Blog break?

I have to admit I have almost completely mentally checked out of Sweden already. Haven’t even gotten around to blog for a while. Guess I really need to get away from things for a little while, even if it requires being around my family?

Anyways, I’ll be in Denmark until next Monday so I probably won’t check in.

Take care, everyone!

Unexpected results

It looks like the long sick streak for hubby has had an unexpected result. One of my “hair things” that he didn’t seem to make peace with has suddenly turned around.
    
Hubby had problems with accepting that I take supplements and he used to give me attitude for it. But a couple of days ago he started talking about how he had been sick for so long and I only finally caught it recently. First he had some sort of influenza, and then he got almost back to full health before getting sick with influenza again. Then he had what seemed to be a cold. Then he got the horrible cough he has had for weeks, first week with fever too. Hubby said he was amazed that after him being sick for some two months more or less constantly, I only caught it recently. After all, I must have been in his virus vapor a lot. He then said he had been thinking about it since we live in the same apartment, exercise about the same, do almost the same thing and eat almost the same things too. The only real difference is that I take supplements. He had obviously put a lot of thought into it!
      
It was a pretty unexpected thing to hear from him. I know his attitude used to be that they were unnecessary and a waste of money if you just eat healthy.
    
Well, I have always said that supplements needs to stay supplements and not the basis of your entire diet. I agree with him so far. I prefer seeing supplements as sort of a “backup” since it takes a lot of time and effort to eat a “perfect” diet. We try to eat pretty healthy in general, but we do have our take away, frozen pizzas and crisps…
    
It used to be the biggest annoyance between us when it came to my “hair” obsession (I will still object to that my supplements are only taken for my hair, but I wouldn’t have started with them if it wasn’t because I began learning on hair forums…)
    
We have our “The good, the bad and the ugly” disagreements when it comes to my hair.
   
The good (And silly)
Hubby has a weird obsession with my braid tassel. He likes playing with it, sniffing it and touching it. He also likes me to keep it long and fluffy. I naturally want to braid down as much as I can and keep the tassel as short as possible.

The bad
Hubby hates it when I wear head coverings. He dislikes that head coverings even exists to hide the “sinful and dirty female body that leads men into temptation” and says that instead of men blaming women for their own sexual urges they need to grow a backbone, develop a moral compass and take responsibility for their own actions. I absolutely agree on that. Women will never have equality as long as weak and stupid men blame their actions on women instead of taking responsibility for what they do or think. 
     
However, it doesn’t change the fact that there are plenty of unsuppressed and happily non-religious women just like me who likes to wear head coverings for their own personal reasons, sometimes even against the wishes of the people around them (Cough).
   
Although I don’t agree on his distaste for head coverings, I can understand and respect his opinion.
   
The ugly (And resolved?)
It used to be the supplement question. But now it seems that hubby is at least interested in giving it a try!
    
As opposed to the head coverings issue, I could never fully respect his opinion on this. I think I covered most of it in the first part of this post so there isn’t much to add.
  
I’m quite excited to follow the development on this!
Since I have several packages of supplements and oil waiting for me to pick them up when I return to Denmark, I really hope he remembers his epiphany when I have returned to Sweden and start taking my supplements again…

Pity party

I’m sick. It sucks. I blame hubby.

No, actually I blame myself. And irony.

Hubby has been sick for a week or so. Coughing and running a fever. I’ve been nursing *cough* babysitting *cough* him and he was worried he would get me sick too. Since it had been about a week since he started getting sick and I was feeling absolutely fine Wednesday when he last worried about it, I said “I think whatever you have can’t get me. Otherwise I would have been sick by now.”

Obviously that was tempting faith and/or irony?

I woke up feeling snotty Thursday. Today, Friday, I have a high fever; I’m snotty, sneezing, freezing and absolutely miserable.

To add insult to injury I should have been to Malmö with Biologist friend this morning and out for a steak and a stand-up comedy show later today with everyone.

The built in webcam in the purple laptop doesn’t do my bright red nose justice. I could win the Rudolf the Rednosed Snotdeer lookalike competition right now.

*Sniffle*

  

Detangle theory

I’ve never encountered anyone who had a ”proper” theory on the detangling process. Here are my thoughts…

Since it seems the front of your hair is weaker by nature and seems to take the most abuse from handling and environment, I try to spare it. It’s not something I put a lot of effort into, but I have just made it a habit.

For my morning detangling, after unbraiding, I separate my hair in two using my fingers. It gets a bit crooked and isn’t very accurate since I separate it where it feels the easiest.

Then I start combing it out. I start in the back and work myself up/forward. My reasoning for this is that when you have detangled a knot, you have also semi-detangled the neighbour hair.

That way when starting in the back and moving forwards and up, the front parts are almost already detangled and have very little resistance when I comb it through.

It might seem like a ridiculously small thing to do, but I believe if you make it a habit and do it every single day, it saves you a lot of handling damage in time.

Let’s say doing this tiny little move “costs” your weaker front hairline just 20 seconds less handling in a day. In one year that adds up to a little over 2 hours of combing.

Not bad for a silly little thing that just comes down to a habit?

Spending money ^^

Since I’m going to Denmark by the end of the month, I took the chance to place an order at my favourite online health store. It annoys me greatly that they don’t ship outside the Danish territories, but oh well… I would happily pay for shipping but I guess there just aren’t enough sales in that to offer it?

 

 I ordered 3 months supply of this supplement. It is pretty much your normal “hair” supplement but it contains fenugreek which I’ve been keeping an eye out for for years. Fenugreek is used in a lot of (Indian) herb mixes for scalp health and growth and is often found in supplements for hair growth.

 Then I ordered my trusty old multi vitamin, minerals and herb tablets. I must have been taking these for over a decade by now! (And it still amuses me after al these years that it looks like some sort of anti-algae remedy for aquariums!) 

I ordered two different fibre supplements. I have taken these two on and off for some years too. 

 Then I found by complete coincidence a pure Macademia oil. Hm? Can’t say I’ve ever heard of anyone using it pure, but it’s found in a whole lot of hair products. This will probably require some experimentation!

One of those days where you feel hopelessly old and boring

Went shopping with the girls.

First point on the agenda was to find two clips I wanted to see if Chemist #1 could use. Two Evita Peroni clips that never worked for me but I could never get myself to get rid of because the brand is so expensive. Holding them I realised I couldn’t remember where I bought them or if I had ever used them. Ouch. Then I felt old.

    

        

Nice artsy picture, eh?

So we went to the shopping mall and the first step was to get some coffee to get warm again. Damn, it’s so cold outside!

My first “shopping” stop was to go to the pharmacy to get something for my poor sick hubby and his horrifying rattling cough.

We later ended up at H&M and I found myself hating the colours of just about every single piece of clothing they had. Boring and out of touch with the fashion this season, are we?

I did find a grey sweater I would really like for hubby, but they only had it in M and S. So I figured since I liked the sweater so much, maybe it would work for me.

But then it got weird: In the female clothes, I’m a XS or S in H&Ms sizes. Which is super weird since I’m 173 cm or about 5´8” tall and that makes me a bit above average height. I’m not super skinny either, so me fitting in XS or S is just a ridiculous joke.

I figured I could easily fit a S or M in male sizes, but no: They were both too small for me! WTF?

I ended up picking up a blue version of the sweater in hubby’s size for him.

So with a bag of cough and cold reliefs and a sweater, all for hubby we leave the mall. Nothing for myself but two bottles of Sunsilk leave in conditioner and a bag of cotton pads. Hopelessly boring shopping!

We then proceed to Öob which is a super market/bulk store. Not exactly glamorous either! I get some VO5 and a super cheap large size conditioner.

Last stop of the day is a hardware store to get replacement parts for our leaky sink. Gosh, my life and shopping is so boring. I’m out shopping with the girls and I only return with sensible, practical things?

I really felt like a hopelessly old and boring married woman whose life revolves around coughs and dripping sinks…

  

Random hair picture

I tend to forget how massive my buns look. But once in a while they just “poke out” and remind me like this picture from a girls night out (Friends cropped out for their privacy) where I’ve had two or three glasses of wine too many and I’m cracking up about something silly for the group picture

Argh, seriously?

Blogger… What a headache. I seriously regret my choice of blog platform!

I’m well aware of the consistent trouble with posting comments. Even if I wasn’t already, people tell me on an almost daily basis. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. Ugh.

Now all my “right sidebar” stuff is moved down below my blog posts and there doesn’t seem to be a reason to. There is nothing I can do to change it and everything appears to be absolutely fine in my control panel so…. Huh? WTF?

  

Washing

I always love seeing my hair floating in the length of the tub when I wash. It moves around as the water pushes it and the ends almost look like flames in the wind.

I got my darling hubby to take a picture of it but I guess it’s hard to catch the true effect.

  

Stylist speculations

When I decided I wanted to get some trims done, I had happily forgotten one important detail: It requires me to actually go to a stylist.

Crap.

I don’t trust them. I really don’t.

Back before I started growing my hair out again and I didn’t care that much, they always wanted to “add layers for movement” or “thin it out”. Ugh. Even back then I knew my hair well enough to know that ended in a giant unruly puff-ball. One length blunt cut has always been the best for me. Some times I wondered if it’s because Danish stylists are trained on the dominant hair type of volume-challenged thin and fine and it’s because my thick coarse hair is so rare for a native Dane, but maybe not. On LHC there was an abundance of threads on traumatic cuts, “add layers for movement” and “thin it out” no matter location and hair type.

I have been lucky enough to avoid traumatic cuts, but I have still experienced enough of them to know that they don’t know anything about hair and the only thing that stands between them whacking off half my mane is my half-scowling-I’m-watching-your-every-move-look. I guess I have a way of radiating “I won’t pay you if you get “artsy” and I will make a scene”. Hah.

Even then I always ask them to show with their fingers how much they think xx cm is. They always show at least double and I always push their fingers together until they show how much xx cm actually is. Yep, I can be a condescending bastard, but it still blows my mind how often they mistake 2 cm for 5. Seriously. You would expect a 5^th grader to be able to show that, but stylists fail it Every. Single. Time.

So far my attitude has saved me from any scissor happy accidents, although I had two minor bad cuts.

• One was back when I had maybe 3 cm of hair on my head and I went to get the bottom cut to get away from the uncharming microphone-head look and make it look like it was actually a haircut. After the stylist had trimmed from the ears and down, she took a few cuts into the top as well. It was just a few quick snips that most of all seemed random and I didn’t get to stop her. I still wonder what the heck she was doing. Some sort of idea of thinning it out maybe?
• The second was when the top hair had reached about mouth length and I asked to get the back cut back to the level of my neck hair line. The stylist used a trimmer in the back of my neck and I thought she removed some fuzz or something but no. She actually removed the bottom of my hairline. I had an extreme case of mushroom-head for a month after that. Uff!

I had two experiences with bad use of equipment…

• Back when I had an ugly mullet-y thing and wanted to cut the hair in the back, the stylist placed me under some sort of rotating heater/blower thing set on such high heat that it made the skin on my shoulders hurt!
• At around classic length I went for a trim and when I shook my hair out, the stylist wanted to take a brush to my hair to detangle! One of those wide paddle brushes where the “teeth” looks like little nails with a head hammered into the cushion pad. To make it even worse, she reached directly for my scalp hair! Sheesh. Even pre-school girls know you detangle from the bottom and work up!

I got a bunch of more or less bizarre advice too…

• “This permanent colour isn’t damaging!” Gag.
• “Your hair can’t grow any longer than it was when you were 12!” I don’t even begin to understand this one! So the information on how long your hair was when you were 12 is somehow saved in the follicle and it can never grow beyond that?
• “You must colour your hair to the colour it was when you were 12! That is the most flattering colour for you!” What’s the obsession with the age of 12? And seriously, like almost all leverpostej (That too dark to be blonde and too light to be brown-colour that is extremely common here) I was blonde as a child and darkened with age. If I bleached my hair to the golden blonde I had then, I would look like an onion with ears. No thanks!
• “Your hair is so thick, we should thin it out” Yea, just what I need. The sexy pipe-cleaner look for my braids. And more volume.
• “Your hair is so thick, you must have a lot of scalp problems and dandruff!” Huh? Because hair doesn’t allow air to circulate or something? Or is it like if you’re very tall, you will definitely have foot fungus? What?!
• Not a hair advice but still, fresh from the stylist’s mouth: “You should always pluck your eyebrows in the direction you want the hair to grow. It will grow out that way next time the hair comes out.” Does this work on cowlicks too? I think a lot of people would love if that worked!
• Stylist: “You should colour your hair this colour!” *Shows picture* Me: “But that’s just a tiny bit blonder what mine is already” Stylist: “Yes but it will deepen and intensify your natural colour!” Ehh…? So I should damage my hair by colouring it to almost the same colour as it is already?
  
• The classic “We should add layers for movement” even though my hair is always up. Of course this would end in a lot of volume which I definitely don’t need.