Product Review – Wigo Curling Iron

Posted on October 23, 2009 by

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Skilled as I appear with the eyeliner and skin care, I am a total loser about my hair.

It is bone straight and I have spent a lifetime trying to put curls into it. (Note Jenny’s Theory – No woman is every happy with her hair.  She has the thick and curly kind that I would just love and she’s tried every method of straightening known to Man.)  When I was 12, my mother paid a bloody fortune to take me to an extremely well-recommended stylist at Sam Martirano’s to get the darling corkscrew curls that were all the rage with the teased bangs in 1986. It did not last two weeks.

I’ve tried sleeping in curlers. Works, (actually works a little too well) but what a pain in the butt. And there was no way I was going to do sleep in curlers in the co-ed dorms.

I’ve tried regular curlers, steam curlers, round brushes…you get the idea. All that is left is frying my hair with the curling iron. I had a pretty good system going with the products last spring, but I cut my hair rather shorter and the large barrel wasn’t doing it for me, so I picked up a new curling iron. Because my last one lasted a good decade, I paid a moderately larger sum for the Wigo, about which the Ulta stores had been raving.  But then I was on summer hours, and you all know that I am pony tail girl all summer long – between getting up earlier and the humidity it isn’t worth styling my hair for real.
September arrives and I pull the curling iron back out. That first morning, I forgot to use the volumizing gel because I was half asleep. But I did my usual thing, sprayed with my usual hair spray and left for work
And my hair held all day. 

What the heck is the difference? Something about ceramic and ionic something-something. But I am using one less product in my hair and it is holding up for an entire work day. Don’t know what kind of damage it’s doing…

Overheard in My House: Conversation Between Kay and Kiwi

Posted on October 21, 2009 by

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Scene:  My mother was in the laundry room.  I heard the sound of Kiwi the Grey flying in to see her.  She lands on the dryer.

Kay:  Kiwi!  You couldn’t just wait on your perch for one minute?!

Kiwi:  (opens a pine nut)

Kay:  Kiwi!  There’s no eating in the laundry room!
Kiwi: (drops pine nut shell on the floor; continues to chew)
Kay:  Kiwi!  You can’t just fly around the house with food wherever you want!

OK.  Kiwi didn’t actually speak in that conversation.

Product Review – Eyeliner Sealer

Posted on October 20, 2009 by

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I started wearing make up at eleven. I know stuff. I don’t know everything, because who can be bothered? But trust me on this one – eyeliner.

I have pale skin and pale eyes, so eyeliner has always been my one most important cosmetic. Although concealer is rapidly catching up. But I have tried every kind. Eye pencils are really good for beginners, and the come in a wide variety of colors. But they smudge off really easily. Liquid eyeliner holds better, but requires really good technique, and even then it can look too harsh. At some point – I am thinking early in college – I discovered Clinique’s water resistant eye liner:
It is like a watercolor. You run the brush under the faucet for a second, until it is wet through. Then get some “paint” on the brush and paint the eyelid. Good product. I used it for years.
At some point, when I determined that I really should keep foundation around, I tried Bare Minerals. Best concealer ever, and I can even stand to use the foundation. Occasionally. Slowly, I started trying the other products. The eye shadow is loose powder, which is odd but perfectly good. The eyebrow stuff is works very well.
Then I tried the eyeliner.
It is also loose powder. The lady in the store told me to mix some with water and paint it on. Well, that worked with a built-in hard palette, but I am hardly going to try it with loose powder. I would never get the consistency right. So I brushed a thin line of powder on my eyelid and then dampened a really thin brush to “watercolor” it, which creates a kind of cosmetic seal.

I have just exactly enough talent to pull this off. Meaning that if I am not totally awake when I make the attempt, I might get soft black powder all over my face, fingers and bathroom counter. So when I screw up, I have to scrub everything and start all over again. And really, I didn’t think this stuff holds up any better than Clinique’s over the average workday.

And then.

I saw that Bare Minerals had a serum designed to solve my problem. “Weather Everything” is labeled as a “liner sealer”. The instructions say to mix it with the powder before applying, but I ignored that again. I put the powder on my eyelid, then put some sealer on the brush. The look was the same.

But people.
8 o’clock in the evening, I went to take a shower. I looked in the mirror and my eyeliner hadn’t moved. I walked outside at lunchtime. I came home and went walking after work. I played four tennis matches on Wii. My eyeliner hadn’t moved. I was so stunned that I rubbed it on purpose. Still didn’t move. It isn’t cheap, but I am in love with this product.

Poor Kid

Posted on October 20, 2009 by

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My brother, Scott, is a web guy. He builds web sites for a living. But he doesn’t like blogs and has a particular disdain for Facebook. A favorite story:

Scott keeps in touch with some people that he worked with at the Herald. They go to lunch every few months. He shows up at the table, all jazzed to show everyone the new pictures of Ainslie. One chick tosses them back on the table and says, “I’ve already seen these.”

He is floored. “They are days old. How did you see them?”

The answer, of course, is that she is Facebook friends with his wife, Becky. He pouted for days.

Earlier today, he e-mailed me that Wil Wheaton had been on The Big Bang Theory. I like that show, but I have missed so much that I am officially writing it off as a “pick it up on DVD unless it lands in syndication pdq”. But I knew Wheaton was on, because he blogged about it.
Unfortunately, I was busy with Professor Blight last night. (sigh).
Scott called me after work today, asking if I’d gotten his e-mail. I’d totally forgotten. He said it was hysterical. I told him I’d heard. How did I hear? Wheaton’s blog.

Silence. I swear he almost hung up on me. But apparently he tivo’d it so that he can make me watch it the next time I am there. That’s a good boy. Here is a picture of him, from the Alex Collection.  The surreal effect.

Book Wars

Posted on October 19, 2009 by

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They’re actually calling it Book Wars.  MSNBC, among others, is reporting that Wal-Mart and Amazon.com are engaging in a price war with certain new releases going for $9.  In other words, they are selling for a loss.  Just to tick each other off, I guess.

I can’t stand Wal-Mart, and I much prefer Barnes & Noble to Amazon.  Also, I’ve been particularly judgemental about books since I heard the rule of thumb that if the author’s name is larger than the title on the cover, it’s a bad book. 

But this is a bit scary.  Remember that horrible movie, “You’ve Got Mail”?  Meg Ryan had a decent line.  She disdainfully told the camera that she heard Tom Hanks’ character compare the selling of books to the selling of cans of olive oil.

That’s how I feel about this.  I realize that I don’t get to talk, inasmuch as I buy so (soooo) many of my books used these days.  But it offends my little sensibilities.

Maybe I am looking at this the wrong way.  Maybe I should just be happy that Amazon isn’t letting the Evil Empire off easy.

Hot Diggity Moon Dog

Posted on October 19, 2009 by

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My friend Jodi is starting a Blog.  I am very excited because she is one of the few people I know on Facebook that posts every day(ish) and is still interesting.  If she is going to post a sentence about her crappy day, it is something like:  “I left my cell phone at the office.  Should I go back to get it?”  I’m thinking about turning off my e-mail notifier thing because of all the conversations she generates.  Another was if you are interviewing candidates for a job, and the otherwise perfect person wears flip flops to the meeting, would you hire?  (The answer is no.  And NO.)

She is cool for about a million reasons but I will start here:

  1. She found a job in Milwaukee and moved there because she couldn’t stand living in the suburbs for one more minute.  I bet she can make a whole bunch of fun observations about that.
  2. She has two cats named…Vinnie and Leo, I think.  After the artists.  So she has goofy cat stories, which I hope will include goofy pictures.
  3. She is also back in school.
  4. She is my personal human urban dictionary.

Oh, and her husband is my friend Rich. 

Jodi’s first blog entry blew me away.  No “Hi, I’m Jodi and I am starting a blog because that is what all the cool kids do.”  She was all personal and relevant and current events-y.  Apparently, gay people are not allowed to be organ donors. 

And now that I have posted about her, she will be forced to keep the thing up.   For awhile.

P.S. Jodi:  Now my mother has your blog.

The House on First Street, by Julia Reed

Posted on October 18, 2009 by

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Book 40
I pulled out another New Orleans book because my friend Andrew just blogged a manifesto about the place, and it made me miss it. And this piece seemed a bit less hurricane-tragic than the others I have read:

The House of First Street: My New Orleans Story, by Julia Reed, is another New Orleans journalist’s account of life before and after Katrina. It doesn’t have near the emotional intensity of Heart Like Water or 1 Dead in Attic. (Although Reed seems to be a friend of Chris Rose, who wrote the latter.) In fact, Reed spends half the book complaining about the nightmare rehab job on her historic house in the Garden District – before the hurricane. While I found it all rather tedious, I ought to keep it in mind the next time I think that I would like to live in a Victorian that has some personality.
No kidding.
Where Clark and Rose wrote of heart-wrenching moments and broken relationships, Reed wrote about how food and booze kept every going. OK.  Where Rose (I think) wrote about randomly breaking down in tears one day at a gas station – which no one seemed to find odd – Reed wrote about gaining the “Katrina 15”. Clark wrote about staying in the city and desperately dodging the cops that were trying to clear the place out. Reed wrote about asking Newsweek for a press pass to get home, because she was afraid the one from Vogue wouldn’t quite impress that National Guard.
Reed knew that she sounded like Marie Antoinette in her dispatches to Vogue, because her editor told her so. She knows that she was very lucky, but I still feel like the story was less about New Orleans and more about her building a newlywed middle-aged life in a big house that happened to be in that city at that time.  I guess that’s fair enough – she does call it “My New Orleans Story”.  The epilogue was about how her house was robbed five days before the manuscript for the book was due and she hadn’t backed it up and had to write the whole thing over again.
She has a couple of interesting accounts.  One was the rumors about typhoid and the plague going around.  They were patently untrue, but kept many people from coming home.  Another was a description of a doctor friend of hers that set up camp in the French Quarter to help people because those in need couldn’t find the official free clinic that had been put together in the basement of a hotel.  He pulled it off because someone – I think it was one of the National Guard groups – gave him access to a pharmacy they had on lockdown.
Those brief pieces of the picture I didn’t have before were few and far between.  To sum it up, “A New Orleans story for readers of Vogue” probably isn’t too bad.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Posted on October 17, 2009 by

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Book 39

The Return of Sherlock Holmes was one of the out-of-copyright freebie books on the Amazon Kindle.  I started reading it for two reasons.  First, I was on the road for two weeks in September and second, I remembered that reading Holmes cases was cool last year while I was in school because I could put it down for a whole week and not have a problem picking it back up.

The first interesting thing was that I hadn’t realized that “The Return” actually meant Returned from the Dead.  Poor Watson.  And you know what that jackass Holmes said – in explaining just why he hadn’t told his best friend that he was really alive?  That Watson wouldn’t have been convincing enough in his grief or whatever if he had known the truth.

So the first case was how Holmes drew out the remaining members of Moriarty’s gang.  Whatever. 

There were a couple of cases where Holmes let the culprit go free – in a which is the greater evil sort of way.   And it is always funny when there is a chick involved.  He calls Watson the expert in that area.  And that also reminded me of House MD.  I have read more than once that House was partially based on Holmes.  Genius jerk with a past drug habit and a most loyal sidekick.  Watson seems like a much less damaged guy than Wilson, though.

I like that the cases are less about big crime or big players – although they sometimes are – and more about whatever weird thing strikes the detective’s fancy.  Also true of House.  Maybe I should just go watch House now.  I have that James Earl Jones one sitting in the Tivo.

On the First Night of My Weekend of Doing Nothing

Posted on October 16, 2009 by

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Obviously, I took some time and finally found a blog template that I can live with.  For awhile.  But it killed all of my widgets and I can’t find the Quote of the Day one I was using.  So I put in the Darth Vader for the time being because that will at least amuse my mother.  I will also have to re-create my links list.

I also tried playing a new cheapie computer game from Half Price Books.  It is called Cooking Academy and it is absolutely terrible.
And I did the grocery shopping.  How lame has school made me, that I did the grocery shopping on a Friday night so that I really wouldn’t have to do anything all weekend? 
Also, I can hear something going down over the loud speakers at the high school.  It is too cold, or I would open the window, but I know it isn’t homecoming weekend.  Because I looked it up on the Internet.  You know they actually have YouTube videos of those events?  What won’t people put on that thing?
There are several suburban library book sales going on this weekend and I dare not go to any of them.  I’ve been buying books for six weeks that I haven’t read since I’ve been in class.  I haven’t caught up on my Tivo from last Spring.  And I must not forget the Vanity Fair magazines.  I’m pretty sure those go back to the inauguration.  And last but absolutely not least, I am only halfway through Professor Blight’s course on the Civil War on Academic Earth.  I am in love with this man.  Kay can have Professor Foote and his Southern drawl.  Blight is from Michigan.  And besides being a big nerd, he sometimes sounds like Indiana Jones in front of his classroom.
And he still uses an overhead projector.

One Week

Posted on October 15, 2009 by

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Tomorrow is my final exam and I will have one week off before the next class.  The big question is whether I will read books, play video games or watch TV.  No.  The actual question is whether I am going to pass this final.  My mother will tell you that I always say that, but for weeks now my job has me so distracted that I can’t concentrate on anything and it isn’t like this particular subject matter comes naturally to me.

I am happy to say this was my best experience with a group project ever.  Because all three of us are having a rough time at work, we were each extra careful to get ahead of the schedule and not be rushing at the end.  So thank you, Rebecca and Nav.  Unfortunately, we are each so close to finishing the program that we will not be in class together again.

Corporate Finance, rumor has it, is calculations and quizzes each week.  I hate math (those present value formulas make me crazy), but the weekly quizzes worked for me in Accounting.  Here’s hoping it doesn’t kill me.

I am just at the point of serious diminishing returns on the studying.  So you know what I am going to do?  I am going to quit worrying about it and go to sleep.

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I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but the views expressed in these pages are mine alone. They are not meant to speak for my employer, my schools, the charitable organizations that I support, the sports teams for which I root, or my mother.