Given how it smelled up on the deck when the ivy was naturally mulching, I don't dare explore composting (and I know it is not supposed to smell. My whackadoodle postage stamp back yard is also not supposed to self-mulch. I know my limits.) I usually don't have more than a grocery bag of non-recyclable trash (same sitch as lisah) not counting litter. I can usually make it a week, but sometimes have to double bag grocery trash and sequester it in the basement in the summer.

I am required by law to recycle and compost. Supposedly I could be fined if I have too much of the wrong stuff in the trash. Also they charge by the size of garbage can.

The current gymnastics standard hair style seems to be dorky ponytail, so a very different hairstyle would probably not have been a good idea either. Also, I suspect that stylists for black hair are pretty rare in Des Moines.

Well, yeah. I thought the half-but (damn you autocorrect--half BUN) thing was sloppy looking, but I thought that about all the gymnasts who had it (several).

I have some herbs and containers trees/plants on the balcony. Don't get me wrong, harvesting is annoyingly messy and I'm not sold on the benefit to my plants. But it's not stinky and it's an easy option for apartments if you like to produce less veg/fruit/paper waste. Certainly eliminates guilt about my Costco produce habit.

I wonder if braids would feel too heavy and cornrows to distracting for someone who was a gymnast.

I have an indoor worm bin and an outdoor compost pile, and I don't garden at all. They just serve as a place to put my food waste, essentially.

What are you feeding with your output?

With a worm bin, after a few months, (or longer, worms will regulate their population and output based on how much you feed them...they can go into a near-stasis if you slow down how much you give them) you can harvest it, and give some worms to a friend, and the castings to someone who does garden. We have a worm bin in our office for our office fruit and veg scraps and coffee filters and tea bags, and we haven't harvested in over a year, and it's not overflowing or anything. And it doesn't smell, and no one knows it's there unless we point it out.

If you have a cold, enclosed outdoor pile, food and yard waste will break down pretty slowly, and animals won't get into it, and you don't necessarily have to worry about using the compost, unless you want to. If you have a hot pile, well, that's a lot of work. I'm too lazy for a hot pile. If I were industrious enough for a hot pile, I'd be industrious enough to garden.

Also, we barely have any food waste these days as everything gets fed to Grace. I know that sounds awful, but we rarely have spoiled food or peels or anything like that.

We should compost fruit from the tree that gets a bite from animals, but we don't.

Are Jews in the US that different from British Jews? Because they just had straight hair at my mostly Jewish school. Same with the Jewish friends I made in Canada. The white people I know who had been down that stressful hair-straightening path were all non-Jews.

I don't really know enough British or Canadian Jews to be able to comment on them.

Do you have the concomitant good hair issues where you're judged as militant if you wear your hair as is?

Not in that way. It's ... I can't find a good way to describe it. It's like, little kids with curly hair are cute. But around the time that you're supposed to start caring about how you look, when you start wearing makeup and heels and stuff, you're also "supposed" to start straightening you hair, and I guess it's somewhat equivalent to not wearing makeup or not waxing your eyebrows? That's not quite right, but it's the best I can come up with now.

Or you're a traitor if you do alter it?

Not really that, either. People who straighten it might get some flak from people who don't, but I think it's mostly teasing. I've seen things in some older books and movies where someone Jewish has changed their name and, while not actually denying their Judaism, is pretty much trying to to just be "American," and some other Jewish character says something like, "She's still obviously a Jew -- just look at that hair." Since that kind of passing doesn't really happen as often nowadays, you don't hear stuff like that as much, but I've definitely heard friends explain that they got their hair straightened because "It looks too Jewish."

Or, sometimes, because "It looks too black." I know some curly Jewish women who go to black hair salons because they say that that's where the stylists know what to do with their hair, and some others who are offended at the suggestion, because "My hair isn't like black hair at all! Right? It isn't, right?" I remember one older relative, when I was little, told my mother that she shouldn't let me play outside in the sun so much, because "That child is starting to look black." I don't know how much of that was just because of my skin, and how much my hair contributed to it, or whether she would have said it at all if I had straight hair, or whether a non-Jewish white elderly relative would have said the same thing about a non-Jewish darkish little kid or not. There's a whole lot of different stuff going on there.

So seeing it treated like a pan-Jewish issue? Eye opening.

"Jewish hair" meaning curly has been around for a while. In all those eugenics books from the late 1800s and early 1900s, the description of "characteristics of the Jew" pretty much always includes curly hair.

Oh, and yeah, we have rats. Smart urban rats. I don't want to encourage rats. And call me weird, but I don't want worms in the house. Which is funny coming from me because I'm pretty pro-slimy things. But, no.

We had grain moths a few months ago, which I was too skeeved by to deal with...until I remembered the worm population down the hall. If anyone is considering it, I would note that yes, worms are kind of gross but since they don't like light they generally don't go anywhere and dive down into their bedding when you open the container.

Here it is! Taxidermied bullfrog playing bass.

I call him Charles Bullfrog Mingus.