hair cut

Happy Halloween Eve!

Callaghan and I have been celebrating Halloween all week, wanting to make up for the fact that we’ll be apart on the actual holiday. He left yesterday for a 12-day business trip in France (Normandy)… so yes, the week-long celebration was necessary. Priorities.

Actually, we’ve been in Halloween celebration mode all month.

I have no Halloween plans for tomorrow. At first I wanted to go to SCARIZONA Scaregrounds with a friend, but then I ~~chickened out~~ re-thought that plan because they promise to prey on “every possible phobia,” and there’s no way I’m risking the possibility of roaches (real or not). I’m thinking roachaphobia is common enough that Scarizona masterminds would use it in the creation of their haunted house “experiences.” I’m a risk-taker in some ways, but not in the roach way. NOPE. Not going.

Instead, kitties and I will enjoy a quiet, spooky Halloween together.

Bunny-butt Nenette and butterscotch Nounours checking out a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin.

I’m looking at 12 days of quality bonding time with Nounours and Nenette. But fear not – I am planning on some crazy shenanigans for the duration. As they say, the cat will play while the Callaghan’s away.

Here’s some of what’s about to go down:

Reading (All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr)
Writing (I round-filed both of my neglected big projects, but this new one is actually a starting-over of one of the discarded ones.)
Watching Netflix (Yes, I’ve returned to Netflix. What can I say.)
Playing with furbabies (Nenette will learn that I can be just as fun as Daddy when it comes to playing.)
Taking the bus (to work – this is new) and walking (home from work). I still refuse to pay for parking at work when we live so close.
Eating simply. (For the next 12 days, I’m basically going to live on salad, baked sweet potatoes, broccoli, brown rice, quinoa, hummus, peanut butter, bread, and fruit. Because these are foods I love, I’m lazy about cooking, and I don’t want to spend time thinking about it.)
Getting my hair cut. (YAY new hair, plus I get to see my girl Melanie!)

And, so as to not make too much of a ruckus up in here:

Updating/cleaning up some of this blog’s details, i.e. the About page, stuff in the sidebar, some of the links and tags and categories, etc., etc. Long overdue.

It’s not an exhaustive list, but it captures the main agenda. You get the idea. It doesn’t take much to amuse me.

Case in point: I was too easily amused by this exchange with Callaghan yesterday morning when he was at the airport, texting to tell me about his pre-boarding adventures.

You know how a text conversation can get off-sync when you receive a message while you’re texting, so after you send the one you were writing, you immediately answer the new one that came in, and the messages accumulate out of order because the timing got messed up, plus you were talking about two different things at once, so now your phone displays a merging of replies on different subjects, and it either doesn’t make sense at all, or it just looks wrong?

This is what happens when you’re texting about airport security procedures and breakfast at the same time. It’s all fun and games until someone gets a scone up his butt. Of course, it had to be Callaghan.

(Sub-title: A Hair Elastic is a Good Thing to Have at a Lunch with a Group of People.)

(Sub-title, la deuxième: File Under “Mortifying Incidents of the Sort You Know Could ONLY Happen to You.”)

You know that special type of embarrassment you get to experience when you’re dining out with people from your work, and you’re talking to your boss (who’s sitting directly across from you), and in between bites, your response to his question is interrupted by the sudden appearance of a hair in your mouth? Your own hair, which is below-the-shoulders long? And your first two or three attempts at removing it fail, and the ensuing hair-capturing ordeal unfolds into a drama that overtakes the conversation as you repeatedly grab at the side of your half-open mouth between words, since each time you try to nonchalantly continue your sentence, you realize it’s still there? And when you finally succeed at pinching it between your forefinger and thumb, you start pulling it out to discover, to your horror and disbelief, that it’s all tangled up in the food that was still in your mouth, so the hair is actually resisting removal… forcing you to yank on it? And by the time you manage to extract the hair from your mouth – drawing it out slowly and carefully in all its long splendor (surely it was the very longest hair on your head that somehow got in the way of the food in your chopsticks) – your poor boss and the co-worker sitting next to you are awkwardly looking around everywhere but at you, including at the ceiling, probably because they’re simultaneously grossed out and painfully embarrassed on your behalf? Long after their initial thought of, Oh! OH, well, um, this will pass evolved into the conundrum of oh DEAR, what’s the proper etiquette for this situation? Should I act like I don’t see what’s going on? as your struggles seemed to never cease?

Well, I sympathize with you. It happened to me on Wednesday.

The wayward hair originated from this.

So, yeah, the expression “foot in mouth” has a new counterpart for a different kind of embarrassing conversation kerfuffle: “hair in mouth” (while eating in a restaurant with people from work).

At least I could laugh when I described the scenario to Callaghan a few hours later. He laughed, too.

“Haha! That would NEVER happen to me,” gloated my bald husband.

“You’d better hope it never happens to you. If it did, it would be someone else’s hair,” I said.

It was almost as funny as the Great Toilet Paper Incident of 1999, which happened while I was actually at work at the University Registrar’s Office. I’m not ready to share that one just yet.

In all seriousness, though, I really am going to have my hair cut an inch or two, just up to my shoulders, I think. I’d been going back and forth on this for the last few weeks, and then this incident happened, and it kind of made up my mind for me. Funny how that happens!