Licorice smelling hair and dog stories

Well hello. The past weekend has been much anticipated (or dreaded - depending on who you ask!). Synchronized swimming junior olympics regional meet has been here in Ann Arbor. Arranged and run by Teresa’s team = parents being busy with endless volunteer hours and cooking dishes for the judges and the concession stand. I signed up for a total of 10 hours Saturday and 6 hours Sunday. I stayed far away from timing duty (sitting on the pool side with a stop watch). Instead I helped collect scores from the judges on the far side of the pool walking them over to the “headquarters”, a duty called a “runner”. And here comes the smart move: after 5 hours of running I had hospitality room duty where I had plenty of access to all the free food for the judges. Yay me! (BTW there was plenty of food so no judges went hungry because of me. Just sayin’). I even had time to work a little

But what does this have to do with licorice smelling hair? Quite a lot! Because all the swimmers put gelatin in their hair for these meets. It’s called knoxing and it helps the hair stay in place during the swimming. Teresa’s hair always looks amazing after these meets and we have a theory that gelatin is good for dry hair, so I really wanted to test it too. Teresa was more than happy to help and because she does not like the smell of gelatin we usually put some aroma in there. What aroma did we have in the kitchen? Anise of course...... an old bottle that was a little hard to get going - until it really got going. Et voila. My hair has smelled of licorice for days now. Woop woop. But it looks good!

And now for some dog stories from the never failing stupidest one of them all: Bailey.

The other night there was a thunder storm brewing and we had moved all of our precious herbs and plants right in front of our patio door so they were protected from the rain. As usual Bailey was let out to pee right before we went to bed. But he flat out refused. First he tried the “I’ll just do a loop under the stairs and no one will notice I did not pee”. I kicked him back out. He tried to run back in. I pushed him out! And he ran over to the patio door in the hope that some nicer family member might let him back in. But......the door was blocked by plants. And the storm was coming. And baileys two brain cells collided! When we actually opened the patio door he was so scared that he jumped right into the mosquito net in front of the door before we had a chance to open that as well. He slammed against it and feel right down in all of our plants. Sigh. Sometimes I seriously wonder what is wrong with that dog. LOL