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And look! You can add pictures!

I found this picture last night. I immediately thought of Light. She loves to lie in bed and read. Well, actually, so do I.

Hair, mostly

I got a haircut today. As I have noted previously, haircuts freak me out a little bit. It seems such an intimate, personal activity, not one I want to share with just anybody. Unfortunately I don't know any beauticians/barbers well enough to entrust my hair to. (bad sentence!)

This song keeps popping in my head when I sleep. It's been the song in my head when I wake up recently. I don't know why.



So I went to the beauty college this morning to get my hair cut. It's cheap but takes a long time. I told the gal I want it short. Yes, short. No, shorter than that. Cut all that part off. I explain it's been a long time since my last haircut, it's grown out a lot longer than I want it. But these sissy bitches don't take me seriously when I say short. I sat in the chair while the instructor, the student assigned to my head, and one or two other students with more experience chopped on my hair for a while.

The chatter was about children. I'm not in a good place regarding children these days. They's all crazy. Babies are OK as long as they're someone else's babies and I don't spend too terribly much time with them. Babies and toddlers are cute. Anything approaching teenage is terrifying. These ladies in the beauty chop had misbehaving children on their minds. I hate it. My kids are crazy bad. Maybe it's my fault they're so bad, maybe I take them too seriously. Maybe I don't take them seriously enough. Comparing my kids to those of others is depressing. Hell, just bringing up the topic of my kids is depressing.

Eventually I accepted my gal Brenda's work on my head. Yes, that's good. Thanks so much. I left a small tip. I came home. Kept running my fingers through my hair. Looked in the bathroom mirror. The top of my head looked square. It parts on the left, and the hair on the right side of my head was bumped up, squaring the form of my head. It needed to be shorter there. Hell, it needed to be shorter in lots of places.

Yes, I did.

I scooted a few things out of the way, then put a towel-sized piece of fabric (towels have too much nap and catch and hold loose hairs) over the sink and counter in my bathroom. I got my small sharp sewing scissors and started cutting. Clip-clip here, grab a chunk and snip away at it there. This seems longer than the other side. No, wait, I thought she shortened that bit more. It needs trimming. More snip-snip, clip-clip. Covered all over with short hairs. I hate that part. Itched like crazy. Finally figured I'd better stop clipping before it got too ugly.

I shook out the hair-covered fabric off the back patio, then took of my shirt and shook it out, too. I dazzled the neighbors' back yards with my fat body in nothing but my undergarments for a minute there. Don't think anyone saw me, don't care if they did. I came back in for another shower and shampoo. The head didn't look too terrible when wet, and now that it's dry it looks, well, not too terrible I think. Maybe. But I can't see it well.

Superman came home for lunch. He noticed my haircut, but didn't notice that I cut it myself. That's a good sign, but not proof that it isn't butchered. Diva's case worker says it doesn't look too bad, and I trust her opinion about hair more than I trust Superman's.

Diva got her hair did last weekend. She's all kinds of proud of it now, and wanted me to take her picture and post it here for all to admire. So here she is.

My doctor sent me to a physical therapist for my back. I've never done PT before. Had my first appointment this afternoon. It was relatively painless, but took a long time. The feller says we're going to work on strengthening my back muscles and stretching (gently) to increase range of motion. I have simple exercises to do throughout the day. Twenty seconds at a time every hour or two. I can handle that, methinks. I see the physical therapist tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. and Friday at 9 a.m.

My kids are home from school now and are irritating me. Sproing is springing and clapping loudly and yelling and arguing. Diva is quiet, but Sproing is arguing about her. He's been mouthing off to her and her social worker. "I'm just kidding." No, son, that behavior is disrespectful and annoying. But he won't hear me. He's too busy yelling at me to listen, and blames everything on others.

I'll write more about my crazy in another post. I felt very very crazy when I started writing at noon, but now I'm too distracted, too numbed by over-stimulation. And I wanted to try to write about it. I need to figure WTF it's about.

hand dancing

Have you seen this?



It has 8.4 million views on YouTube, so chances are pretty good that you may have seen it. I saw it this evening for the first time and just had to share it.

I have found a new blog in which to get lost. if it's hip, it's here. Art and design and weird and interesting stuff. And I've been clicking hip links since early this afternoon (with a mid afternoon break for errands and other important things). Found the above video on one of her posts. I'm in design-geek heaven!

Spring with a Bang

 We have an ornamental pear tree in our yard. We used to have two, but the really nice big one in front of the house died a couple of years ago. The one that's left is much smaller, and closer to the neighbor's yard on the small side of the driveway. Until this morning it was bare. Naked. In winter shut-down mode. Even more bare than the neighbor's tree is now, as you see on the right.

Her tree is also small, and on the small side of her driveway. They look pretty nice together, actually.

This morning Superman went outside to do whatever it is he does on Saturday mornings and Ta-Da! The tree was in full bloom! Just like that. One day bare, the next day full of flowers. There's our tree to the left. And that's the next door neighbor's house. It looks very nice, much nicer than ours. Which is why I framed the shot to show her house.

 Below is a shot of the two trees beside each other. 

It isn't good photography. The light was bad today. (Bad light! Go stand in the corner!)

It's been wet. The big bad storm that's been making its way across the south finally got here overnight. There was a very big, very loud, very close bolt of lightening that struck at about 2:30 this morning, waking everyone in the house. My very unscientific theory is that the big bolt shocked the pear tree into blooming. Put the fear o' Thor in it, perhaps.

In other news, my back still hurts. Still in the tenderloin district. It's been, what, three weeks or more since it started bothering me. I have an appointment Monday afternoon to get the doctor to reevaluate things. The "duuu-u-u-u-u-d-e" drugs, I'm still taking them, but they no longer "dude" me out. Make me a bit sleepy sometimes, and I have a bit more trouble concentrating sometimes, but I feel pretty normal-ish when taking them. And they do help the back a lot, but not completely. I just took a dose about an hour ago and now I'm getting kinda vacuous.

I read a very good book last night. Do you know how I read books? Especially novels and such; fiction. Non-fiction doesn't have quite the hold on me. I start a good book and don't find a good stopping place. Hell, a lot of times even the end of the story isn't a good stopping place, you know? So I read until close to 5:00 this morning. In doing so I also monitored the storm. The tornado sirens went off at 4:15, though I doubt many people besides me heard them.

But I was telling you about this book. Or I told you I read a book. Changing Tides by Michael Thomas Ford. If it had been illustrated, this is what the pictures would be:

These are nudibranches, also known as sea slugs. One of the main characters was a marine biologist who's specialty was these guys. Nudibranches were not integral to the plot, really, but the author wrote fascinating descriptions of them. I wish there had been pictures in the book, but at least we have Google, you know? Google image search "nudibranch" and ta-da all over again. Pages and pages of colorful fellers like these.

The point I'm pretending to make is that the book was very good and I recommend it. There is a bit of M/M intimacy in the story, tastefully written and not gratuitous.

I have some deep thoughts concerning the subject of my previous post, in which I shared the Roderick Thorp quote: "We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."

But I haven't sufficiently processed the thoughts for comment here. Right now the "dude" drugs have my brain too sleepy and fuzzy to make sense of much. And this post already has enough stuff in it. 

Quote for today

"We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."
-- Roderick Thorp


Because heaven knows I play the role of my own enemy often enough.