Hair and Gone

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little vein about my long locks of hair. I’ve been wanting to have the courage to cut my hair short for months. Reasons: I cannot comb through it, I’m constantly purchasing Draino, it gets in my food, it gets stuck in my coat zipper and quite frankly, I looked like a shaggy puppy most of the time. But, I was afraid to cut it because friends were telling me how lucky I was to have such long hair and how beautiful it was blah blah blah. I can take a compliment as well as the next person but… it’s just hair. 

Example: Juan is my friend and colleague and Toast, the restaurant I work at.  He cooks, is Ecuadorian, very nice, good friend of mine, and has a girl friend with long hair. I think that sums Juan up to make my point here.

Paige- “I’m thinking about cutting my hair pretty much off Juan, what do you think?”

Juan- “No, Paige no.”

“What? Why not? Don’t you think it will look cute?”

“No Paige no, it is the long hair the makes the womens beautiful. It is how you can tell the womens from the mens.”

“Oh, so you don’t think I will be pretty if I cut my hair?”

“Nope.”

KKKKCCCCCHHHHhhhhhh- oh that’s just the sound my ego makes as it is shattering.

So I didn’t cut my hair. It was superficial I know, but I honestly think it was because I needed a reason to. And I found it. The thought just hadn’t occurred to me for some strange reason that I should just donate my hair! Brilliant. So I called Locks of Love. Reading the qualifications pertaining to length, style, color, fake color, made me a little nervous, but I passed inspection. So I made an appointment with my local Great Clips and did it.

The Locks of Love Program takes donated hair and makes high-quality hairpieces for disadvantaged kids with medical hair loss. Participating Great Clips salons give free haircuts to those special customers who donate hair. By donating hair at a participating location, you can give children who need it a real boost in confidence and self-esteem - http://www.greatclips.com/about-us/charities/locks-of-love

I might even make this an every two year thing. What an easy way to help someone in need! 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Traveling Cabinet: The Gal who Writes this Stuff

The Traveling Cabinet: The Gal who Writes this Stuff: Greetings I'm Shasta, A Minnesota girl through and through - avid learner, recent college grad, and amateur geographer... cartographer.....

Shasta and I went to high school together- she is lovely and produces nothing but lovelies! Enjoy!

That's commitment.

I’m not trying to pull a Sandy Rivers (How I Met Your Mother) here, but I just read this interesting article about a fellow Minnesotan, Nicole Meyer. She launched a “design one logo a day” for all the Minnesota lakes project in her spare time. I’m always saying to people who ask me what I do in my spare time, “What spare time?” But I guess I shouldn’t complain! This girl is amazing. 

Take a look at some of her logos and then think about it. She’s doing one logo for every lake…. This will take her about 27 years.  I can’t even stick to a work out plan or keep one consistent hobby for a long period of time for that matter.

Read the full article here.

Hair-free since '53

I like to try new things. I only have two stipulations. New things that A) don’t cost an arm and a leg investment and B) aren’t potentially super painful. But sometimes- you can’t really gage the latter of the two until you try it…right?

Warning to all gentlemen: If women talking about the latest shoe trends, menstrual cramps, and “yucky feelings” isn’t up your alley- I’m going to have to refer you to The Chive right now, because this will not be your cup of tea.  You’ve been so warned.    

Waxing. I’ve done my fair share of it. When it comes to legs or eye brows- not a big deal. But ladies- I can guarantee you, I will never wax my lady flower again as long as I live.  

We all want hairless, smooth, freckle-free skin. But what’s wrong with a little freckle and some hair? I say nothing. But, for the means of trying new things, I was dying to know about laser hair removal. So I did it.

Before we get there, let’s do a Marty McFly and talk about how women started to poke, squeeze and well, pluck all the time.

The year was 1953 and if you were a woman, a night on the town meant either squeezing into a girdle or slipping on a garter belt. Formal dress dictated that females wear such intimate, and often uncomfortable, articles of clothing. How else could you hold up your nylons? Mostly considered to be a woman's and girl's garment, pantyhose appeared in the 1960s, and they provided a convenient alternative to stockings. People of both sexes often find pantyhose to be comfortable for wearing during frigid weather or while horseback riding. In 1953, Allen Gant, Sr., of Glen Raven Knitting Mills Panti-Legs", but these were not brought to the open market until about 1959. My grandmother always said that the worst invention was pantyhose because, “we all had to wear them!” developed a commercial equivalent to these hose that he named "

Now, I’m not about to go horseback riding nor am I going to strap on a girdle. No but in that sentence. I do think that hair is natural and it’s meant to grow in places as a form of hygiene: Eyebrows- to protect the eye, arm hair- for temperature control. That’s easy. But society tells us to be germ-free, sugar-free, and hair-free. So I’m going to test ways to do just that- the hair one anyway.

I made an appointment for laser hair removal on just an easy, small part of my body as sort of a guinea pig test. I’ll admit, I was sort of nervously asking questions like, “Is this going to hurt?” and “I’m a first timer- what should I do?” to the woman at the front desk. I found my room and situated myself, when a very young woman walked in with what looked like a silver lint roller. She informed me that the laser gets very hot (no kidding) and I need to keep the surface of my skin cool, otherwise it will blister like a bad sunburn. If anyone knows me at all, they know how susceptible I am to burns, so I gladly started rolling that frozen lint roller onto my skin. Then came the laser. It looked like a vacuum extension for vacuuming stairs, small and square. I looked over at the laser, through my protective eyewear of course, to see if it was going and surprisingly felt nothing! I felt a tiny tingle at best when she clicked the laser and then moved it to the next spot. Ziing POP. Ziiing POP. It didn’t hurt at all. So I started chatting it up with the assistant about sessions, liposuction and whatnot- when all of a sudden- I felt it. The burn! I told the girl to stop. She simply said, “keep rolling…..” So I rolled and froze and we started again. Nothing.

 Super-cool eye wear.

The session in total took maybe 5 min.  I have a total of four more session before I’m hair free. But we will see about that- I’m still skeptical!

If you are interested in laser hair removal or any type of procedure like that- I would highly recommend the friendly and professional service from Edina Skin Clinic. I’m not hair free yet- but I’m definitely pain free!

Before vs. After

Who doesn’t love a good before and after photo? Remember that show on ABC “Extreme Makeover,” where people were chosen to have a full body makeover? I loved that show because the saying, “easier said than done” completely resounds in every person on this show. It’s always easier to say you can lose ten pounds before bikini season. It’s always easier to say you will start dressing better, take more time for yourself, or the big one, be happier about the things God gave you. But sometimes, we aren’t happy or shall I say satisfied with what we were given. Be it the Vergin “thunder-thighs” in my family or the always appreciated Petron crooked nose. I was lucky enough to inherit both those family attributes.
Even though I can’t go on a nationally broadcast show, have plastic surgery, a personal nutritionist and trainer and completely revamp everything I don’t like about my appearances, (not sure I would if given the chance either) I can still get a good before and after fix whenever I want. And it doesn’t involve life-threatening surgeries!

Design Sponge has my favorite before and after photos of basically anything you can think of revamping. They categorize the projects based on how much money it costs to do the refurb, what kind of furniture or room was redone, and the difficulty and skill level it takes to do such jobs.

Wherever I live, I cannot help moving rooms around, replacing old, or even new, pieces with something of a different style, or simply giving a spruce to a room with a little paint job. I’ve got to hand it to design sponge, yet again, for giving me the creative spark to decide; even though I can’t snap my fingers and stop biting my fingernails, or have perfectly natural red hair, I can do something about the color of my apartment!



Look out for MY before and after pictures of my living room and dining room! It's a work in progress!

My inspiration for my new color scheme: Rowen and Wren

Try ‘em, you’ll like ‘em!

Rice cakes have always meant one thing to me-deprivation; deprivation of all things good, that is. I used to eat rice cakes when trying to cut back on my bad mini-candy bar snacking habits. Nothing about a big, chunky rice cake is appealing: it crunches into a big mess on your shirt, it tastes like cardboard, and not to mention the fact that it’s not that healthy. It’s just carbohydrates. I’m not one to snack on celery sticks or non toasted almonds but I want to enjoy at least some of the healthy foods I put in my mouth!

While shopping for my next days’ salad ingredients, I wanted a quick snack after my LifeTime visit. I speed walked by the bags of Reeses pieces, paused at the string cheese sticks, and lingered around the mixed nuts and dried fruits. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted them, the aforementioned rice cakes. But the sale item next to the rice cakes were these big bags of Quaker bite sized Multigrain Fiber Cakes with Blueberries! Also, there were so many to choose from. I chose the healthiest ones; the blueberry ones, but the cheese, chocolate, and apple cinnamon ones were pretty tempting. With 110 calories per 15 (rather large for bite-size) pieces, 12% daily fiber and 0 trans fat, cholesterol and saturated fat- I couldn’t pass them up.

Like the back of the package says: “Eating well doesn’t mean you have to skimp on the taste.”

And boy is that true for these tasty little babies!