Archive for the ‘’ Category

I wanted to write about this the other week but did not get a chance due to many dif­fer­ent things going around, lucky for me they have now been solved (re-arranged dri­ving test to Decem­ber time and took my resit which I think I have failed).

Make-Up Prod­ucts

I per­son­ally would love to save money on my make up, why is it so expen­sive to buy decent prod­ucts and I try to the cheaper ver­sions but they do not seem to do the same thing, some of them.

Here are a few tips:

If you want to save money on lip­stick, I did read a great tip and that was to use a lip­stick brush (the very small make-up brushes) and use every lit­tle bit out of the pot but check to see it is still in date (lip­sticks nor­mally last about two years but I am not 100% sure on this).

My mum gave me a tip for remov­ing make-up when she had very lit­tle money (I had just been born), she use to use petro­leum jelly and a tis­sue to remove her water­proof eye make up and the rest of the make up base.

The one way I do save money and my beau­ti­cian friend does this as well is shop­ping on eBay, the amount of decent make up you can get of there for a small price. I love L’oreal cleans­ing, toner and eye make up remover and I man­aged to get a bar­gain of all three for £5.

A great way to try make-up, free sam­ples, most com­pa­nies you can do this and it is great just to use these when you have just run out of foundation.

You can always shop for make-up in the sales, I love the box­ing day sales and I love all the make-up palettes you can get, I also love it for next year Christ­mas shopping.

Only spend money on the impor­tant items, for exam­ple, I am ter­ri­ble with foun­da­tion since I have such sen­si­tive skin plus greasy T zone so I try to spend more money on foun­da­tion that will help with this at the moment I love the Lush foun­da­tion. But I do not need to use that much eye­shadow or blusher so I go for the cheaper versions.

What do you do to save money on make-up?

Hair Prod­ucts

I did come across an inter­est­ing arti­cle with about how to wash your hair with bak­ing soda by Mrs Money.

How to wash your hair with bak­ing soda

Take one table­spoon of bak­ing soda and dis­solve it in one cup of warm water. I use a plas­tic con­tainer to take in the shower with me so it’s safe if I drop it. After the mix­ture has dis­solved, pour the con­tents slowly on your head, mak­ing sure to cover your entire hair. Work the mix­ture in your hair using your fin­ger­tips. If you need more bak­ing soda, you can always sprin­kle more on your wet hair. It’s all a per­sonal pref­er­ence. Make sure you rinse your hair very well.

After you’ve scrubbed your head using the bak­ing soda mix­ture, now you want to use the vine­gar rinse. Mix one table­spoon in one cup of warm water. Apply to your scalp and let it set for a cou­ple min­utes. Make sure you rinse it clean and get all the vine­gar out. Vine­gar is not only a great hair con­di­tioner but it also helps neu­tral­ize the pH of the hair after the bak­ing soda wash.

That’s it. That’s prob­a­bly the most inex­pen­sive and nat­ural way to wash your hair!

I do not know if I will give this ago but maybe one day when I run out of sham­poo one day. A few ways to save money on hair prod­ucts is to use less of it and con­di­tion every other day.

I did find a great recipe for mak­ing your own shampoo:

You can still make your own nat­ural sham­poo, using read­ily avail­able ingre­di­ents. To start with, you’ll need to make your own con­cen­trated sham­poo base. To do this you’ll need to sim­ply com­bine the fol­low­ing ingre­di­ents to make ½ cup of sham­poo base:

* 1/4 cup of grated veg­etable oil based soap (aka castile soap) melted and dis­solved
* 1/4 cup water
* 1/2 tsp olive oil (prefer­ably extra virgin)

You will then need to use the sham­poo base in your main recipe, where essen­tial oils are added.

* ½ cup base sham­poo
* 2 tbsps glyc­erin
* Around 5 drops essen­tial oil

You can also incor­po­rate fresh herbal ingre­di­ents, such as laven­der or pep­per­mint into your sham­poo recipe. To extract the oils from the herbs, you will need to add the herbs to half a cup of water and gen­tly bring to the boil, before adding to your sham­poo and glyc­erin. The sham­poo will need a few days to thicken before being used, and should be stored in an air­tight recy­cled old sham­poo bottle.

I really want to give this ago but the hus­band is not that keen on this idea, have you ever made your own sham­poo? I saw a recipe for con­di­tioner using may­on­naise with avo­cado, Mm I am really not sure on this one just the idea of putting may­on­naise on my hair, I love the stuff but I pre­fer to eat it. You can always try hot water and honey? I found a great web­site where you can make your own loads of dif­fer­ent items — Make Your Own

Since most of you already know my hus­band and me are in the progress (nice way of putting the two week wait) of try­ing for a baby, it is harder than I thought it was going to be, I thought you could just do it any­time of the month minus dur­ing the period and get preg­nant but it turns out you get a max of a 72 hour win­dow to get preg­nant each month and even then the per­cent­age is only 20% for a healthy couple.

Okay hope I did not freak you all out but the way to work out your ovu­la­tion you can use many dif­fer­ent things, maybe try­ing the ovu­la­tion sticks which you can get pretty cheap of eBay and you pee on them nor­mally in the after­noon if and only if your line is as dark or darker than the con­trol line that means you should be ovu­lat­ing within the next 48 to 72 hours.

You can link this to temp­ing which is where you take your BBT (Basel Body Tem­per­a­ture) you can take this in your mouth or vagi­nally, I pre­fer to take it via my mouth just because I do not want to stab myself down there (ha ha!), you have to take your temp as soon as you wake up before you even get out of bed.

Once you take your temp every day and along with the ovu­la­tion sticks you can use a web­site like fer­til­ity friend.

This is mine one for this month, as you can see once have what they call an ovu­la­tion dip where your temp drops and then jumps up and stays up for three days this means you have ovu­lated, you nor­mally ovu­late a day after you have your ovu­la­tion dip.  If your temp stays above the cov­er­line in the days past ovu­la­tion you could be pregnant.

Other ways you can fig­ure it out is to your a mon­i­tor which tells you your low, peak and high days, you have to pee on sticks dif­fer­ent days of your cycle so it can work out where about you are in your cycle and what day you might ovaulte.

There is always the good old cer­vi­cal mucus which increases when you are ovu­lat­ing and a fer­tile sign of it is watery or egg white. Also you can give your cer­vi­cal posi­tion­ing which I heard it pretty tricky and I get grossed out quite eas­ily, if it is high and soft then you are more than likely ovulating.

I hope this helps any­one try­ing for a baby or doing nat­ural fam­ily plan­ning technique.

Well I have failed the blog­ging sched­ule this week, well just Review Thurs­day and Fru­gal Fri­day, I am hop­ing to get some­thing out by the end of the day but I have been away for the last cou­ple of days vis­it­ing one of my friends. Isn’t that always the way that life gets in the way

Not a lot really hap­pen­ing at my end, other than my resit is next Wednes­day and I am slowly freak­ing out, and poly­mor­phism is not going into my head! Arugh! I wish this was easy, I wish I did not need to know about all these stu­pid con­di­tional state­ments and higher order func­tions so I am try­ing to make up some say­ings which will hope­fully get this rub­bish in my head.

I am still try­ing to paint the kitchen and under stair area but since the hus­band is off next week then we will hope­fully do that, more excit­ing news I am cur­rently in my wait­ing period and it seems to be drag­ging a bit, I won­der if it works this cycle, who knows, in my head I am already think­ing that it will be neg­a­tive so if it is pos­i­tive I think I might faint or cry or freak out!

My dri­ving test is in about three weeks and I still suck, so I know I will not pass that.. all about pass and fail­ing this month so only time will tell me the truth, it would be amaz­ing to pass my resit and my dri­ving test, and then get a pos­i­tive preg­nancy test but I will keep you updated

It is my turn today to do the Day­dreamz WeBlogIt project and this weeks theme is How the Inter­net Has Changed Your Life.

I was think­ing about this when I was read­ing some of the other mem­bers posts, when I was four­teen years old, I had moved away from all my friends but I was still going to sec­ondary school with them but I did not live near them (about an hour and half away, talk about com­mut­ing) so I relied on the inter­net for enter­tain­ing me and I must say I was a lit­tle bit obsessed with the inter­net, but I did meet some amaz­ing peo­ple (One of my best friends Elise who I went to the USA to meet) and learnt how to code which opened up a whole new world for me.

I think if I did not have that oppor­tu­nity back when I was four­teen, I would not of learnt how much I love web design, cod­ing and com­put­ers in gen­eral and now I am in my third year at uni­ver­sity study­ing Com­puter Sci­ence, I am pretty sure if I did not get into com­put­ers the way I did I would still work­ing as a admin assis­tant which I hated (or legal sec­re­tary, or call mon­key or PA, all hated!).

I admit I am addicted to the inter­net, I would be so mis­er­able with­out it but I am start­ing to see most peo­ple are like this these days and so it does not seem as odd as it was spend­ing all day on the inter­net when it did when I was four­teen, I can quite hap­pily spend all day mess­ing around on the inter­net and since every­thing I do these days are on-line it is a pretty nor­mal day for me to spend it in my office.

Oh other than my career, the inter­net has helped my dyslexia, because I am forced to spell and cre­ated sen­tences on my blog or talk­ing to other peo­ple, I use to write fan­fic­tion (I really want to get back into it but no time at the moment) and this has increased my under­stand­ing on the Eng­lish lan­guage. Some days when I am writ­ing an essay for uni­ver­sity, I re-read it and I am like whoa did I come up with that on my own, I am impress myself.

Final note, can you imag­ine ever using the sen­tence “Just google it” about ten years ago, I am guilty of using that all the time nowadays.