as hell by the time I'm even half way dry.  Gotta use the next few days to plan some stuff out.

Random: birthday was good, dating is weird, friends are funny and my nieces are flipping amazing--big up to my brother for raising delightful children.  Butter London released polish inspired by the color of the year.  One was the direct color and one was Purple Reign.  Yep I copped that well both of them and a third light purple shade to add to my purple mix.  If it was gel I would have flipped my shit but it's not so my toe nails may enjoy it and I'll consider my finger nails.  Donuts are magical, meal prepping is easier when I'm tired for some reason, love my family and life can be good even when it doesn't seem like it.

Here's looking forward to a productive 2018.

Curly Girl Back From Hiatus

Hey Folks,

I just realized it's been over a month since I posted.  Right after my last post I went to a conference, taught a week long intensive course, wrapped up my other summer class, had to prep for fall classes, and had about 18 meetings all before classes started.  My twists were meh and I can't say that I was doing the best job taking care of them but I'll get to that in a bit.  I took them down Friday after work and was having a moment of regression.  I was back to mini afro puff status lol.  I left them in puffs for the rest of the night and yesterday as well cause.......lazy.  Much more on that later.  I've been watching videos on hair care and checking out products and adding a few products to my rotation to try out so I'll try to get to all of that now.

Living as a Curly Girl

So there's lot of randomness to share with all of you.  I'm taking a break from organized weight loss and meal planning until the week before classes start.  That's the plan anyway.  Next week it's back to before more deliberate about what's going in and out.  I'll be at a conference as well which means I'm normally moving around much more than I am at work so there's that.  Come August 13th it's time to get back on the grind though.  I feel a little fuller which I'm not digging and I would like to just have the health and mental wellness benefits that come when I work out regularly.  I'm giving myself between August 1 and December 31st to get back into the losing weight camp again.  If that doesn't happen I may have to cut all my hair off and move in with monks.  Okay that's not happening but I will be pissed.

Twilight Zone Marathons rock

So I logged on earlier with the intention of just giving a brief update on what's been happening and to of course go overboard with my happy for the tv show that makes all the random fireworks tolerable today.  Except when I got to my page things looked off.  Turns out Photobucket, who clearly is tired of giving away things for free, had replaced a few of my hosting images with one of their own saying that I needed to "update" my account in order to restore them.  So I click over to the site and look for something to update and there's squat.  I at that point am getting annoyed and start doing some searching before going directly to the website the image referenced.  In order to keep using the images as I had been the previous few years this blog has been active I would have to upgrade not update my account.  And that upgrade wasn't going to come cheap.  I had to be willing to shell out at least 40 bucks a month, or 400 annually woo two months free, to keep my links active in the way they had been.  Most of my images of my hair and stuff I upload directly to blogger so thankfully I wasn't losing a ton of stuff there but my divider bar, signature and a few things in the side bar were MIA.  I just had done some digging about other images and remembered I could embed the images in this site and just did that but then had to edit the HTML code.  Many cut and pastes, a random error that I had to look on how to fix and many saves to be safe and the page is mostly restored.  Some of the image tags for different posts will be absent until I go in to fix them but the page itself is good.

Adulting is Hard

It's been a minute since I posted.  I did all of things I mentioned in the previous post and since then have been in on a billion other meetings, been mom's doctor appointment taxi service and almost finished teaching all of my classes for the summer.  Two weeks from now give or take a day or so I'll be super duper done and can focus on rest, working on a presentation for the upcoming conference in August and randomly do a few things for my job in July but really I want to do as much of nothing as humanly possible. 

Amazingly enough my twists are still holding on and I am likely going to leave these in until the summer classes.  Then I'm going to take them down, tending to the trauma of detangling my locks and try to deal with my fro for as long as possible during the month of July.  I think I mentioned in the last post that I finally figured out that I probably wasn't using enough product on my hair after I washed it to let it dry.  My excuse will be that for relaxed hair would have been a hot mess had I done that and I'm still learning to process this textured hair versus the silky smooth hair.  On the upside I have no desire to revert back to relaxed hair.  For one thing finding a consistently available stylist in this area is a hot damn mess but beyond that I'm enjoying my hair and learning how to deal with the mass of curls that were on my head when I was a younger human.  I am looking forward to my real Mufasa Mane of salt and pepper tendrils.  I'm just enjoying my hair. 

Weight has been holding steady but that's because my gym motivation has been nil when there are 50 other things going on.  Meal planning thanks to my trainer is good but I need to revisit my self care mantra and figure out how to get kick started again.  Okay I'm for some reason watching the Belmont race so I'm going to get back to that and hope it cools down again soon so I can take a walk.

Life Lessons Learned

So this post is going to be super random.  I have gone through another round of install, take down, let my hair rest and reinstall of my twists.  I didn't take any photos cause I was like seriously done when I took my hair down.  Let me pause for a second.  I'm so damn tired I cannot see straight some days.  Work is as always hectic.  Mom is woosah it's time for mom to visit my brother and she's going through fifty million machinations to not go visit right now.  I still have grading to do, entitled students to entertain, evaluations to conduct and somewhere in the middle of that I still have to escort students to a field trip, present at a conference, present an award to one of my favorite students (ok that will be fun) and attend graduation.  There are good things in the middle of there for sure but a sister is exhausted.  It's that time of the year and if there was a teleport a la Star Trek I'd be on Riza on a quick trip getting massages and booze and sleeping in.  Oh sweet precious sleep. 

Tell you all about it....

.....when I see you again.


See I'm back to being corny.  So I mentioned last post that it's been a full year being natural with lots of protective styling I've gone from tiny fro to larger fro and loving it.  I spent the last week natural and tried my first for real wash and go that didn't to hell immediately.  There was some shrinkage of course but not as much as normal thanks to Jane Carter's products, which I did have to order from the site directly and Amazon.  Now I could have gotten it all from the site but I assumed my local Sally's had some products I wanted and they were running a 2 for 1 deal so yeah gotta take advantage of that but locally they have no love for me and my hair texture.  I'm better off at Kroger of all places.  Anyway I got all of my stuff by Wednesday but really just slept in a baggy all the days that I was teaching and then Friday afternoon came home and  planned to wash my hair again because it was almost time for a new twist install PLUS I had plans and wanted my hair to be shiny since it was going to be out.  I didn't actually get to my hair unitl Saturday morning.  Wednesday was the 13th Anniversary of when I became a Delta.  We met up yesterday to hang out and catch up.  Love my sands, I'm down front if you are looking for me.

The Last Time I Checked I only Had One Butt

I legit don't have a witty or appropriate title so I went with a line from the last movie I saw: Lego Batman.  If you haven't seen it you definitely should it's quite funny and actually much less kid oriented than you'd think considering it's made of Legos lol.  Okay so got lots of updates and I will try to get to them as I can.  I haven't posted since December and yeah I was borderline depressed post election and ensuing foolishness that was on the horizon.  I took a quick trip to London which was amazing.  So far the hotel I was staying at is home to the best pizza I've ever ingested and I was sad to leave it an ocean away from me.  They also had a Belgian chocolate pudding (chocolat pot) that was oh my goodness.  And breakfast was quite tasty as well.  Of course I took photos cause that's what we do now.  The pudding is covered in homemade whip cream, berries and with chocolate straws but not straws cause there was no way to even begin to suck anything through them without looking entirely stupid.

Ok enough with the food porn because while I was there I walked around a bit and actually got in a legit workout which was good too.  Cute couple to chat with on the way out.  Not as much on the way back but I did have the row to myself which was nice.  Since I've been back it's been one thing after another derailing both my time and my psyche some days but I realized a few days ago that it's been a whole year since I chopped off my relaxed hair and embraced natural life for good.  Well with the plan of it being for good because yeah I wasn't sure how my hair would grow or what it would be like and all that.  It's been in twists cause I'm super lazy and can admit to being a little self conscious about the tiny fro because shrinkage is a bitch. 

So I am going to share some photos of this whole last few months.  The first up is a photo of me in London with the fresh twists.  Then there's a collage of pictures.  First up is immediately after take down of the twists--I was feeling very much like a member of the Lion King.  Second is the morning after where I just rolled my untwisted hair around soft foam rollers.  Third is post detangling and the final one is just showing a little bit of the stretch.  Cause yeah shrinkage.

Now finally in my random updates, at least concerning my hair, is a year comparison.  I'm not sure if I look grayer in the second photo because I've developed more gray hair or because there's just more of it but here we go.  . 

So yeah my hair grows and it gets thick.  Moving through the detangling and take down process this time wore me out.  That's a good thing of course cause that means hair is growing but damn not sure what I'm going to do.  I feel like I lost less hair this time but there is still more work to do there.  Like taking down my edges faster and getting them redone cause they take more stress than the rest of my hair.  Staying more focused on moisturizing all of my hair.  I took them down this weekend because it felt like my roots were just screaming for moisture even though I had been tending to them as much as possible.  The length of my hair though was soft and pretty well moisturized.  Winning.  And star members this installation were Jane Carter Solutions products in particular Slumber Party.  I just bought a ton of new products from her and will be updating you as I use them.  Wash day worked better with DevaCurl products as my hair felt clean with no tangles.  The Kinky Curly products were where the tangles came in and came with a vengeance.  I took my time after my deep condition to move through most of the tangles with my fingers but then coated my hair with my products and did something I haven't done in a long while: 3 comb detangle.  Oh my gosh it still works lol.  And here we are with the hair. 

In terms of working out it's been abysmal for months now.  My visit to the doctor to make sure my girly bits were still where they should be lol reminded me that while I'm still not back at the formerly scary weight that I need to get it back together and actually utilize the service I'm paying for.  GYM GYM GYM.  I gotta do better.

How is life with you?