shampoo-free, day 6

on day 6, my hair has made a complete turn-around! it is clean and shiny, bouncy and swingy, smells great, feels squeaky and well-behaved. a miracle, you ask?

sadly, no.

i am weak. i caved and went back to shampoo last night. i couldn't take sleeping on a greasy head for one. more. night. i think the nocturnal grease-wallowing was not helping my flighty complexion, either. so i slathered on immodest handfuls of ooey, gooey, smelly, sodium-laureth-sulfate laden, organix nourishing coconut milk shampoo and conditioner. and i have never been happier.

ahhh, chemically cleanliness. how i love you.

don't tell the hippies, but i also clean with bleach. a lot. sometimes i dream about pouring undiluted bleach on all the surfaces (non-porous or otherwise...eek!) of my house, sniffing the burning scent of clean. but i also like vinegar! i do! but i like bleach more.

amen. over and out.

shampoo-free, day 5

considerably less greasy, due to omission of vinegar rinse. i washed my hair last night with the baking soda and things were pretty okay. i am looking rough today, however, because i overslept and didn't wash my hair this morning.

i am *this close* to giving up on this hippie venture. i will give it one more day, because i feel that today is a poor representation since i overslept and skipped the shower. if tomorrow looks bad, i am jumping headfirst back into the den of sin that is scented, frothy, wonderful shampoo and evil, soothing, shine-making conditioner.

oh sin, how i miss you.

shampoo-free, days 3 and 4

still greasy, but it's the weekend so who cares. i read that i should stop using the vinegar rinse altogether, and that should nix the hobo-esque greasiness and general malaise that my hair is projecting. i'll try that next...

weekend of action

wow, did i ever accomplish a lot this weekend. please allow me to brag for a moment:

1.) i spent most of saturday cleaning out the hell-hole of my bedroom closet. it was an embarrassing mess, and i kept having these recurring nightmare-ish scenarios in my head where the house catches on fire and my messy closet is unveiled to the world/neighborhood in all its unholy glory. i mean, seriously. nearly all the hangers were hanging all snaggly and empty on the rod. all the shelves were either suspiciously empty or contained odd items like an empty tea mug or a wadded up beach towel from last summer. i had shoved my dresser into the closet last year to free up space in the bedroom, and somehow that action rendered the dresser useless - the top two drawers were filled with knotted up tights and hose, probably all riddled with holes and runs, and an assortment of seldom worn and ill-fitting bras. the other drawers were empty, and remained blocked by a drift of tangled clothes and shoes that reached mid-thigh. how does this happen? i am a grown woman and should be ashamed. it was also time to switch my winter clothes for my summer clothes, so i thought i would pull the ol' clean and switch all at once. and it worked! it was hellish, and involved 3 groaning bags of garbage on the curb - but it is done. i purged myself of all broken or worn out shoes (why did i have them in the first place?), all bags with rips or broken straps, and a ton of clothes to take to the thrift store. all in all, very cleansing.

i also found the camera charger buried in the rubble, so i will be posting pictures soon - very soon.

i also found that 90% of my summer clothes are either very, very ugly or too small. i will be the next contestant on "what not to wear" unless i go shopping very soon.

2.) scott and i planted our hedges in the backyard! most of sunday was spent hacking with a mattock, digging holes, hauling bags of dirt and mulch, planting bushes, pounding fence posts into the ground using a miniature sledgehammer, and wiring up bamboo fencing. scott did all the digging, so he's probably a lot more sore than i am! haha. serves him right, the manly man. i supervised the digging - which is a much harder task - by skipping around making helpful "suggestions" and trying not to be too bossy. he handled it very well and never once threatened me with the shovel. everything looks grand! and we only ended up making two unscheduled trips to home depot. i think all home improvement days involve at least two back-to-back unscheduled trips to either home depot or ikea. always. i can't really go to our neighborhood hardware store, as it is run by a mean, rude, old pervert who marks up the prices in his store. and he doesn't even carry flyswatters! fool.

3.) we saw a movie on friday night - part of the final showings of this year's Filmfest DC. it is called The Fall and it was just great. beautiful scenes and imagery, great story, cute little girl in the lead role. sort of like a fantastical Princess-Bride-meets-pan's-labyrinth. some gruesome parts, and some fairy tale parts, and everything good.

shampoo-free, day 2

kind of disgusting. even though i took a shower this morning, i have that greasy, tired, unwashed feeling. and my head is a teensy bit itchy. in fact, just seeing those words typed makes my scalp feel even itchier. *scritch scratch* overall, rather unpleasant. not to be deterred, i am going to do a tad more research and see what i can rig up to get rid of the oiliness. it's almost the weekend, and who cares how grease my hair looks. i am not going anywhere but home depot... maybe the grocery store... that's about it.

exciting updates on monday!

no-poo

as in, no shampoo.

one of the blogs i read has been discussing the use of baking soda and apple cider vinegar to clean(se) your hair and scalp, instead of shampoo and conditioner. hmmm. it sounds dodgy to me. i recall the paper-maché volcano projects of my youth. you know, the ones where you fill the innards of your homemade volcano with baking soda... pour in the vinegar and red food coloring... and stand back to watch the gurgle-y explosion... but i suppose that's not what will happen (surely not?) because in this shampoo-free regimen you don't mix the two parts - you apply them separately.

as someone with naturally greasy hair - no, i mean GREAZY hair - it still sounds dodgy to me.

but hey, i am always keen to subject myself to slightly hippie-ish beautifying treatments. why not give it a go? plus the benefits supposedly include shiny, bouncy, vibrant hair, the likes of which haven't been seen since the days of eden. because i am a brilliant researcher in my work-life, and a very lazy one in my own life - i only consulted the two resources that i accidentally stumbled upon:

1st one, very friendly and light on details (this is one of a couple of different mentions in her blog): http://angrychicken.typepad.com/angry_chicken/2008/04/melts.html

2nd one, militant and scary: http://babyslime.livejournal.com/174054.html

okay! so now i am armed with every bit of information out there, so i am ready to begin. i was really jazzed up about the idea last night. i wanted to start immediately, but i only had a sprinkling of baking soda left after a recent cleaning binge. and i was fresh out of apple cider vinegar. i suppose i could have used white vinegar, but it seemed extra stinky and harsh. then i remembered the militant lady saying that you should alternate the baking soda/vinegar thing with days of just washing your hair in plain ole water. so that's what i did today.

verdict, after day one - water wash, no soda/vinegar: my hair is just as limp as usual - no more, no less. slightly greasy - normally if i skipped a shower, my roots would be wet-looking and greeee-zay at the roots by mid-day. i think the water-wash simply distributed the oil and the result is mild, but uniform, greasiness.

tonight, i buy the supplies. updates to follow.

hedging our bets

or hedging our yard. either way, we're hedging this weekend!

scott and i went to Behnke Nurseries last night (which apparently just got a freaky looking new website) to pick out plants. Behnke's is the greatest nursery in the area. or maybe the greatest in the world. they have the best staff and the best selection of old classics and exotic varieties, and lots of regional plants. so anyway, we went and after a whirlwind tour of the shrubs and bushes... and after a lengthy discussion with one of the shrubbery professionals... we chose the japanese yew. i would link to a picture, but the camera is dead once again and none of the google image search results really look like what we got. so maybe i have the name wrong. but the important things are: the bushes were reasonably inexpensive so we could afford a slightly more mature plant to start with; they can be pruned into a thin hedge; they cap out at 7 or 8 feet; and they grown pretty durn fast. and the best part was when the shrubbery lady was walking around with us, making recommendations. she said something like, "well, you might consider a yew? now the yews are over here... no, wait, they were just here, i swear... now where have those yews gone?" and i had slap back my inner must-make-a-stupid-joke-at-all-times-gland which wanted to say "are you sure they aren't WANDERING YEWS? har har har." because, although the lady knows her plants, i wasn't sure if she would think of the PLANT called wandering jew, and think i was making some crazy antisemitic remark. but golly i wanted to say it. i still want to say it.

scott is working on saturday, so i'll do a little prep work and we'll do the big stuff on sunday. !! in the meantime, i need to find a place to rent a roto-tiller. the digging that happened during the Patio Adventure was enough to teach me that our yard is full of random crap suspended in a mix of hard clay and dirt. and that mixture is highly resistant to shoveling.

i am still hoping to make it up to the maryland sheep and wool festival on saturday, but those plans might be scrapped at the last minute. we'll see.

if i can dig up the camera battery charger over the weekend, i'll take pictures to document the mess. stay tuned.