Tag: hair cut

Haircut Redux?

I posted something the other day about having a bad experience trying to get a haircut. Checking in early only to have to wait a ridiculous amount of time, and being in a large crowd in a confined space in the time of Covid… granted the state of emergency for Covid was lifted last week so I guess I can’t technically say it’s still the time of Covid. Whatever, I didn’t feel safe.

I am going to try again tonight after work. I booked a 6:00 appointment. Here’s hoping I get right in because they close at 7:00. My hair really needs to be cut. I look like bozo the idiotic clown right now. The mirror cried “uncle” this morning and I have to appease it.

Unrelated story, I bought a fly swatter the other day. I was at the grocery store and I saw it and that was literally the definition of an impulse buy. The idea behind it was to keep it at my work desk in the cellar and use it to eliminate bugs with extreme prejudice. Spiders mostly, but also little flying assholes that I don’t have a name for that often annoy me while I work. Earlier today, the swatter tasted insect blood for the first time and it liked the taste. It is thirsty for me.

There was a yellowjacket buzzing around. It was loud and obnoxious and clearly in a shitty mood. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t go anywhere that I could get a clear shot at it with the new fly swatter. It just wouldn’t stop flying around long enough, and when it did it stopped in a spot that I couldn’t swing my weapon with any accuracy.

If flew into one of the lamps and I thought a spider got it. It was quiet for a few minutes. Good riddance, I thought. But no. It flew out of the lamp with spider webs wrapped around it and trailing behind. It was clearly in distress and couldn’t fly very well. I saw my chance. It landed on the wall behind my desk for just a second and I struck. The sound of the fly swatter slapping against the wall was deafening (no it wasn’t, I am just being overly dramatic) and the bee fell to the desk. It was alive but severely injured. I struck again and the invader lived no more. Rest in peace, asshole.

I grabbed my little waste basket and swept the corpse off of the desk into it. It was then that I saw the little inch worm/caterpillar looking prick that had been hiding under the basket. The fly swatter tasted bug blood once again.

Something tells me my impulse buy will go down in history as money well spent. Money very well spent.

I Don’t Recognize Myself Part Two

Sometimes my brain gets all fluttery. I had something I wanted to write about in the last post. I wrote the title appropriately and then never touched on the topic at all. Doofus.

So weight loss surgery. I’ve lost 160 pounds in the last six months. A normal side effect of the surgery is hair loss, and my hair has definitely thinned out a ton over the last few months. It’s also starting to get curly again, for the first time since I was about four years old. It’s very weird. Yesterday my hair was past the point of just being too long and was starting to get downright clownish. I could stand it no more and after dinner last night I went and got a haircut.

It was a very strange experience. Having lost over 150 pounds, when I see myself in the mirror it’s a little disjointing. I don’t really look like what I think of as “me” anymore. I look like an alternate universe version of me. A variant, for my fellow Loki show fans. It’s odd, but last night as I was watching my hair getting lopped off in the mirror it went up to a new level. For 51 years I have had ridiculously thick hair. There is just so much of it. Even when it’s cut it still looks like a mop on top of my head. Last night it looked really thin. It looked… wrong. I didn’t really recognize myself.

Whatever it was in the moment, it isn’t that way now. I still look different than what I usually expect of myself, but that odd unfamiliar sensation I had at Supercuts last night is gone. I look like me again, or at least variant me.

It’s a strange new world we’re living in, isn’t it?

Long Day

I’m a little more than half way through my 48 hour parent sitting shift. I have been here for approximately 28 hours but I swear it has felt like 9,000.

Nothing bad happened today, it just seemed to drag on forever. My father has been fine. The home health worker sat around bored for most of her shift, but she was able to pitch in with dad on the couple of instances where he needed a little help. My mother hasn’t had a bad day pain-wise, but memory wise has been difficult. They were supposed to go and get their haircut at 1:00pm. My sister was going to come over and pick them up and drive them to the appointment. On the way over the woman who cuts their hair called her and said she was on her way to the house. What?

So instead of my sister and my nephew coming over and then everyone leaving the house but me, every one stayed and we added the hair stylist too. It was really hard to work while all 600 people were here. My step son coming over for lunch made it all better, but I ended up putting noise canceling headphones on and cranking the volume so that I could almost shut them all out. It didn’t work that well, but it was better.

The whole time the hair dresser was here my mother kept asking her how she found them. She was constantly insisting that this is not her house even though all of us assured her that this is the house she’s been living in since 1969 or so. She wouldn’t have it. She was positive she wasn’t in her house and she didn’t know where she was and therefore the hair dresser should not have been able to find them. My father whispered to me that she is getting much worse. She is. It’s heartbreaking and it’s awful.

Tomorrow is another day. They have another appointment in the afternoon, but it’s a tele-health appointment with their primary care physician. My brother is going to come over and take the call with them. I have a meeting at about that time so I don’t know if I will be able to join them. My father has been plowing through bottled water this week and we ran out of his favorite kind. Also, strangely, he is craving Rice Krispies. My sister stocked up on both today and will bring them by tomorrow. My goal is to focus on work as much as the situation will let me, and then when 6:30-7:00pm finally arrives I will get the fuck out of here, go home and watch The Suicide Squad with my wife and my step son, and not come back here until Tuesday night.

I need this to be over. I need to spend time with my wife. I need to spend time with my step son before he leaves for school in a couple of weeks. After that, I need my fucking band to get back together and that can’t happen while I’m parent sitting. I need this to be over.

Half Day

I still have a ton of stuff going on at work, but I also have a half day today (dr. appointment in the afternoon). I’m going to have some time to kill and I want to try and fill it with something more productive than Netflix, although the second season of Black Summer* is out and the reviews are good.

I already started the laundry. I already started the dishes. I already took out the trash. I already made the bed. I already shaved off a week’s worth of facial hair and let me tell you it feels wonderful to not be itchy anymore.

I probably won’t have time for an eye exam. I don’t think I’ll have time to wait in line for a car inspection. If I could guarantee a quick turn around I could definitely do it, but if there’s a line… nope. Maybe I can sneak in a hair cut. That would help. It has been 55 days. 7.8 weeks. I am definitely due. Maybe.

Who am I kidding… I am going to watch stupid Black Summer, aren’t I.

*I watched the first season of Black Summer without knowing what it was. Had I known it was connected to Zombie Nation I would have taken a hard pass, but fortunately the tone of the show wasn’t stupid like Z Nation. Although two of the eight episodes were among the dumbest things I’ve ever subjected myself to. I swear the last two seasons of Fear the Walking Dead are a “hold my beer” response to the episode in the school and the one with the heist. The rest of the season was pretty good though, and a couple of the episodes were great.

Lunch Break

Lunch break on a Wednesday. We’ve been talking about the desks in our new building today. March 13, 2020 was the last day at our desks in the Waltham building. Two months ago the Waltham building was sold. Now we have desks in another building but prior to this morning none of us had gone to check it out. One guy went today and reported back that none of our stuff from Waltham has made it to the new desks yet. Uh oh. The upside is that some of us might be getting new monitors out of the deal. I had two when we left. They were both old and less than good. This could work out for me.

Wait… didn’t I write something about not talking about work?

The AC folks have come and gone. The window for their arrival was between 7:00 and 11:00. They knocked on the door at 10:50. His first question was, would you like me to wear a mask? Yes, yes I would. Thanks. It was just a routine cleaning and the AC in the wall in the bedroom clearly benefitted from it because it’s working like crazy now. It’s actually cold in here. I haven’t spent much time in the rest of the house yet so I don’t have any news from that front yet.

The tech said the wall unit in the bedroom was pretty old. Huh? It was installed three years ago. How is that old? Was it sitting on some warehouse shelf for a decade before it was installed in our house? Worse… was it used?

My father is in the hospital again. Day two. My brother is with him. The idea is to move him back into a rehab so that he can get back to a point where he can take care of himself better than he can now… which he can’t. He asked to have some of his more common aches and pains looked at while he was in there. Good idea. No real news on any front yet. Hopefully he’ll be in a new rehab quickly and he can get back to working on getting better. I am scared and worried and stressed and wracked with guilt and I am just overwhelmed with it all… and I’m not the one in the hospital bed. I can’t even begin to imagine how he feels. I hate this. I want my dad to be better again.

So Covid is over, right? The world is opened up again, right? People are still getting sick and people are still dying, but it’s all over, right? I’m thinking about things that I can do that were put on hold. Vacations would be first on that list but we have two college kids now and we are out of money. I already had a haircut, but I need another one because my hair grows faster than light. I need to get my eyes checked. Jen has done that already but see the previous sentence regarding money. I may have to ride out my old glasses for a little while longer. There is a guitar and an amplifier that I’d like to trade in. It depends on how much I can get for each item, but if I can get a used ’68 Deluxe Reverb or a used Les Paul Junior in exchange, I might. I don’t know how that will go.

Okay, time to clean up my lunch and get back to work. The hope is we will be watching episode two of Loki by 6:00pm. Four hours or so from now. Fingers crossed.

Wish my dad good luck, okay? Thanks.

Happy Halloween

In early May my hair was lock down long. Jen cut it for me. It was wonderful. One month later it was getting shaggy again and Jen cut it again and it was wonderful. Today it was back to super lock down long and Jen cut it again and it’s wonderful.

I have never had a buzz cut before. At least not since I was old enough to tell everyone I didn’t want a buzz cut anymore. My hair has never been this short before. My 1992 hippy long hair past self is in shock, but I love it.

Thanks, Jen!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Boo!