What Type Of Salad Are You?

I walked into my coworker's office the other day to eat my lunch (because I'm a people person and eating my lunch at my cubicle gets boring), and she took one look at my salad and said "that is the crunchiest salad I've ever seen." I looked down and saw she was totally right. In my glass pyrex bowl (which also immediately upped the crunchyness) was kale, quinoa, edamame, sliced almonds and avocado. And the first thing that I thought of was that if there was Buzzfeed quiz about salads, I would totally be the Whole Foods Saladbar person. Now a small little part of me hates being that person, but I also fully embrace it because my salad might be crunchy but it is DELICIOUS. And the best thing is that you can make it at home and not spend all your money at the salad bar!

The Who Needs Whole Foods Salad
(ironically, all these ingredients were bought at Whole Foods but that's neither here nor there)

1 cup of cooked quinoa
1 bunch of lacinato/dino kale
2 avocados
1 bell pepper
Half a bag of frozen shelled edamame
Handful of almonds, sliced
Two lemons
Olive oil

1) Cut up your kale into tiny little bite size strips and put it in a bowl. Cut your lemons in half and squeeze lemon juice on top of the kale. Add a bit of olive oil (depends how lemony you want your salad) and mix it all together. Let it sit and absorb for a good 30 minutes.
2) Boil up some water and cook your edamame. Drain and let it cool.
3) Cut up your bell pepper and almonds.
4) Mix everything together! Add salt and pepper to taste.
5) Cut up your avocado and place on top.
6) Enjoy!

All these ingredients gives you about two and a half servings and I actually make it in bulk and then just cut up the avocado for when I'm ready to eat it. Then the kale gets even softer and yummier to eat the longer it hangs out with the lemon juice. In the fridge it should last 2-3 days depending on how fresh your produce is.

Behold the bun maker!

I'm feeling bunnier than ever.

I bought a Conair bun maker from Walgreens a year ago but my hair was not long enough to use it at the time. (Due to a rogue bleaching experience, I have determined that my hair grows approximately one and a half inches per year. The average is 6 inches per year.) 

Cut to a year later, I pulled that saucy bun maker out of the closet last night and WHAMMY — my hair is long enough now. 

It's very easy to use. You just make a pony, wrap the bun maker once around the top of the pony, wrap your hair around that and cover up all the mesh parts, then put a hairband and bobby pins around all of that jazz. Bing bang boom. Voluptuous ballerina hair for $3.49. Enjoy yourself!

How to make your feet and shoes stank way less

One of my favorite comedians is Amber Preston. I feel like she is a comedian of the people. If those people are me.

In her set, she likes to give you some fun facts about herself right off the bat. One of those facts is that she uses a special foot powder from New Zealand to curb her foot-smell issues. She later circles back to this fact, letting you know that so many women ask her about the foot powder that she simply worked it into her set, and then gives you all the details about where to find it and why it's so great. Which is one of the many reasons why SHE is so great.

Here it is, friends. Gran's Remedy! Here to solve all your foot stank problems. You just sprinkle a little bit in your shoes after you wear them, and it dries that shoe right up overnight while eliminating odor. I find it particularly useful for Toms-brand shoes, which are the stankiest shoes in all of shoe land.

I ordered my jar straight from the company, but you can also get it on Amazon. My little jar has lasted me over a year and it's not even half gone. I even got all fancy-like and bought a makeup brush to brush the powder on the footbed of the shoe instead of using the provided sprinkle spoon.

Amber, thank you for sharing this amazing product with the world. And thank you for sharing your comedy with people who love you not despite your feet stank, but BECAUSE of it.

How to make hair static go away for the rest of your g-damned life

A few years ago I was so fed up with winter temperatures and things like coats and scarves making my hair full of static that the only thing I could think of to do was go to the hairdresser and get a bunch of my hair cut off. 

But as any of you who live in a cold climate know, shorter hair just means shorter hair still filled with static. So I just lived with it, trying to dunk my hair in water every time I went by a water fountain, or sometimes becoming so desperate that I used my own saliva to mat it down. 

Until my hairdresser turned me on to THIS little guy. Moroccan Oil. I don't know anything about it except what you can see on the bottle, and that it came from the place I get my hair cut (The Fox Den at 704 W. 22nd St, Minneapolis).

If I spray a little spritz of that golden static juice, my hair stays straight down all day, only touching me in appropriate ways. Not clinging to my face for dear life, trying to get into my mouth and eyes and driving me nut-balls crazy. 

If you're not able to get down to The Fox Den, I was able to find it on Amazon. Enjoy your new life!

An update from Infertile Myrtle

-- The following is a guest post from our secret lady friend who chooses to remain  anonymous until a baby kangaroo is officially put into her mama pouch --

You know what’s weird? Seeing a guy in army fatigues walk into a doctors office and know exactly why he’s there: dude’s about to get his swimmers tested. Today I sat in the waiting room of the U of M Reproductive Medical Center and watched the couples coming in and wondered what their stories were. But a guy there on his own? Semen analysis. 100%.

 ***** 

Hi, friends! Maybe you were wondering whatever happened to Possibly Pregnant Polly. It’s more likely you didn’t give me a second thought. But hi! I’m back. And still sans enfant. Please allow me to fill you in on what’s happened (and hasn’t happened) in the past seven months.

What hasn’t happened is my period. After Flo came to town in July, she abandoned me, seemingly for good. I was expecting this, since I had gone for long… er… periods of time without menstruating the two times I went off the pill during my decade- long Birth Control Bonanza. Both times my gyno prescribed me a hormone called Provera to kick start a period so I could get back on the pill.

Anyway, back in October I had a physical with a new GP who seemed completely unconcerned when I told him it’d been many moons since I’d had my womanly courses. He told me not to worry.

But worry I did. I started a routine of taking pregnancy tests every three weeks or so, because I couldn’t be sure if I wasn’t having a period because I was pregnant or because I was broken. (One of the notes in my pregnancy tracker app says, “Today I answered the question of bloated or pregnant with ‘bloated.’”) Each time I promised myself I wouldn’t be upset when I got the inevitable negative. Each time I cried a little bit, and left the test out where my husband could see it so he’d know why I had The Sads that day.

By the time December rolled around, I confided in a close gal pal that I was coming up on six months without a period. She made me promise to see my regular lady doc, which I did in January. She ordered a bevy of hormonal tests, put me on Provera to force a period, and referred me to the clinic’s infertility specialist, Dr. K. I saw Dr. K the next week, and he told me that based on the results of my blood tests he suspected I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.

WHICH TOTALLY SOUNDS LIKE CANCER.

I freaked out and started blubbering while he asked me if I had noticed an increase in acne or male-pattern hair growth on the face, chest, or belly (no to all). He explained that it was a genetic disorder that causes an imbalance in the hormones, leading to cysts on the ovaries that cause women to menstruate infrequently or not at all. It’s also associated with diabetes. All I heard was: YOU HAVE MALE HORMONES AND YOU’RE GOING TO GET DIABETES. He ordered more tests and I went off to work, trying (and failing) to keep my shit together.

My health provider lets you check test results online, but the only information they give you is your value and what a normal range is. No other context. According to my results, all of my hormones fell within the normal range. This led me to convince myself his diagnosis was wrong, which made it all the more crushing to return to Dr. K’s office, this time with Hubs in tow, and have him say, “I was right. You have it.” He launched into an explanation of the hormone treatments he wanted to put me on— Provera to stimulate menstruation and then Clomid to stimulate ovulation—but I barely digested any information. I was spiraling way, way down into The Dark Place, and all I could do was sob uncontrollably. 

We went home. I sobbed. I called my mom. I sobbed. I texted my close friends. I sobbed. I had never cried this much in my life. I cried so hard I puked—and I NEVER puke. All the while I tried to synthesize why this news made me feel so devastated. It’s not like I had cancer. No one was dying. But I felt the pain of discovering that something you spend your whole life thinking is a given, something that is obviously in the cards for you, suddenly… isn’t.

I think the reason I felt that way is that infertility is not something you hear about unless someone close to you is going through it. Facebook, at least at this stage in my life, is a constant deluge of pregnancy and birth announcements. Not one of my friends has posted a status about the rigors of IVF, or the tragedy of a miscarriage. If people talked about it more, maybe it would normalize it, just a little. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so devastating. 

 ***** 

Flash forward to today. I saw a new doctor at the U’s Center for Reproductive Medicine, one with whom I felt more comfortable right away. Dr. L talked me through my previous lab results and explained everything to me, making sure I had my questions answered. She did an ultrasound to confirm the PCOS diagnosis, and sure enough, I’m a “classic case.” She ordered a few more blood tests for me, including a genetic screening, and had some special tests for the Huzz as well. We’ll be back in a month to review the results before I go on the hormones, which I feel much better about. It sure would suck to put my body through so much stress only to find out that there’s a problem on his end too.

The most important thing I left the office with is a new sense of confidence about my chances of conceiving. Dr. L told me that if I had to be infertile, this is the kind of infertile I want to be. I’m young, I’m healthy, and I have plenty of eggs; I just need a little help coaxing them out so they can become behbehs.

For the first time in months, I have a positive outlook.

This Friday, Husband will be going into the RMC by himself, and I bet you can guess why. Please send happy thoughts that his swimmers will swim straight and true.