I’ve found a great recipe for hair gel. It’s organic, really easy to make, and the ingredients are cheap 🙂 Well, the basic version is really cheap, and the ingredients for the enhanced version are cheap over time, though there’s an initial investment.

I call it elephant snot. This is due to the disgusting, egg white texture of the stuff. However, it looks fantastic on the hair 🙂

Method:

Put the flax seeds in a sieve and rinse them well in the sink using cold water.

Put flax seeds and water in a pot on the stove.

Bring to a boil and let boil for 10 – 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Pour goop into a sieve over a bowl. Stir to help the snot flow through the seive. Dump the seeds in the trash.

Add jojoba oil, grapefruit seed extract (preservative), vitamin e (preservative), glycerine, and essential oil (to desired scent). Stir lots, with a whisking motion. (Why, yes, I suppose an actual whisk could be used!)

Gloop the snot into some kind of a container. Because of the grapefruit seed extract and the vitamin e, it should not need to be refrigerated…

The consistency is like snot or egg white. Very gross. I’m somewhat concerned it will separate into its oil & water parts later. However, it’s ridiculously cheap, eco-friendly, and everyone says good stuff about it…

Lots of people use straight up flax seed gel with none of the extras. Flax seeds cost $1.75 *per pound* in bulk at the health food store, so it’s hard to beat the price…

Yup, still sunny. I admit that all this sunshine is distinctly weird.

Trader Joe’s strikes again. I bought 3 whites and 3 reds:

White
$2.99 chilean chard
$8.99 bogle chard
$4.99 vermentino

Red
$6.99 perrin reserve
$4.99 celier du rhone
$5.99 trentatare

Andrea bought 2 bottles of champagne. We opened the cheaper of the two this evening. It wasn’t bad at all, but for $5, it wasn’t enough better than Andre to justify the extra money.

Then we played miniature golf. Hilarious. Andrea and I ended up with the same score: 70. On a course where par is 54, it is pretty clear that neither of us will be rivaling Tiger any time soon. That was the first time Haley had played mini golf — she wanted us to play another game as soon as we were done!

So there’s a great live theatre group down here — the Melodrama. The Great American Melodrama and Vaudeville, that is. Sawdust on the floor, and tiny tables crammed close together. You can buy food and drinks and sit and watch the show in style.

Grandpa scored us some tickets, so we got to see the show. It was awesome! Gold Fever is about the antics of the residents of a mining town and some outsiders intent on swindling their gold. We bought slices of cake and a pitcher of margaritas. Alas, I was mostly on my own with the pitcher, so by the end of the evening I was *stuffed*. It wasn’t the alcohol that did me in, but the sheer quantity of food and drink I ended up consuming.

Afterwards there was a vaudeville revue wherein Snow White decided to become evil. So “bad guys” from all sorts of movies came and coached her in how to “switch sides”. Dr. Evil, Ursula the Sea Witch, Catwoman, Captain Hook, the Riddler… Naturally they were all singing. Haley loved it 🙂

Haley got back from her slumber party yesterday, and apparently didn’t sleep at all (at least that’s what she claims). She says that even after the other girls went to bed at 3, they snored so loudly they kept her awake. Who knows, it could even be true. So I fed her (the party was pretty last minute, and apparently they didn’t have enough food in the house for all the guests) and let her hang out for a bit watching Ghostbusters. We made a deal that when the movie was over she would wash her hair (it was crazy tangled though I swear it was brushed and braided before she left the house!). She got in the shower and about five minutes later I heard the water turn off. But she didn’t get out… I went to go check on her and found her lying in the tub trying to sleep. So I got her up and washed her hair and dried her off and sent her to bed. She made me promise to wake her up for dinner, because she was still hungry. But come dinner time, she couldn’t be budged. She did wake up very briefly around midnight, but I explained that it was the middle of the night and that she needed to wait till morning to eat. I woke her up this morning at 8:30 and after 17 1/2 hours of sleep, she’s in a much better frame of mind!

After breakfast we hopped in the car and drove out to Jed Smith campground. I parked the car and hauled our bikes off the back. We spent about an hour riding our bikes around the campground. This is a good place for a kid to practice because there’s very little traffic and the few cars are moving slowly. She was very intimidated by her new bike (between buying it and our adventure she’d managed to talk herself into being quite scared of it) but by the end of our hour she was comfortable with using the brakes to slow down (as opposed to just stopping) and had even learned how to shift gears 🙂 She still has some trouble getting started because she’s a little short for her bike, but I think that’ll get easier as she gets more confident.

Next we drove down to our favorite swimming hole and she changed into her swimsuit and played in the river. There were several groups there with young children, so Haley had some kids to play with. I sat on a very comfy rock and read and snoozed and hid from the sun. I let her swim for an hour and a half and then dragged her back on to dry land.

Now she’s back in the tub and she’s been there a while… But I can hear her splashing and playing with her toys. At some point she needs to wash her hair…

So on Thursday, Haley was invited to a slumber party Friday night. Last minute invitation. She was allowed to go, on the condition that she got her room clean first, which she did (more or less). During the cleaning we discovered that she had 2 copies of a book in the Pixie Hollow series. A whole series about all the faeries that live with Tinker Bell in Never Never Land. Very much a preadolescent girl thing. Convenient discovery, right before a birthday party! But then on Friday we couldn’t find it! So we looked and looked. The last place I’d seen it was in my room when she brought it to me to show that she had 2 copies. So I looked everywhere. Haley was convinced it had gotten under my bed somehow. (That was where I eventually found my iPod!) I was more skeptical, but after we’d looked everywhere else in my room, I lifted up my mattress to check. My pillow tumbled down, my laptop slid a couple of feet, my water bottle tipped over (no big deal — it was closed). And boy howdy did I have a lot of junk under my bed! But no faery books! So we looked and we looked, and finally, we found both copies sitting on her bookshelf. Aargh.

So we wrapped the presents and I dropped her off at her friend’s house. I was a free woman! So before I settled down with my dinner of cheerios, ramen, and champagne I thought I’d surf the net a bit. But for some reason my laptop wasn’t working. The power light was on, but the screen was black. I tried pushing buttons and clicking the trackpad… I looked down at the power cord: yup, it’s plugged i– And that’s when I found it. The puddle. Oh, I thought blankly, that water bottle wasn’t closed after all. Oh. Shit. Because my computer was sitting, plugged in, in a puddle of water. I unplugged it and yanked the battery. Water *ran* out of my computer when I tipped it over. So now it’s sitting, drying out. Much like Schroedinger’s cat, until I plug it in I can still pretend that everything’s going to be ok.

The webpages tend to recommend letting it sit for 72 hours to (hopefully) dry out completely before trying to turn it on — I guess that means I can keep hoping till Monday night :p

Dear President Obama,

I was terribly disappointed to see your administration’s response to the question of Gay Marriage. Comparing homosexuality to incest? Wow. What an incredibly shitty and ironic attitude towards this civil rights issue.

As a country, we constantly struggle with civil rights issues. It is a measure of how far we have come that you are president at all. Sixty years ago it would have been inconceivable that a black man should become president. Black people were second class citizens. They were not awarded the full measure of rights that white people possessed. (Hmm, sound familiar?)

Many people felt that this was unfair. They spoke out and marched in protests. Not all of those people were black. The civil rights movement would never have succeeded if all the white people had been content with the status quo. It required popular support — many people of varied colors standing up and saying, “This is not right.”

I’m not black. I’m day-glow, fish-belly white. It’s no skin off my nose if black people are oppressed. And yet, had I been alive back then, I would have proudly marched beside your ancestors. Not because I would have personally benefited, but because it would have been the right thing to do.

Of course, it would have been fairly easy for me to make such a gesture. After all, I am clearly not black. It’s a lot easier to be a supporter of an oppressed group than to be mistaken for a member of that group.

Fast forward to the civil rights issue of our time. It’s a lot harder to be a supporter of homosexuals. After all, it’s not like you can tell who’s gay or not just by looking. And so it’s easy to dismiss support for gay marriage as being “a bunch of queers”. Unlike white supporters of the black civil rights movement, straight supporters of the gay civil rights movement are not obvious. Many feel the need to declare themselves. Sometimes I wonder whether they are thinking, “They need to know that not all supporters are gay.” or “They need to know that I’m not gay.” Is that your problem? Gee Barrack, don’t worry. With your lovely wife and two kids, you’re probably not going to be mistaken for a homo.

So what is the basis of many of these objections to gay marriage? I think it would be difficult to argue that most of the criticisms are religious in nature. However, I was taught in high school civics that in America we have a separation of church and state. Because marriage is a legal status that confers many rights and responsibilities, it seems ludicrous that religion could dictate who receives that legal status.

Some people argue that “marriage” is a religious term, and that gay people should be granted civil unions. Fine. I think it’s rather petty, but as long as you guys are willing to spend time doing a “search/replace” on all the legal documents in the United States that mention marriage, and replace the word “marriage” with “civil union” I guess it really doesn’t matter.

But you’re not offering to do that, are you? Basically whenever civil unions are mentioned, they seem to be second class marriages. Good enough for them homos, but not as good as a *real* marriage, for real people.

I recognize that supporting gay marriage would not be a popular move with much of your constituency. After all, you ran on a platform that included your faith. But faith can be an evolving thing. Unless you’re following the bible strictly in your life (when were you planning on selling your daughters?) it seems hypocritical to pick and choose which pieces of bigotry you’re going to follow in your own life. You need to balance your presidential popularity contest with doing the right thing.

So Barrack, I guess I’m asking you to grow a pair. In the name of all the white people who stood up for what was right so that you could eventually become president, why don’t you stand up for what’s right, even though your marriage is already legally sanctioned?

Sincerely,
Meg Claypool