Tell It To COACHIE

Today I finally went and got my first Missouri hair cut. Finding someone new to cut my hair is always stressful to me, particularly here because most of the “salons” appear to be converted auto shops or chicken coops. Of course, the environmentalist in me should applaud the whole “brownfield” reuse of former properties, but the girl in me would much rather go somewhere with bright lights and an artsy paint job. The whole area outside the gate here looks so worn and neglected, that it is hard for me to believe a great stylist is lurking out there. I’m sure he or she is, but with no one to ask for recommendations (most of the neighbors have nice long hair) I followed a bit of advice from another army friend: go online and find an Aveda salon - they make their stylists get regular training, and even if you don’t like your haircut, it will smell really good.

I probably have an unwarranted fear of new hair stylists, because I’ve only had two or three really bad haircuts in my life. Unfortunately, the worst haircut I ever got came six years ago from an alleged Aveda salon in Kentucky. (The place had been probably been an Aveda salon at one time, but when it changed owners or whatever, it never got taken off the web page - it did a few months after my horrible haircut). It was a few days before Lauren’s christening (about a month after September 11), a friend was watching both of the girls and I just needed something to cheer me up, make me look presentable rather than pathetic in the eyes of all the family that was coming to town. The following description will probably sound like I’m making it up for effect, but I’m not.

When I got to the salon, it looked like it was closed because it was so dark inside. They were open, but apparently times were tough, because the only lights on were the two above the two chairs. The salon owner, a stereotypically flamboyant gay man, was cutting someone’s hair in one chair, and he directed me to the back where the hair washer, a stereotypically grey-faced, downtrodden cleaning lady, waited. Her hair hung flat around her face, completely unstyled, and she was wearing jeans, a grey sweatshirt with some sort of logo on it, and reeboks. I had never seen a salon employee so “undone” but I wasn’t too worried - maybe it was casual Friday or something. She did an expert job with the hair washing, it was very relaxing and the water temperature was just right, so I figured that was how she held onto her job. Then she walked me over to the empty chair and started to comb out my hair. The combing did not go so well, but since I was expecting a stylist of some sort to appear soon, I didn’t worry about it. Then she picked up the scissors.

You know how most stylists and barbers seem amazingly ambidextrous, combing and cutting with such a smooth motion that they seem almost like real Edward Scissorhands? Yeah, not this chick. She would comb out a piece of hair then hold it between her fingers then put down the comb and picked up the scissors. After one snip, she put down the scissors, picked up the comb and started on another piece of hair. In other words, she cut hair like I or any other untrained person might cut hair. I know some smarter people might have jumped up at this point and demanded an explanation, but I was just too confused. The salon owner was standing right there - shouldn’t he have known that his employee couldn’t cut hair? Even worse was the blow-dry which did not leave me with bouncing shiny salon hair but with sad, limp, frazzled hair that looked much worse than what I could have done myself.

As I was leaving, the owner called, “Come back and see us again!” I turned around and made eye contact with him, at which point he realized that I was not to be jollied, that I was not fooled by his pretend stylist, and that under no circumstances would I be back. His expression changed a little and he gave a small shrug when he finally noticed how terrible my haircut was.

The only possible explanations for this trip to the salon twilight zone are: 1. the hair washer won a bet and the prize was to cut some poor sucker’s hair or 2. the owner knew his salon was going down, so he figured what the hell, let all the employees cut hair. Either way, there are hundreds of pictures of Lauren’s christening floating around, and every one depicts that horrible, horrible hair cut.

I’ll never forget it, and neither will Aislinn apparently. Today as I was taking the kiddies to school and mentioned that I was getting a haircut, Aislinn said, “Remember right before Lauren’s christening when you got that really bad haircut?” She was two years old at the time, and while I know she never forgets anything, even for her that was quite a memory. I asked her how she knew about that and she said, “One time when we were looking at a picture from Lauren’s christening, you said that was the worst haircut you’d ever gotten.” She did not disagree.

On Friday as Marty and I were walking down the sidewalk to his school, he looked up at me and said, “Wow, Pete sure has grown a lot.”* I was carrying his bag and raincoat over my arm and trying to hurry him along as I dug through my bag looking for his swipe card, but it was such an odd statement for a four-year-old to make, that I stopped for a moment to look at Pete, who was walking ahead of us. Marty was right; Pete must have grown because Pete’s pants, like the pants of many children here, were about an inch above his shoes.

Fall clothes are yet another surprise of parenting that I wasn’t expecting. I wore a uniform to school, so I never really participated in the whole “back-to-school” shopping until I was in college, and by then I had basically stopped getting taller. Obviously kiddies grow like weeds, but everywhere we’ve lived, the back-to-school weather has been really warm, so the kiddies just continued to wear their shorts. Then every year, the weather suddenly turns cool and, unprepared as usual, we pull out the long pants and jackets from last year. Most of them don’t fit, so the kiddies march off to school with their ankles and wrists exposed until we can get to the store and get some new stuff.

That plan was all well and good before we moved to the prairie. Now the nearest Target or other clothing store is over an hour away. Like the Ingalls who lived here before us, going to the store is a day-long family affair.  We have to make sure that we get everything we need, because because we don’t get into town much, and if we forget something, it might be months before we return to the mercantile again.

Unfortuntely, there are many pitfalls involved with clothes shopping for the entire family at once. Marty wants to race up and down the aisles, climb through the racks, eat pretzels and drink lemonade at the snack bar, and/or lie down for a snooze in the shopping cart. The HP wants to wrap things up as quickly as possible and head to a bar for lunch and a few drinks.

Then there are the girls.

I’ve read that some types of reality TV, like American Idol or that Smart as a 5th Grader show are the new “family shows.” I can’t stand any of those shows, but I have introduced the girls to one reality show I like - What Not to Wear. Apparently they have been taking the lessons of Stacy and Clinton to heart, particularly the one where you should try on everything, because you never know how it will look or feel. Given that they are 6 and 8, a little on the short side and a lot on the skinny side, I’ve never had any trouble finding clothes that fit them. As long as the pants have an adjustable waist** and the shirt size matches their age, pretty much everything looks great on them.

Or so I thought. They informed me that I was being to hasty, that we really should get ourselves to the dressing room and try some things on. And by “some things” they meant one of everything in the girls’ section. After all, the What Not to Wear people always have armloads of clothes, so that is now the way the girls plan to shop.

Many many minutes and many many dollars later, we checked out with the new fall wardrobes and started to discuss lunch. Then Aislinn remembered her birthday gift cards. We couldn’t make her wait until next time  because who knows when the next time would be, so we marched off to the movie/video game section as a rather cranky and hungry fivesome. We lasted through about 5 minutes of browsing before the HP and I began to demand a decision.

We finally loaded everyone into the car and then started to drive around looking for somewhere (with beer) to have lunch. Marty immediately fell asleep, and the girls began whining about how hungry they were and then about how badly they needed to go to the bathroom. We eventually ended up in a restaurant in an outlet center, which was good since one of the main things we need to get was a jacket for Aislinn, and of course that was the one thing we couldn’t get at Target.

After lunch and a last round of jacket shopping, we finally headed off into the sunset (literally). I’m not sure how the pioneers survived all that togetherness, but I’m sure that’s part of the reason why breweries are some of the oldest businesses in this country.

*I’m assuming that Marty must have heard some adults discuss how big some kid or another was getting, or else he also has watched too much What Not to Wear.

** With apologies to Al Gore, the person who invented the adjustable waist should also be considered for a Nobel prize. I can’t imagine the belt collection we’d need if the kiddies had to wear regular sized-pants.

Way back when the show Newlyweds was just beginning, when neither of them had a career and Jessica spent all of her time floating in the pool and reading magazines, there was an episode where she bought a bunch of groceries, intending to start cooking, and then ended up throwing all of the produce away. That is my worst nightmare.*

Every week I go to the Commissary and buy (it seems) at least one of everything in the produce aisle. Then, for the rest of the week, I am on a mission to get the people of the household to consume it. I don’t have to do much convincing - at least one of the kiddies will eat pretty much any vegetable or fruit, and the HP will eat anything, including produce of marginal freshness - but I have a certain amount of OCD about it. I don’t want to throw out the produce. In the loony toon cartoon in my head, the cashiers or other shoppers in the commissary are wondering why I need so much produce, and some day one of them will ask me, and then I want to be able to honestly tell them that we eat it all, every week.

Last weekend when my parents were visiting, I had to lay in extra produce for all the fancy cooking we were going to do. Unfortunately, over the course of the weekend, a bad smell started to permeate the refrigerator. I did a quick check of the produce drawers on Saturday, but didn’t find anything. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t take the smell anymore, and I started emptying the drawers until I came upon a nasty lemon. The top of it, visible from the top of the drawer, looked fine, but the bottom of it looked ready for Halloween.

If only that were the end of the story. The stench in the refrigerator never really cleared up or even got that much better. I knew it was probably absorbed into the cardboard in there, and the water in the Britta. So today when the Britta announced that it was ready for a replacement filter, I decided maybe I’d clean the fridge a little bit, and hopefully get rid of the smell.

I looked online to see if there were any helpful hints about getting a rotting lemon smell out of your fridge. Each helpful article began with the same step one: Remove rotten food from the refrigerator. I thought to myself, “Really, idiot? You can’t just leave that stuff in there and clean around it?” With that sort of advice, what chance was there that any of the other steps were going to be helpful?

I started at the top, clearing shelves, cleaning the shelves, and then sniffing all the food and condiments before they were allowed back in. On the bottom shelf I made room for a dinner plate and filled it with baking soda (the internet recommended unplugging the fridge, filling each shelf with a cookie sheet full of baking soda and leaving it overnight - the dinner plate in my still running fridge was my compromise). Finally, I pulled out the produce drawers and stacked all the produce on the counter, figuring I’d wash the drawers and the bottom of the fridge and then reload everything.

In the second produce drawer, I found a rotten orange. So now the internet can sniff and say, “Who exactly is the idiot?” and I am compelled to say, “I am. I am the idiot. I did not remove the rotten food from the refrigerator.” The fridge looks beautiful now (really? how beautiful? why not post a picture? grr), like it’s ready to audition for a refrigerator commercial, but it still doesn’t smell quite right.

The HP claims that he doesn’t smell anything. The fridge stench investigation is just one of many incidents recently that has made me start to wonder if what I’m smelling is the rotting of my brain in my own head.

* That is just an expression. My worst nightmare right now is a snake coming up through the shower drain which recently happened to a friend of mine. I’m pulling my feet up onto my chair right now just thinking about it.

Yeah, so I moved to Missouri. Things are different here. I could tell you that the terrain is very rocky (cliffy, in fact, if that were a word). I could tell you that we’ve painted almost every room of our new house, some rooms in rather arty fashion. I could tell you the story of how the second computer desk arrived, and now we’ve got two cheapo black computer desks. Yes, there are many things I could tell you and then you could say, “At current exchange rates, why don’t you cut 1000 words out of this post and just post a picture?”

Yes, that would be sage advice, if my camera worked.

Here’s the problem: From the age of 18 until the time I got married, I was on a very, very strict budget. No purchase was too small to escape a mental evaluation. Did I really need to spend $13 on a CD? Couldn’t I just sit by the radio with a tape recorder and get the songs that I wanted for free?

Now we have money for CDs. I may mentally evaluate whether I really want them, but I don’t wonder if I can afford them. The price of anguish has gone up to about $100. Unfortunately, the cost to have Sony diagnose my camera is $111.

On the one hand, I don’t view a digital camera as something disposable. On the other hand it was already 4 years old, and $111 may well exceed its current worth. Then again, if it were fixed for $111 that would certainly be the most economical solution. However, if the problem is not fixable, I may be out the $111. Maybe I should just get a new camera. But what kind?

Welcome to the hamster wheel in my feeble little brain.

So I sit and ponder all these things, occasionally regretting that months are going by and the kiddies continue to have events that are not being photographed. Do we desperately need to document every thing that happens? No, but wouldn’t it be nice to post pictures of the girls with their guitars so that their far flung relatives could see them? What about Marty and his new Backyardigans dance? But we’ve waited this long, couldn’t I just send off the camera and see what happens?

Of course we could, but then…

Yes. All things considered, I know I’ll continue to do nothing about the camera situation.  And that is so annoying.

To me, that is.

This past summer I pretty much ignored the blog altogether, and rarely looked in on it because I knew better than anyone that there was nothing to see.  Unfortunately, one day I did open it up to find it in shambles, a black and white mess  without even the teeny bit of design I’d managed to cobble together.  Apparently the cure for this disruption was to upgrade to another version of Word Press.

I did the upgrade, held my breath, checked that the old posts were back in their old places, and then turned my back on the blog for another month or so.

Now unfortunately I realize that while the upgrade seemed successful, every dash, quote, apostrophe, and other random symbol throughout the entire archives is now represented by gobbledygook (and rest assured that is the correct spelling, because I looked it up - and I learned that it can be shortened to gobbledygoo.  That certainly saves a lot of time.)

While I am a pretty easygoing person, that sort of thing drives me bonkers.  I can’t stand that people who are sent here by google (most of whom are looking for a picture of a kite or a tree) get one look at this place and assume it is run by the technologically inept.  On the other hand, I can’t stand the thought of going through and fixing every last post either.

But I’ll have to - either fix them or delete them- and that is so annoying.