Coffee heat rising

Olive Oil: The ultimate hair conditioner

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Over at WiseBread, Nora has been holding forth on some unexpected ways to use powdered milk and toothpaste, ranging from softening your skin to filling holes in the wall. This entertaining discussion reminded me of something I learned from a dorm-mate in college. She had long, spectacular, radiantly shining black hair, the envy of every woman and the ruination of every man who saw her. One weekend she showed us how she used plain olive oil to condition her hair to a high pitch of beauty. Here’s her secret:

You need:

  • about a cup of olive oil (less, if your hair is short)
  • shampoo
  • plastic wrap
  • three old, clean bath towels
  • paper towels
  • a bonnet hair dryer, a gooseneck lamp or other incandescent lamp that you can move close to your head, or a warm, sunny day
  • a clean utility or kitchen sink in which to wash your hair

Prepare your tools: Pour about a cup of olive oil into a measuring cup, if your hair is shoulder length or longer; for shorter hair, you can use a half-cup or so. Place this, the paper towels, and the bath towels near at hand where you will wash your hair. Pull out a couple of lengths of plastic wrap, about two or three feet long, and lay them out neatly on the countertop.

Don’t use the shower for this process! Olive oil dripped on the floor of a shower is extremely slippery and dangerous. Bend over a large sink to wash your hair and apply the oil.

First, wash your hair and thoroughly rinse out all the shampoo. Don’t apply commercial conditioner. When your hair is clean and well rinsed, towel dry it until it’s just damp. Set the wet towel aside. Now, again bending over the sink, apply the olive oil to your hair. Gently rub it in well, so that all your hair and your scalp are bathed generously in olive oil.

Grab a few paper towels and wipe the oil off your hands. Now take the plastic wrap and wind it around your head, turban style, so your hair is firmly covered. Grab the dry bath towel and wrap it around your head over the plastic wrap. This towel should be an old one, not your favorite guest towel!

What you want to do now is keep your hair warm for at least a half-hour; better, for an hour or so. One strategy is simply to keep the towel wrapped tightly over the plastic wrap and let your body heat keep the hair warm.

Another is to drape the towel over your shoulders to absorb leaks and sit beneath a lamp with an incandescent bulb. A gooseneck lamp is good for this purpose; some floor lamps can be adapted to work, too. A third strategy is to sit outside in the sun for a while, allowing the sunlight to warm the wrapped hair.

But the best technique is to use an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer. Wrap another couple layers of plastic wrap around your hair to try to minimize drips as much as possible. Slide the hair dryer over the plastic-wrap turban and turn the dryer to “high.” A half-hour or forty-five minutes of this treatment is extremely effective.

Whichever approach you choose, after your hair has marinated in olive oil for 30 minutes to an hour, it’s back to the sink, shampoo bottle in hand.

Shampoo your hair twice. If it’s very long, you may want to shampoo three times. If your hair still feels like it has any olive-oil residue, shampoo it again. Rinse well after each shampooing. Now towel-dry your hair with the third towel you set on the counter, and voilà! You’re ready to proceed with your regular styling and grooming routine.

If your hair looks at all limp or oily after you’ve styled it, you’ll need to shampoo again to remove the last residue of olive oil. One more shampooing should do the trick. To avoid this, be sure to shampoo and rinse thoroughly the first time around.

The effect of an olive-oil conditioning is amazing. It utterly does away with any dryness and frizzies, and it seems to last a long time—at least a month.

Clean-up

Olive oil, not surprisingly, is…well, oily. The towel used to wrap your plastic-wrap turban and keep drips off your shoulders will end up with a lot of olive oil on it. Wash thoroughly, preferably by itself in the washer. Sprinkle the absorbed oil liberally with Spray’N’Wash or a similar product and allow to stand for at least an hour. Then apply some liquid clothes detergent or a paste made of dry detergent and water to the areas that took up the oil. Finally, wash in warm water on a long cycle. It may take a couple of washings to completely remove the oil from the towel. This is why it’s best to use an old, tattered towel for the purpose! The other two towels, if you used them only to dry clean hair, should be fine—just don’t wash them in with the oily towel.

If you enjoyed this post…

Explore the way olive oil works as a facial cleanser and conditioner.
See an update on the olive-oil cleanser experiment.
Find out how lemon juice and vinegar can bring out your hair’s highlights.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has a new URL

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It took us a while to obtain and then ensconce our new domain name at The Copyeditor’s Desk. We’d expected to apply the domain name to the site shortly after we started it, but somehow we didn’t get the process done until after we had picked up a number of readers, who now probably think we’re lost and gone forever.

If you’re an unmoored reader of The Copyeditor’s Desk, here’s its URL: http://thecopyeditorsdesk.com

Please come on back! Or, if you haven’t seen it, c’mon over. Tina just posted a squib on getting scholarly work published; in the next day or two, I’m planning to write on the progress of starting a small business. To our amazement, our little enterprise has already generated as much work as we can handle — if we get any more assignments this month, we’ll have to farm them out. We’ll let you know at that site how we did it, what worked, and what apparently didn’t work.

Moments of Fame

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Everyday Finance has posted the 166th Carnival of Personal Finance, where Funny’s piece on the threat posed by the astronomically vast US national debt appears. This week’s carnival has a commodities theme — EF having just finished an MBA, the content around the links is interesting and knowledgeable. And the links are great! My eye was drawn to No Debt Plan’s “Where to Store Your House Inventory Documentation”…mine is (ahem) in the file drawer next to my desk — yipe! Dividend Growth Investor has some much-needed positive advice about the likely future of equities investments, backed up reassuringly with some convincing figures. Blue Jeans Millionaire has a veryinteresting post, part one of two, describing an approach to investing in real estate. Money under Thirty has created an Excel spreadsheet that will allow you to calculate how much you need in your emergency fund. At the Digerati Life, SVB lists quite an array of routine, almost unnoticeable expenses and explains how they can help you diddle away $175,000 over ten years. This carnival contains many other useful and entertaining posts — don’t miss it.

Living Almost Large has posted the 73rd Carnival of Money Stories, and what should pop up among the Editors Choices but a tale near & dear to my heart, Finance Girl’s story about what it actually costs to entertain friends with a nice dinner! Meanwhile, at Value for Your Life Amanda is determined to have her cake and eat it, too: she argues that frugality doesn’t necessarily mean deprivation. At Penny Jobs, Curtis has an interesting insight on finding work that you like to do. Funny’s Big Brother story appears in this week’s carnival.

Our Four Pence Worth has posted the 139th Festival of Frugality. Funny’s worry about whether layoffs are coming to the Great Desert University and how to prepare appears here. Quite a few interesting posts are listed in this week’s festival. Daddy Financials presents ten tips for getting yourself in the habit of dining in. KCLau explains in detail how a couple rounding on middle age with middling earnings can prepare for retirement, and Penny Nickel holds forth calculating the true costs of transportation.

The 77th Making It from Scratch Carnival is up at Life on Both Sides of the Pond. This carnival gets better and better. Check out these two AMAZING recipesoffered by Your Mileage May Vary, one for a gorgeous watermelon (!) salad and one for a to-die-for smoked fish and cucumber specialty. Here’s one from Seabird Chronicles for peach salsa that sounds really delicious. Funny’s recipe for cucumber soupappears, flatteringly, in this distinguished company. I enjoy MIfS because it has such a wide variety of posts, from cooking to crafts to household tips and home improvement. Check out Money Blue Book’s description of the great roach wars: you’ll find a whole series of ways to beat back the little devils, with critiques of how each works. And (hope you’re ready!) check out this ingenious washing stick from HowToMe.

We’re starting to postdate this blog entry: as of 8/21, Living Almost Large has posted the 12th Finance Festival, where Funny’s report on the advent of The Copyeditor’s Desk was featured. Among the Editor’s Picks is Jim’s first installment of a new Blueprint for Financial Prosperity series, “Seven Deadly Sins of Personal Finance: Skipping Emergency Funds.” The Baglady has a very interesting rumination on allegedly recession-proof jobs. And whoa! Here’s a riveting piece on how to profit on domain names and websites from the Shark Investor; though I’m no expert on this subject (by a long shot), it looks like this contains some useful information and fresh insights. Good festival: check it out!

FeedBurner in; Feedburner out

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Very nice. I got FeedBurner ensconced on FaM, having discovered an error in the HTML snippet’s code and having persuaded a friendly IT guru to fix it, with sterling results.

Further observation, however, left the Beloved Proprietor of this website wondering. First, it became clear that the vaunted statistics we were to enjoy applied (duh!) only to those who elected to opt viewing the site in favor of having posts delivered to them by e-mail. Second, it quickly became clear that widespread complaints to the effect that stats were in error are probably correct.

Why, the Royal We asked Ourself, why are We doing this? The answer was simple: We don’t know. WordPress’s stats a) provide everything FaM needs to know and b) actually work, without requiring that one navigate to a different site. So, we decided to delete the Feedburner site, here and at The Copyeditor’s Desk.

The Copyeditor’s Desk, btw, now has its own domain name and concommitant URL: thecopyeditorsdesk.com.

Please feel free to subscribe to either or both(!), using your own choice of RSS feeds.

B-a-a-a-d basselope! Frugality 0, Spending 1

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Okay, I fell off the frugality wagon with a resounding thud this afternoon, cleverly managing it at a moment when I probably should be pinching every penny that comes my way. What the heck: life’s short and tomorrow we die.

For several years, I’ve been quietly watching for a sideboard that would go with my dining room table, please my finicky tastes, and not bankrupt me. Right now there’s a console table sitting in the dining room, the sort of thing you put behind your sofa to hold a lamp. That’s what the table’s doing there: holding a lamp. It has no storage, and storage is desperately needed, given that the former homeowner’s kitchen remodel was beautiful but short on cabinet space. So I’ve wanted something with shelves and maybe even a couple of drawers.

Today a friend and I headed out in search of a desk to fit a small space in her house. After several hours spent traveling across the city, exploring many new stores we had never visited, we ended up at the Crate and Barrel, which is having a summer sale. And what should we see but…ta-DAAA! Not just “a” sideboard on sale, but THE sideboard, marked down $550.

At $1190, the price was still a bit rich for my blood, but I do have it in my diddle-it-away savings. True, it will drain Diddle-It-Away to zero, but why does one have diddle-it-away savings if one does not intend to diddle them away? It is incredibly gorgeous. It’s also set up to serve as a media center, so if I have to move to a smaller house in the future, it’s versatile enough to adapt to a different purpose.

Even though I’m sure I could have acquired something cheaper, this is well made with solid wood and mortise-and-tenon construction, and it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. M’hijito will get the console table — also a very nice piece of furniture — and I will now have a place for serving items presently stashed in a back closet and in the garage. So I guess I don’t feel too guilty…after I get over the sticker shock, I’m sure I’ll be very happy I bought it. Especially if I don’t lose my job….

Is the Layoff Boom about to Fall?

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Out at the Great Desert University, rumors float on the breeze like leaves in the autumn air. We our told that Our Leader will make a momentous announcement on the first day of the fall semester, in a week or so. Nothing anyone hears indicates the contents of this message will please the peons. Some expect to hear of massive layoffs. Others expect a hiring freeze. Still others predict we will be told the satellite campuses are to be deemed “teaching campuses” and the main campus will be the “research institution.” Paranoia rises. The facts support the general angst but confirm none of the dire predictions.

Factoid:

The university’s budget has been slashed to and peeled off the bone.

Factoid:

Our Leader’s elaborate building campaign, which could bankrupt a healthy institution in good times, continues apace.

Factoid:

Caps on class sizes have risen into the stratosphere. Lecturers and instructors — nontenurable faculty who teach four or five sections a semester — groan under obscene courseloads, with ten times more students than anyone could reasonably be expected to teach adequately. Tenure-track and tenured faculty also find themselves facing classrooms filled with more students than they can teach. Faculty are eliminating most or all writing assignments and assessing performance on the basis of a few machine-graded, computerized exams.

Factoid:

HR staff have been seen acting strangely. They refuse to meet your eyes, and at “benefits fairs” their responses to questions make it clear they’ve been told, on pain of dire consequences, to keep their tongues on a tight leash. One of them remarked to a colleague, semiprivately, “Oh…you don’t know what’s happening.”

Factoid:

Administrative staff who do know what’s up have leaked hints that something very grim is slouching toward Bethlehem.

What to Make of It?

Heaven only knows. I hesitate to assume the worst, although knowing that place, anything is possible. If we do indeed face layoffs, I would be high on the list of the expendable. My job is exempt, meaning my contract says I can be canned at any time, for no reason. Although one could argue that our office supports the university’s core mission of research and publication, others could say faculty could get by just fine without us. If the bad news is “only” a hiring freeze (unlikely: the last hiring freeze was not announced from the balcony with trumpets blaring fanfares), my job will still be at risk, since the director of the graduate program whose students staff our office walked with short notice this summer. A hiring freeze will mean he can’t be replaced, which will mean his program will die instantly, which will mean my office will quickly go away because my staff will disappear. In either event, I lose my job.

I’m now eligible to take early Social Security payments, although I would prefer not to. If I collect SS now, the amount will be peanuts. If I wait until I’m 66 (or even 65, when Medicare kicks in), my income will be slightly more generous. I’ll be 65 in 22 months; COBRA will cover me for 18 months, and so if I can hang onto my job for just four more months, I can at least keep myself insured if I’m laid off.

Being averse, as I am, to jumping off the high wire without a safety net, I reconnoitered the resources I could use to survive if I’m canned. Figuring 4% of my retirement savings as a drawdown and subtracting from that the 12 grand that’s going into the Investment House, investment income right now would be $10,254. Because I haven’t yet applied the Renovation Loan payoff fund toward principal but instead have stashed the money in low-risk mutual funds, I have $9,848 in cash that I could live on. The university has to pay me for 175 of my 275 hours of accrued vacation time at my regular pay rate; the figure on my paycheck seems to says that amount is $3,214, a little more than one month’s net pay (I believe they have to pay my gross rate for this, which would come to $5,280). Also, the state pays retiring employees who have accrued 1,000 hours of sick leave a kind of severance bonus in the amount of 50% of their hourly wage per sick-leave hour; for me this would come to $17,160. It’s not paid in one swell foop, however: they dole it out over three years. So, in the first year after severance I would get $5,714. Pretax Social Security, if I started taking it this year, would add $12,228 to the pot.

Amazingly, all these bits and pieces add up to something close to my net pay. Though the bottom line is pretax, few of the figures that go into it are earned income, and so my taxes might be relatively low.

COBRA will inflate my healthcare premiums from $30 to $473 per month, but even that would be affordable for a couple of years. It would be tight, but I might not be forced to move out of my home, especially if I could engineer a steady flowof freelance work.

Thank goodness I saved the Renovation Loan snowflakes to double as an emergency fund, instead of paying them directly to the loan principle!

Matter o’fact, the scenario above isso positive that I wondered what would happen if I delayed collecting Social Security. Could I get by until I can collect full Social Security payments? Well….

Foregoing Social Security for two more years, I’d have to come up with an extra $7,000 to make ends meet, just barely.

But that’s not unreasonable: I could pull it off with a part-time job — maybe greeting shoppers at the WalMart! Here, too, a steady flow of freelance work would do the trick. At The Copyeditor’s Desk we’re hoping to make $1,000 a month per person by the end of the year. If we meet that goal, next year’s $12,000 annual income would just about replace the amount of Social Security I’d get if I started drawing payments now.

So, if they can me, the world is not going to end. I may have to sell my home, but not right away. There will at least be time to see if I can get by, cobbling together a living from four to six different sources. A year or so hence, though, I’ll have to either cut my expenses drastically or find income to replace the one-time vacation pay reimbursement and the three years of sick leave payments. The slightly increased Social Security payments I would have by waiting to collect until I’m 65 will not substitute for those amounts.

I don’t like it. But I’ll survive.