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Okay, this is going to be kind of gross…well, if you find stories about greasy hair to be distasteful, then perhaps you should not continue reading!!

Let’s begin with the hair…just regular non-greasy hair at this point. I have naturally curly locks, which easily segue to naturally super frizzed hair without any effort at all. In order to tame the frizz, I must exert some effort, usually in the form of applying goop.

Which brings me to my ruminations on the name Buenos Aires, or “Good Air.” On sweltering days when we bake in the heat and humidity, respirating black particulate exhaust spewed from the city’s buses, the girls love to comment on the irony of this fine city’s moniker. In other words, “Dirty Air” would be a more appropriate nameplate.

Now, if you take perfectly clean hair with a little de-frizz product going on, and you introduce said hair to a very unclean air environment, you can achieve quite the oily appearance in a matter of hours.

Recently, I found myself in just that situation. I had to be somewhere for a social engagement and looked in the mirror before departing, freaking out on the spot due to my suddenly greasy mane. I didn’t have time to shower and rewash my hair. In a panic, I recalled an article I read on personal hygiene shortcuts that can be used while camping (I have no idea where I read this). The article suggested using talcum powder in your hair. You sprinkle it on your scalp wherever it appears greasy and then flip your hair over and vigorously try and shake all of the powder out with your fingers.

You then flip your hair back, and presto, there is no appearance of greasiness at all! (Or powder either, for that matter.) It works like a charm.

Today, we made a long overdue addition to the sidebar of the blog. No longer are you limited to reading just Michele’s tweets, but now you can also find mine there as well.

Twice the entertainment! Twice the fun!

(I’ve saved the ridiculously lengthy story of how I put multiple twitter widgets in a WordPress sidebar for my own blog.)

In order to combat my all too common tendency to swear a blue streak, I have cemented a deal with Zoe and Zelda. For the next month, every time I curse, I owe them 5 cents (they were savvy enough to make sure we were talking $US coinage).

The catch is that they have to witness the swearing and they have to track it with their own log sheets that they design.

They embraced this task as if they were in hall monitor heaven! They were both very thorough about cataloging what constitutes a swear word. It turns out, this was important because they like to indicate which curse word I have uttered on their log sheets (I have no idea why). Happily, they only know four curse words: the a-word (ass), the s-word (shit), the f-word (well, that speaks for itself) and the b-word (bitch, which I only use as a substitute for “whine,” such as, “quit bitching about…”).

If you click on the photo above, you will see on their log sheets that I already owe them 10 cents, which was for the use of the f-word and the s-word. In all fairness, I said these two swear words yesterday when Zoe dropped a knife off of the stairs from the second floor that flew, point down, through the atrium, at an alarming rate of speed right past my ear, which was attached to my head on the first floor! I’m starting to wonder if she did it on purpose to provoke swearing… .

Okay, we’re not really technically on TV, but our video interview for Clarín was posted online, along with an article that was also in the print edition of the paper, all of which served to give us the same feeling as being on the tube!

Our interview was conducted by two Columbia School of Journalism grads named Sandra and Karen (from Mexico and New York, respectively). They are currently working on an internship for Clarín (one of the big papers in Buenos Aires). Originally, they were pursuing the hot rumor around the city of the mass exodus of financial weenies leaving NY and coming to Buenos Aires because it’s so affordable. But, as they began digging…and digging, they could find nary a financial person seeking refuge in the warm bosom of Porteño hospitality.

What the hell does that have to do with us? Well, what our two intrepid scriveners did find were expats that had relocated to Argentina in advance of the crisis (as the financial meltdown is called here), which is where we came in!

Follow the link above to see the interview and read the article in Spanish. (It’s kind of funny with Google Translate!)

We have been wanting to enroll the girls in some tennis lessons here as an alternative to the soccer and baseball that they miss back home. As a part of that, we checked out various tennis clubs in Buenos Aires.

One such tour was of the Vilas Club, as in Guillermo Vilas, as in the totally hot tennis player women thew themselves at many decades ago. (I thought he was cool in my preteen tennis fanatic days, but my heart belonged to John McEnroe.) Well, needless to say, the Vilas club is as slick and good looking as its namesake was in his heyday.

The staff very nicely shepherded us around the immaculate clay courts, beautiful restaurants, lovely gym, and gorgeous grounds. At the end, they hit us with the price. I credit my workout schedule with keeping me upright.

Let’s just say, for a family that only wants a few hours of tennis lessons a week for the kids, it was a bit steep.

The positive result of our Vilas Club meanderings is that we now have a whole new inflated metric against which we judge all expenses. We can happily commit ourselves to any and all activities by noting, “Hey, it’s much cheaper than the Vilas Club!”…like we were ever actually going to join in the first place.

First, I’d like to apologize to my parents for my Guinness Book of World Records phase. Good Lord, I must have been so irritating.

On our recent ill-fated trip to the bookstore, we purchased this edition of the Guinness Book of World Records and are already regretting it! We have had to institute a “3-record per day” sharing rule. In other words, Zoe and Zelda are only allowed to show us three items per day from this insidious book.

In the meantime, I have learned that the world’s youngest ringmaster was three years old (at least as of this 2007 edition). We have seen the world’s largest and smallest chess sets. We have had the pleasure of viewing the largest bucket of popcorn, the most accurate corner gun ever made (a gun that literally shoots around a corner), and the largest newspaper edition ever published.

“How do they find the world’s tallest person Mommy?” Sigh. “I don’t know, dear,” I reply.

Our Ian has just left the building on his way to the airport to undertake the long journey back to the Pacific Northwest. We will miss him terribly!

He has watched the girls (notice how that’s always first on any of my lists), helped us translate, introduced us to fabulous friends, taken us to La Bomba de Tiempo, taught us Spanish, ordered us tons of yummy home-delivered helado, driven me crazy (he is my younger brother, after all), hosted our only asado (with enough meat for a soccer team), made us laugh, washed dishes, introduced the girls to cool music, taught Zelda to jump Ian-style, taught Zoe how to surf, given us the skinny on good restaurants, and perhaps most importantly to our survival in Buenos Aires, introduced us to the Guia T.

As we were putting the girls to bed and they were sobbing over Ian’s departure, they said, “now we don’t have anyone to wrestle with.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

A benefit of blogging about daily life is that when crappy things occur, I find myself thinking, at least this will make a good blog post. (Of course, best case scenario is when something crappy happens to Tom because I still get to write about it, but the pain is experienced by someone else!)

Anyhow, this weekend, I lost what seemed like all of my hair in a peluquería disaster. I went to a local salon (walk-in) that had stylists with short hair (important here because the vast majority of women in this country keep their hair very long) to finally get my curly mop styled with an interim cut as I continued to grow it out a bit. (I would say that my locks were falling somewhere between my ears and my shoulders at the time of my ill-fated salon appointment.)

Prior to my cut, I explained to my stylist that I wanted to restore a little shape and movement to my hair, while making it very clear that I was growing it out and desired to keep as much length as possible.

What ensued was a disaster. She cut about 6 to 7 inches off of the top layer of my hair (leaving roughly 2 to 3 inches, which shrinks to nothing when curly). She removed approximately 1 to 2 inches off of the bottom portion of my hair and then thinned out all of the rest in between these two layers. At the end, this debacle culminated in a blow dry that left me with a modern version of an Annette Funicello Beach Blanket Bingo helmet head with flip. (You must look at this picture of Annette here to really have a clear idea of what I endured.)

Hairtastrophe!

Poor Tom, who hates post-haircut fallout, was nervous about my remedy — removing the flip, and indeed the entire lower part of my haircut, with crappy scissors in our bathroom by myself without the benefit of a mirror to see the back of my hair. The result is pictured above. So, yes, I had to pay someone to give me a crappy cut, then go home and remove the rest of my hair myself, but hey, I got a f&*(#ing blog post out of it!

(Just to clarify, I love short hair and have had my own style much lower than this many times in the past…it’s just that I wasn’t planning on having most of my hair removed over the weekend! It’s funny though, I am constantly being reminded of all of the things I like about very short hair — less shampoo, less conditioner, bitchin’ styling products, versatility, easy to swim in, easy to work out with, roll out of bed and look okay, and it grows!)

On Sunday, in a Jumbo-induced shopping haze (similar to an Ikea-induced shopping haze), Tom purchased the pepper (pimienta) pictured here. (Pepper is not a commonly-used spice in Argentina. We generally buy it in containers, such as this, that have their own little grinder on the top.)

Yesterday, we made pork chops with home made apple sauce for dinner (yummy). Naturally, we salted and peppered the chops before throwing them in the pan for some searing. When everything was cooked to perfection, I sat down and almost immediately brought the chop to my mouth for a big chomp. I stopped in mid-bite though because I caught the whiff of a strange odor that I don’t normally associate with pork. I moved my nose nearer to the slab of cerdo, attempting to place the strange bouquet… . “Cloves?” I said to Tom. His chop rapidly greeted his nostrils and after an assessing sniff, he agreed with me.

Digging into a bit o’ research, we have discovered that “Pimienta de Jamaica” is not pepper, but rather allspice, cleverly disguised as “Pimienta Negra” in a pepper grinding jar waiting to trap a hapless male shopper at the Jumbo. I have never seen allspice in its whole berry form and have since learned that it is in the same family as cloves (Myrtaceae), but possesses a more mild flavor with cinnamon and nutmeg overtones as well.

Who knew? (I’ve been saying that a lot lately!)

Washcloths are not very popular here in Argentina, so I had a solid five months of dead skin cells that had accumulated on my body (they have received a generous smearing of soap though) since traveling to South America.

Then, a few days ago, I remembered that I am a girl. I don’t have to accept a lack of exfoliation in my life. There are other ways to shed old skin besides using a washcloth. Primed for action, I marched down to the local Farmacity and immediately began perusing the loofah section. Alas, I was not happy with the selection, so I went with recycled pink plastic poof — pictured here.

To accompany said poof, I am using a Dove product that claims to have 10 times more moisturizers than soap. (I automatically love anything with an order of magnitude in the marketing). My new oily, yet cleansing, soap is combating both my uber dry skin (another problem I have had for months) and ridiculously ashy legs (a condition from which I shouldn’t suffer given that I have the skin tone of an albino).

I am happy to report that I am very pleased with both products! It’s great being a girl.