Product

A friend introduced me to Nioxin brand shampoo for fine hair and I love it, I lost my last bottle at the Y--There were just a few teaspoons left, but the stuff is so expensive and takes so little to wash my wash'n'go hair. Today at Kroger they had a gel for thin hair and I bought it, and boy it works, I think I am going to use this often. I haven't been doing one thing with my hair this summer except washing it and wearing it completely flat and very very short. It is supposed to spike. Now I found the thing that makes it do what it is supposed to do. Remember, I promised in my first post that this would be a boring blog.

Grasshoppers

I remember the grasshoppers of my childhood in California as gigantic. I saw photos of them this week saying they are as big as your finger, they really were that big! I wonder if the carnations that grew everywhere really smelled so spicy as I remember? Not hybridized out of scent.

Something for Rose

Something flitted through my life yesterday that made me think of my grandmother we called Mammie. At 1604 she scrubbed and waxed the stairs to earn money to buy at least 12 grandchildren identical Christmas presents of the underwear kind. She wore shirtwaist house dresses and black clunky shoes size 10 with a quad A heel. Her hair was always carefully brushed and contained in a bun with a part on the side and a slight lift to the front before it was wound tightly into its bun then secured with hairpins and covered with a hairnet. I suppose the apartment was tiny, it was two rooms, a kitchen with her tiny white enamel table and her sturdy wooden box that she used as a stool. After she would wax the kitchen floor, she would cover it with newspaper to keep it clean. There was a dining section of the room with a table and chairs and one of those white metal cabinets where she kept our olives and our alka seltzer which Rose and I thought was a great treat. Alka Seltzer! I don't think we had much pop, so that must have been the lemony tingly thrill. Above that cabinet she hung a framed drawing of a horse I had done, it was so wonderful of her to do that for me. We could have a whole jar of those green olives with pimento as a treat. The tall skinny jar about the size of a 50 cent piece in diameter. WOW! those were the days! There was a "front" room with Papa's bed and Mammie's sofa bed where we slept with her when we stayed over.

The ice man actually still came to this apartment and carried blocks of ice up the back stairs. The bathroom was shared amongst the apartments on the floor and had a huge claw footed tub. My grandmother may have kept that clean, too. I think I remember four apartments on the floor. Everything was very dark. It was so much fun to get on the bus with Mammie and go downtown to Woolworth's. That special smell that Nancy Griffiths says smells like bubblegum on the bottom of a leather shoe ground into the wooden floors. She's right. My other grandmother took me to L.S. Ayres. Papa would come home from work, the machine shop, and throw his keys up to us from the sidewalk. He may have whistled. Papa was pretty scary and stern then once in a while he would surprise you. He took me downtown once and bought me a real drawing table--and a couple of learn to draw books by Walter Foster. It meant so much to me that they noticed my interest.

Menards

Just got back and they have 200 watt equivalent energy saving bulbs, now I can READ! Almost every bulb in the house has been replaced with a fluorescent bulb, but they never seem bright enough for a boomer to read by.

I got here just in time to get a call from my daughter in Israel, she is having a great time and will be headed back to the states next week. midweek.

My lawyer daughter once had a really bad allergic reaction to preparing fresh mangoes, did you know they can give you something similar to poison ivy? (in your mouth) I ate three in one day and my lips are verging on that Hollywood star injection look, just a bit. Maybe I shouldn't peel them either. This may be a warning to me! When I was in college, I didn't know mangoes were a fruit, I thought they were a green pepper, so imagine my surprise when the new Baskin Robbins in town had mango sherbet--and it wasn't green, I was mystified. A year in Florida cleared that up, the mango tree in one of the biggest trees down there and the fragile fruit falls all over the ground. Who knew?

Appropo of Nothing/Random Thoughts

1. I hate the new Home Depot commercial with the Asian family where the little girl is manipulating Daddy then Mom pays her-- yuchhh. I get angry every time I see it and want to run in here and write it down. So there.

2. I forced myself to go out and chop weeds in that hole DH left a year or two ago for the future studio-- actually the studio will exist by the end of this summer. Some people call it yard work or gardening, but it was merely weed chopping.

3. Spider Solitaire is a cruel invention.

4. A friend has the theory that summer break is Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and I am on saturday and we go back to school early Sunday afternoon. June is Friday, July is Saturday, August is Sunday. That really makes it seem short.

3. I am reading a Chris Bojhalian book, I loved "Midwives".

4. I read for a couple of hours in a local coffee shop today and noticed I am not the only person there just to read. It is a way to ignore the relentless distractions of home.

5. My niece who is awaiting her baby girl from China wants to get together this week and that sounds like fun!

Workout

Great tough workout last night, and the rain poured down sounding like buckets of bricks on the school's roof. I did stagger home last night and could not have mowed like I did on Monday. 30 minutes on the elliptical and 30 on the treadmill, plus half hour of rather difficult floor exercises. I am feeling more flexibility coming back into my hip joints, it is noticeable. This morning I went off to the pool, it was closed and I was wearing sandals, but I went into the fitness center with another swimmer and we rode the new semi-recumbent bikes for half an hour followed by a two hour breakfast and chat with a colleague from school. I got to see all of the pictures of her new grandbaby on her new digital camera which is the same brand as mine, but much more compact, very nice.(Camera AND baby) It is a gorgeous day but it is fast becoming terribly humid out there. I have a bag ready to go to the park and draw. Maybe I will just do that and I will feel like I have accomplished one of my summer goals, or a step of my summer goals.

Water

I am addicted to the morning swim classes, my whole sense of well-being is around that in the summer time. That may be unacceptable, I must work on that. I always feel fresh and new in the water when getting some laps and stretching out my muscles. Tonight is my really tough workout and I am going to try to get a full hour on the elliptical. I am not getting my summer reading done. What is it when there is too much time and you don't get things done? I can't really say that to anybody because that is not a problem for most people, they have too much to cram intheir day. I have many things I want to cram in my day and don't. If I had known what this summer was going to be, I would have scheduled some classes at the university, I need to get that done for next year.