I Kinda Disappeared

I realized the other day that I had been sharing photos on social media but not on here since well my last post in August.  That wasn't intentional necessarily.  It was just easy to throw them up from my phone while I was sitting still for a minute.  Teaching during the pandemic, trying to take my own class and taking care of myself plus mom took more out of me than I thought.  My hair is growing quite a bit, mostly because it's locked into a style where I'm doing even less to it.  I'll show you photos of that in a second.  Part of that is to protect a weak loc and part of it was I had a ton of speaking engagements over the last few months and no desire to keep pushing my hair out of my face.  I like it, just hard to get to sleep initially for the last few months because the hair is getting longer which makes the spot in the back where they join up lower.  So I'm going to just dump photos in here for you to see and then I'm probably going to fight taking a nap so I can do some homework and grading.

September Photos

October Photos

look a little crazy in that last one lol

November Photos

New Interface, Hate This

Two of the primary platforms I utilize are switching the layout and I have to say I kind of hate them both.  I didn't default back to the old Blogger interface because they said it was going to disappear soon but that new Facebook had to go after I couldn't really control what I wanted to see on my feed.  Right now it's gonna stay "classic" until I'm forced to make the switch.  In other news, I got my retwist done by Sarah who started my locs in the first place.  Two years and one month or so into the game at this point.  I'm happy with the outcome and the drive is actually a little more straightforward.  I need to hang out under the dryer longer next time because dead center on my big head was still a little moist when I got in the car.  Anyhoo here are some photos.

And the comparison to last year

The Only Thing Constant Is Change that includes my hair

I am about a week and a half out from my official two year loc anniversary.  That's actually kind of amazing for me because really this was an experiment in my patience and seeing what, if anything, my hair would do in this state as opposed to a giant undefined fro which is where I was stuck after big chopping.  There was also some noticeable breakage in parts of my hair where I was wearing a head band to create a puff when the fro was just too boring for me.  The locs in those spots may be a little shorter as a result but are still long enough that most people wouldn't notice.  As a coworker says now, my hair is draping.  At the longest point in the back it sits under my color.  The sides are resting comfortable on my shoulders and the front is playing catch up.  I'm ok with all of it for a few reasons.  The first of which I'm pretty sure my hair always grew at different rates and this just proves it.  Second, my hair has different textures all over my head with the tightest coils being up front and the looser ones being in the back.  That could account for length differences maybe but it mostly just makes the locs in the back more prone to spring hair free between appointments--I'll come back to this.  Third, not that hair isn't always an extension of you but these FEEL like an extension of me.  The struggles, the triumphs, the history is all here in my hair.  I started these a few weeks before I started teaching my first set of graduate students.  Those humans are weeks away from graduating and going out on their own.  I got my laser surgery a few months later.  I haven't purchased glasses in a over a year.  Very random.  All of these things have happened with me growing out these locs.  Tons of memories attached to them.  Looking forward to the next phase which either means a new stylist or going out on my own.  I'll decide that next month.  I had someone in town do them yesterday and add some extensions in the spot that just refused to stay in the surrounding locs or loc up on its own.  Next month I'll see the other person that was recommended when I started my journey and after that I'll know what it is I want.  I need to vibe with a stylist and if I don't then I may as well get used to doing it solo and then going in for special occasions.  Okay here are some photos and then I need to try to sleep.  Regional conference is in the morning.

Love yall

So here we are, back where we started

I have been home mostly since mid March.  All travel has been halted, classes were taught remotely, there has been no tennis and I have had no retwist since February I think.  Right before I went to see my nieces and yeah my brother but mostly my youngest niece for her birthday.  I have to drive a bit to get my hair done and the city where I typically go was in major lock down for almost two months.  My loctition appears to be stepping away from doing hair and my initial one is taking over her clients but it's been nearly a month since I got that news and still freshly parted retwisted hair so I'm debating going back to doing my hair again solo.  That terrifies me now more than it did when I just went natural but I'm not sure if it's I'm lazy or that I have to do more reading on my own to be healthy.  On the flip, much like when I was doing my own hair pre locs I get to save a lot of money and I can do my hair on my schedule and no more hour long commutes.  Given the pandemic it may be the best option because there's no way to prevent getting exposed save not leaving the house and not letting anyone in the house.  I'll think it over but you know me.  I tend to make decisions after thinking on it for longer than any human should and asking for input.  That's the stage I'm in now.  I'm also in the itchy scalp and needing to wash my hair phase so I may do that tomorrow regardless of anything else I do.  Hope you are all well. 

Six Months Down

I am just home from my loc retwist.  We may have to allot more time because it's always been thick but now it's getting longer and is taking more time to get her done but I was close to right on the time today so I feel good about that part at least.  It feels like the entire back row is hanging towards the base of my neck now instead of just brushing it but I'm sure there's some length disparity here and there.  I also have two or three locks where the loose curly hair is thinned away from the bulk of the hair that is loc'ing but the rest of it is thick and doing it's thing.  Should have remembered to asked about that today but this whole being sick and draining thing is effing with my sleep so I was just glad to sit down and let someone else play in my hair like for real for real.  The new shop is a little further away from home but it's bigger, seems more private and I think they will grow into it well.  Regardless, my hair still looks good, it feels good and I'm glad I started this journey.

Photos are below.

Loc Update & End of Semester Praise Report

So let me start this off by saying as of about 8 hours ago I'm officially done with this semester.  I cannot at all begin to explain how excited that is.  No last minute grading or negotiations with students about their grades.  I was even able to help one out on a paper she needs to rewrite for someone else.  I stayed on top of my grading this term with my two official classes, internship and research.  Proud of myself on that front so yeah do a dance there.  Okay let's move on.

So yesterday was my loc retwist and my hair keeps maintaining well.  As they get longer I can see more closely what size they will likely be as they continue to mature as well.  Loving that.  I'm officially five months loc'd as of today.  I saw someone's locs fresh off her retwist when I was just getting settled into the chair and she's probably six months plus ahead of where I am but around the same size and I was like in love.  We started talking to someone else in the shop who started wondering if the loc life was for her and it was like ma'am totally depends on you but I'm loving this process in ways I can't actually articulate.  She asked if I was saving money being loc'd and I'd have to say probably not on one front.  I'm still having to pay someone at least once a month to do my hair.  That's instead of the every two month Senegalese twist life that would be the equivalent of three months of loc visits and one month of my hair doing whatever it wanted while I let it rest.  Plus products.  At this point, I'm light on products outside of oils and my hair is doing its own thing with minimal input from me.  We both shared that sentiment and she seemed to take it to heart but probably not ready for that and I totally understand that.  It's a lot to commit to.

The Year of Many Changes

I have been a busy girl.  I've gone from planning a graduate program to nearly being done with the first semester of a graduate program--five more to go.  I've gotten another 20 ish students to conferences.  I've gone from planning a study abroad course to being four months away from heading out on said trip and have been fundraising my ass off well figuratively not literally cause my butt needs to go to the gym.  And while all the work stuff is good, the personal stuff is good too.  Earlier in the year I planned on getting Lasik cause I was tired of my glasses costing a tiny fortune and if I could I would like to opt for just waking up and seeing clearly with no assistance.  Recovery time was factored in and July seemed like the best option but mom was ill so I stashed that idea.

Two Month Update & Other Stuff

Hey guys,

I am finally coming up for air from last week.  I was busy every day but Friday when I started getting sick and just slept in.  Monday through Thursday was super hectic for me including a drive in for my second retwist.  My loctician is on maternity leave so someone else in her shop is filling in.  In general I liked the new technique but she combined a few without letting me know and they just looked awkward when I came home so I split those and went about my day after letting her know I had done it.  There was also a bit of oil overload so I will probably ask her to stand down on that next time.  Now beyond that I noticed a few things about my hair. 

First thing is the length of these coil/starter locs.  My hair is longer all over, save the damaged patches I mentioned a few months ago, to the point that it is hanging in certain places and is making tying it down with my old method problematic.  I did buy a loc soc from Curly NuGrowth and a new Slap Cap that allows me to tie it into place.  I have mentioned before that I have a big head and it's because I have a big head.  Anything that is wholly dependent on a band to keep it on my head will be okay for a few weeks before my head stretches it out and then starts slipping off while I'm asleep.  Even with the tie down options I am probably going to put on an extra cap to hope that something has my hair covered in the morning. 

Second thing is even as much as I move around in my sleep and play in my head, still working on that, my locs are retaining their shape really well as has been noted each time I go in.  I wasn't sure that would happen because when my hair is in braids it is resistant to all of that and starts to slip in different places as soon as humanly possible.  Doing nothing to my hair is taking almost no effort.  I am more concerned about dryness of course but spraying with one of my moisturizers and oiling my scalp has been working well.  I may start adding some JBCO to the patches that were damaged before I started the whole loc process to help them grow but I may just need to massage those areas a bit more like I did many moons ago when my edges were on vacation.

Finally, I am just loving a new phase of my hair journey.  I'm not sure I would have gotten here without the long and winding road I traveled and not because I had issues with locs but because I wasn't ready to risk whatever I thought might be in play professionally and personally by going in this direction.  That's the beauty of aging.  The field of effs you have to give about things like that become more and more barren.  All right, enough of me babbling. Here are update photos.  Oh and I lost 2 pounds lol.

Six weeks down

So this Thursday marked my sixth week of loc journey.  Nothing magical about it except I had some moments of randomness that I should document because they were both interesting and funny for me.

• I have random moments of wanting to wash my hair or go swimming  Neither of those things is gonna happen any time soon cause yeah I'm not trying to schedule an emergency appointment to get retwisted or hide my hair under a hair wrap until I could get back up to my loctitian.
• Apparently my face looks so different with my hair down in the starter locs a woman that has seen me repeatedly couldn't place me because of it.  We ended up having a good conversation about how locs start because she had no idea.
• Someone described the act of playing with your locs constantly as loc paw.  I don't have that anymore but I definitely have a loc or two that are my favorites and I find myself messing with them all of the time.
• The back row is holding up better than before.  Just that left outside one that keeps going meh I don't know if I'm about that life.

So that's what I know at the moment.  No major updates.

One Month In

There will be photos.  I was going to do before and after appointment shots but the way my lazy was setup that didn't happen.  I had a meeting before my loc session and yeah when I got out of the car I was just glad to be out of the car.  Everything started on time and I was happy that she thought the locs looked good.  The back row was redone and is chilling on my neck.  Correction the row above that is chilling on my neck.  The middle of that row is minding its business.  The edges are on my neck and feeling more solid than they do when I redo them but got confirmation from the person doing my hair that it was normal for that row to just be a pain.  Based on how they looked today she said that I should be loc'd in a year.  Yeah but letting my hair just do its thing is been oddly liberating even when it wasn't quite doing what I wanted it to do.  And because I haven't been doing anything to it besides oiling my scalp and moisturizing the length of my hair the shorter bits are growing out and I'm pretty happy.

I do need to be fired as my own photog but here's two new photos.  I may tonight or later this week do a side by side from a month ago to today but this is what you got for now. 

I'm happy with the size, the flow of my hair and that it doesn't feel like my hair is somehow unkempt.  The only thing I have decided to do is make sure that my hair is tied down.  The first week I just put on my bonnet and went to bed and I think that led to some of the initial fuzziness.  I was a little worried that it was flattening them out too much but apparently not.  I did grab some caps that are allegedly specifically for loc'd hair so I may just switch to that for the next few days to see how I like them or don't.  Right now I think it's fine because most of my hair is still short enough that it wouldn't matter what was covering my head as long as something was.  Six months from now that may not be an option.  I also thought about an easier way to get oil onto my scalp primarily and remembered I had a bottle for that purpose that I hadn't been using.  I'm going to whip something up and take it from there.  That's it for now.

One week in

This has been the longest week ever and not just because I have to make myself stop touching my hair.  It's the week of the summer intensive program and it has been plagued with rain so to make sure my hair didn't get wet I kept it under a head wrap the last four days.  I probably didn't need it today but I wasn't feeling fluffing out my hair.  I'm going to need to come up with a back up plan for the coils around the nape of my neck cause they are not about that life right now.  I fixed one and it was like good looking out.  The rest are slipping--which I have heard is normal but still--along the hairline.  There are only a few though so all things considered my hair is holding up relatively well.  You can't really see the parts at this stage and I'm ok with that.  My scalp was feeling hella exposed for the first few days.  The longer starter locs feel pretty solid and like they are going to chill into their next evolution.  The shorter ones are about 50/50 and then there's the aforementioned nape hair. 

My scalp isn't as itchy now either.  If I don't think about itchy scalp it tends to not flare up.  Even when I do it's something that can usually be resolved with a spot scratch here and there.  I'm going to try to stay up on documenting this process even if I don't post about it weekly I'll try to take photos.  For one thing I'm curious about how this will look over time.  But honestly I wanna be more mindful about my hair while I technically do less to it.  A few days ago I had a dream that I woke up and just combed it all out but I don't have plans to do that.  For now I just wanna keep it looking and feeling healthy for the next few weeks.  Retwist is already scheduled for three weeks from now but got an out of town trip that may push it up a week if I don't like how my hair is feeling when I get back.  I'm not sure why that would bother me really cause I'm not going to do much besides be somewhere with a completely different climate for this time of year. 

Here are the one week photos

So I Did a Thing

In my last post I mentioned I was considering getting locs of some kind.  One of my sorority sisters gave me the name of her loctitian and I ended up looking around for someone else I could consult with around that time.  I was debating small traditional locs or getting something called Sisterlocks.  You could hypothetically do something called microlocks without them being Sisterlocks but let me get into my thought process more.

So when I search for small locs the first thing that tends to come up is Sisterlocks.  They look like locs immediately but are super small.  You can only get them from certified Sisterlocks stylists or trainees.  Trainees are cheaper but the process itself is not in the realm of cheap.  Consultations appear to be a standard part of getting locs but the price for the SL consultation was 10 to 35 bucks more at a minimum than the traditional consult.  Okay I can go with that, you're specialized but I hit a roadblock in that process.  There were no SL certified folks in town and as much as they cost you want to see someone that is certified because the company will not assist you with a bootleg install if the were not in their system.  After months of driving mom back and forth to Indy I was trying to combine trips and couldn't find someone with an opening to see me to consult on the SL that was remotely reasonably priced for the install.  One site just said installation of the locs would start at $750 and then retwists would be around $150 for two hours with a fee per hour after that.  I don't mind paying for my hair but my math was saying that's gonna be 1500 at least over the course of a year and I would have to go a full year before I could take a class to learn how to twist my hair myself, gotta pay for that too, and as I mentioned last post my hair thickness impacts my lazy and I wasn't sure I had it in me to do my hair when I had 300 plus locs in my hair.  If you don't retwist them on a regular schedule they will break as well so yeah the way my bank account was set up it was going ma'am whatcha doing.  That plus as I mentioned no sessions.  I sent a message to someone and they never followed up.  I'm a big fan of go with what the universe is telling so I let Sisterlocks go for a multitude of reasons.

Hairy Decisions

I mentioned a hair setback last post and I'm happy to report that it seems like the hair is saying chick I ain't going no where.  It will slowly grow back out and in the mean time I've been debating what to do next with my hair.  I think I mentioned it before that I got frustrated with my braid shop because the last install I either lost braids around the edges or kept having them just totally untwist around the edges as well.  My hair is at least two different textures.  The vast majority of my hair is wiry and coarse so it hangs out with braids relatively well.  The back of my hair, the kitchen as my grandmother would call it, isn't as coarse and so there's a 50/50 shot that the weight of a braid is going to slide off of it not matter what I do.  That's why I would go back to the shop about a month after the installation and get them redone and by the time I was ready to take them out it would have slipped back to the redo point.  So yeah the braids weren't going to be a permanent option to help my hair grow especially since I wasn't retaining as much hair I wanted to each time.

Leaving my hair out is fine but limiting at the moment because I am not going to put my hair into a puff ball as much while the damage grows out.  I can attempt to make it defined and curly but that only works for a finite time frame.  That is leading me to what is totally a permanent solution but allows my hair to be in its natural state but in a style that is flexible.  I'd lose the giant fro option and I'm trying to decide if I'm okay with that.  I've been debating getting dreadlocs or Sisterlocks.  One would be more expensive but look better to me and the other would be more cost effective but may not be as manageable as I might like.  I'm going to include a slide show here for you to see what I'm thinking about.  Locs, if I got them would need to be on the smaller side which I think is like slide three here.  The Sisterlocks are smaller and the ones here are maybe a bit smaller than I might like but I like the look of them.




What are your thoughts?  If you have locs or Sisterlocks would you recommend them? 

Let's Get Caught Up

It's basically been a month since I posted and that is because the simple surgery that my mother was supposed to have on the first has turned into another weeks long odyssey.  On the very good upside she's back in town and on the mend instead of in a hospital an hour away from me.  On the down side we're looking at least another week before she's headed home.  Considering where I was two weeks ago though I'm glad that she's getting healthy and I'm not in the middle of making less optimistic plans.  I still haven't put my hair back up in a protective style and there are a few reasons for that.

I need to get used to my hair just being out.  I don't want to have to wig or bun or twist forever.  So far it's meant paying more attention to my hair and figuring how to keep it stretched.  When I just tie down my fro the ends get tangled up more and end up causing some breakage.  Since I got more mindful about what to do with it before bed there has been less of that.  I looked at lots of options and if my curl pattern wasn't supercalifragilisticexpialidotious then those would work.  I also saw the hair threading and yeah I just don't have that patience for that plus I don't really want it straight just not so shrunken in the morning.  I finally stumbled on someone with similar texture who said they just did two strand twists overnight and then fluffed it back out with water and product in the morning.  That has been working surprisingly well when I stick to it.  Gotta be consistent if I want the gray mane to keep it pushing.

And I did notice some damaged spots where my band sat in the back of my head.  I'm sure there are some protective styles that wouldn't put stress on those spots but for now I'd rather be able to get to them easily to nurse them back to help with whatever potion or product or scalp massage I like.  I have been using As I Am Long and Luxe Scalp Serum mostly.  I had some castor oil elixir but let me tell you about how my hair like legit rejected it.  My scalp was angry so I just skipped that.  I also briefly thought the damage might be related to the DevaCurl products but I haven't noticed any other major issues and the damage is on both sides in the same position so I'm going to go with the bands.  Thankfully the serum is soothing and so far my hair likes it. 

Classes are good and now done ha.  Now it's just take care of me.  I haven't gained any weight but I'm stuck at my loss point so back to the gym as well.  What's up with you guys?

Who is Massively Sleep Deprived with a Fresh Haircut

If you guessed me you are totally and completely correct.  This week is normally hectic for me because I take students to a different state for a conference.  That means 50 million store runs and stockpiling food for mom so that she doesn't have to cook for the count em THREE WHOLE DAYS I'm not there.  This week to add insult to injury mom gets freakishly sick the night before I need to leave.  So sick that during the wee hours of the day I need to leave we end up at the ER.  As ERs go they worked super fast.  From admission time to keeping her three hours passed.  The problem is those three hours led me into work time.  I had to shower, go back to the hospital, go to work and then decide about taking 11 students on a trip that no one else is prepped for except me.  After consulting with the doctors and seeing her in the morning I decided to go for it and at the worst I would crash when we got to the hotel.  As usual, there was some confusion upon getting to the hotel but we got settled in, went out for dinner and then I eventually crashed 20 hours after I was woken up to start my adventurous day. 

Before the great medical caper occurred I looked to see if there was a natural hair shop near the hotel because I was in desperate need of a trim.  Like my hair was healthy and felt good but the ends were like ma'am please quit playing.  It's been at least a year since I had a trim because my hair has mostly been in twists.  And when I was ready to stop twisting for a bit I looked up and my stylist has left the shop.  This matters cause I live in an area where there is very little option of getting my hair done in town by someone who actually understands African American hair.  If you remember that's part of why I quit relaxing it several years ago now because there was no one around that could be relied on after people got fed up with their shops and just moved to different shops without notice.  So instead of hacking my own hair off cause I would totally be focused on maintaining length more than health I figured it was time to find a professional.  Not surprisingly because of where our hotel is located but the search I did for natural hair salons near X came up with 20 results.  About five of those results were reasonably walkable from the hotel and two of them seemed to actually focus on textured hair not just be a hair salon using "natural" products.  I went with the one that had the most extensive site, reviews and seemed to be focused on hair health more than just providing a style of choice.  Heck I didn't even want a style I just wanted a trim.  Now due to the exhaustion of yesterday I had no idea if I would even make it to this appointment and was prepared to forgo the deposit if sleep said girl naw sit down.

I was in a good session until it wasn't and then I ran up and dropped off some stuff I knew I wouldn't need and headed out because I can get lost faster walking than I can driving.  It wasn't a huge detour but I made it there super early so I wandered around after making sure I was at the right spot.  Side note, the donuts were disappointing and I'm mad they are in my calorie count for the day.  I needed the hair cut like I thought.  And it was about how much hair I thought needed to go after looking at a few youtube videos, thanks ladies, about looking at the areas where our hair starts to then as an indication of health.  Depending on the area of my blown out fro I lost between and inch to two all over and it looked balanced after she was done so that's good.  She wet my hair again and then added a little bit of product to what I thought was scrunch it but it was more of a defining of my curls and put me under the dryer for maybe 15 minutes.  Let's just say I was surprised my hair was behaving and felt full and healthy with no weird knots at the end where it was tangling on itself.  Yeah for hydration, steamers and a good cut.  No photo cause I'm hella tired.  Maybe in a few days when I get home. 

Hope all is well.

Preemptive fail?

I took my twist down yesterday because I was tired of them and my scalp was super itchy.  But as I'm home alone for a bit there was no need to rush through the process of washing them out and what not.  Instead I lathered in some oils and leave ins so I could do a long term deep condition.  When I do that it loosens up more of the dirt and makes the detangling easier later.  I planned on washing my hair before bed and then doing an overnight deep condition before styling but that didn't happen. I'm home alone because I got up at 2:30 to make sure my mother was ready to get on plane at 6:30 so she could make it to Dallas in time for the family roll out to a funeral in another state.  So we're clear that is AM.  I still had to run to work, have a meeting and eat some food and then take down said twists.  By the time I was done with that and putting in the leave ins I was hanging on by a thread.  At 9PM I gave it up and slept all the way through till the next morning. 

I took my time today and watched more YouTube videos about what to do with my hair.  I was fully prepared to attempt a horse shoe method twist out.  I went through my routine, all was good, and my hair was like ma'am stop it.  I tried it with a few different lengths and thicknesses of flexi-rods but it was still like give up the ghost ma'am.  Now I didn't really have a plan B so I got frustrated and was about to say eff it let it just dry and I'll put in something to make it curly on Monday and we'll rock the fro with my new wraps.  But instead I went back to my old short flex-rods, hard to find them that length anymore which is neither here nor there, and did a normal flexi set using one rod per pull of hair.  I used Curl Manetenance from Aunt Jackie's and Wrap and Roll lotion from Jane Carter Solution and then set my hair.  I rolled it from the root for a change and I can't say it took longer than normal but I was taking my time.  Everything is rolled now and I don't have to take this down for over 24 hours so if it's not dry then my hair is just being evil.  I will try to take a photo when it's all loose and see if we have achieved cute curls or if I really need to learn hot to braid my own hair.

How Black Panther Made My Month

This is still going to be a hair post but it will take a random journey to get to me.  So unless you've been sleeping under a rock you know that Black Panther was released.  In FOUR FLIPPING DAYS it made over 400 million worldwide and appears to have picked up another 200 million over the last week.  It's a good movie.  It's a good superhero movie.  There are themes that I'm willing to unpack beginning March 1st but right now I just have to say after living with a shitty president, racism on steroids, white men convinced they are being discriminated against, enablers of all the aforementioned things and folks at work you can't back hand slap but who really really need that let's just say I was tired.  I was so tired that if someone had given me an express pass to what white folks THOUGHT Wakanda was I would have taken it just to be enveloped in blackness for a bit.  I bought my tickets to the movie weeks ahead of time.  I took mom and rocked my Wakanda Panthers gear (thanks inclusiverandomness.com) and then my I'm rooting for everybody black shirt.  It was glorious EACH OF THE THREE TIMES I saw it.  It gave me my mojo back, a new girl crush, someone to inspire my nieces with, and a great idea for a work thing that other folks loved too and boom now we're doing that.

Black beauty and excellence, especially in the post Obama moments, was much needed.  I don't think I was aware how much I needed it but I'll be damned if I didn't.  My petty has made all manner of things possible after Black Panther and I don't think folks will fully understand what this means now or for the future.  We'll see.  Now you're probably still wondering how this connects to hair.  Well every fierce melanin infused woman in the movie was rocking her natural hair.  No one was trying to assimilate into anything other than the follicles coming out of her head.  Some may argue about Shuri wearing braids but hell we do that to protect our natural hair so eff that argument.  Again this movie gave me life when I wasn't sure that's what I was even looking for.  If you haven't seen it go do so please and thank you then on March 1st we can talk.

I'm still deciding what to do with my hair.  This latest twist install has not gone well and the shop owner is making me think its time to figure out how to suffer deal with this ever growing mass of tendrils on my own.  Nope I won't have a stylist on tap but there's got to be a better way to do this without paying an arm and leg to someone who doesn't seem as invested in my scalp as I do.  And there's gotta be a way to work with this level of gray without it making me angry that the styles don't blend as easily as I liked. I'm committing again to figuring out the products and the styles that will make this curly cuteness pop.  First step up is hair wraps.  Let's see how that goes.

For now enjoy your journeys and your tendrils and oh yeah Wakanda Forever!

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.

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.