How's it gonna be, when you don't know me anymore?

Let's catch up on some of my life for a little bit. I compose blog posts while I drive or while I imagine myself to sleep, or in meetings at work, but nothing really ever gets typed up for distribution. I need to work on that.

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Lately I have been thinking about my hair. It's getting pretty long. Longer I think than I have ever had it, so I'm not really 100% sure of what to do with it. Thus creating the first problem with long hair. Secondly, I have a ton of split ends. And I mean TONS. It seems that I lose more hair every time I brush it than I may actually have on my head. I'm not sure I want to go bald. To try and stop the problem from taking over my head I have been doing some internet research on what I can do to help my hair. (I know, the internet is full of such helpful information. *that's sarcasm*) I found three basic hair treatment options in my searches, which are:

1. Don't wash your hair with shampoo. Rinse it with just water and if needed use a mild shampoo once a week.
2. Pay lots of $$$ for a product that probably doesn't work
3. Cut it all off and start again

Well, I'm not really willing to do option 2 because I don't have money to spend on crap or 3 because I tried that once and my family started calling me "Jim"... In that case,  I decided to try option one for a few days. Let me just tell you... Yuck! One day with just a water rinse wasn't terrible, until it got closer to the end of the day and it just started feeling gross.. Day two using just water was less then appealing. by mid day my hair was just gross. (However, I did decide that this is probably how those women get their hair so big if you put enough product in your hair you probably can't tell how gross and greasy it is, but it also helps it stick up very well. But I don't think it's worth it.) Needless to say that that option didn't pan out for me. I've gone back to my daily washings and my hair being soft and pretty with the exception of all the split ends which make the bottom three inches of my hair frizz out like crazy. Other than using a leave-in conditioner and skipping the blow-drying I don’t know what to do with it.

Does anyone have any good solutions for damaged hair??

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I love Chocolate Crackle Cookies! I had to make some last week after I spent all night last Friday dreaming about them. Seriously, they were everywhere in my dream, so Saturday morning I called my mother and got the recipe. That's THE recipe for Grandma Mc's cookies. Umm num num! I spent a large majority of my childhood eating these cookies from my grandma's cookie jar. And let me just tell you, they are a little bit of work to make, but they are so worth it.

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Monday October 11th was Canadian Thanksgiving, because we all know that Canadians are a whole month more thankful than us Americans. We celebrated the holiday this year as usual, minus the maple flavoring and beer. However, instead of going to Marie Calendar's for their Thanksgiving platter we decided to celebrate with the Evans'. So we ate our Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday the 10th instead. I got to do the turkey since it was our idea, and that was kind of fun, if you ignore the part where I sprained my wrist trying to defrost the thing, or the nasty steam burn when I was taking off the foil tent at the end of cooking... ouch! I've been paying for those little oopsies all week. But the meal was good and delicious once the family gathered with their offerings of food.

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This last Monday we went out with our adorable friend Megan Smock to have our pictures taken for this years Christmas card. (Because John and I are so cute.) Megan has decided to pursue her future in photography and we offered to be some subjects that she may or may not want to put in her portfolio. We're good at being portfolio subjects. We had a lot of fun we went out to Ogden and hit a park up on the benches, I think it was called Beus Park, and then we went over to Union Station and had some photos shot on the train engines there. We wanted to go inside, but it closes at 5 pm and we didn't get there until closer to 6 pm. After our fantastic photo-shoot we had dinner at the Union Grill right there at Union Station. The food was pretty good, but pricey, I wouldn't recommend it if you're on a budget. We had a grand old time hanging out together, it's been a while since we have been graced with Megan's presence, and we love it every time.  

If you're looking for a photographer in the Northern Utah Area give Megan a call. She also does some beautiful landscape photography that I wouldn't be ashamed to hang on my walls. (You can check out some of her photos on her BLOG or her Facebook page if your her friend there. Her website: MeganSmockPhotograpy.com isn't really functional yet, but it's getting there.)

I'll post a picture or two of her work with me and John when I get them back... I'm excited to see them, I hope I don't look as dorky or fat in them as I usually do. (and that's all me, and not the fault of the photographer.)

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On October 12th the was the yearly Relief Society "crafty/service" social with food. In my effort to try not to be such a recluse I signed up to bring crackers for the nursery a few weeks ago when the list went by in Relief Society. When the day finally arrived I really didn’t want to go, but I had to take the crackers. I took the box of fishies over to the church and got sucked in. First with a friendly little sister of a guy I went to school with, and then I got roped into organizing a table of school supplies (I can't pass up organization) and then... My weakness - Quilting - I got sucked into tying a baby quilt. My OCD said to just do a row and then you can go home... do another row because you have extra string.... do another row because you can't just leave that row unfinished... and so on, until I had personally tied half of the quilt myself. The other half was tied by four or five other sister's who wanted to help out. And everyone that walked up to me that night asked: "Liz, are you a quilter?" Well, I guess the answer is Yes. So I got stuck there for Two Hours. Ugh! I really dislike social situations.

 

** Speaking of Quilting **

 

-- Quilt Update -- If you may remember, I started this blog out when I started on a patchwork quilt that I was going to make all out of Halloween material. It was going to be awesome... Well, that was 2007. It is now 2010 and I think I have four squares cute out, and 10 yards of Halloween material in various patterns. I'm not doing so good at getting this quilt off the ground and into production, but the desire is still there. John said he'd help out... we'll see if that helps. It may take another three years, (or more,) but I will finish that darn quilt eventually.

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Also on a church related note. John and I have gone several times in the last two months, and even stayed for the entire three hours on most of those occasions. (Yay us.)  But with our reactivity come the demand that we join the choir.

If you know me, you know I like to sing. I used to be pretty good and I was a fairly good Mezzo-Soprano (second soprano for those who don't speak Italian) if I do say so myself. However, over the years, my anti-sociality combined with depression, asthma, allergies and a general dislike for the world population, my voice has gone unused and is no longer what it used to be. - There's a lesson in there about hiding your talents under a bushel - blah blah blah -

If you know John, you know that he doesn't sing. It's not that he doesn't like singing, or that he's terribly bad at it, he's just not a musically inclined fellow. Most of the songs he has in his head include the lyrics "Something, Something, Something" in place of the real words. Which I find adorable. (Except for the fact that I always find myself singing those lyrics now days because I have decided that he makes me forget words to songs.) John has no understanding of technical musical terms or of counting measures or names of notes. Music is music and we just sing along... I think that's pretty much his philosophy. Never-the-less, and not withstanding he does try his best and I love that about him.

Well... We both usually get wrangled into the ward choir because our neighbor, and friend, is the choir director. Through this round of choir practices we are singing an arrangement of... Wait for it ... Joseph Smith's First Prayer to the tune of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, but it's a special arrangement so the tune is not quite right... It's going to be beautiful, it's just a challenge. It seems that the large majority of the men in the ward choir are musically talented. So in choir practice we get statements thrown around like: "Pick up to measure 38." or "Sing that B note" or "your in the wrong key" or "In measure 19 on the third count..." -- Needless to say this is annoying to one who does not know what's going on.

Anyway, long story short (too late) John is not having fun in choir practice, but he's there with me and it's something I love that we can do together. Lets just hope that the conductor doesn't expect perfection  and John doesn't get run out of town on a rail.

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I haven't updated the Choose Your Own Adventure story this week. (I'm sure some of you have noticed.) I haven't forgotten it, I have just been really involved in reading two books by Maggie Stiefvater. Lament and Ballad. Both were very good. I'll write a more detailed review of them in another post. Both were pretty fast reads and I really liked both of them, but I loved Ballad more than I liked Lament.

I'll get the Choose Your Own Adventure back on track at some point this weekend so we're not all hanging on the edges of our seats wondering what's happening to You, the demon, and the dying woman. I really have no idea where this thing is going, I'm just making it up as I go along, and that's pretty fun. Most of the time in my writing I skip ahead because I think something would be cool later in the story and then I have a huge gap I have to fill, and that is harder that one might think. I have several writing assignments that I have to work on this weekend so this should be fun spending my time away from work in some of my imaginary worlds.

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This post has ended up longer than I thought it would. Apparently I have diarrhea of the brain and it's all spilling out of my fingers today. I'll stop now before I have more words in this blog post then I have in my novel.

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And on a final note, something smells like onions today, or maybe sweat, and I’m pretty sure it’s not me.