So this year, I decided I needed to do a few resolutions and as a way to track my resolve to follow through a blog. Most of them were to get back to my favorite habits: reading and writing. So I’m going to try to do a hundred new books.
One of my favorite things to use on my long days is dry shampoo. Now I don’t ever use dry shampoo to avoid a shower. It just doesn’t work. But I love dry shampoo as a quick fix to avoid the crazy oily hair that develops from working 8 hours a day and I still have another few hours of work. Thanks to Schillers, I was able to try out the Klorane dry shampoo with Oat Milk the non-aerosol can.
We don’t sell the non-aerosol can but we received a tester to try out. Since Patrice knows that I use the Shampowder (another dry shampoo that is in a brush applicator), she let me try out the Klorane dry shampoo. The canister is really cool. You open up the top and squeeze. Then you just brush it through. That’s it.
I like the Klorane shampoo. It really got things cleaned quick. It seemed to actually clean things rather then just absorb the oil. So that’s a perk.
Now I have to say this one I have to be careful. Klorane is a white powder. If you put too much in, it can give the hair a weird white powdery look that is just as bad as the oil slick. So it’s about balance. For my hair length a couple squeezes and then flip the hair (I don’t always have a hair brush in my purse so you MacGyver something). Sometimes it's nice how my Shampowder is a brown color (close to my natural color) versus how the Klorane is a white color.
Other downside compared to the Shampowder is the size of the bottle. It’s something that fits in only my Snow White Purse and the Bath and Body plaid purse I own (i.e. my big purses). So I have to plan ahead on if I’m taking the Klorane dry shampoo rather then just have it on me in any situation.
I like the Klorane dry shampoo. It’s a great quick fix on my long work days. It’s something that I am glad that I have it to use on days I work more then 8 hours.
So last night I finished my latest book: The Awakening by Kelley Armstrong. This book I highly enjoyed. Sometimes I just need some light occult books in my light and this definitely hit the spot for me.
This was the last of my Christmas goodies from a wonderful co-worker. Now my pile of books will be blander for a while since I only have a couple more conventional Kathy fiction left and a lot of biographies and a couple mangas.
I’ve had a lot of experience with reading Kelley Armstrong books. So I was looking forward to reading this book. For some reason I thought this book was somehow related to her Men and Women of the Underworld series. But the Awakening was actually part of the Darkest Power Series and book two at that. Thankfully, I don’t mind when I read out of order and Kelley Armstrong does a great job of getting you to speed without being too much of a recap.
The Awakening is a fun book where Chloe and her friends are running away from the Edison Group who are bent on using them as Guinea pigs. There is a neat mixture of occult monsters: necromancer (Chloe), shaman (Liz), werewolf (Derek), sorcerer (Simon) and witch (Tori). Well to be fair Liz is a Shaman and a ghost who only Chloe can speak too for the most part. Now Derek was a prototype werewolf and very similar to Clay (one of the werewolves in the Otherworld series) but at the same time, I really liked how Derek played off of Chloe.
Having the main character be a necromancer is interesting. She has problems of having her powers be out of control and there are times she’s raising the dead in her sleep and she can’t recognize who is alive and who is dead. I am looking forward to learning more about the amulet she wears and to see if at least helps her keep the
Plus I read the next chapter to the next book in the series (The Reckoning). Between the adventure of The Awakening and the two preview chapters, I really want to read the next book in the Darkest Power series. So just what I need, another book in the I want to buy pile. But a highly enjoyable read.
I finally finished up the books from my great belated birthday/Christmas package. The final book that was sent to me was The Man on Mao’s Right by Ji Chaozhu. I was glad that my friend included this book since I’ve always been interested in China for a very long time.
Ji Chaozhu has the improbable history of studying at Harvard and was an important person in the Foreign Ministry as an English-to-Chinese interpreter and later became an ambassador. His life was a fascinating twists and turns from being a rich landlord’s son to being an American student who was driven to quit Harvard and go to his homeland to help the Communist cause.
I really liked the candidness of Ji Chaozhu. He gave opinions of different people he worked with. You could tell the people he admire verses people who were challenging to work with. He had no love lost for Jiang Qing (Mao’s last wife) and her gang of followers. Like many others, he believe that many of the purges of the Cultural Revolution and the ineffiency of foreign policy based on her prodding.
The book was very good. There were times when he did repeat himself. He gave the same description of Jiang Qing a couple times and shared an anecdote with a meeting from Kissinger twice.
I wish there were more stories from his work. He shared some but not a ton of details. But I understand when dealing with state secrets, there is a time for openness and a time for speaking in broad strokes. Most of the memoir meant speaking in broad strokes. But he did share some insights of what is was like to be at a negotiating table during Korea and the different styles the Chinese and Americans had.
This is a book I would full heartedly recommend reading if you are interested in Chinese history or foreign policy work. Now I will have to say, I’m not a Chinese history expert (I’m terribly underread in this field) so I can’t say how it compares to other memoirs about working during the Cultural Revolution, But I do feel like it was good foreign policy book. Now I’m looking forward to discussing this book with the friend that sent the Man on Mao’s Right to me and to the friend I just passed it on.
So I decided to read the Typhon Pact book that had my eye the least. I hate to say it like that but that was the truth when it came to Seize the Fire by Michael A. Martin. I wish I could say that this book surpassed my expectations which were that this book would be okay, but I can’t. It merely lived up to being okay.
Seize the Fire is the second book in the Typhon Pact (so now I’m finally all caught up chronologically). It deals with the Gorn Hegemony and the Titan crew (captained by Riker). In many ways it takes things best found in classic Trek and expands upon it by placing it in the more contemporary timeline of that with Riker, Troi and Tuvok from TNG and Voyager. I will be honest, I’m not a huge fan of the original series of Star Trek so that’s why I was bit hesitant.
I don’t actually think I’ve seen the episode dealing with the Gorn. Hate to say it but it’s true. So this book in many ways was like entering a new world by having it focus on the Gorn. But the book also focuses on the debate about the Genesis project (a terraforming device that can remake worlds). Even when I saw the two movies (Star Trek II and Star Trek III) , I never got how the Genesis Project was the akin to making a nuclear weapon in the schemes of things. To me the Genesis Project was always much more like a comprehensive missile defense system- inherently dangerous but at the same time it does more good than bad. If you can remake a dead world in a matter of seconds into a living breathing world, that should be a good thing. It’s if you try to use it on a world with living matter, then it can destroy that.
There are some things that I enjoyed in this book. It was an interesting story line and I could capture my attention really well. I would read a good chunk of the book in a sitting without realizing it.
I learned a lot about the Gorn. You got to see a much fuller picture to the Gorn and just see how things played out. For a culture that got named-dropped a lot, it was nice to see an actual depiction of if it in a form of Trek. So there are things in this novel that I actually disliked. They had two different spellings for many words: the Gorn way and the Federation way. But there were times when the Gorn spellings would slip in during a Federation point of view segement. So it would throw me. Plus if the Gorn can match/mimic human speech almost perfectly to the point where it can nearly fool a computer and definitely fool humans for being a match, why would they call Riker Rry’kurr? Same thing when it comes to calling the Federation the Federrazsh’n? By having the differences there, it makes me wonder if that voice mimicking even existed to such a high degree. Another thing that threw me was giving a Cardassian a comme ci, comme ca hand motion. I had to be taught what that hand movement was in French class, so why would I believe that a Cardassian would know how to do that?
Another thing I really disliked was how on pages 322-323 you get a philosophical moral to the novel by the thinker above Hranrar. Normally I would love this. It actually pointed some good things like how the Gorn and the Federation are very similar despite their biological differences. But it’s the location of this. The book is actually 488 pages. If you want sum up a moral to the story, do it at the end like Martin did with Tuvok’s hesitance to discuss what he learned from the mind-meld with the ecoscuptor device (the Gensis Project like device). Don’t do it mid-novel. It just seemed useless especially from a perspective that provided so little to the book.
The characterization of the main characters from the Titan who I was most familiar (thanks to reading Destiny and watching Voyager and TNG) was hit and miss. There were times I could hear their voices in my head with the dialogue and the movements and other times I just couldn’t get the voice with dialogue. It wasn’t dialogue that was so far off that I shook my head or broke my Trek reality, but enough were it didn’t seem quite right.
So I have mixed feelings with Seize the Fire. It was okay but it had issues too. But not all books will be stellar. I’m glad to read it to read it just see how it fits with the Typhon Pact series even though it was nowhere as good as the other two books I’ve read in the series.
P.S. I decided to include this little gem. As I said before I’m not really a huge TOS fan although I can appreciate their spot in Trek. So it’s amazing that I can recognized where half the clips came from in this video.
Philip B Styling Gel is another Philip B product. It’s another good product from the Philip B collection and one more likely to find its way into my daily hair routine. So upon for a first few uses of the Philip B, I loved it. It has a great supple hold without being too firm. Only once in a while, I would have that crunchy feel to my hair that you get with too much sticky product. Plus I could finally get that kink out of my hair mentioned in the other Philip B testing.
It holds well in my hair for about 8 hours, after that, then the hold starts to wane and I get a strand of hair that separates out and insists upon being in my eye. But that’s when my hair gets oily and needs to get a dry shampoo treatment or a full wash. So I don’t fault the styling gel for not holding up to some high grease context. In fact, the Philip B styling gel does a better job than other styling gels that I’ve tried.
The Philip B styling gel is $20, so that’s a good chunk of money. I think for now the trial size of the product was perfect. It gave you that hold and feeling you want that will make you spend the money.
Philip B Drop Dead Straightening Baume is a sample that I enjoyed quite a bit. It’s a light weight styling product that I could use in a few different ways.
One of the most common ways I would use the baume was to help take the frizz out of my hair and make it manageable without doing anything else. While those days weren’t always the greatest hair days since I often just put the baume in the hair and didn’t take the time to fully style the hair. You still have to take the time to style. Plus I would notice how there was always the one kink in my hair that never seemed to go away when I used only the Drop Dead Baume.
But one of the things I really liked about the Drop Dead Straightening Baume was when I used it as a way to condition my hair and then style it proper way. My hair never felt dried out when I used my straightener iron nor did it frizz up when I put the baume in. So that was a major plus.
Philip B is one of the more expensive hair product lines at Schillers. We sell the Drop Dead Straightening Baume at $25. Like most botanically and essential oil based product, they are pricier. But they work really well too.
