And Barb, my little sister and a friend are going to a romance mini-convention in Sept. in WVirginia. Could you...maybe look at the list o' authors and see if you know anyone, and make rec on who I should steer my sister towards? Suzy's a bookseller/librarian who reads books! She fights crime!

Dude, totally!

And yay for orgasmic baths! I walked up a flight of stairs today.

I just took my hair out of its ponytail, because even that tiny bit of pressure was hurting my head. Stupid sinuses.

Speaking of hair, some sort of series of links led me to this: [link] It's an article by a white woman with three biracial (black/white) daughters, talking about combing and styling their hair. This sentence struck me:

Most white women do not know this kitchen, the snarls at the nape of the neck.

Because, well, I know exactly what she's talking about. When I was a kid, my mom combing the tangles out of my hair could sometimes take an hour. (And unlike the woman in the article, who watches stuff like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, we'd always have to watch stuff like China Beach.) I figured this was normal for kids with long hair. My first few years at sleepaway camp, I wasn't very responsible about combing out my own hair, and I'd come home with basically one huge tangle, which would take my mom about a week of working at least an hour a night to get through. Is it just a curly hair thing?

The only problem with that (gorgeous!) recumbent steampunk trike is that it's so low my skirts would probably drag on the ground.

I have no snarls at the back of my head. The hair there is straight and soft, illogically. The tightest curls are at the front, which makes no sense. The "kitchen" is supposed to be the test of good hair.

I'd come home with basically one huge tangle, which would take my mom about a week of working at least an hour a night to get through. Is it just a curly hair thing?

Nope-- fine straight hair can have a tendency to really snarl up miserably too, especially right behind the ears and down at the nape of the neck. And it's easy with straight hair to pretend it's not happening as long as you keep the top layer brushed.

Hmm. Interesting. My sister straightens her hair, and she seems to get much fewer tangles than I do. And her hair was definitely as much trouble as mine when we were kids.

Is the hair at the nape of your neck tighter curled than the rest of your hair? That's the tendency with black folk, for it to be nappier than the rest.

Is the hair at the nape of your neck tighter curled than the rest of your hair? That's the tendency with black folk, for it to be nappier than the rest.

Definitely. Tightest curls at the nape of the neck, loosest at the front around my face. Leading to a lot of really horrible haircuts from stylists who don't know what to do with curly hair and assume that, if they cut it all one length when it's wet, then it will be all one length when it's dry. (My hair gets pretty close to pulled straight from the weight of the water when it's wet.) My favorite stylist will always look at and feel my hair when it's dry, before the shampoo, and also factors in the curls boinging up when it's shorter and they don't have the weight of longer hair pulling them down.

Huh, cool. Classification of different types of curly hair. [link] I think the back of my head is 3b and the front is somewhere between 3b and 3a. My sister's 3a, my dad's 3b, and my mom is either 3c or 4a.

I was thinking the same thing, Jilli. The answer, of course, would be bloomers. Ruffled, black bloomers.