Unwashed Teenage Blondes

Well, for those who know what I mean, Second Life is down for updating and the Beta grid doesn't seem to be working either, so I may as well prattle in here a bit seeing as I haven't done for a while.

Perhaps I will moan about my teenage daughter for a paragraph or two. What is it about teenage daughters and clothes? Mine has like hundreds of things to wear, but yesterday she wanted to wear the one thing that hadn't been washed. Never mind that everything else was clean and dry, it just had to be the one top that she'd forgotten to give me for washing the day before.

We had far more fun during the Easter holidays, though. Her hair is naturally medium-dark brown with red highlights. Due to the fact that, like her mother, she can be a bit scatter-brained at times, the majority of her schoolfriends have told her that she should have been born blonde (she was actually dark blonde as a toddler, but it darkened). Anyway, to this end she decided to colour her hair blonde. Unfortunately, being 'blonde', she didn't make too good a job of it and ended-up with a large patch of very blonde hair on top, surrounded by reddish blonde, graduating to gingery-brown as it went further down. She did all this at her father's and he hadn't the common sense to tell her that with hair the length of hers she'd need two or three packets of colourant, not one. She did try using several others afterwards, but it didn't seem to work.

I had a similar problem when I was her age. My hair then was extremely dark brown (blue-black in some lighting), but it also had red in it. Blonde highlights were all the rage when I was about the same age my daughter is now and as my mother didn't want to pay for me to have them, I decided to try them myself. I bought myself a box of peroxide, grabbed an old toothbrush, and ... well, the end result was several huge frizzy pieces of ginger fuzz and the eventual loss of an entire head of hair that had taken me years to grow to well past the bottom of my bra strap. The hairdresser insisted the only way to solve the problem was to cut it all off to nape of the neck level (way above the bottom of my bra strap, on account of the fact that I have never worn a bra around my neck). Since then, it hasn't seemed to want to grow much past my shoulders, so goodness only knows what damage I did to it.

The upshot of this is that my daughter ended-up having to colour her hair medium-dark brown and the final count in financial terms was around £30 to get herself back to the colour she'd started with.

Google Mood Ring (Blue): Comfortable, breezy, at rest, lovable.

The Last McDonald's American Holiday

It's been the Easter holidays for the past two weeks and I took my son to the cinema a couple of times. Last week we saw The Last Mimzy and yesterday we went to see Mr Bean's Holiday. My son wanted to see Mr Bean last week, but I persuaded him against it as I didn't really fancy it much. However, I have to say that I did enjoy it when we watched it yesterday. The Last Mimzy was good, but nothing extraordinary. It started off reminding me of Gremlins, then became more and more like ET as it went on.

Anyway, the first time we went to McDonald's after the film and the second time we went before. This is the third or fourth time I have been to McDonald's since I NOTICED SOMETHING. The kids noticed it, too. Quite simply, the size of the various burgers has decreased, as has the size of the drink cups. The prices, however, haven't decreased. In fact, they appear to have increased. Even before this change our portions were much smaller than the American ones (as I recall, our small doesn't exist there and our large is their medium or small or something - I think they have two sizes bigger than our maximum).

Not that I want American sizes here, it's all I can do to manage our largest, but I do wonder why Americans eat so much more than we do. It's not as if they're built any differently. Do they feel they're missing out if something isn't BIG? I remember a friend of mine going to America once and coming back saying "Oh my god, one portion in a restaurant is equivalent to what I eat in a week". She was obviously exaggerating slightly, but she wasn't far wrong. I've heard similar from other people, too.

Most restaurant portions here are way too large for me. Ideally, I would eat a child's portion, that's usually about right for me. If I went to an American restaurant I'd probably be sick at the very sight of what they would place in front of me. I suspect that even a toddler's portion would be too big.

I've never understood why restaurants don't offer smaller portions for smaller people - let's face it, there is no way a woman weighing 7 stone can eat the same size portion as a man weighing twice that size, yet there is no difference in the amounts they are given. This makes no sense to me, but I suppose it's all down to money, as they'd be expected to charge less for the smaller size. Nevertheless, if anyone ever has the common sense to start a restaurant chain like this, I think they'd make a fortune.

Just realised it's Friday the 13th today. Not that it bothers me, it's supposed to be lucky for us Scorpios. I shall live in hope of someone reaching 30 pages before midnight (don't try to work it out, you won't be able to, unless you're the person writing 'em).

Google Mood Ring (Grey): Anxious, ill at ease, strained.