live laugh blog | jenn schiffer

weekly retro: what if a haircut smelled like fresh cut grass

this is my 20th weekly retro, and i've not missed a week. it's but one more streak along with my not having missed my meds. every morning i wake up at 8, take my thyroid hormone, feed pumagreg his "wet breakfast" and then go back to sleep. today, i'm starting a new streak of not going back to sleep - to see if it gets me in bed earlier and rotting less in the morning.

photo of the curb of a street near a gutter and someone painted michealangelo from teenage mutant ninja turtles above it saying "keep it clean"

last week was very gray, with isolated thunderstorms happening throughout the week. i've been reading braiding sweetgrass, which has reminded me to lean more towards celebrating nature cleaning itself over feeling woefully inconvenienced by all this summer rain.

photo of a green usps carrier box that someone wrote "dbag" in white chalk and below it someone wrote "keep it clean" in green"

i'm waiting on my new pair of walking shoes - they should arrive today!! - so i haven't been on the treadmill in a couple of weeks. i walk by so many interesting things on the way to the gym, but there's just something about a mailbox that's tagged "dbag" that gets me pumped for the workout ahead.

photo of a window with a flower box full of really cool and different little leaves and some pink flowers

this particular window, in it's manicured beauty, inspired me to finally tackle the task of finding a new hair stylist. imagine if freshly cut hair smelled like freshly cut flowers and grass?

salon mirror selfie where my hair is wet and slicked back before my haircut

in an incredible twist of fate, i chose a stylist who i not only got along with greatly, but she is friends of my prior stylist who had moved out of the country - miss you xylo 😫. if you're looking for someone in the jc area who can cut a good shag, let me know and i'll pass on her info. i am manifesting her and i doing karaoke together with our friends, and then everyone is friends together.

photo of some bushes and plants in the park, one bush is a more vibrant yellow green than the rest, and another has purple and blue buds - i'm assuming these are hydrangeas about to bloom?

i'm loving what's going on here. you probably cannot see the bumblebees hard at work, but i could and you can trust me.

photo of my large glass baking dish of lentil shepherd's pie going into the oven, so the potatoes are mashed and cooked but there's no broiling yet. thyme and olive oil are spread on the top

i made nisha vora's lentil shepherd's pie which i highly recommend unless you're in the middle of a heat wave - i shan't be making it this week. i used almond milk instead of coconut milk and no one perished.

close up photo of a small silicone mold for making teeth shaped things, next to it are wax teeth i removed from the mold. there's 27 of them and they are small but i arranged a few to look like a tiny jaw

i finally have all my business tax stuff sorted after months of wrangling a new portal and my business somehow getting trapped in some database migration purgatory. gosh i fucking love software. i finished the store website (not yet deployed) over the weekend and experimented with some teeth molds. the state says i'm finally ready to launch, q3 begins next week, it's all coming together finally...

things i enjoyed this week

this "learn css grid" tutorial came in very handy as i started studying the foundations of css grid, vs struggling with it live on stream lol. browsers fully supported it in, like, 2017, which was around the time i stopped paying as much attention to css updates because i had been busy with glitch. there's so much that's changed, which is great even though "fr" as a unit is diabolical.
i've been following pbs newshour for news and i feel it will be the most useful in keeping us informed on what's going on as we are now at war. i'm already seeing tons of misinformation being spread on tiktok and bluesky, so this is just a friendly reminder that you can - and perhaps should - assume everything you see is untrue until you've done your research. if you get something wrong and share it, don't take it personally when you're corrected, and remove it promptly and share the correct info.
okay here's a different one: last year i had to spend my fsa money before i quit or else i'd lose it and got a bunch of stuff from the fsa store - one of those things was this foot roller. i've finally started really using it regularly and i've found that releasing those foot muscles have made me more flexible in my forward bend stretches. this isn't sponsored, i'm just saying you should try rolling your feet!

having gotten up early, i've already accomplished a bunch of tasks. will the leader of jenn nation keep up this streak, or will a scorching heat wave cause this beautiful, delicate flower to wilt? stay tuned next week for another episode of weekly retro.

xoxo jenn

this was published June 23, 2025 under living health food working weekly-retro jersey-city flowers hair candle-making business teeth

weekly retro: garbag'ino, garbag'outo

weeks can go in like a lion and out like a lamb, and not just in the month of may. if i could (and i will) describe the first half of last week in a photo, it would be this...

weekly retro: june in bloom and gloom

i always blamed my preference for cold weather on my norwegian maternal side, everything just feels harder when it's hot. by the time i got to the lab to get my bloodwork done, i was drenched in sweat.

weekly retro: blog birthdays, blood and buds

i'm coming to you and this retro with one vial less of blood and having been up since the crack of dawn to have said vial taken. this kicks off the bi-annual celebration of seeing if my thyroid has finally joined me on the quest to be hotter and smarter or not.

five years of living, laughing and blogging

in the early spring months of 2020, i half-jokingly started tweeting about my goal of becoming a "lifestyle blogger". it was impulsive, public, and - i think those who were around to witness my process - pretty funny performance art.

weekly retro: one of those winding road kinda weeks

it's a new week, although the "holiday weekend" still if you're in the states. during my workaholic corporate era, these holidays were more like a working vacation where i still logged on to get stuff done, but didn't have to talk to or answer to anyone (ie. no zoom calls). well, here i am technically working by writing this and planning to do candle work after. it's a good thing i only left corporate, not therapy as well.

on 'important changes coming to glitch'

today the news is out that [glitch is basically shutting down](https://blog.glitch.com/post/changes-are-coming-to-glitch/). i knew this was coming in some form because gossip has always been fastly’s greatest export, with speedy and non-vague communication usually coming in at, generously, 10th place.

weekly retro: spider feet have hydraulics

i just got back from a dentist appointment where i found out, unfortunately but not surprisingly, that i'm going to have to spend about 5 billion dollars to take care of a tooth infection. enough about this week, though, let's talk about _last week_.

weekly retro: the 'late because i went to boston' retro

this week's retro is late because i was out of town for the weekend and am, today, finally able to Go On The Computer™ and Blog™ - you know, *the two things i was born to do*.

weekly retro: crunchy flowers and interesting feline shapes

after a week and a half of weird joint paint, i was starting to accept that this was perhaps the moment every person who has sat for 4 hours in an endocrinologist's waiting room is told may happen (rheumatoid arthritis), but as of today i've been 5 days without any pain.