• Home
  • Accidental Birder
  • Accidental Traveler
    • Trips
  • A Travel Love Story
    • Rendezvous Journal
  • About

The baby aspirin years

~ Ms. Boice falls in love, travels and eats her way through life in the post-40 years.

The baby aspirin years

Tag Archives: musings

2014 Resolutions: Ditch the yearly thing and go monthly

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Ms. Boice in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

2014, goals, humor, January, marriage, musings, New Year's resolutions, self improvement, shopping

Here we go again. Another year.

Two years ago I mapped out for you my sure-fire way to not just set goals but achieve them. How do I know it works? Well, for starters it’s my own little algorithm of sorts that helped me settle down and find my husband.

Yes, really! I was alone and despondent and quite tired of the loser blind dates, the failed attempts at trying to meet someone and not having anyone to drop me off at the airport. (Do you know what a drag it is to always be begging for a ride to the airport?) And then I did my chart map / goal thing. And it totally worked, because this happened:

A New Year's Resolution led to this.

Not bad for a New Year’s Resolution, eh?

So, let’s mix it up a bit, shall we?

This year, though, I’m doing things different. I’m not bagging the chart map / goal thing, because it does have great value. But what I’m going to do is have monthly goals in 2014.

Why do it monthly? Well, look, if you’re like me, you’re über busy and life is different month to month. I travel a lot for work and I travel a lot in my personal life. That kind of turns things upside down at certain times of the year. For instance, take weight loss or staying fit. I need a different approach when I’m traveling—maybe it’s just to maintain during those times. Or for Pete’s sake, when on vacay I need to be okay about eating ice cream, you know?

Goats Milk Ice Cream

Because if it’s Goat’s milk ice cream you gotta have it.

Plus, what might seem like a worthy goal in January may not be as valuable of a focus come August. Maybe I find myself a little sweary in July (probably because it’s #$%&! hot here in Utah around that time) and so I’ll set a resolution or goal for the next month to zip it.

It just seems like a month-to-month method is achievable and will garner more success than dragging out the pain my goals all year, which eventually become abandoned by June. (Wait, who am I kidding? Probably February.)

Let’s get started with January

Okay, so here’s what I’m doing for January. A shopping fast.

Not shop fast, as in be speedy about buying oodles of clothes, but do without shopping for a whole month.

Grocery shopping is okay. Or if I need deodorant or hair product, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve actually done this before—last October, in fact. Not a single one on my staff at work thought I could do it, so they each put money into a pool and if I succeeded (total honor system, you know), the money was donated to our United Way drive that was going on at the time.

And you know what, guys? I totally did it. And the community benefitted.

But I need to do it again, mostly because this last month I went a little crazy with the shopping (the holidays, duh) and to be honest, I felt like I learned a lesson last October that needs to be re-learned: I found that I actually didn’t need a lot of stuff. I didn’t need that skirt or that scarf or those shoes I was looking at. I had plenty of stuff already in my closet.

So doing it again is a great way to start off the year and I know I can do it because it is doable. So no more trips to Nordstrom, shopping on QVC, or even online shopping. Sorry all you merchants, I’ll be back in February, okay?

When it gets closer to February I’ll let you know what February’s goal will be. As for this last day before January you must know that I went shopping today in my last few hours because I needed a fancy dress for a work celebration meeting in January and I knew I couldn’t shop after today, and I couldn’t decide between the short skirt or the long skirt so I got both.

Oh geez. I do need help.

Long skirt fancy

Long skirt fancy

Short skirt fancy

Short skirt fancy

I’m not done here

So two questions I have for you. Short skirt or long skirt? And how are you tackling New Year’s Resolutions in 2014 or do you just skip it altogether? (I guess that was three questions.)

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

Most Outstanding Achievement in Hair Over Four Decades award goes to me

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by Ms. Boice in Uncategorized

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

1980s hair, beauty, botox treatment, brazilian blowout, curly hair, dark curly hair, different hairstyles, fashion, hair, humor, marcia brady, musings, pat nixon, Seiren salon, straight hair, style

Hair.

It’s troubled me since I was a child. I’ve always envied lovely, beautiful, trouble-free hair beginning with my mom’s fight with my hair every morning before kindergarten as she vigorously brushed through my “rat’s nest” (her words), to my youthful longing to have Marcia Brady hair, followed by the desire for Dorothy Hamill hair to the coveting of the crème de la crème of all hair–Farrah Fawcett.

Growing up, no one had dark curly hair unless they were on Soul Train.

Still to this day, my hair troubles me. So, last week I chopped off my hair. I went from this:

To this:

I got lots of interesting reactions from the change. Most people exclaimed, “I love it!” Then there were those who said, “Don’t take this wrong, but it’s really slimming.” I’m okay with that, I think. (Wait, are you calling me fat?) It’s better than the opposite, I suppose. The most interesting reaction was when someone came into my office, closed the door and said in a delicate, quiet voice, “Your hair looks great. Is everything okay?”

I laughed and assured her, “Oh for Pete’s sake. No. I’m not going through a divorce,” because that’s what brooding, downtrodden women do when breaking up. I continued, “Steve and I are still madly in love, though he’s out of town and hasn’t seen this yet.”

(I imagined this for the husband airport pickup: Stand next to all the limo drivers who hold signs for their passengers and I’d have my own sign with “Don’t worry sweetie, it will grow back.“)

So, as I was looking through my iPhoto catalogue I noticed that I’d been through a lot of different hairstyles over the years and felt some were deserving of awards. Here I present the Most Outstanding Achievement in Hair Over Four Decades awards (cue drum roll):

Best Pat Nixon Look at Age 3
What a perfectly coiffed three-year-old!
Most Outstanding Skin Smoothing Technique
In order to make sure that my hair stayed in place all day, my mom put me in ponytails that were so tight, I would never have to face a Botox treatment later in life.

The Best Achievement in Layers
Layering the hair certainly helped with the rat’s nest issue,
but it mostly just helped me achieve frizzy hair faster.
(Sorry about the tiny photo. This was my Senior photo from my high school yearbook.)
The “Why Am I Not Dating? Award” goes to…
Just days before I went away to college I chopped off my hair. Bad call.
This hair explains why I didn’t date at all my Freshman year.
That and the unfortunate argyle sweater I’m wearing in this photo.

Best Big Hair Ev-uh!
Thank goodness for big hair girl bands. (Heart! You girls are my heroes!) And shoulder pads. Frankly, the whole 80s! And guess what, I didn’t have to tease my hair to get it to be big and poofy. It just did it all by itself. I went from growing up envying others to having girls envy me! This photo is from my Senior year in college.
As you can see, I let it grow out since my Freshman year.

Best Use of a Barrette Award
The barrette became my best friend. I pretty much had this same hairstyle during all of my 20s, once I moved to California. It was easy peasy to take care of.
Shampoo, run gobs of product through hair with fingers, put in barrette and
go out the door. I didn’t even own a hair dryer.
(And no, going outside with wet hair does not give you a cold.)
Most Likely To Succeed Award
This is my “professional” ‘do that I started sporting once I decided to get serious about my career in my 30s. This photo is a little deceptive. It looks a little bit coiffed, but it’s not. I still maintained my same ritual as above–shampoo, run fingers through with product
and out the door. Still no hair dryer needed.

Best Achievement in Luring a Man
This is me in Scotland. I had just met the man who would two years later be my husband. If ever there was a time that I needed the best hair on the planet this was the time and it certainly delivered. Look at how perfectly those curls rest on my head!
Oh shame to have scorned them when I was younger.
Steve (the man) kept referring to them as springs. (sigh)

Your Hair Is Taking Over the Planet award
This, my friends, is my biggest nightmare.
After I met Steve, we dated long distance for two years, visiting each other in five different countries during that time. This was in Calgary, AB the day after a big snow storm. But the day was warm and the snow melted/evaporated so quickly the humidity in the air created this crazy mess. My hair is like a Chia Pet. It gets bigger as the day goes when moisture is added. It’s a wonder Steve still married me after this.

Best Wedding Day Dream Hair
Bless her heart–that Annie at Sieren Salon made my hair look fantastic on my wedding day. I wish this could be my hair every day.
Every girl should have awesome hair on her wedding day.

Extreme Makeover — Hair Edition
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I learned about the Brazilian Blowout. I did this for almost a year and I loved it. Too bad it’s really, really bad for hair stylists. Frankly, it’s not safe. It’s got formaldehyde in it, much to everyone’s chagrin. And the FDA ruled it not safe. But I’m waiting for a product to come out that’s much safer and when it does, I’m there in the chair again!
Here’s a version of the straightened look, but using a curling iron to give me a few sassy waves. Hey! It’s almost like Farrah’s hair!

And that, my friends, is Lisa’s hair over the years.

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn
  • Print

Like this:

Like Loading...

You give me your email address and I send you an email when there's a new post. Easy peasy.

Join 1,308 other subscribers

The Accidental Birder

Follow my birding-around-the-world adventures on The Accidental Birder blog

My most recent stuff

  • When in Isla Contadora
  • I turned 50 and this is how it went
  • Keeping Big Bend a secret
  • What Marfa can teach us
  • Confronting the enemy
  • Purging time capsules
  • The technicolor world of Bisbee, Arizona
  • Thank you, Utah.

Accidental Tweeter

  • Some favorite moments from Costa Rica. 🇨🇷 https://t.co/q5f0J8RlCE 1 day ago
  • RT @NaturehawkPhoto: Seeing the Egret & Kingfisher on last night's #Winterwatch , I thought this might just be a toptrump @ChrisGPackham ht… 1 week ago
  • The series Mosquito Coast is a lesson in storytellling. Don’t take two seasons to tell the back story because Apple… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
Follow @MsBoice

Older stuff (archives)

Ms. Boice

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • The baby aspirin years
    • Join 619 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The baby aspirin years
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: