 Good morning. Welcome back to vlogmas number four. If you haven't been here since the beginning of the month, I am doing daily videos from December 1st to Christmas, alternating between vlogs and hair videos. And today I am working from home, started editing my last vlog. I'm like halfway ish done with that, but I'm getting hungry. So I'm about to make breakfast. I'm really enjoying vlogmas so far, but vlogging every day can be tricky because I feel like not every day is interesting enough to vlog, I guess, but I'm going to try my best to make the mundane things seem somewhat entertaining, I guess. For my breakfast, I am going to do two eggs, turkey breakfast sausage, a little bit of cheese sprinkled on top, and I am gonna eat that on one of these Dave's killer bread, everything bagels. These are so freaking good. Ooh, I have avocados too, I just remember. So I'm gonna cut up a little avocado and put that on the side as well. Oh, I'm so excited. I usually eat breakfast pretty late because I don't tend to get hungry first thing in the morning and I'm not really a big lunch person. So I usually will just do like a bigger breakfast. So I'm gonna eat this while I watch other people's vlogmas videos. I've been so busy doing my own that all the videos in my subscription feed have just been piling up. So I'm gonna catch up on some of those while I eat and then I'm gonna finish editing this video and then go to the gym and then probably just come back and edit another video. I just got back from the gym. Let me pause the tea. Watching Gilmore Girls as usual. I just did an hour on the treadmill and every like 10 minutes or so I would just kind of change the speed and the incline and I just did that while I watched vlogmas videos, which I have to say if you have been trying to get back into a workout routine or start a workout routine, not even necessarily like a workout but if you've just been wanting to become more active, I feel like this is the perfect time to start. Like don't wait until January 1st. Start now because so many people have been posting daily videos and just throw on a YouTube video and go on the elliptical or walk on the treadmill or listen to it, listen to a podcast, whatever like as you're walking outside because cardio can be so boring and especially the days when I'm just like not feeling it, I'm not in the mood to move. Throwing a video or podcast or something on that can hold my attention and distract me and make me not think about the fact that I'm exercising is perfect. So yeah today I honestly just was not feeling it. I am supposed to be getting my period soon too so I'm just really like low energy right now but the days that I'm not at the salon I need to force myself to get up and move because otherwise I will just be sitting on the couch on my laptop the entire day but I'm about to make a protein shake because that's the other thing I've really been trying to dial in my nutrition as best I can. I'm obviously not perfect and I'm not trying to be crazy strict because then I feel like it gets a little dangerous and unhealthy and then I get obsessive which I don't want to do but I've just been trying to cook at home as much as possible, eat more whole foods and get in as much protein as I can. So I do unsweetened coconut milk and then one scoop of vanilla whey protein. I get this one from Trader Joe's and then I do two tablespoons of powdered peanut butter and then I like to add a little bit of cinnamon. I'm just gonna blend that up. I usually will add spinach to this as well if I have it but I don't have any at the moment. Here we go and this is just my little my little Nutribullet blender cup. I'll link that down below and then last straw from Amazon. So good! It literally just tastes like a peanut butter milk shake. I'm gonna drink this, watch a little more Gilmore Girls and then do some cleaning. I don't know if you can see the sink behind me is piled up with dishes so I'm gonna load those into the dishwasher and I have a lot of laundry, clean laundry that I need to fold and put away. It's a few hours later I ended up passing out after I drank that protein shake so I took a little nap for I don't know maybe like an hour or so. Loaded up the dishwasher, now I'm making dinner. I have this asparagus risotto that I got from Trader Joe's so I'm making that with some chicken and I just cut this up and seasoned it with olive oil, salt, pepper, onion powder and garlic powder. Hopefully this will be good. I've never tried this particular risotto before but it smells good and I'm like how could it be bad. It's like 6.30 now even though it feels so much later than that. After I eat I am going to put that laundry away because I still haven't done that and then I'd like to get a little more editing done. The way to be successful with vlogmas is you have to do at least a little bit of editing every single day. It's nice when I'm doing the hair videos in between the vlogs because I can have those pre-recorded but then I just need to make sure that I'm staying on top of the editing obviously. Good afternoon technically. I just finished having my breakfast, this banana nut protein instant oatmeal and then I added a tablespoon of natural peanut butter and oh my god this filled me up so much so didn't even finish all of it. I just posted the most recent vlog this morning where I shared that I got approved for the apartment and I'm already getting so many comments. Thank you guys so much for all the congratulations. I'm so excited and I'm really excited too because the lighting in the new place is going to be so much better because yes I got decent-ish natural light in this one but if I'm like in the bathroom or it's after the sun has set all of the bulbs in this apartment are so warm so it always looks so orange and yes I know I could have replaced the light bulbs if I really wanted to but it's just a pain to do that. When I was touring the new apartment I was like playing around with my camera to see you know what did the lighting look like and the light bulbs in there are so much better so I'm excited for that too for you know just to be vlogging in there and for everything to just look nicer oh that's nice. My boss just texted everybody and said that her mom brought lunch to the salon and to help ourselves so sweet oh my god so last night I slept for over 12 hours and that was even after taking my hour nap during the afternoon but it makes sense because I feel like yesterday or just the past few days I was feeling really tired I think it was just after going out for that Christmas party I didn't even get hungover or anything but I think just from being up super late it really threw everything off and like as I'm getting older I can't just like bounce back from stuff like that the way I used to when I was in my early 20s you know but it's interesting because before I would just be like oh I feel tired or oh I slept a lot today that's interesting but now that I have my fitness ring it wasn't so shocking to me because this has been telling me for the last few days that my recovery was not good and it even was saying like you probably feel tired and sluggish today you need more rest and my sleep index was not good this is the ultrahuman ring not sponsored they did send it to me which I'm very grateful for but I had talked about it when I first unboxed it last week and I told you guys that I would you know update you throughout vlogmas and let you know because it takes seven to 14 days to establish a baseline before it can really start getting like super detailed and really like track things accurately and now it's been just over a week so I don't know if it has my baseline yet or not but it's crazy how accurate this is like I will read this app and it will tell me me what's going on in my body how I'm feeling all of these things and I'm like how do you know that and I've been tracking my cycle on here too and my cycle ever since I got off the birth control pill my cycle has been so regular and for the first time in my whole life I can tell exactly what I'm ovulating from like you know I just have certain symptoms and I also can feel it like I can feel exactly what I ovulate and from which side but I knew I was ovulating the one day and it literally said like you're in your ovulation phase and it's saying my skin temperature is in the optimal zone this signals optimal recovery and I had a 95 sleep index last night so it said I got optimal sleep and optimal recovery and I am doing better today like look you can track throughout the week you see how my recovery now is pretty high and it dipped significantly yesterday and that explains why I'm so tired and just the last few days it was pretty low but it normally is like up here which is crazy and I'm like yeah looking back at it because Monday that was the day I had the salon photo shoot and I went and did the apartment stuff and I felt pretty good that day not my best but decent but the day before and then the day after yesterday I felt like garbage and I was so tired and sluggish and had no energy and it's crazy to look and be like so cool I'm really loving this and I've been finding it so helpful I love that I can track my steps which has been great and it'll show me how many calories my body burned for the day which has been good too because I've been also tracking the food that I'm consuming so I can literally see okay this is how much I burned generally speaking I don't know how exactly accurate it is but you know it'll just it just gives me a general idea and then okay this is how much I consume so I just want to make sure that I'm not consuming more than I'm burning because then that's how you end up gaining weight so it's been helpful for that and it is nice to just see like okay do I need more rest how was my sleep last night did I was I tossing and turning a lot throughout the night because like sometimes you don't even know that you're doing that and I have reached out to them and I asked if there was a coupon code or anything that I could share with you guys and they did give me a code so I will link that in the description but the brand is called ultra human it's just like the aura ring but it's just a different brand and actually my friend has the aura brand and we both agreed that we like this ring a lot better because it's way more comfortable and it just looks more sleek and it comes in a few different colors depending on what your preference is but I just got the gold one because it literally just looks like a regular ring and it matches with the rest of my jewelry so yeah if you want to get it for yourself I have a discount code for you that you can use or if you want to get it as a gift for someone and it's been really comfortable to wear I think I've had to take it off to charge it once so far but I leave it on when I'm in the shower when I'm at work shampooing clients it's waterproof anyway I'm going to get ready really quick I am going to go walk on the treadmill for a little bit nothing crazy because I don't have a lot of time so I think I'm just going to do maybe like a 30 to 45 minute just steady paced walk just to get in some extra steps and then I'm going to work the front desk at the salon looks like I'll be there till at least like 7 30 8 o'clock several hours later I just got home from the salon and I'm making dinner really quick I have some leftover Italian sausage with I'm just gonna make this is the only kind of pasta that I have so gonna make some small shells and that's gonna be my dinner I really need to go grocery shopping but I'm just trying to like make do with what I currently have I think I should be able to last until the weekend because I don't know I just hate grocery shopping I always have like even as a kid I used to hate going with my mom I don't know why I just hate grocery stores I think because they're just like so overstimulating and usually cold and I know I could do like instacart or something like that but it also feels stupid for me to like pay extra fees when I am fully capable and have the time to just go myself you know so I just try to get everything that I need like people who go to the grocery store and just buy like you know what they need for certain meals and then we'll go back to the store like throughout the week I don't I know even having to go once a week is like I try to just buy a lot of stuff because I know that I always end up eating generally the same things and I can kind of like stretch things out because you know it's just me um so like each meal that I make I usually will have leftovers at least for like another day or two after so I try to just buy a bunch of stuff freeze my meat that way I don't have to go to the store more than like once every other week let me know if you can relate maybe I'm just crazy I don't know it's a little while later I had my dinner and I edited my hair video that by the time you're watching this video it would be the one right before this the one about how to repair extremely damaged hair so that is all done and scheduled to go up in the morning I feel really proud of myself we are a week through vlogmas and so far I've been consistent with my videos uploading every morning I haven't all planned out like I've been on it like okay these are the videos that I want to go up on each day so I know like okay I need to record this video on this day and then make sure I edit it and it's a lot of work but it's fun it's a fun little challenge just to do for a few weeks I could never be able to keep this up long term but for like three weeks it's doable but let me pull up the questions from the last vlog so at the end of each vlogmas vlog I'm pulling up questions that you guys leave me in the comments of the previous vlog so if you have a question that you would like me to feature and answer in the next vlog in two days leave them down below in the comments and yeah like I said thank you guys so much for the support with vlogmas I'm just blown away like there's been so many comments and so much engagement and I really really appreciate it because it really does help if anytime you thumbs up a video or you leave a comment just that extra engagement helps with the algorithm and it helps YouTube see like oh okay this is like a popular video and then it will push it out and suggest it to other people and then you know it just helps bring more people to my channel and allows more people to watch and you know just helps me grow and I really appreciate it I usually just like scroll all the way to the bottom and then just kind of see what we got and I think again since this vlog is probably a little bit shorter I'll do a few questions uh the first one I see is do you see yourself being married to your man in the future do you believe in soulmates um I don't want to be too soon because whoever really knows what the future holds but yes we do speak about marriage I'm at that point in my life I'm 31 I don't really want to waste my time in a relationship if I don't see it going somewhere and especially like given all the history that me and my boyfriend have and everything we've been through and all the work that we've put in to like get to this place where we can get back together I wouldn't have done all that if I didn't think or hope that he would be like end game for me and I do believe in soulmates but I don't necessarily believe like oh every person only has their one soulmate and their one true love because that just doesn't seem possible or make any sense but I definitely do believe in fate and I believe in chemistry like even with a lot of my friendships I think about how if you guys saw the last vlog I was talking about my friend Hailey and how we knew each other from back in Pennsylvania and then we reconnected when I moved down here because we both happened to move down here at different times and like we ended up just like being super close and I don't know I feel like I have a lot of people in my life that I've just met in these weird circumstances and it's like oh my god what are the chances it just feels like the universe and fate brought us together you know and I think that those people are soulmates and I don't think that a soulmate necessarily has to say in your life forever I think that they just serve a important purpose in your life to me a soulmate is just someone that was meant to be in your life for a particular reason whether it's forever or just for a certain season but yeah I do believe in soulmates and I definitely think that my boyfriend is one of my soulmates a hundred percent I've always thought that how did you decide on North Carolina as the state to move to from Pennsylvania honestly I just loved the Carolinas I had been to Charleston South Carolina and fell in love with it but when I was looking to move basically I just had certain criteria I knew I wanted to be in the south I still wanted to be on the east coast I wanted to be along the coast because I wanted to live by the beach and I wanted to be south enough where it wouldn't snow or get too cold but north enough that I would be able to drive to my parents within a day honestly Charleston was kind of like what I was first leaning towards but it's kind of far so I just honestly looked at a map and I followed up the coast and I was like okay what's the next like city or like bigger town that's like just north of Charleston it was Myrtle Beach and I was like sex trafficking no and then the next one up was Wilmington I was like oh okay that's cute I think that's where they filmed Dawson's Creek and I did a little research on Google and I was like oh wow this seems like a really cute beautiful town drove down here a few weeks later had never been here before toward two apartments the second one was this one signed the lease right there and then moved down here a couple months later what products do you recommend for keeping gray hair bright and moisturized I am doing a purple shampoo video at some point in vlogmas stay tuned for that one but I would recommend using a clarifying shampoo you don't want to necessarily do this every time you wash your hair but I would say every third time or so it'll remove any kind of buildup that you have in your hair that could be making it look dull then I would follow it up with a purple shampoo that's going to neutralize any warmth in your hair any like yellowy tones it's going to really make your gray nice and silvery and fresh and beautiful and then just make sure you follow that up with a really good deep conditioner personally I love the joyco k-pack conditioning treatment but stay tuned for my purple shampoo video because I'll get into more detail about that and I'm going to show with swatches like before and afters of what exactly it does I'm from South Africa I've been doing hair for 21 years I feel after COVID a lot has changed for the hair industry I was wondering if you feel it over there do you also feel there's a lot of people potential clients doing their own hair from tutorials on YouTube do you feel that clients also stretch their appointments not like the old days where they come in every four to six weeks I feel a lot has changed in the hair industry it was wondering if it was a global problem also people complaining about the costs a lot more so I have only professionally been doing hair since 2017 so I didn't have too much experience before COVID happened so it's hard for me to say if there was like a huge switch at that time I mean of course there was but I feel like even before COVID there was already kind of this lean at least over here in the States towards low maintenance lived in color balayage was huge like people were already starting to want color that they only had to refresh like a couple times a year and personally I love doing that kind of stuff so I have just been embracing it so rather than doing like shorter less expensive root retouches on clients every four to six weeks instead I will do these bigger longer appointments where I'm doing like little tiny baby lights and a lot of blending and teasing and that kind of stuff and maybe I'm only seeing them like three times a year but those three times a year they're longer more expensive appointments so I feel like it kind of balances out a little bit I don't know it's tricky because people are struggling right now you know people don't have a lot of extra money to go get their hair done in salons and like we as the stylist are dealing with inflation so we have to keep increasing our prices in order to stay above water and have our own bills paid you know you want to be really sympathetic to the fact that everybody is struggling to get by or you know I shouldn't say everybody a lot of people are struggling to get by but what can you do like you know you also have to put food on your table we're definitely feeling it over here I mean I even said like this holiday season normally December and November are crazy and I'm normally slammed but not so much this year and even the other girls at my salon like it's not as busy as it even was last year so there's definitely been a change that is for sure okay let's just do one more question do you think you're going to miss being single I've been with my boyfriend for five years and I can't even remember what it was like anymore I and I love being in a relationship dating seems so stressful dating is really stressful there I feel like there's pros and cons to both for sure I always was a relationship girl like pretty much all through my adult life there was just one year in between my two serious relationships where I was single and then obviously like these past two years but I like the freedom of being single I like that feeling of going out with your single girlfriends and you just never know what the night's gonna hold you never know who you might run into or who you might go home with you know like that's fun but the idea of it is becoming less and less fun to me like as time goes on I think the only thing that I'll probably miss is living alone most of my friends especially the ones down here that I hang out with regularly most of them are in serious relationships or married a lot of them so it sucks whenever I'm hanging out with them and it's just all these couples and then I'm just there by myself so I am getting to the point where I'm like okay I'm over this I'm sure that I will have moments where I look back and I'm like oh that was fun like it was fun to be on my own live the single life but I mean the dating world honestly sucks especially with dating apps and stuff it's terrible go listen to my podcast it'll be linked in the description because it's me and my best friend Julia and we talk all about that kind of stuff dating and being single and like the trials and tribulations but yeah that's gonna be it for this vlog thank you guys so much for watching and commenting don't forget to leave your questions down below for the next one and I will be back tomorrow with a hair video and in two days with another vlog bye