My hair is antique lace

…or at least now I am treating it like so.

Analysis:

The longest layer is about belly button length, the shortest is just past my collarbone.  I’ve always wanted super long, beautiful hair.  Right now, I would say my hair is super long.  In college, I would say there was a point where my hair was beautiful.  But I’ve never had both at the same time.  For too long I have been high-lighting it over and over, straightening it and this just wrecks havoc on it, especially the hairs on the top and sides of my head.  The ends are no where near the same thickness as the roots.  Not even close.  I realized that this is because the hair on the top and sides of my head are the hairs that get bleached and styled repeatedly, and they are the shortest layers even though I didn’t deliberately get them cut that way.

Washing, or lack thereof:

For almost a year, I have dramatically cut down on the number of times I wash my hair per week.  It sounds gross, but I only do it one or two times per week.  Maybe three if I have important things going on.  Three max…and that’s rare.  Around day four when it gets gross, I just use loose face powder on the roots and put it up.  This has really helped because in a year, I have also not had a hair cut…and it’s still in reasonable shape.  I’m not allowing myself to cut or color it until right before my thesis defense…it’s sort of like a playoff beard.

Biotin:

Another thing I have started doing is taking 5000 mg biotin everyday to help my hair grow faster.  I am not sure if this is working yet, but I’ll give it some time.  At first, it did a number on my face, which was near perfection acne-wise before this experiment.  On biotin, I don’t get many zits, but I get big ones.  After a few months though, this seems to have subsided for the most part.

Sleeping:

When I was a geographical bachelorette, I wore sleeping cap to bed.  This really helped keep my hair nice and neat at night.  Though when my stint as geographical bacherlorette ended, so did the sleeping cap.  I felt stupid wearing it to bed where my husband could see me.  Just last week, I had slightly less old-lady idea.  I started wearing a head scarf.   At first, it made me look like I was sick and dying…so it wasn’t much better than the sleeping cap.  I’ve found a way to look reasonable.  I put my hair in two very low pigtails.  I make what I call “sleep tails” on both…that is I put a hair ties about every four or six inches down the length on the pigtails.  I tie the head scarf around my head so that it protects my hair roots and tie it in a knot on the underside of my hair.  It sort of looks cute.  If I had make-up on, I could possibly pull it off outside of the house.  Anyway, this keeps every single hair in the same place all night long and when I wake up, no knots!  Just after a week of doing this, I can already feel a difference in my hair.  Supposedly, pillow cases snag the outer layer of the hair and night, especially if you are tosser and turner like me.  Sometimes I would wake up and I couldn’t even brush through my hair…and if I had a bad dream or something and sweat…forget it.

I imagine after a year of doing this, I can get the top and sides of my hair to actually grow.

Styling:

Though everyone says heat styling is bad for your hair, I still do it.  You see, my hair is quite curly.  If I cut eight inches off of my hair, I could get spiral curls.  Now the weight of the length sort of stretches them out.  Since my hair is fine, it lends itself to manipulation easily, so straightening is not difficult.  It’s actually easier than curls.  Straightening my hair helps keep it knot-free and I can go much longer without feeling the need to wash it.  But I think that the way I was drying my hair and straightening it was causing breakage, so now I’m trying air-drying until I can’t stand it anymore.  Then I am very anally straightening it in tiny one inch sections, so no single hair gets pulled or broken.  The sides are the most curly and also the most broken, so I’m just trying to live without perfectly straight side hair until I can get it to grow and have some weight to straighten it out.  Since I wash my hair infrequently, it also get styled infrequently.

Why do you care?:

I don’t know, you probably don’t.

Mediterranean vegetables

Even though I am a bachelorette for two weeks, I’m trying to not eat cereal for dinner every night.  I enjoy cooking, but I really enjoy cooking for other people much more.  Tonight for dinner, I’m having Mediterranean vegetables.  It’s easy and yummy…another slow cooker recipe, actually surprisingly similar to the one I just posted, but not soup.  I wasn’t a slow cooker fan until about two months ago.  It really works well for cooking vegetables because it slow cooks the vegetables over low heat, so they keep their vitamins.

Ingredients:

1 can of tomatoes

1.5 cups of vegetable stock

.5 cup of wine, I use red because that’s what I have, but white may be better

Fennel bulb, diced

.5 onion, diced

2 cloves of garlic

1 carrot, half-moons

.5 can of artichoke hearts

2 bay leaves

1 tsp oregano

1 tsp thyme

salt and pepper to taste

I just put everything in the slow cooker around lunchtime and it’s ready for dinner time.  I like to serve it over brown rice and some sort of legumes or beans.  Tonight, it will be lentils and rice.

Minestrone

I’m going to start posting some of my vegan recipes to share with all.  Mostly because I am bored.  Secondly because I would like to debunk the often held myth that vegan food is gross.  To start, let’s begin by saying I am not actually a vegan.  I eat honey liberally.  It’s delicious and in return, for the bees, I supply them with a multitude of backyard flowers and crops.  I will eat meat if someone prepares a meal out of love for me that includes meat.  However, at home, I do not eat meat at all.  Nor do I eat dairy or eggs.  For all intensive cooking purposes, I am a vegan chef.

I think most people think vegan food is gross because they think it always uses tofu or some other creepy thing.  I don’t use any meat, egg or dairy “substitutes”.  And here’s why…Good meat is good.   Period.  No over-processed soy product is going to replace good meat.  I’d rather eat no meat than bad meat, so if you want to replace bad meat with a meat replacement, go ahead, but I choose not to.  In a recipe calling for egg, there are many natural foods that can replace the egg’s purpose.  For example, in pancakes, I use a mixture of bananas and vegetable oil to perform the binding function of eggs.  Soy milk, almond milk and oat milk are just plain good.  They are better than cow’s milk in my opinion, but they taste nothing like cow’s milk.  I was never really a dairy milk drinker, I only used it in cereal and such, but I’ve been a soy milk drinker since college.  The stuff is delicious.  In most recipes, soy/almond/oat milk can be used to perform the colloidal function of milk, except in something like pudding.

The place where I think most people go wrong is they take an omnivore recipe and then replace all of the carnivore ingredients with herbivore ingredients.  Take something like tacos for example.  Tofu for beef?  Soy cheese for cheese?  Soy sour cream for sour cream?  You wanna know why it tastes gross…because it is gross.  Tacos are good because they are a fatty mixture of beef, cheese and toppings combined in a fried tortilla shell.

Don’t get me wrong.  Tofu can be delicious when prepared with care.  I’ve had some killer salads with baked tofu on the top, which was way better than any chicken salad I’ve ever had…but it still tasted nothing like chicken.

To make good taste vegan food, you have to stop thinking like a carnivore.

Today for dinner, I am making a minestrone soup.  I decided to make soup because I had left over fennel stalks from earlier dinner that just smelled too good to waste.  It’s cooking in the slower cooker as I type…I mean, as I write my dissertation.

Ingredients

6 cups of vegetable stock

2-3 carrots, chopped

2-3 celery stalks, chopped

2-3 fennel stalks, cut big enough so you can fish them out easily if you don’t want to eat them

2 bay leaves

.5 onion, chopped

1 can of diced tomatoes

1 cup of uncooked white beans

.5-1 cup of small pasta

1.5 tsp thyme

1.5 tsp sage

black pepper to taste

I put everything in the slow cooker except the tomatoes and the pasta.  After the beans were cooked (about 2 hours), I threw them in.  Apparently, beans don’t cook well in acid.  I learned this the hard way from chili.  I also threw in some green beans because my husband for some reason decided that for dinner one night we were going to eat all but 7 of our green beans in the fridge…and what the hell do you do with 7 green beans?

It could be my best soup yet.  The smell is killing me.  It’s only 4 now, still like 2.5 hours until dinner time.

We’ll also be having baked potatoes.  Instead of butter, olive oil and vinegar is really great on them.

Working for the man

This semester, my husband is not teaching which means we are both doing research from home and we get to spend all day together.  We have instituted the work day, which roughly goes from 9-5 with lunch at noon.  We eat breakfast together, go to our respective offices around 9, take a lunch break around 12 or 12:30, complain about what a jerk “the boss” is and how we hate “working for the man”, go back to work until 5.  So far so good.  I got two great days of work in, and I worked overtime both days.  The first day was really frustrating because I couldn’t (and still can’t) solve the problem I needed to.  The second day was great.  I actually felt a little bit clever for once.  Today, I am taking a sick day.  The boss isn’t too happy since it’s only my third day on the job, but I really wasn’t feeling well.  I did a little work from the bed, but I just needed to rest mostly.  Tomorrow, back to the grind.

Dissertation Avoidance Complex

Yep, I have this.  Today, I did very little in the way of writing my dissertation or doing research.  I just can’t do it.  My brain is mush.  I am burned out in a long term way…not like I used to get burned out from a rough semester, but in a more profound, neural pathway changing way.  What I did do today was print out calendars for the months December2009 to May2010 and visualize myself finishing.  Very productive, I know, but it was somewhat motivating.  I also had my 19 year old imaginary skinny-punk rock personal assistant print out a fresh copy of a chapter I need to edit and send out to my advisor.  It is sitting on my nicely organized desk for the morning.

I have to defend by April 26 to graduate in May2010, which means I need to have my dissertation completed by March 26 to give my committee time to read it…I think all but one of them will indeed read it, word for word.  I set the deadline of February 24 for myself, which gives me a month’s worth of fuck-up time.  Really, I have an additional 3 months of fuck-up time, because I am funded through August2010, but I need to finish this bitch so my serotonin can resume flowing freely.

Here’s my basic dissertation outline.  The colors represent the amount of panic the chapter in question is causing me.  They correspond with our country’s ingenious method of telling us how afraid we should be when we fly on airplanes.

Chapter 1 – Introduction – not yet written

Chapter 2 – Background – written, but not set out to my advisor yet

Chapter 3 – Passive Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – written, pretty much finished

Chapter 4 – Active Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – not written, but well researched

Chapter 5 – Two-dimensional Multi-Frequency High Resolution Imaging – not written, not well researched

Chapter 6 – Active Imaging using Retransmission – written, but not set out to my advisor yet

Chapter 7 – Conclusion

Also before my defense, I plan to submit two journal papers and at least one conference paper, all which will be right out of my dissertation.  If I can, I will also try to get another two journal papers out of my dissertation, but I’m not going to kill myself to get that done before my defense.

I get lots of work done at Starbucks for some reason, so I calculated some interesting things about Starbucks and my dissertation.

If I go to Starbucks every weekday for 4 hours while I am finishing my dissertation, I will spend about $250 and ingest approximately 10000 useless calories.  To put this in perspective, the money spent could feed a family of four meager meals for one month and if I didn’t modify my diet to account for the yummy, sugary drinks, I would gain 2.8 lbs.  Seems worth it to me if it meant that I finished.

FINISH THE BITCH!

Iodized salt and soy milk

Lately, I’ve been having some issues.

I am constantly cold.  Which usually isn’t that odd, because I’m always cold, but I’m talking ridiculously cold like I can’t get warm unless I take a burning hot shower…so cold my joints hurt.  My house is at 70 degrees, so it’s not like it’s cold in here.

I think I’m losing more hair.  It’s just ridiculous when I shampoo and style my hair how much hair ends up in our bathroom.  Good thing this only happens once a week.  It’s not like I’m balding or anything, but my hair overall looks thinner than it did a few years ago looking at old pictures.

Somedays I’m so tired, I can’t even stand it.  All I want to do is lay in bed, and sometimes I do.  Like Sunday, I was in bed all day long.

Some of this probably has to do with hating school and being unhappy and stressed out, but it has become more pronounced since we started our new diet.  One could just and say “you’ve gotta start eating more meat”, but I don’t think that’s the case.  I have done some research and found that my symptoms fit an underactive thyroid nearly perfectly.  It has been shown that soy inhibits the thyroid, as does black tea, two of my favorite things.  It makes sense that the symptoms would get worse upon starting the diet because my soymilk intake increase by about 1000% since starting it.  Also, an iodine deficiency causes thyroid issues.  I’ve known for a while that we get most of our iodine from iodized salt because our diets, even healthy ones, generally don’t provide enough of it, but I thought that all salts were iodized.  Turns out, they aren’t.  It also turns out that we’ve been using non-iodized salt for years.  Great.  Considering that we eat out less and eat way less processed food, there no way I’m getting enough iodine.

So I’m going to try using the iodized salt and cutting down on soymilk.  I’m also taking a mega-dose of biotin everyday to help get my hair growing again.

New foods

One could call me a picky eater.  There are many common things that I simply do not like.  This can make going to other people’s houses for dinner difficult.  I do not like fish or seafood, period.  Even the non-fishy things all taste like a mouthful of ocean water to me.  People shit into the ocean.  Also pretty much any raw vegetable I am not going to like.  A partial list of vegetables I will not eat raw: Carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, onions, mushrooms.  You can imagine I cringe when someone else makes me a salad or puts out a veggie plate for an appetizer.  Sometimes I will chew on a single raw carrot to be polite for 20 minutes much like my dog.  A partial list of vegetables I will not eat cooked: mushrooms, sweet potatoes, spinach (or any cooked leafy green), brussel sprouts, big squashes.  This is usually OK, because most cooked vegetables I actually really like, including most on my “do not like raw list”…except for the mushrooms.  People that like mushrooms, love mushrooms and want to adulterate everything with them.  I also do not like beans, especially when they are ground up into mush, which makes Mexican tough.  Hello tacos.  Also, not a big nut fan.  Honey roasted peanuts only please.  I never got people and their damn cashews and pistachios.  What an over-priced, over-hyped food.  The perfect way to ruin cookies or brownies is by putting nuts in them.  Gag me with a spoon, grandma.

However, as I am getting older, I’m finding that I wish that I liked all of these foods.  I feel like I am missing out on a lot of good things.

Since starting our new lifestyle, I’ve been forced to abandon my childish ways and try many foods that I never would have normally tried.  When you limit the amount of processed food you eat, you need to expand your horizons to keep you palette interested.

It turns out that I am starting to like (or can at least learning to tolerate) most foods that I thought I didn’t like.  Foremost are nuts.  Turns out I actually love almonds and walnuts…just plain or on a salad or in an appropriate dish where meat should have gone.  I still don’t want them ruining my brownies though.  I’ve also learned to eat radishes and sprouts on my salads.  While I don’t enjoy the taste of them individually very much, they give a nice texture to the salads I eat twice a day.  Plus they are really good for you.  I’ve even tried mushrooms on my salad – cut up into very small pieces and with the creepy gills removed, they can be quite delicious.  I actually prefer them raw.  Cooked they still gross me out, but even still, tonight we are trying grilled portobello mushrooms.  I am forcing myself to try them…well because I never have.  They are marinating and look absolutely delicious.  I hope I like them, because I kind of miss steak…and they are the steak of mushrooms.  I’ve also tried butternut squash, which was really good both in texture and taste.  I’ve sort of had to learn to like beans…they are a good source of protein for us non-meat eaters.  Plus they make you feel full for a while unlike vegetables.  I wouldn’t exactly eat them solo, but in soup or chili, they are actually pretty good.  Raw vegetables, still not a fan.  Sometimes I put raw tomatoes on my salad, but I chicken out everytime and put them on my husband’s salad when he’s not looking.  Maybe someday.

Day 3 – dinner!

For dinner we had a little watermelon and a half an orange.  Watermelon was the first thing I bit into.  It was so sweet and so delicious…I just wanted to keep chewing it.  The orange tasted quite tart, more tart than usually, which is good because I think my salivary glands forgot how to work…this got them going.

I weighed in at 1XX+2 and weighed out at 1XX-3.  That’s 5 pounds.  Holy crap.  I’ll probably gain most of it back, but it would be nice to keep it at 1XX!  My husband lost 6 lbs and wants to gain like 12 back.  Haha.

We may have some more later tonight…wait, we definitely will, unless I barf first.  Herbal tea is whistling!

Day 3 – breakfast time

I slept through the night without throwing up!  Yay!!!  I did feel a little bit sick right before heading to bed, but it went away.  I almost slept through the whole night, I woke up twice and just pet the kitty for a while…a real kitty you perv, her name is Maggie.

Last night we exchanged massages.  My body has actually been sore, especially my lower back.  I’m not sure if it’s the decreased activity and so much sitting or if this is what it feels like when your body cannibalizes itself.  It’s not that bad, but not really pleasant.  The massage definitely helped.

This morning, I feel pretty good…not hungry, but I am really looking forward to the watermelon tonight.  Today I will take it really easy, just rug making and some grading…and probably against my will, some football watching.  Yesterday, I was fairly active.  I vacuumed the whole house, which takes about 30 minutes and we took a 30 minute walk.

We also went to Whole Foods to get some food for Monday, since we have none.  It was a little bit like torture.  I’ve never really spent a significant amount of time in that store because I don’t have much desire to buy organic vegetables; however, they have some really great conventional food too.  They have a great selection of rices, grains, dried fruit and nuts, which are all cheaper than the grocery store we usually go to.  We have been mostly avoiding peanut butter since we started eating much healthier because of the hydrogenated oil and sugar they add to it, so we ground our own peanuts into peanut butter there.  I’m soooo excited to taste it.  It’s probably great!

Day 2 – lunchtime

Sooo, last night kind of sucked.  I went to sleep just fine around 11:30pm and slept until about 5 am, where I was awoken abruptly by a dream where I found out I was pregnant.  I felt my heart pounding in my chest when I woke up and felt like I was going to throw up.  My hands and feet were a little tingly.  I woke up my husband because I was freaking out, ran into the bathroom to throw up nothing.  I had nothing to throw up at all.  I drank some water while hanging out on the bathroom floor and felt much better and went back to bed.  An hour or so later, the same thing minus the pregnant dream happened, but I had some water to throw up now.  So I got up and walked around a little drinking some water.  I stayed up and felt OK for about another hour and threw up again.  After this I went back to bed and stayed there until 11am and haven’t throw up yet.  I feet generally OK, though my hands, ankles and knees are a little bit tingly sometimes.  I’m working on my area rug and watching some trash on TV.

Supposedly puking while fasting isn’t that uncommon.