Haircuts

My hair's getting fairly long at this point, and the Queen is beyond hinting at me needing a cut. That's not a trim; that's a cut. It is cold, so maybe I can use that as an excuse. One part of me likes the hair cut because I do have a smidge of vanity about me, but another part doesn't really care and would rather do something more beneficial with my time. I thought back to my history of haircuts (yeah, what a boring topic, right?), and while my overall hair cropping hasn't varied that much, I have had some interesting cuts in the past. 

Growing up, my mother always cut mine and my brother's hair. She just used your basic electric clippers with an attachment for what amounts to a buzz cut over the summer. During the winter, she would use scissors and cut my bangs and over the ears and up to the hairline in the back with no layering action at all. It looked like your basic bowl cut, though no bowl was involved. When I got older, I continued with that same basic cut, but in a barber shop where they layered it, but I still combed my hair straight down all over (as evidenced by my senior picture with holds to the same basic haircut I had in my kindergarden picture). 

Now, there was one time when I was in those 'tween years where a stylist got a little adventurous on my hair and thought it would be cool to really style me up good. She trimmed it up about the same way they always did, but then proceeded to style it up and gel it into place so it looked like a Disney teeny bopper. How long did this style last? We went grocery shopping right after this cut, and outside the store, I did my best to mess my hair up real good, since I preferred it that way (if I remembered the comb my hair before school, that was a good day -- actually I'm still that way, though I remember more consistently now). I spent quite a bit of time that night washing all the goop out of my hair.

Naturally, I can't go through this without mentioning the Army cut. Yeah, I've seen myself completely bald. It's not a pretty sight. A lot of people out there have a nice dome to their head. It's perfectly round and you could chop them at the neck, and use them for a bowling ball. Those are the people who shave their heads and take a razor to them to keep them short and shiny. My noggin is not so nice.

I will be the first to admit that I've bumped my head a few times in my life. I clearly remember falling backward off a ledge about three and a half to four feet off the ground and landing on my head. I was subsequently yelled at by the bus driver who saw it happen for holding up his route when I did jump right up and run to the bus which was pulling up. But I landed right on my head and had a pretty good knot for awhile.

Anyway, it's kind of hard to explain what the deal is with my head. I have what amounts to a dent across the forward center of the top of my head, so from front to back, my head come up over the forehead, it dips down, goes back up to the crown, the crown of my head has a bit of a crater to it, and then it comes back out of the crater and down the back. It's not as extreme as it sounds, but that's how it looks to me. Makes me wonder sometimes how I managed to get a non-dome-shaped dome.

While I was in the military, I got what's referred to as a "high and tight" during my time in AIT. This is basically a short cut across the top of the head (covering my deformed brain cavity, restoring my head to a normal look), but almost no hair on the sides. In the latter days of AIT, and onto Fort Carson, I changed it to a "low and tight" which is the same basic idea as the high, but you have more hair on the sides that fades quickly as it moves down. It is a military cut that stays within the 2 inch rule of Army haircuts. My hair grows really quickly, and I did not get it cut weekly, so it grew long enough fairly often for me to do something with it, and I started combing it to the side to keep it out of my eyes (as 2 inches shouldn't go into your eyes, right?). Ok, so the band was a tad lenient on hair cuts, but they still required it cut.

I kept the side look for awhile once I left the military, but I got a little weary of trying to control it. I dislike dealing with any kind of styling, since I have better things to do (in my own little world). When I did go in for a haircut, I told them (and I still do) "about a quarter of the way down the forehead, off the ears, up to the hairline in the back, and even it out all over." This description has yielded a world of difference between hair cutters.

I say hair cutters because it's hard to classify these people as they all want to be something different, and that's the most general term I have. I have had barbers, hair stylists, cosmotologists, and hair professionals on my knot, so they all get lumped into "hair cutter." Teach them to not settle on one standard name.

Well, it was within a year of being out of the Army that I found the hair style that I maintain to this day. I use the word style very loosely because I really don't do anything to it but comb it back and then let it dry. My hair appears to have a natural part to it...right down the middle. I mean, perfectly down the middle. So my hair parts itself without any help from me, and my overgrown bangs fall to either side of my face allowing me to go even longer without a haircut than I could in high school. Haha!

Now, I will admit that this does make the Queen crazy. You see, my hair continues to grow very full and it does this quickly, so when I don't cut it for awhile, I have one thick head of hair that gets harder and harder to control, and while to an extent, I don't care, I do have to maintain the status quo of the business world meaning I can't look like a total hobo. However, I think I've got more hair than most of my office does, and I suspect that's not entirely their choices, if you follow me.

Anyway, I'll probably end up chopping my hair off again sometime soon, but I figured I'd share a little hair history for the sake of sharing. Now you know that when it comes to styling my head, I do as little work as possible.

Blind As Bats?

It's really cold here. Normally, our temperatures in the winter will dip below freezing, but it doesn't usually get colder than in the twenties for long. This morning, we're sitting in the lower teens with a wind chill that dips into the single digits. Add to that on the way to work this morning, it was snowing, but given just how cold it is, it's basically snow dust that blows around out there. This, however, does not stop people from being crazy. In fact, the sub freezing temps plus snow makes them worse.

Now, if you re-read that, you'll see that by sub-freezing, we're just talking about cold, and by snow, we're just talking flurries that aren't sticking at this point. Basically, the situation wasn't all that serious as I was driving in. Oh, but apparently it was for some. My drive was almost uneventful but for one intersection, and what occurred there continues to amuse me.

In Tulsa, there are some hills. Now, nothing that compares to, say, Colorado Springs, but there are some hills that are not to be reckoned with on icy days, and 61st and Sheridan possesses two of these hills. Coming from the South and East, you can overlook the intersection below to kind of get an idea of what's going on down there before you actually reach it. This morning, I noticed the traffic was a little backed up coming up to 61st and Sheridan on Sheridan from the South. It was nothing serious, mind you, but more than normal for the time of morning I was driving in.

As I passed over the hill, I surveyed the intersection, and sure enough, there was a car with its hazard lights on sitting in the left turn lane to get onto 61st going West. Naturally, this was the precise direction I needed to go, but I found the cause of the backup was that I am not alone in this need to head West and those left-turners were simply going around this car and turning left the best they could. Ok, none too serious. I can live with that.

Here's the funny part. From the hill to the intersection isn't that far, but I saw no less than three people pull into the turn lane behind this stalled car, at least one pulling right up to the car's bumper before realizing he wasn't moving and needing to get back out of that lane. They had exactly the same vantage point I did, and I recognized the peril from the top of the hill, a good 5 minutes before I reached the point where I could even consider turning.

It just continues to prove this point: People don't pay attention while driving.

The iPod Plays Favorites

You know, gadgets develop personalities. They do. You get used to the little quirks that your computer, dvd player, TV, or iPod tends to do, and you just say "that's the way it is." Not only are there quirks, sometimes, but at least with my iPod, there are songs it likes to play and songs that it doesn't. This little phenomenon was firmly established and proven in my James Bond song list.

I'm an avid James Bond fan, and as such, I have the title music for every movie (right up to the current one) as well as some extra tunes from the movies loaded into a playlist of about 30 songs that I play when I drive to work. The Queen just prefers it over anything else I could play. So when I first created the list, I just played it on full shuffle, and it picked whatever song out of the 30 it wanted to play, and played it. After awhile, I noticed that some songs got more airplay than others, and we got to the point where there were tunes, such as Nobody Does It Better, that had racked up over twenty plays while others had barely gotten over ten.

My response to this was to even the odds and set up a second smart playlist that sorted the songs into a 30 minute list that took the least often played songs and played them. This snagged all the low play songs and played them first, and on that setting, we never heard the 20+ play songs. Well, I was getting weary of hearing the same songs over and over every morning, so I cleared the play counts on that entire playlist, and set it to play the least recently played songs, and since we were back to zero for them all, this will keep them all fairly even. After all, my drive to work is about 30 minutes, so it generally played the whole list minus one or two.

Well, over the last few days, I noticed there is a song that my iPod doesn't like. It seems to have an aversion to From Russia With Love. Why do I believe something from an inanimate object? Because since late last week, that song has been in the 30 minute drive list, but it always plays dead last. This means it kicks off as I'm arriving at work or doesn't play at all. It's been passed up for probably every other song in the master list because my iPod continually places it last in the list. Weird, huh?

This isn't the only list it does this with either. I have a ton of playlists setup, and I'd gone to restricting many of them down because my iPod has overplayed one particular song when they run. For instance, in my 80's list, Addicted To Love comes up almost every time unless I use the least played list. A review of play counts on my iPod (if you discount the obvious multiple plays of single albums) shows several songs with inordinately large play counts from when I would shuffle everything. My iPod just pulls them in more often, I guess, because it likes those songs.

Now, I can't look into least plays on anything because of the way I'm running my iPod at this point. I am currently running a playlist to play every song that hasn't been played in 2009. I've listened to about 800 out of the 6000+ songs so far, and I'm running them by album so I can hear all (or most of) an album that I might not have listened to in awhile. I know there are several songs that haven't played since last May, so I'm just trying to get a listen to everything on my iPod coming into the new year. I figure it'll take me a few months to do it, but hey, I put the music on there, I probably like it.

Right now, I'm running the Beatles' album Help! Been a little while since I've heard it.

Another Job Slump

So, it was 2001, and we'd successfully moved into a house. While we didn't own it, the guy had mentioned the possibility of a rent to own situation after the lease was up in a year. It was somewhat encouraging, so that maybe we wouldn't just be throwing money away completely. 

That summer, the Queen did her teacher outings and such. She had gone through her first year, but the (insert unkind word) of a principal she had gave her a heck of a hard time that year. We're not sure why this was, since the Queen took her suggestions, and then she retracted her suggestions to make some different ones. No kidding. It was a very frustrating time for her.

As the Queen got more pregnant through the summer, we hit the end of another job for me. Suncraft decided that they wanted someone in the office who could do more stuff. I had seen this woman come in and talk to the boss for a little while one day, and I could feel that something was going on that I was kept out of. Later that day, I was told that they were going to let me go, not because I'd done a bad job, but because this other person could do more.

Now let me iterate here that they hadn't actually asked me to do anything else, nor did they indicate that anything more needed to be done. I basically wasn't given a chance to learn anything additional or do anything else before they judged that someone else would be more capable. They simply knew who this other person was, and rather than chance whether I could do the same thing, they got rid of the temp and hired her on to do my job and whatever else they needed. They did this on a Thursday, and the boss did graciously tell me that he would pay me for Friday as well. That was kind of him.

I returned to the temp service, but nothing else of this nature was available, so I was on my own. It was high time for another mistake, so while job hunting, I came across a vacuum cleaner sales place that did in home demonstrations of vacuum cleaners to sell them to individuals. I should have walked out, but the pay rate per sale was incredible. I thought that if I could pull off selling these things, we'd do pretty well. Besides, if you did a minimum number of demonstrations, they'd pay a decent wage.

Then I learned the reality. These overpriced vacuums were impossible to sell. Sure, they were cool beyond words, but at a whopping $2600 per unit, no one was willing to buy them. They were too expensive. I found some on eBay later for half that or less. The demonstration minimum was also impossible to hit. After all, you had to have somewhere to go, and though they promised that they had a small cold calling center that set up appointments with good leads, there weren't often enough appointments to justify the 2 per business day minimum to achieve the minimum wage requirement. Even if you did have 2 appointments, actually making them both would be hard enough, and if someone didn't qualify once you got in the door (i.e. general feeling, the decision maker wasn't there), that one didn't count. 

I tried. I really did. I tried for 3 months, but ended up with bupkas for my efforts. The Queen was supporting us solely over that time, and she was getting a bit fed up that I wasn't bringing anything home. She let me try the cleaner thing, but after so long without progress, she was done. I was too. I finally gave back my demo model and I was out. That was a hard time for us, and probably the most stressful. It's about as close as we ever came to losing each other. It was our two year hump (though more like two and a half years), and it was hard.

She was our sole provider, pregnant, and I was turning into a deadbeat, no matter if I was trying or not. We had a baby coming within a month and struggling to make our payments. Something had to give.

Darth Vader at the time was working for a teleservices company, and it was a company I'd applied to work at right after RadioShack, but I'd turned it down because I didn't want to work nights. It was $9 an hour, though, and that was as much as I'd made before. I also knew they hired in at 30 hours, but it had been four months since I'd had any income and anything is always better than nothing.

And so began my time in customer service. I went to work for a cell phone provider called Cricket in their customer service area. It was the beginning of a whole new career path for me, since customer service pays more than I'd done before, and all the customers come to me to solve problems. For a Geek, problem solving is second nature, so it was destined to work out fine.

Philbrook Second Saturday Free

This was fun. We had heard about this program from Moneypenny who had sent us an email on it, and given that the Socialite is rather into art and such, we thought it would be a perfect visit for her. Not only do they give you a case and some free art supplies, but there were some activities and free admission to the museum and grounds and such as well. It was a lock, so following lunch on Saturday, we headed on over.

There had been a lot of changes to Philbrook since the last time the Queen and I had gone. We went to Philbrook when we were till dating, and I believe at the time, you still entered through the main front door, and the stairs up and down were blocked off, giving you one floor to peruse the artwork on. Or maybe it was available and we just never took the stairs. Who knows? 

Anyway, we entered into what was definitely a newer wing where there was a large rotunda and everyone is greeted there. We were given a schedule, told where to get our supplies, and encouraged to return at 2 for a "quickie tour." We grabbed our boxes (one for each child, so we got three), hung our coats in the nearby honor-based coat room, and headed off to see about snowflake snowmen. 

Snowflake snowmen are made using white paper folded and cut into the classic school room snowflakes and then glued onto a paper to create those layers of decreasing size. Other papers allowed for the scarf and hat, and there were wiggly eyes and pompoms for the nose and buttons. They each made their snowmen and proudly displayed them for the Queen to snap some photos (the Queen is quite snap happy with her new and cooperative 12 Mp camera. It's got an 8Gb card in it and she was down to 1900 pictures left at the end of the day. Oh horror!).

Once we had the snowmen, we decided to walk through the museum for a bit since we only had 15 minutes till the tour and we didn't want to start something else before the tour and have to end it early. We found ourselves in the old house portion and saw the original entrance, and we pointed it out to the princesses. We showed off some of the rooms to them, being sure to draw their attention to the paintings that adorn the walls and ceilings. Past the artwork within, Philbrook itself is a work of art in its architecture and interior decorations.

We only got so far as the light up floor (which was off when we got there) and we had to go back. I confirmed with the Queen about that floor, though, since I could swear it lit up. She thought so too, but for now, we had to head back for the tour.

The tour was pretty decent. The guide talked about how artists use lines to give feeling to their works. Horizontal is space. Vertical is height. Curves are comfort and softness. Jagged is fear and tension. Diagonal is motion. And a horizontal and vertical (think table leg) is stability. She pointed out a variety of painting and figurines of pets to demonstrate these principles, and it was really interesting.

The tour actually left off at the far end of the house part of the museum that we hadn't gotten to, so we picked up there and started walking back. We passed over that light up floor again, and I asked one of the museum people about it. We were right, and he lit the floor up for us. The princesses thought that was really cool. 

We went downstairs after this to check out the painting activity where they were supposed to draw and paint a pet. The Socialite looked like her brain wanted one thing, but her hand wasn't cooperating, and while she started drawing one thing, we eventually told her to just draw the horse however she wanted to draw it. She did, and she was happier. Rock Girl is actually drawing really well at this point, and Sassy Pants had more of a collage of color there at the end, but they all had fund getting there.

Leaving these to dry, we moved onto the galleries on the lower level, since that's where the studios for the painting were. Most of these were Native American paintings, tools, furniture, and pottery. It was kind of neat to see the wonder on their faces. We went from there up two floors to the upper level (that part where I'd never been before) to view the artwork there. There was one that was really strange. Someone had taken footage of a diver at the Olympics and set it to music, but it was really syncopated. When I looked at it, I didn't get it. I read the description, and while I understood the explanation, I didn't go back to see if I got it a second time. Maybe next time we come in.

The princesses were getting worn out, so we decided to head out to the gardens so they could check that out as well. With all the changes, the garden remains unchanged. The Queen took some pictures, of course, and once we got all the way out to the gazebo, she turned around and tried out a panoramic picture on her camera. It worked really easily and made a very wide angled picture.

They were done by that point, though, so we returned to the studio, picked up our pictures, and made for the car. This program goes every month (at least October through June, according to the stamp areas on the art box) on the second Saturday of the month, so we'll definitely be coming back so they can see everything there is to see there and know the place inside and out growing up. This is especially important to us since The Socialite is very interested in art and wants to be an artist.

So at this point, we have one interested primarily in Meteorology and the science thereof, though her dream is to go into space. We have one interested in art pretty heavily. She was all over those paintings. And Sassy Pants... Well, she hasn't locked onto anything yet, really, but given how much of an attention hog she is and how much she can over-dramatize herself, I fear she may want to be an actress. Perish the thought.

Fear of a Crash

So I've been playing one instrument or another in a group setting for over 22 years now as well as having participated in theatre and movie production, so I would like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what it takes for a show and performers to come together. I recall the "rehearsal" for this shindig on Friday that we had last Wednesday. We played "Oklahoma" great. Other than that with people not knowing the music and others not showing up, I figured we'd have another rehearsal or two (at least) before Friday.

Well, it's Monday, and I haven't anything about any further rehearsals yet. I would presume one for Wednesday (again, before church), but unless we get the full compliment of everyone together, we're going to have one frightening train wreck on Friday. After all, I know the source material for the show pretty well with only some moderate fogginess on a couple of songs and how they plan on doing the songs.

There was some chatter about a rehearsal yesterday after the morning service, but I never got a call, and of course, I go to a different church, so I wouldn't know. Who knows? They may have rehearsed and not told me. For all I know, the confidence-undermining minds over there found someone "that could actually play drums." Nah, I'm not bitter or anything on them. Of course they've done that before.

Anyway, my curiosity remains and I'll probably check with the organizer tomorrow to be sure of what's going on there to see if we're still on or not. It just worries me that no one seems to be taking these performances seriously.