Braiding question.

My husband and I both have long hair. He wants to try something with his hair though that I am unfamiliar with. He says that he roomed with someone before that had long hair and wrapped leather around the braid, and had this give the effect of him having longer hair (like down to his butt).

I think it sounds neat, but have never seen this before so I don't know how I should try and do this to his hair. I don't know if anyone has tried this or has pictures or anything, but it would be great if anyone could help us out. :)

x-posted

Yuck. :P

Soooo... I made my first flop of a dish today. Really, I've been whipping up a lot of yummy dishes lately, which is cool. Nobody thought I could cook, but I can! I guess I really was learning to cook when I spent all that time with my gramma. I've made breads (regular, with cheese inside), pasties (yooper soul food lol), ham with pineapple and raisin dressing, chicken alfredo from scratch, etc etc. Scottie keeps joking that he's not going to let me go back to school so that I can keep cooking for him.

Tonight however, I decided that I was going to make a dessert. Once I was set on this I realized that I didn't have powdered sugar (we have organic cane, granulated cane, and brown, but no powdered) to make the frosting. What I was making was frosted banana bars. I figured it wouldn't be a great idea to substitute sugar, so I looked it up online to see what other people thought. I read that while it would make the frosting gritty, it wouldn't really make a difference in taste. I thought, hey, gritty frosting. Our bananas are starting to got overripe and it's making the apt smell like overripe bananas, so I wanted to use them up. I should have just made banana bread. But since I'd been thinking about making this since before Christmas, I thought I would try it anyway.

Bad idea. Now, the frosting is gritty, I'll give it that. Not 'OMG did you make this in a sandbox' gritty but just granulated sugar gritty. The banana bread/bar is good. The frosting is too frickin sweet. And since I like things that are sweeter than what my hubby can stand, I doubt he'll like it either. It's a cream cheese/butter/sugar frosting. I think it would be great if you could taste the cream cheese more. But I followed mom's recipe, and I swear all I taste is sugar. Is it because I used granulated instead of powdered? It doesn't seem like it would make a difference in flavor. o.O

Now, I haven't had these bars since I was in like 8th grade. Mom got the recipe from our great aunt and thought they were the best things EVAR. So so made them all the time for a spell. Now at first I thought they were great, but when I was eating them for meals practically (we didn't do a whole lot of the family dinner things- it was mostly 'eat what you find' and 'eat what you find' excluded a bunch of foods that were reserved special for my spoiled picky eater brother) I ended up getting sick of them.

Now, I think part of my problem is that even after all these years, I'm still sick of them. Oi. It sounded good theoretically but I tried some of it and I practically wanted to throw up. Too sweet! Too... too... something else that I can't put my finger on. I think about them and I want to throw up.

It could be that we don't really eat dessert? We'll have an occasional piece of chocolate and ice cream now and then, but this is the first real dessert thing I've made here in WY. Perhaps I'm just not used to uber sweet things? I suppose that would make sense, in the past when I've cut all unhealthy foods out of my diet (so basically I never ate sugar), greasy or sugary things would just gross me out if I tried them. I could end up working them back into my diet, but to go from weeks of not having said bad foods and then trying something unhealthy? Just yuck. It wasn't appealing at all.

Perhaps the bar part can be salvaged if I scrape the frosting off of them. I feel bad though because I'd be throwing out a bar of cream cheese, half a stick of butter, and a bunch of sugar (that I'm not so concerned about). I'd give them to people if I thought they were any good- but would you really want to give people something you can't stomach yourself? Maybe someone else would like them, but I don't really want people to say 'Wow, when Scottie says Tanya can cook... he's just being really charitable, 'cause that was terrible!'

I'd like to at least think that I'm doing something right, and if the only thing I can do for now as I look for a biology job or grad school is to keep my hubby healthy and as happy as possible with things even as simple as food, that would be good.

Quiz on what candidate is for president is best matched to your views

Scottie found this, and I thought it was pretty neat. My top candidate turns out to be someone I hadn't even heard was in the running. Scottie's top guy was the same one for me. It also tells you how closely matched you are to other candidates. It also gives you links to information about issues so that you can make informed choices. I think this sort of thing should be in the voting booth, something you could do so that people don't just blindly say 'Oh hay I'm a Democrat/Republican, and I saw this guy on tv and he seems good enough, I'll vote for him'. Not that everyone does, but I do know people who do. And the people who have less campaign backing so they aren't seen as much? Doesn't mean they aren't good candidates.

http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html

My top match is Former Alaskan governer Mike Gravel (D) at 96.23%. He's followed by Dennis Kucinich (D) 94.34%, Hillary Clinton at 60.38% (holy shit, look at the drop!!), and John Edwards (D) at 56.60%. I'd put down all of my data, but I can't seem to copy & paste it. I'll skip the middle of the pack, though I'll mention Obama is at 52.83% and Giuliani is at 32.08%. Giuliani is the second Republican on my list, following Ron Paul at 38.58%. All of my top tier candidates were Democrats. (I think the one downfall of this calculator is that there aren't any parties except D and R). My bottom of the barrel were Duncan Hunter, Mitt Romney, and Tom Tancredo all tied at 13.21%. My percentages were much more polarized than Scotties.

Soooo... the person that matches Scottie and I isn't going to be elected. Kinda sad. :P It was kinda funny, because Scottie and I had really closely matched candidate scores, but Obama and Hillary were switched for us.