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1. The smell of Coppertone Waterbabies To quote master wordsmith Nelly, “It’s getting hot in hurr.” Today was 89 degrees! Last week it was 25 degrees cooler, but this week it’s starting to feel a lot like summer. I try to take Connor out nice and early to wear her little booty out, but before we go, I slather this sunscreen all over her and myself. This stuff always makes me think of summer and long lazy days at the beach. I love it. 2. Turn and learn I mentioned this Ted Talk in the last Saturday Surfing, but if...

It has been four months since the last time I dyed my hair, and I believe that I’ve reached the point when almost everyone who grows out their grays says that they want to attack something. Or someone. In other words, the point when it gets really hard. Last week I came *this* close to booking a last-minute color appointment. Multiple times. The biggest challenge has been figuring out what to do about my hairline, because I have a lot of gray there, and the hairs are ever-so-slightly coarser, and therefore more unruly, than the darker hairs. Back when I...

Happy 106 birthday to Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), mother of protein crystallography, and Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964.Image caption: A full 3D set of x-ray structure factors obtained by indexing individual diffraction patterns and summing intensities of indexed spots. This is akin to powder diffraction, where every grain is first oriented in 3D.Source & Credit: Protein crystallography using x-ray free-electron lasers (SPIE). Figure courtesy of Thomas White, Center for Free-Electron Laser Science—CFEL—at DESY.)

Yay for the Bay! In this series, for the month of February 2019, I’ll be featuring products from and around my stomping grounds, the San Francisco Bay Area. My idea of the perfect party punch involves strawberries, and if they aren’t in there in copious amounts (mashed or sliced, doesn’t matter to me), I’m out. There’s a Strawberry version in the new-ish Benefit Punch Pops, so YAY for me and my red berry addiction, which I blame on a childhood spent obsessing over Strawberry Shortcake (the doll, not the dessert…although I do love both). For the life of me, I...

Oh, gosh, where do I even start? — because there are so many levels and layers to this answer! Out of all the things that are hard for me about doing eye makeup (and, dude, there are so many of them), the hardest for me is applying eyeshadow. Loved it since the beginning of time, but it took me years to figure out what to do with it with any degree of competency. And when I really started putting ALL THE THINGS on my lids, I read books and tried to follow tutorials, so I’d put color in the crease...