Happy New Year! Like everyone I hope the turn of the calendar brings good things. Love, hope, healing and solutions to the big problems of the world as well as the little issues in our own lives.

Speaking of problems of the world, let’s start with one that’s easy to solve. The new house we live in here in Calca has a fine solar powered water tank for the hot water supply. This baby is glorious. I mean, it’s a bit of a drag in rain season when the sun may not show for 3 days straight but on a sunny day, we’ve got hot water ranging from scalding hot on the low end to microwaved lava on the high side, what with the UV factor here in the Andes mountains totally of the scale. Forget about medium to lukewarm hot water heaters and low flow save-the-world shower heads, with our solar powered tank we can burn skin totally guilt free and I love it.

There is one detail though. For some reason I love washing my sexy naked body in scalding hot water but I don’t like the scalding hot quite as much during those crucial 15 minutes while I’m trying to find the shampoo bottle, picking up bottle after bottle after bottle to try and find that lucky one.

Once upon a time when I was young and single finding the shampoo bottle was easy: there was no more than one or two bottles in the shower. Nowadays there’s about 18. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, salt and oil something. Separate instances for colored hair and frizzy hair and shiny hair, plus a half a dozen near-empty bottles that must remain in the shower but never be used again, for some reason.

Not that I’m picky – at one point I resorted to washing my hair with bar soap no mas – but according to everyone else who lives in this house each and every one of those bottles is special and there’s only one designated winner that papi can use. So I have to pick up a dozen or so bottles and read the hallucinating verbiage on every one of them.

• Extracts of coffee and avocado
• Brilliant and radiant
• Repairs and heals
• Full of vitamins and beta kerosene
• Moisturizes (moisture, shower, what am I missing here?)
• Free of gluten and beaver liver products
• …

And somewhere in the middle of all the exotic words and pictures, in teeny tiny little letters, the word “Shampoo”.

Here’s a suggestion for all you P&G type multinationals, a slam dunk product idea. I know you can’t do anything about the small print on the back of the bottle but on the front of the bottle, just a one-liner, 3 words:

“SHAMPOO FOR DAD”