Barnmaven

The price of contentedness

Sometimes you can be too happy.

Sometimes you can forget that there are things you must still pay attention to, no matter how much you might be settling into the warm, snuggly feeling of liking someone.  And when your focus strays, you must eventually deal with the consequences.

The eyebrows that you normally maintain with meticulous focus -- they might very well have started a concerted effort to join in the middle.  And spread out to other parts of your face.

The new pair of jeans you got that were already starting to feel a little loose in the hips, the button and the buttonhole might resist your wish to meet easily.

While you might not appreciate that there will be consequences to staying up til nearly midnight several days in a row, your body will remind you that indeed, there are. Usually about halfway home from work, when you might learn the hard way why there's a rumble strip on the side of the highway.

You might suddenly realize that you have a week's worth of laundry to do.  Immediately, in fact, if you'd like to have something to wear to work tomorrow.

There might be dust bunnies the size of Rhode Island lurking under the oak hutch.

 

Be warned and beware.  THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.

 

But its worth it.

 

Don't move, he's holding scissors

April 24, 2007.

I remember this date, because its the day before I boarded a plane with my mother-in-law and my children to fly West to begin a new life.  J and his dad had already left a couple of days earlier in our minivan with the dogs.  The kids and I would fly to Seattle, spend a night at my parents, then drive to Eastern Washington to our rental house. 

I'd spent the last couple of days having farewell drinks with just about everyone I could fit in (I think my liver is still mad at me for it, too).  The day before we were to leave I decided at the last minute to go get some highlights and get my layers evened out.  There's nothing like a good haircut to give you confidence on the first day of your new career, right?  Right. 

I walked into the [famous department store styling salon] at the Ocean County Mall without an appointment, as usual, guaranteeing myself the lowliest of the stylists.  I'd never really had a bad cut there before, I had no reason to believe today would be any different.

After a few minutes of waiting and idly perusing the magazine stacks, an elderly gentleman came out from the back and read my name off the checklist.  I had a brief moment of thinking perhaps he was the [famouse department store] Salon equivalent of the Wal-Mart Greeter.  Maybe he was just going to wash my hair for the stylist?  No.  He WAS the stylist.  Dude was eighty years old if he was a day, but I've never been shy about meeting new people and I was determined to enjoy my haircut, so I took my seat in the chair with an air of optimism and innocence.

I love old people.  Really, really love them.  Two of my favorite things about singing in my church choir are Perry and Cora-Jane, our director and his wife.  They don't know it but I often fantasize that they are my real-life grandparents, I love them that much.  Although most won't admit it, we make assumptions about people based on their age.  Don't we?  Of course we do.  What do we usually assume about the elderly?

"Sweet."

"Cute."

'Harmless."

"Oh, such a dear person."

Hmmph.  What a crock of doodle. 

It all started off well.  I told him I wanted some red highlights here and there throughout the crown of my head and I needed my layers evened out. Simple, yes? 

As we looked at color samples and we started the chit-chat that you usually have with a new stylist, things like "Where are you from?" and "How long have you worked here?" and "You're not going to ruin my hair, are you?"  I learned that he was had been a widower for a few years after a long, happy marriage, that he had a grown son who he was close with, no grandchildren.  How sweet, I thought.  We talked about my husband and my kids, and we started swapping stories.

As he began to put the foil in my hair and put the paste on, he started to tell me about how hard it was to start dating again after so many years.  I commiserated, dating isn't easy for young people, it must really be hard for you.  I noticed he was being a little heavy-handed with the color, but I was too afraid to be rude to an old person to speak up.  How bad could it be? 

After I'd been under the dryer for the prerequisite length of time, he rinsed out the color and started to cut.  As he was cutting my hair he started to tell me about a woman he'd been dating recently.

She apparently was a lady who came in to the salon weekly for her regular style and set with another stylist, and he thought she was rather nice looking.  He asked her out to lunch.  He said at first she seemed reluctant to go, but after a few weeks she relented and agreed to have go out with him.  They had their first date and he really liked her. He wanted to ask her out again, except...she stopped coming in to the salon.  I felt so bad for him, his first dating venture after becoming a widower and here this mean old bitch was breaking his heart.  "Well that was awfully rude of her," I said.  "Exactly," he said.  But what he did next?  He asked her regular stylist if she'd heard from her, and when the stylist said no, he played it off like he was worried about her, maybe something had happened, and did she have a phone number to contact her?  No, but the stylist had her last NAME. 

And he went on to tell me how he looked her up in the phone book and got her address and phone number and he called her and asked her out again and she said "no."  So he started driving by her HOUSE.  And he noticed she had a gentleman friend, which he figured out because sometimes there was a car there that wasn't HERS. And that he had called her a few more times but she stopped answering the phone so he thought she might have that Caller ID thingie-ma-bob, so he was going to ask his son if he could borrow his phone to try and see if she would take his calls then.  And as he's telling me this, he's getting clearly more agitated by the recital, and he's cutting more and more of my hair, except I'm afraid to say anything because apparently my hairdresser is a scary STALKER and he's holding scissors.  Scissors!  And all I can hear is the blood roaring in my ears and Freddy Krueger's nails scraping along the wall.

By the end of the ordeal, I'd lost a good three inches of length, and my red "highlights" were a lot more like "fire engine red hair ALL OVER."  And I was too scared to say anything critical to him.  "There, look at it in the mirror!  Doesn't it look nice?"  "Great," I mumbled, "It looks great.  I need to go now."  I paid and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

Lessons learned:

a) Old people are not necessarily nice people

b) Make an appointment next time. 

c) Don't ever give the salon your phone number. Or your last name. Just say that you'll call THEM when you need an appointment.

d) You don't really need a new haircut to start a new job.  Odds are you'll end up looking like somebody totally different than the person they hired and when you show up for your first day of work your new boss will do a double-take and say, "Wow, that's REALLY, um, RED." 

Impulse

How to get more sleep

1.  Put the kids to bed early later than usual at midnight.

2.  Have your last glass of wine no later than 7 pm right before bed.

3.  Make your bed your personal space, only for sleeping Eat in bed, read in bed, drink in bed, watch movies and talk on the phone.

4.  Eliminate unnecessary noises Let three large dogs (combined total weight of 215 pounds) sleep with you.  Or rather, wrestle, lick themselves, snore, fart and shed while laying on your bed.

5.  Meditate quietly with your eyes closed Periodically threaten your children with death when they are still whispering and talking across the hall at two am.

6.  Its best to sleep on your back on your left side, then your right side, then your left side, then your back, then your right side.  Rotate every half hour.

7.  Train your body to sleep through the need to go potty get up every half hour (or when you change positions) to pee.

8.  Television should never be watched in bed left on all night so the flickering lights and the muted sound make you think there's someone else in your room. 

9.  Leave your bedroom door closed open so the cats can come in periodically and taunt the new dog.  Then close it in the middle of the night so that they get mad at you and start clawing at the handle.

10.  Get a pet sitter and a babysitter and get a hotel room.

Tonight?  I'm going with option #10.  See you in Portland Charles & Julie!  You don't care if I just sleep the whole time, right?

A minor complaint

Today has just yanked the stuffing out of me, pissed all over it and left it to dry on the sidewalk.  I didn't want to wake up when the alarm clock went off.  I didn't want any of the stuff I premade for my lunch.  One of the dogs crapped on the carpet.  My hair wouldn't comply with my most insistent attempts to tame it.  My son wouldn't wake up so he went to his dad's for the day in the same clothes he went to bed in, unfed.  I've been grumpy, tired, paranoid and overreactive all day.  I even mistook a minor request for some information  from my boss wrapped it around the knobs in my brain so many times I converted it into a suggestion to get my resume ready.  Then I cried about it. 

As I was on the end of hour two on what ended up being a two and a half hour conference call, ear cartilege begging me for mercy, bladder screaming for relief and voice cracking because I'd failed to fill my water glass before the call started, I put my hand to my face to shove up my glasses and rub my eyes.

Ouch.  What was that?  Ouch again.  Right there, next to my nose, what?  You bastard, a zit.

HeLLOOOOOOOOAH PMS!  Mystery solved; source identified.  You are well advised to steer clear for a few days.

Powerless

Sometime over the night our power went out.  My alarm clock woke me up around 3:30 am with the cd player whirring as it tried to reset itself.  I reset the clock and alarm and went back to sleep.  Power was still on at 4:30, but within 15 minutes it went off again.  I ate breakfast in the dark, stared longingly at my computer screen, sitting there are black and lonely-looking, and decided that if we didn't get our lights on again soon I was going to have to just be late to work, since there was no way I was going out in public with morning hair.

While I was eating my bowl of cold cereal by the light of my scented candle, I of course wondered how long it would be out, why it went out, and what could be fed to the two pickiest children on earth that didn't require electricity to prepare.  My mind wandered back to February of 1979, when in the wake of a massive windstorm, we went without power for several days.  The storm, which we later learned had blown and sunk out a half mile section of the Hood Canal Bridge, reached wind velocities averaging 80 miles per hour.  According to the US Weather Service, some gusts may have reached as much as 115 miles per hour.  We were living on Marrowstone Island at the time, a small community in Puget Sound.  Marrowstone is about 7 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide at the widest point.  We lived on the belt of the island, on East Beach road and I could stand on our road and see water at both ends, Mystery Bay to the West and Puget Sound to the East.

It was a hell of a blow.  I woke in the middle of the night to hear trees snapping and falling and my horses shrieking like crazy idiots.  Dad and I braved flying tree limbs to get them in the barn so they'd feel safe.

For days after the storm, while local husbands and sons helped out the county crews by helping to remove the fallen trees from the countless miles of road in our county, we lived like pioneers.  When they built the house we lived in, my parents had installed an antique wood stove.  It was vented and the floor and wall around it bricked so that it could be used if needed, although we had an electric stove.  Thank goodness for that old Modern Acorn.  It was still cool in February, so not only did that stove keep us fed, it kept us warm.  We couldn't get off the island to get to a store and it was too early in the year for gardening, but our chickens were still laying eggs, and we had a pantry full of dry goods.  Milk could be gotten from our neighbors up the road who still kept a dairy cow that they milked every morning. Bathroom time was a bit of an issue - our water came from a well and our toilets fed into a septic system that required a pump to run, so unless it was an extreme middle of the night I need to go RIGHT NOW emergency, we took a short walk to the county park at the end of the street and used the wooden outhouses.  We lit candles at night and for entertainment we read books and played games.  It was a rustic few days, and interestingly enough, I look back on it with fondness and nostalgia.

Could you just imagine if I had to do it now?  DISASTER.  Life without internet?  Warcraft?  Television?  DVD player?  Cell phone charger?  MICROWAVE?  Forget it.

Twenty minutes later when my power came back on I knelt and kissed the power outlet that feeds my computer.