I swear I'll get better at this

5 months since I last blogged? Yikes.

The summer went slowly. Each walk to work in the morning was quiet, mainly because of the absence of all the school kids I had become so accustomed to seeing. I couldn't rely on the fact that when I cross 2 major intersections the cross walk button would already be pushed by the crowd of kids waiting to cross. I also saw much fewer faces and so few orange shirts (I still haven't figured out which school has so many kids wearing orange shirts to school). By the time September rolled around I was eager to see everyone back to school, yet sad that some of the once familiar faces had disappeared. I can only guess they graduated, or transferred, or are just walking at different times.

I had one bit of excitement through that summer of walking. One fine August day I realized that they were filming the newest season of Glee at one of the schools I pass by. This was made clear by 2 things. 1. Those yellow signs with an arrow that everyone in LA knows is a sign for filming, with the initials WMHS which I could only assume were the initials from the high school in Glee. And later that day as I walked home from work, I saw lots of security and trailers, but also an extra in a Cheerios uniform. And if you watched the first episode you saw it, the scene where they filmed the food fight, that was filmed a mile from my house!

I still love my walk, though it is starting to getting darker, which is obviously not ideal, and with the darkness comes the cold, which is really not my favorite. But I guess that's just how it goes with the seasons. See, we do have seasons in LA!

I really enjoy my walk to school, I mean my walk to work

I start every weekday with a 20 minute walk followed by a 45 minute bus ride. It's one of my favorite things about the day cause I get my exercise and some reading in before I even start work, and often times I've listened to a podcast too. In the span of 20 minutes I pass roughly 4 schools, 1 middle school, 1 high school, and 2 elementary schools and I've really enjoyed the familiar faces I see as I go. I can even tell how late I am depending on at what point I pass someone.

I take this all for granted and only noticed how much I enjoy passing teenagers and young kids when for the entirety of last week, I passed almost no one. LAUSD was on Spring Break and so I started my morning with a very lonesome 20 minute walk to the bus. It was still an enjoyable walk, but I enjoy seeing certain people.

There's the nerdy kid I pass first, who still won't smile back at me. The really trendy girl and her guy friend who always smells intensely of perfume. The mom and daughter who often cross the street with me. The mom and son who pass me, linked arm in arm. Then there's the rock kid with really big hair. And last there's a girl and her boyfriend who are always attached. I missed all of them the past week, and it was really nice to have them all back again. It's sad to think it will be short lived as summer is approaching and the streets will once again be lonely in the morning.

But for now, I'll enjoy it, and take this as a sort of replacement for the fact that I was never really able to walk to school cause it was too far. I hope all the people I pass enjoy it as much as I do, and that they keep walking.

A hair update

It's now been almost 2 months since I last washed my hair with shampoo of any kind. When I get in the shower, I do what basically every other person does, I just do it without shampoo. I still wet my hair and massage my scalp to get rid of the dead skin cells and brush it and then I get out and towel dry. I'm really happy with everything. I don't think of my hair as too oily, in fact, it just sort of maintains a nice healthy level of oil. My hair feels nice, and it smells like hair. The only downside is that after I shower and I brush my hair there is a grey lint type residue that comes off my comb. It goes away after I come it a couple times, but it's still kind of gross at first. I have found that intensely massaging my head in the shower as well as when I towel dry really helps to reduce the linty stuff.

Regardless, I'm willing to deal with it so I don't have to put a bunch of chemicals and stuff in my hair, plus my showers are shorter and I generally feel like I use less water. So yay.

The world needs more bike racks

I never used to think about bike racks before. But that was probably because I had a car or something. Now that I share a car with my sister and my main forms of transportation involve a bike and/or public transit, I think about it a lot. I can think of two main examples in my life at the moment.

The first, is my work place, though I've been taking the bus because I can read on the way and have a nice 20 minute walk each way, I do have the option to bike if I want and it would take me the same amount of time and I did this the first week I worked here. Now the problem is that there isn't really anywhere for me to put my bike when I get here. I work in an office in Beverly Hills, and so I can't really store my bike in the office because it would be sort of in the way and awkward and there isn't anywhere I can lock in the back of the building, so I was forced to lock it to a parking meter downstairs. OK great, a parking meter is a completely legit place to lock my bike, but that doesn't mean I feel totally awesome about it. Ideally, there could be a bike rack where the employees park and take their smoke breaks, it wouldn't take up much room and would make me feel much better.

The second, became apparent just this past Sunday as I went to church at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels here in Los Angeles. I live less than a mile from the Cathedral and obviously rode my bike there. I walked in the pedestrian entrance and asked the lady at the Visitor Information desk if there was somewhere I could put my bike, and she replied in completely serious manner, that bikes were in fact not allowed. Not allowed! What kind of policy is that? I ended up parking my bike to a handrail and I felt pretty crappy about it, but the doors that it led to were closed, so it made me feel a little better. This is a church in the middle a downtown Los Angeles, it's accessible by car, by foot, and public transit, it also has ramps and elevators for the handicapped, and somehow there are no bike racks. I think this is a serious failure on many points. 1. Church should be accessible to everyone, and if it's not there's a good chance you're losing some people. This is the biggest failure to me because there are so many Latino boys in LA that ride really cool bikes, Latino boys who are probably Catholic, and they are apparently not riding their bikes to church or not going to church at all 2. We should be encouraging people not to drive, I noticed first hand the line of traffic that is caused by people trying to get into the parking lot, and that could be a little shorter if a couple more people biked 3. You would be more likely to have people who don't usually, come to mass as they passed by.

I really love riding my bike places, and hopefully it will eventually become easier for me to ride places with new bike lanes/sharrows and more bike racks to encourage bike usage.

I'm never buying shampoo again!

It's been over 2 weeks since I've used shampoo and I'm not going back.

This all started while I was reading my blogs at work and GOOD had a challenge for the month of January to go without using soap (except for like before you prepare food and after you go to the bathroom) for the month of January. The post I read was an update from someone who had been doing the challenge for 2 weeks and he said everything was going well. So I looked in to it a little further on the internet and thought I would try it. I also found an alternative to shampoo, using baking soda, and then apple cider vinegar as conditioner.

Things are awesome. I shower daily, with just water, so I don't smell, and once a week I'm washing my hair with baking soda and vinegar. I'm hoping that as time goes by I'll have to wash it less and less. The key I think, is to wean yourself off shampoo instead of just going cold turkey. Switch to the baking soda and vinegar method and just wash your hair less and less. Everyone always complains that their hair is too oily, but it's only too oily because you shampoo it so frequently. So stop washing it so often and things will be great. I feel like my hair is softer now than it ever was when I used shampoo, plus, I shower so much faster now, and spend less money on both products and water.

I'll try to get some pictures up later of my hair and how it's looking, but so far, I am really pleased.