Our neighbor has a cat

So hey, everyone! How's your January so far? Everybody doing okay? Can I get anyone a beverage?

My kids went back to school on Monday, by which I mean H went back even though she'd been sick over the weekend and C's teacher started coming to the house again on her regular schedule. C is starting back up with two subjects that kind of fell by the wayside last semester, English and Spanish, and I am helping him rather a lot with the former which is taking up a lot of my time, but I don't mind. (As for the latter, he is on his own with that. I took four years of German. SO USEFUL. Fortunately he has a new Spanish teacher and she is preternaturally awesome, so I think he's going to be okay.)

I feel I should tell you that the no-shampoo experiment lasted six days. The first two days were horrible and despite daily applications of baking soda and water, it felt like I'd been using my hair to scrub a FryDaddy^®. The third day I finally figured out how to get my hair feeling clean, but it still smelled unclean. The fourth day I started adding essential oils to the apple cider vinegar rinse, which made my hair smell like your grandma's powder room. The fifth day my hair finally felt and smelled clean but it had this rough texture I just couldn't get past. The sixth day I considered shaving my head again. And on the seventh day, I shampooed and conditioned the everloving crap out of my hair, and all has been well ever since. Thank God THAT'S over.

The paleo thing is going good though, you guys! It is! I bought a pull-up bar! I can't do actual pull-ups on it, of course, but I have it now and it looks kind of badass all leaning up against the wall like that when it's not actually on the door frame which it never is because I can't do pullups.

The diet part hasn't been hard at all, really, I think because I'd cut way back on grains and legumes gradually over the course of losing the weight and then trying to keep it off for the past several months. I'm not eating more meat than I did before, but I am eating a lot more vegetables and nuts. These paleo crackers and this paleo hummus (original version) have changed my life, and the other day I made a mini pizza in the toaster oven using a portabella mushroom cap as the "crust". I have no idea if I'm the first person to think of that, but if I am I totally want credit because come on, that is genius. If you like mushrooms on your pizza, that is. Which I do.

I'm still reading Mark Sisson's book, The Paleo Blueprint, because I am the slowest reader ever. I have a metric buttload of other books all loaded up on my Kindle, and I wish I was one of those people who can read more than one book at a time, but sadly ... no. It hurts my brain.

Let's see, what else is going on?

All this paleo reading has led me to the work of Esther Gokhale and now I find myself re-adjusting my posture several times a day so as not to sit on my tail.

Today is Day Two both of constant rain and of other unmentionable things that you don't want to know about.

H is home sick with the crud. (She WAS well enough for school Monday and Tuesday, I swear.)

And the dog? Well, he's doing a lot of this:

Yeah.

So, business as usual, really.