It grows back doesn't it?

It sucks that you don't know how bad your hair will look until the next day.

And yes, it did go poof in the middle of the night!

I was concerned that the young little thing didn't have a clue what I was talking about... and I was right to be concerned. What a hatchet job.

I was going for a 1950's style and getting close to it... now I have down-right boring interpretation by a 20-something fool.

So this all grows back doesn't it? That's the great thing about hair it grows back... it will take ages though :-(

Should I wait up for the poof?

Got my hair done today. But not by my favourite hair stylist.

When I called to book the appointment, they said he left the salon. I asked where he went, but they wouldn't tell me, and since I needed a cut, I went with someone new - Whitney... just as long as she didn't sing, I was ok with that. Boy do I know when she was born and who her parent's favourite singer was! Poor kid.

Whilst I was on hold and they were figuring out what to say to me about my old hairdresser I heard a really silly add. It was for a new product of theirs. It's a frizz control that lasts 12 hours. All I could think was "What happens at hour 12? Is there a popping noise, and your hair puffs out in a huge ball of fur?"

So when the new hair stylist said "Can I use this on your hair, have you ever tried it?" and she pulled out the frizz control stuff I started laughing.

I don't have frizzy hair, but it's their new product to push, and I don't typically have allergic reactions to the Aveda products, so I said sure, why not.

But now I have a dilemma. I would like to see the 12th hour poof, but it was put into my hair at 1pm, so that means I would have to stay up until 1am to see this miracle of hair productus poofius.

So is it funny enough to stay up that late... hmmm.

Update: Didn't stay up... didn't have to... around 1am my spouse actually reported a popping sound... when I woke up, the morning was extreme on the poof, it took much shampooing to get it to stay down! Quite the science lab hijinks on my hair!

Why is he wearing sunglasses?

You know it's been raining for a long time when the sun hurts your eyes when it occasionally peeks out from behind the clouds for a couple of minutes.

It's been raining for a long time.

So why is that guy wearing sun glasses?

The chance of anything poking out from behind the clouds today is slim to none. The sky is a uniform shade of light grey - flood-fill grey if you are familiar with image software. That guy will not be attacked by any stray beams of light today.

He's looking around at everything and everyone. Looking everyone in the eye, it seems. So he's not blind. He's not trying to avoid being noticed. He's actually looking like he wants to be noticed. That's rather odd.

It seems like a good day to smoke some herbs, judging from the number of clouds of herb smoke I have gone through today on the sidewalks. That's an odd thing when it seems only elderly women are walking around out there... OK ladies, who has the pot?

So is the guy in the sunglasses having an interesting trip? Is that the reason for the sunglasses and the staring into stranger's eyes? So if he's walking quickly around all the streets smoking pot, does that qualify as exercise? Does the pot help make the flood-fill grey less depressing, more varied and interesting? Do dark sunglasses that make everything even darker help?

I think I need to run back to my home and sit by my full-spectrum light lamp. This is just all too odd.

Who is that?

Sometimes a situation or something I've read starts me thinking about characters for a story. This is one of them.

The Food Lurker

A magazine article I just read had suggestions for starting up conversations at a business conference. The first suggestion was to hang out around the food table and talk about the food as a conversation starter. There were suggestions on what to talk about after a conversation was started - asking what company the other person worked for, or asking what their job in the company was, and other ideas, but it made me shiver to think of someone who missed the part about having other things to say after the food conversation was over.

A character like this would probably be an introvert, a technical guy who works with computers and can be very succinct when instant messaging with the people he works with, but stumbles when talking on the phone or in person with them. He is probably in his 20s and hasn't managed to find a life partner yet - due in part to his lack of confidence when speaking - but has many friends that he instant messages with for hours on non-business topics.

What drove the food lurker to the business conference? Was he forced to go by a well-meaning boss that wanted him to get to know more people? Does he himself want to increase the number of people he knows? Does he want to learn something from the formal sessions? I think it may be a combination of all of these things. Unfortunately, he may succeed in learning something from the formal sessions (I've been to a lot of business conferences, and I know learning things from them does happen, but honestly, it's rare) but will he succeed in getting to know more people?

Now where does this story go?

Won't those fried eggs get soggy?

It's been raining for um, when hasn't it rained? Oh yes, we had one day in a row of brilliant sunshine this month, so we went to a bird sanctuary to take photos.

But right now the weather forecast for Vancouver has these odd fried-egg like icons on it. They are round and yellow, and there is some white bits around the sides.

Won't those eggs get soggy in all this rain?

I don't believe it could actually mean sun is in the forecast, the icon shows up for about 4 days in a row!

Must be soggy eggs expected.

Is anonymous fame possible?

If googling yourself is the ultimate in vanity searching or egogoogling (is that a fun new word, or what?) then is googling for photos you've taken a vanity search for the introvert?

I have a very old name, I can still count on one hand the number of times I've met someone else named Clara. The name is coming back into fashion, I've heard of three or four babies being named Clara in the last couple of years, but mostly people with my name have died of old age many years ago, so I'm in a dip of name popularity (and generally very happy for it). So when I do a google on my own name I typically come up with a lot of pictures of grave markers. This kind of vanity search is not a cheerful thing, so I avoid it.

But I do use Flickr to post a lot of photos I've taken and lately I've found many of them right at the top of google searches! All of my rose photos have the full variety name attached to them, I don't bother taking pictures of roses unless I can also take a photo of a name tag to go along with them. Otherwise, there are millions of photos of roses with the tag "yellow rose" or "red rose" and mine would be just one of millions. But if you search in google or google images on "rotary sunrise rose" or "harwelcome fellowship rose" or a few other rose variety names, my photos come up first! I've also found other non-rose images of mine coming up on top in google searches. (And for a fun twist, my photo of an odd image in a tree came up first when searching on "sasquatch suicide" for a few days.)

So on a vanity search for my photos, I come out quite well. Does this mean I have achieved anonymous fame? Is this introvert ego searching?

Did we really move that far?

This is our first December in our new place. It is 4 city blocks over and 5 city blocks down closer to the water than our old place. It doesn't seem that far, but yesterday - a day after the parade - we realized we missed the Santa Clause Parade noise completely for the first time in a decade! We only realized this when we saw a balloon caught in a tree outside our windows and remembered it was that time of year again.

As I mentioned in at least one previous blog entry we used to be awakened on the morning of the parade by 6 or 7 marching bands at a time warming up outside our building. Then when the parade started we heard many bands walking the parade route a couple of blocks from our home. This year we heard nothing. We saw no traffic jams, no crowds of people. We didn't even notice there was a parade.

Of course, in August we had a great view of the Pride Parade from our balcony in our new home, and that was noisy too, as I wrote in another blog entry, but it was so colourful and fun and warm, it wasn't nearly as annoying. (That may have something to do with the complete lack of tired old Christmas songs being played to death... could someone write something new, anything new, for Christmas?)

So have we really moved that far away? It seems like such a short distance, but it is like a completely different city just a few blocks away! What a difference a few city blocks makes!