Don’t yours?  Haha, actually I am playing second fiddle (what a fitting saying after last week’s post!) to Doug who woos them with green grass in the winter time.  They see him, run past me,  and yell out a joyous, “Daaaad!” to see if they can get some more.  It’s working, he is planning entire trays of grass for them and the new arrivals scheduled to arrive in March.

Anyways, back to me.  Grandma gave me these curlers a long time ago.  I adore them.  Just hop out of the shower or bath, roll your hair up, fasten with bobby pins, slick a fancy scarf over them and do all your errands in town.  It is a great way to spread unexpected smiles.  Take them out before going out to dinner or before bed and enjoy three more days of luxurious, 1940’s esqe curls.  Last week I forgot to spritz them with any hair spray or gel and they promptly came out leaving only a slight wave and tangles.  So, I am going to share with you today my hairspray recipe so that this doesn’t happen to you!  It is non-toxic, you could drink it if you were in a real fix, but, just don’t.  Spray it on your hair for fabulous movie star curls that look great while pursuing seed catalogs.

I do enjoy the look of freshly colored red hair.  It’s really not fair that my sister was born with red hair, my daughter was born with red hair, my grandchild will likely have red hair and I have an unidentifiable kind of dirty blonde, but not that pretty, hair color.  I think.  I haven’t seen it in a while.  I barter medicine for beauty at the local beauty salon where a gorgeous, buxom blonde with a great sense of humor, who looks transported out of Texas does my hair and then teases the front to stand high on my head.  I get it done twice a year, so it’s not like I am there all that often.

Then there was the infection.  Okay, so this oughta scare a few color junkies and manicure queens into humble au natural.  Shortly after I got a manicure, pedicure, and hair color done before Christmas, I noticed an infection on the cuticle of my toe nail where she had pushed the cuticle back too far.  It didn’t feel great but I am an herbalist and was able to fix it pretty quickly.  Shortly after that my finger started feeling arthritic.  Swollen, red in blotches, stemming from my…you guessed it….cuticle.  It took me a good minute (love that phrase, stole it from my kids) to figure out what it was.  It wasn’t until my daughters looked at it in horror and said, “Mom, your finger is broken!” that I realized it was a severe infection.  Luckily, I am an herbalist and was able to drink two bottles of my Herbal Antibiotic.  I think there is still a little bit of infection that moved to another finger.  Not cool.  The fingernail polish is long gone.  The dirt under my nails really never left.  And I am stuck with swollen knuckles.  I can deal with no more manicures or pedicures.

Around that time, the hair stylist calls Doug and asks what medicine to take for boils.  Apparently she and her assistant have boils now.  She thinks they got it from an alpaca.  Even though only one of them was around said Alpaca, she thinks that the other got it from the phone.  Hmm. Something is going on at that salon.  Now, my hair did not turn out the color I wanted, it is kind of brassy because the colors underneath just keep peeking through.  A nice chunk of hair fell out a few weeks ago.  The same thing happened to my Grandma with her hair right before mine, but she uses color in a box.  This leads me to think that perhaps if God wanted me to have naturally red fingernails and curly, red hair, he would have made me enter this world looking like that.  And perhaps, swollen, infected fingers and chunks out of the back of my head are not as sexy as previously thought.

So, this year, I am going….gasp….au natural.  No more bartering for magical beauty.  I will be content with my farming fingernails.  My calico colored hair can at least be put up in old curlers with dash of homemade lemon hairspray, right?  1940’s esqe multi-colored hair.  Watch out fashion world…I mean farm world.  This is going to be hot stuff.

Lemon Hairspray

I made this when we did modeling classes for little kids.  You can really get hairstyles to stick with this concoction yet your hair will feel super soft and you won’t worry about inhaling odd particles of something cancerous.

Fill a small, glass squirt bottle ( http://sunburstbottle.com ) with 2/3 vodka, and 1/3 lemon juice then add a few drops of lemon essential oil.  Done, now go curl your hair!