Mr. Golden Sun

I promised you some funny "traveling with Melissa" anecdotes, so here's the first one.

Melissa and sunscreen application. Let's talk about it. First, she sets up three different bottles of sunscreen, with different SPF levels. She takes the one that has an SPF of 50 first, and squirts out a tiny amount onto the tip of her pointer finger.

She then takes that finger and looks in the mirror to find a specific spot on her body. Once she finds the spot she's looking for, she takes the tip of her finger and rubs the tiny amount of sunscreen onto that area for a few minutes, making sure the sunscreen really gets worked into that dime sized area. These areas are scars, sunspots, and other places of suspicion that cause her worry. I had to film a demonstration of this process, so that you could really appreciate the finer details of this process. Enjoy, and take copious notes, so that you can stop applying sunscreen like some kind of cretin :



(You can see how, when she began this process, I laid back down on the bed and grabbed a magazine, because I had quickly done the mental math, calculating the number of square inches of skin multiplied by the number of seconds of rubbing per dime-sized area, remembering to add in a few instances of resquirting sunscreen onto the finger, and realized I wasn't getting to the pool anytime soon.)


The next step is to take the SPF 30 sunscreen bottle, and apply that to those areas that have ever gotten sun poisoning. Those areas are a bit larger, so she can use more of her hand to apply larger quantities. And the last step is the SPF 15, which is applied in more of a normal fashion, one you would recognize as "sunscreen application". She applies this sunscreen to larger areas of skin, in a less painstaking way.

All in all, watching Melissa get ready to go to the pool is like watching an A&E documentary, the "before" clips of the people with OCD who are going to go through intensive therapy so that they don't have to tap their chin 30 times before each bite.


Who needs reality TV when you can just travel with Melissa????


(did you notice my present from Eric? he started stripping the wallpaper in the master bathroom while I was away...)