Upgrades

Hey! How’s everyone doing?

The girls are good. So far, high school and middle school are working out okay. They’ve got people to sit with at lunch, their homework load has yet to ramp up, there are favorite and least favorite teachers. . . and I’m very excited to settle into the routine. I’ve been catching up on work and volunteer projects, and eventually I might even get my desk area clean.

Along with our “school upgrades,” we’ve had a few other upgrades around here.

First, a new phone for me. A Samsung J7, if you are the kind of person who “follows”/knows about/cares about phones.

I am not one of those people. I actually really hate buying a new phone. But it had become pretty much unavoidable. Remember when I almost ruined summer camp for J by not bringing the right paperwork? Well, on that same day I couldn’t manage to get the phone out of selfie mode. Because apparently my front camera had died. I hate selfie mode. I have an extraordinarily protruding, Broomhilda-like chin. Yeah, I know: you haven’t noticed. It’s not so bad head-on. But take a look at me in selfie mode, and pretty soon that camera’s going to break, too. I also had a persistent phone memory problem. I would try to “clean out” the phone and migrate all these apps to the SD Card and I’d still get all of these error messages that nothing could get updated. Plus, my phone kept disconnecting from my car. It was as if the car was like, “You are unworthy of me.” So then I’d reconnect and the car would roll its headlight-eyes and let me use steering wheel speaker for a few days until it kicked the phone off again. It had become persistently annoying.

So I finally bought the new phone, and you might think that my anxiety would end after I put in the credit card number and hit submit, but it didn’t. The phone arrived in a shiny box and I just set it next to my desk, where it sat for at least 24 hours. The thought of opening the box and setting it up made my stomach churn. I’ve finally done it. Mostly. I have the most crucial things set up, but things aren’t quite the way I like it yet. They’re functional enough for now. Actually, just typing this whiny paragraph has motivated me to stop for a moment and turn off Facebook notifications, which had been chirping at me with notifications which were in no way crucial. So, yay me. Baby steps.

Another upgrade: my new pajama bottoms! Aren’t they cute?

They are PUNJAMMIES®! What does that mean, you ask? Well, “PUNJAMMIES® are loungepants made with hope by women in India who have escaped human trafficking. Whenever you purchase PUNJAMMIES®, you invest in the freedom and dignity of these women and girls who are working to forge a new life for themselves and their children.”

I actually got a Sudara gift certificate for Christmas, and when I went online shopping, I decided that I wanted the Bhara Capris, but they weren’t available. And then I checked again, and again, and they still weren’t available. And then I signed up to have them email me, because if I’m going to get loungepants from India, I want them to have elephants on them, for sure! I moved on with my life, which was easy, because I didn’t know what I was missing, which was adorable pajama pants that I love-love-love and that I can wear with a pair of sandals to drive my kid to the early-morning soccer bagel breakfast and feel like I’m super-stylish even though technically I’m still wearing pajamas.

And finally, possibly my most life-changing upgrade? A new dry shampoo! My hair is fine and starts looking oily about 18 hours after I’ve last washed it. Which is freakin’ soon, you guys! That means that if I take a shower at night, by the next afternoon I’m looking not-so-good. And my hair is always a little ombre, whether or not I’ve dosed it with Sun In lately (why yes I do, and a $7 bottle lasts me roughly two years, thank-you-very-much!), so when my hair’s looking oily I also have just awful roots. . . it’s a mess. A while back I bought a dry shampoo in hopes that it would solve my problem, and it didn’t. It totally, totally didn’t. All it did was make my hair smell bad and feel sticky as well as oily. Now, I can’t remember why I bought the particular dry shampoo that I did, but I think I looked up a few reviews, and everything that got good reviews was expensive and only available at a salon, so I just grabbed something that was the same brand as a shampoo I like: TRESemme. And it didn’t work at all. And even though it didn’t really work, I would spray the stuff in my hair hoping that some day it would help. Mostly, though, I figured that dry shampoo in general is just a scam.

On a recent afternoon when my hair was looking greasy and terrible, I happened to be at a drugstore and, armed with my functional phone, I stood in the dry shampoo aisle and did a search for reviews with all of the products in front of me. And guess what I found? Total Beauty had a list of the 10 Best Dry Shampoos — and the 2 Worst. And guess what was the #1 worst dry shampoo? My dry shampoo, TRESemme! So I checked this list and a few others and I went home with Batiste Dry Shampoo instead.

And it is awesome. Suddenly, my hair looked fabulous. Not only that, it looked lovely the rest of the day, and the next morning, still un-showered, I looked in the mirror and I was like, “You look fantastic!” I was tempted to just see how long I could push it, but since there’s apparently no such thing as Batiste body wash, I just took my great head of hair into the shower stall. But seriously, this is going to make my daily life better. This is a health-and-beauty aid revelation on par with switching to my electric toothbrush and the Diva Cup, I am not kidding you. And if you are a person who is still brushing your teeth with the free brush from the dentist, using tampons, and walking around with oily-looking hair, you can spend $60 to make your life much more wonderful. And no, I don’t even bother doing that Amazon Affiliates thing where you get a nickel every time someone spend fifty bucks at your behest. Consider this a community service message, my small effort to make the world a better place with this personal-care trifecta.