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I announce that I'm joining a hair growth challenge, and two days later my hair starts falling out. Y'all think you're so slick? Hope you enjoy being bald, I sent that back right away, and haven't lost a hair since. I can't even grow my own hair in peace, for fuck's sake. Hey WitchTok, take note - this is the life you're choosing. Witch Wars are part of it, whether you want to get into it or not. I sure don't, but here we are. Make sure you're ready for the heat, everyone's a target. Basically, you get publicly cancelled and magically cursed at the same time. And they won't just target you, they'll hurt you by hurting your family, your pets, your job & finances, and your home/sense of security, too. It's super fun. Anyway, not a lot of blog activity this week, because I've been working on getting the 3 Witches Clothing Swaps Spring Clothing Swap on the calendar, and getting the website updated. I already have a bag of clothes to swap going, I keep finding pants that don't fit me anymore... As an aside, TW: weight loss, mammograms... I keep walking past mirrors and thinking "goddamn, I have massive tits and a tiny waist" 😅😅 Not that I'm any size 00, I'm actually more like a size 0W. But, I'm in a 38K cup in US sizes, and I'm potentially creeping down/up to a 36L. See, I had my first mammogram when I was at my heaviest weight, and I had "extremely dense breasts," which in the three subsequent mammograms got less and less dense, until my last squish, when I had no density at all. My boobs are definitely lighter than they were a few years ago. But I only lost the fat, not the tissue. Which means, they're the same size as they were a few years ago, they're just a little softer. I lost the weight specifically to prove that I need a breast reduction, but it takes literal YEARS to get into a plastic surgeon that takes Medicaid, and I likely won't have Medicaid by the time they get to my referral... so compression bras it is. I am indeed a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World. Life is microplastic, it's fantastic. Anyway, I am definitely looking forward to swapping out my too-big pants for just-right pants. Like Goldilocks. And looping back to our original topic, if you think you want to throw anything at this clothing swap's success simply because I'm attached? I have politely asked my new giant spider demon friend to bind you.

yr Auntie here is unsurprisingly on the "alternative spirituality" side of YouTube, with the tarot readings and the current astrological happenings tracking and the daily Schumann Resonance reports. And yr Auntie is all over the comments, and can see the fear, we might as well name it, even in the spiritual community right now. I'm likening this energy to wave riding in Lake Michigan. Something I first did at six years old, and it's been one of my most favorite activities on earth ever since. The water feels like chaos and danger until you realize that the waves and the riptide all have a rhythm. They act in very dangerous, yes, but very predictable ways that you just have to know how to answer correctly, and not only will you be fine, you'll have the best fun. I'm personally utilizing this energy to the fullest, and I'm having a great time. Now, how do we answer chaotic but rhythmic earth energy? We stay ready to jump at the exact moment. How do we do that, in this metaphor? We prepare to be self-sustainable for a period of time. aka, prepping for a time with no electricity or internet. That means a time without commerce, likely only the smallest mom & pop grocery stores would be able to transition to cash only, and how many of them still exist? That means stocking your pantry with shelf-stable foods, and making sure you have a way to cook them without any electricity. This means keeping potable water in reserve (using the correct blue canisters, please!) That means keeping your car's gas tank full, and keeping a tank or two in reserve (using the correct red canisters, please!). That means stocking and charging batteries. That means figuring out how you're going to see when the sun goes down, and making sure you have everything you need for that to happen (lamp oil, matches, batteries, etc). That means figuring out how you're going to stay safely warm if it's dangerously cold during the outage. That means keeping working fire alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and fire extinguishers on hand, as well as a stocked first aid kit. And we're refilling our prescriptions as soon as we're able, as a general rule, so we always have plenty in stock. I wrote out a guide to prepping for a snowstorm on my recipe blog as Winter Storm Fern was poised to freeze out 2/3 of the US a few weeks back, that has some more detailed advice for prepping, particularly for a cold weather event. Also, now is the time to make plans with your community. Who's going to pick up your elderly aunt and bring her back to weather the event with your family? Will your church or American Legion offer a "stone soup" community pot each night, or offer an emergency shelter? Knowing that you're prepared to take care of yourself and your family no matter what happens does a lot to help calm the fear of the unknown, and makes it easier to tackle the waves when they come, no matter how big they are. Remember, if they're too big to jump, you dive under the turmoil until the wave goes past. aka, hunker down and get to your tbr pile for a few days while the world sorts itself out. If the power's out, there's not much else you can do.

I'm to the point where I was before my hip went south in October. I can get around my house without a mobility aid, and I'm back to just a cane when I go out (unless it's to a place where I need to bring my own seat, then I use a rollator walker or a manual wheelchair, that was pre-bionica thanks to the spinal cord injury). I can even get my own socks and shoes on! This feels like a big life complication resolved, so I'm in high spirits today. I saw my new podiatrist today, and got a care plan set up there, so that's another thing I can check off the list as dealt with, which definitely adds to the light feeling. Though it's good I picked out my new eyeglasses last week while I was bored in the blizzard, I definitely couldn't read the small print on the flyers on the exam room wall... I'll have to make that appointment here soon...

The Challenge! How much hair can I grow between today, February 1, 2026, and February 1, 2027? What we're starting with! U-shaped layers from jaw to shoulder length when stretched. What we're working with! Very fine, highly porous, 3B-C curls with significant shrinkage when they're not stretched. Hair status: Virgin. Never been colored, chemically processed, or heat styled in any way. I stretch it with cornrows. The Growth Method: Internal: Approximately 1 gallon of water per day, with electrolytes (not a sponsored link) Daily supplementation of: Bovine Collagen Peptides Iron Vitamin C Omega 3-6-9 Fatty Acids Scalp: Regular, targeted cleansing with Kojic Acid Soap. Oiling and massage with a homemade, custom blended scalp oil. Length Retention: Use of an updated LCO method, with freshly cleaned, wet hair as the L iquid, a commercially manufactured leave-in conditioner as the C ream, and homemade chebe butter as the O il. The above products are then set under a steam bonnet for an hour to melt down the oils and butters so they can penetrate the hair shaft. Silk bonnets are worn to bed every night, and silk or satin barriers between my hair and the world are worn whenever possible. The Goal Length: Before surgery, my hair was growing at around 2" per month. It's all but stopped while my leg has been healing, but I expect to get back to that rate pretty quickly. If I can preserve it with the chebe, I'm hoping to be somewhere around waist length by this time next year. Now, I won't beat myself up if I don't make it there, especially considering I'm pretty obsessive about keeping the ends trimmed and even, and that can sacrifice some length. But my goals are ambitious. The Record: I'll take pictures just like the ones above on the first of the month (or as close to as possible) to track the growth, and write up a report on whatever I think is worth talking about regarding my hair that month. And you'll follow along!

TW: medical neglect I've read from a few sources that it was believed for a long time that autistic people don't feel pain, or feel it at far lower levels than neurotypical people. As a neurodivergent person with multiple chronic pain issues that have brought me to the Emergency Department on many occasions, I've experienced this personally. But it's not that my Emergency staff knew I was neurodivergent and therefore assumed I wasn't feeling pain, it was that my neurodivergent, accustomed to a certain level of daily pain response is so different than a healthy neurotypical person's that Emergency staff don't recognize me as a person in pain. It also doesn't help that I'm a cisgender (that means the outward, social expression of my gender matches my sex/genitalia), AFAB (that's "assigned female at birth") person, women's pain is traditionally downplayed even when we're incoherently screaming, so I'm basically fucked. Let's start with the infamous pain scale. It became the biggest metric of my life 10 years ago, and I very quickly had to figure out how to use it to convey my pain levels as accurately as possible. For the record, your doctor will immediately discount your pain if you report it as an "11" while displaying zero stress symptoms. Also, that's about the most neurotypical thing you can do. Here's my pain scale: my daily pain levels fluctuate between 2 and 4, and that's medicated, they'd be an easy 8 unmedicated. 5-6 is about where I was from October-hip surgery, painful but I can generally handle it myself and minimally function. 7 is where I call the doctor, 8 is where I head to Emergency. For comparison, 8 is usually compared to unmedicated childbirth. There's also a "my 10," which is not the "screaming uncontrollably and unable to communicate" that the 10 is officially reserved for, but basically your absolute limit pain, which for me rounds out to around an official 9. I would like to point out that this is the pain scale of a chronic pain patient, which is widely recognized to be completely different from that of a healthy person's scale. My "gosh, maybe I need help with this" is most people's "writhing and screaming uncontrollably." Thing is, that doesn't mean that my pain is any less stressful to my body than the writhing and screaming neurotypical's, it just means that I'm not writhing and screaming. Okay, here's the problem: at 7, I can't mask my face or voice anymore. Both go flat. I'm told at this point my complexion is absolutely corpse-like, and the stress in my voice makes me sound bitchy, and it doesn't help that I can only manage short responses. But when I'm in the ED, I can pull it together enough to answer questions thoroughly, strike one against me for actually being in the kind of pain I report. Never mind that I'm in a hypertensive emergency thanks to the pain, and the blood pressure monitor is going bonkers. Why? Yeah, I'm this kind of autistic, I sat back and figured it out one day - I'm not emotionally connected to my pain. People don't scream because of the pain itself, they scream because they're terrified of what's happening to them. Me? I apologize to my care team in advance, because I know that if I'm going to outwardly express my pain, it'll be with expletives. I'm sure you're not surprised. I have the benefit of knowing full well what's going on in my body, I've had a whole lot of imaging done. I just saw my bones yesterday, even, including the new titanium one. I know the difference between nerve pain and muscle pain, I understand where pain originates from, and I know what I can handle and what I need help with. This makes me the opposite of a "drug seeker," by the way. I take Naltrexone daily for fuck's sake, you can't even give me opioids. Another fun neurodivergent trait is that we do emergency situations really well. Sure, we're anxious, depressed messes when everything's going great, but a disaster happens? We're locked the fuck in until it's over. That's how I can muster full, detailed answers to doctor's questions during my worst pain, I'm in mind over matter mode, and the matter is my malfunctioning body that we are now focused on fixing. Or at least I am, if I can convince my doctor that the fact that I'm even there means it's serious. They're not used to patients like me, with the level of body awareness that I have, or the level of pain familiarity or neurodivergence. Why am I writing this? Hopefully it helps neurotypical ED workers understand their neurodivergent patients better, so we don't get dismissed, and get more comprehensive care. And hopefully it finds other patients like me, because this is a very lonely feeling when you're half naked on an ED gurney.

Funny story... They used Dermabond to close spine surgery 4, and it gave me the worst rash. Like, itching at an 11, it was terrible. So, I had my doctor put Dermabond on my medical allergy list. I pointed this out before surgery, and right before I went under, in the OR, the surgeon's assistant told me that they usually use Dermabond to close the incision based on where it is, and could they spot-test the Dermabond before making the decision on how to close the incision? And I told them to do whatever they needed to do, right before I went out. Now, no one tells you how they closed you up in the hospital, and for the first week you have the big foam bandage, which covers a smaller mesh bandage. I didn't inspect the mesh bandage any further than making sure that it wasn't bleeding or infected, and for some reason I assumed the Dermabond worked and I just needed the mesh removed. The mesh has just started to peel off... and revealed the stitches that have been in my leg for nearly four weeks now 😅😅 Now, I have yet another virus, lucky me. I've had nasty post-nasal drip for the past couple of days, as well as a lack of appetite, and some general wooziness. I cancelled my PT for the day, and informed my surgeon's office that I am sick, and I will be masked, and that they can head me off if they want to. Since I haven't had a fever, they want me to come in, because I need my stitches out. Glad I discovered them last night, that would have been a surprise 😅😅 I'll be back with an update, which I'm sure will be glowing! Update: Stitches are out! The incision happens to be in a spot where I have enough nerve damage that I didn't feel a thing, even as they were like "I'm so sorry, I know this is uncomfortable!" Nope, not for me. I could barely feel them tugging on the skin. And yet, it's still easier to bend that joint without the stitches in there. Of course, this is why I'm seeing my new podiatrist on Monday, because I can't tell when I'm slicing into my own nailbeds with sharp pedicure implements. But it came in handy here, so I'll take a win where I can get it. Everything's healing super well, and post-op 2 happens in a month.

TW: medical diets, food allergies. I tracked my food intake and how that breaks down nutritionally for the first time a few days ago, for a What I Eat In A Day blog post over on Auntie's Allergy-Free Eats. That used to be about the most toxic, controlling thing in the diet culture, making you account for every single thing that goes into your body every single day. Even if it wasn't on social media, it was usually shared with weight loss groups. I refused to participate until now, and that's mostly because people are doing #WIEIAD videos on TikTok where they're being... very honest. And considering I eat a very restricted diet that I have to cook from scratch, I thought that me recording this content, but in blog form with recipes and nutritional content instead of just mukbang videos, might actually help other people getting used to a new, restricted diet get ideas on how to feed themselves day to day. And I learned that I'm on a slight calorie deficit (which I knew), and getting plenty of protein and carbs, but maybe only half of the unsaturated fat (or even saturated fat) I should be getting. When you can't eat dairy or nuts, you better like eating a lot of avocados, olive oil, and seeds 😅😅 So, I've started to begin and end my day with a serving of dairy-free yogurt substitute, and 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed and a teaspoon of raw honey from my neighbor's hives. The yogurt has 6g of fat, the flax seed also has 6g of fat, and the flax seed has the dietary fiber to feed the probiotics in the yogurt and the honey. So, at least I know I'm getting 24g of fat from plant sources each day, and it'll keep my gut biome healthy. When did having a body get so ding dong complicated?

Guess who hasn't been to PT now in nearly two weeks? Thankfully, I'm doing all my home exercises every day, and healing just fine, but this whole stuck at home while I have a bunch of medical appointments thing is pretty infuriating to someone who takes commitments seriously and hates being unreliable. With a chronically ill body, you'd think I'd be used to being unreliable af and give myself more grace, but I do not. But this is what it looks like outside my bedroom window, and it has looked like this all night: The camera actually saw a lot more than my eyes did, all I could see was white. I couldn't see my neighbor's house or all those trees. On a positive note, especially for Milosh, I'm back to walk-up head scritches. They involve bending a bit past 90°, so I'm just starting to get back to carefully scritching his floofy head. I'm not quite to "speedy pets" yet, which is where he runs at me half-speed, and I have to pet him once as he runs past. If I miss my cue, I get the stank-eye and a do-over. The boy was getting mad that I was neglecting my Mumma duties. Milosh.

I know the trend is "Things I'm Not Buying," but this is a shorter list: Food. Gotta feed myself. Nutritional supplements. I enjoy being the most animated corpse I can be, and that takes nutrients. Hygiene, skincare, and hair care consumables. Which I don't use a lot of, and only buy one bottle of one kind at a time, two if there's a BOGO sale. Marijuana. Infrequent "little treats" in the form of inexpensive jewelry and perfume. Possibly a piece or two of secondhand clothing, potentially the fabric and elastic to make a pair of "balloon pants." I'm adding "new tattoo" to this list purely for manifestation purposes. Update: it occurs to me that I've been wearing the same glasses since pre-pandemic. I should probably have my eyes looked at. Not a sponsored link, but I discovered Zenni Optical 20 years ago, when I was in college, and I haven't bought glasses from anywhere else since. That's... about it. My current wardrobe is fantastic. You know how I said I have an ancestress recorded only as "Enormous Viking Lady," not by first name? I got her build. It means that 50lb weight loss I can't stop bringing up in every post didn't drastically change my measurements, and my weight's been so up-and-down over the past 10 years, anyway, that my wardrobe is very forgiving. And so very well curated right now, I can't wait to be able to wear it out again. But that means I don't really need to add anything to it. I'm even set for 80% of the predicted trends already! I'm getting the biggest and most gorgeous library you have ever seen right down the road from me, so I'm planning on utilizing it to the fullest for my physical media needs when it opens later this year. YouTube & YouTube TV are the only paid online services I have... I'm on a family plan, I'm not the one paying, heh. No Netflix, no Hulu, no Amazon Prime, no HBO, no Disney+, no Spotify... you get the idea. I have a small makeup kit I assembled last year, it's all still just fine, and also rarely touched. The only time makeup has been my thing was during the pandemic, and I'm kind of over it. If I do anything, I like the minimalist approach Gen Z is starting to take. As for beauty maintenance, I do my own (ish). I wear and cut my own hair, use temporary glue-on strips if I want lash enhancements, do my own manicure and have a podiatrist for my toes, I don't have dermatological procedures or plastic surgery done, and I don't remove my body hair. And yes, I know the science behind it, but those red light masks still look like the worst beauty snake oil. I don't need to spend my money on one. And as for "stuff," I have so much stuff already, I don't need more stuff. I need more stuff to do. That's it. I feel like this should end with everyone holding hands and singing "Simple Gifts."

Tomorrow is three weeks post-op, and I have two updates, finally: "Winter Storm Fern" (as a person named Katrina, I hate the practice of naming storms, but shared meaning and all that...) had me miss two PT sessions and my first post-op last week, so all of that has been pushed into this coming week. Since that was when I was supposed to be graduated from my walker back to my cane... I graduated myself. tbh, I've been walking around smaller rooms in my house unassisted. I feel totally stable on my new joint, at this point it's just what's left of healing the sutures and the bone. And not getting tripped by stir-crazy cats. And today I have this weird nerve thing in my left thigh. It's nowhere near the incision, much lower on the thigh. I'm pretty sure it's my body telling me it's time to switch back to the Baclofen from the post-op Robaxin. Baclofen has never been much of a muscle relaxer for me, but it does turn off the "spine ache" from my spinal cord injury, so I'm on a 10mg daily dose... as long as I'm not on Robaxin. I'm going to switch it up tomorrow, and see what happens. And turns out all that gastrointestinal distress and sweat-outs right after the surgery was probably norovirus. My sister brought the same symptoms home from her job just this past week, and gave them to her boyfriend. I didn't spread it because I was isolated in my bedroom. So, maybe those aren't common post-op symptoms after all.

TW: medical neglect I'm going to let you in on how the medical system works. When you go to your PCP, they're there to treat normal stuff - colds and flu, high blood pressure, etc. They can be your first gatekeeper when it comes to determining if your condition is "normal" enough to see a specialist or not. Otherwise, they refer you to a specialist. Now, here's the thing. Your body is intimately connected. And you may not be seeing the right specialist based on the symptoms your body is giving you to work with. I'll use my most recent personal example to illustrate: My first symptom that something was "wrong" was that I was having urinary problems. I'd empty my bladder but my brain wouldn't turn the "gotta go" signal off, so I'd feel like I'm going to pee my pants with a freshly emptied bladder, and that feeling would persist for a good hour. Or I'd genuinely need to empty my bladder every 20 minutes for a two hour stretch, usually at 2am. Or, I wouldn't realize my bladder was full until I'd cough or laugh and have to change my pants. Or, I'd have to strain to empty my bladder. A nine month wait for a urology appointment, and a full Urodynamics workup showed a bladder in pristine health. They sent me to a pelvic floor therapist, who's tests revealed I had a perfect pelvic floor, and something wrong going into the left bend of my colon. At the same time, I'm dealing with chronic constipation so bad that Epsom salt and vegetable glycerine enemas were my only option for voiding my bowels all summer. A six month wait to see a gastroenterologist landed me with a nurse practitioner who dgaf about what my pelvic floor therapist found. I got no real treatment. It wasn't until I couldn't walk that I got the referral to orthopedics, and discovered that my pelvis was tilted thanks to the rotten hip joint. The bladder issues resolved immediately after surgery. The bowel issues are starting to heal. Here's the takeaway: all of those doctors treated me to the fullest their specialty allows... with the exception of the gastroenterology NP, she was pretty useless. But they were not going to look outside the bounds of their specialty for answers. The urologist was not going to x-ray my pelvis, he was going to cath my bladder and put it through the paces. I saw a young patient complaining online recently that they can't find a neurologist who will take the nerve pain in their arm seriously. Of course - a neurologist isn't going to care unless it's a migraine or MS. You need to go to either orthopedics or spine & pain for that. But a neurologist won't tell you that. A neurologist will simply tell you that there's nothing wrong... but they mean that there's nothing wrong that they can treat within their specialty. I think House, MD really messed with a lot of people's ideas of how medicine really works. And diminished the role of the patient as advocate. When you have a chronic illness, you need to stay on top of your doctors, and make sure you're seeing the right one with the right tools. It's not the other way around.

I have AuDHD and the very literal thinking that goes with it, and even I am confused by how many people are getting incredibly literal about hair growth, to the point where they're dismissing products and techniques that work because they're not for "hair growth" specifically, but for "length retention." Let's start with the basics. Hair grows from the scalp. To grow your hair, you need: Proper nutrition and hydration. Particularly note your iron levels, anemia will not only stunt hair growth, but also cause your existing strands to break and shed. And if you're over 40, I cannot recommend supplementing collagen peptides and vitamin C enough. It's made a hugely noticeable difference not just in my hair growth, but in my nail growth and skin quality, too. Regular scalp cleansing and exfoliation. Shampooing has conditioned (pun intended!) us to focus on cleansing the strands, but it's your scalp that needs the focused scrub-down and exfoliation to clean the follicles out for growth. Scalp oiling. Some folks find scalp serums work better for them than an oil. A dry, crusty scalp isn't the best environment for your hair to grow, and proper scalp cleansing will dry your scalp more than you're used to. The stimulation from massaging the oil in also stimulates growth. That is what you need to grow your hair. That's it. And that doesn't address my fine, highly porous strands that literally dissolve at the slightest hint of environmental stress. I can grow that all I want, but no one will know how fast my hair grows if I lose the hair just as quickly as I can grow it, which has been my problem all my life. This is where length retention comes in. Now, as I write this there's three camps when it comes to how to retain length: Expensive protein bonding treatments and salon hair care systems. The "Abbey Yung Method," a drugstore products version of the above. The "LOC" or "LCO" method (that's Liquid or Leave-In - Oil - Cream) that was popularized about 10 years ago by the natural hair movement, which is being modified today with products like chebe butter from Chad. I'm in the third camp. I've been using the LCO for 10 years successfully even before the "modern" (which are actually millennia old) modifications, we all know I was raised crunchy af and stuck with it, and I still have trauma from 30 years of using "white" hair care products and looking fucking godawful no matter what I did because they ruined my hair over and over. Never again. So, when it comes to my length retention routine: Start with wet hair. This is important, many people start with dry or slightly damp hair. This method has the opposite intended effect if you do it on dry or damp hair. It has to be wet, slightly dripping even, to work. Apply your favorite leave-in conditioner. It took me a whole year to find one with no nut or soy oils that works for my hair. Apply chebe butter over your leave-in. A decent amount. I'm using a good 2-3 tablespoons on my shoulder-length hair right now. Make sure you concentrate the application on the ends. Put on a steam bonnet, and settle in for at least a half-hour of heating all that moisture and oil and butter and resin up so your hair can best absorb it. Your hair will be just as wet as when you started at this point, so here is where you dry your hair and style it as usual. And finally, wear a silk bonnet to bed every night. I do both my scalp care and my length retention routine every 2-3 days on average. Up to once a week when Life or Health gets in the way. I should note that I'm working with "virgin" hair - uncolored, never chemically processed, never heat styled. I kept my hair dyed since I was a young teen to try to hide all of that product damage, which of course provided its own damage... the last box went in July 2021, right before my first professional photo shoot. The headshots on my About page were taken in 2023, two years into the growing out process, which took three full years all told to grow my hair to shoulder length. This was before I discovered scalp oiling and chebe steam treatments, this was also before I was diagnosed with food allergies and started supplementing iron and collagen/Vitamin C. The 2026 Hair Growth Challenge starts in a week and a half, and I'm planning to go from shoulder length to somewhere from bra strap to waist length by February 2027. That's how fast my hair has been growing since I started using this two-part method in September 2025.