At the beginning of 2008, this blog would have been called "Just another shitty day..." a lot can change in a short period of time and I'm so thankful for it!
Ok, that might be a wee bit of an exaggeration, but a lot of it is gone.
Ten, maybe eleven, inches is gone from my life, hopefully to bring joy to someone else.
This...
...met the scissors...
...and became this.
It was actually very hard for me to sit and get my hair cut with those three bundles of hair sitting on the counter in front of me, just mocking my trichous inductus vomitus.
The decision to cut my hair off was not made lightly. I am actually very vain about my hair, despite the fact that I don't do anything with it. I love it long and healthy. But it was getting too hot and, frankly, it was pissing me off. I was getting hair cramps from putting it up and it was too heavy to stay on top of my head at bedtime, so I'd wake up with it wrapped around my neck.
I wasn't sure I'd be able to go through with such a drastic change, but I knew if I chickened out, I'd regret it, so I took a deep breath and willed myself into the chair.
I haven't decided if I love it yet, but it is only hair and it will grow back.
In the meantime, I hope some sick kid gets some use out of what used to be my hair.
For our only full day together at High Country Rendezvous, we all planned a nice ride in Roosevelt National Forest. Knowing the trails we'd be riding, I was a bit nervous about doing it bareback, since the trails we were going to be on were a little steeper than I was used to riding.
Compass over at the Livery offered me the use of her new treeless saddle, so I brought it on over to the Lodge and thunked it on Estes (ended up not using it though).
I was completely unsuspecting of the evil swirling around me. Bill was laughing at something, but I wasn't paying attention to what he was laughing at.
"What the???"
"RockCrawlinChef, did you do this?"
Bill. Of course.
Oh. Yes. He. Did. Defiled my Ripley.
Poor thing may never be the same again.
It gets worse. Not only did he defile the driver's side door, but he covered all of his bases and got the passenger side door, which I didn't discover until the next day.
It's been cold in Colorado lately. And I don't mean a little on the chilly side, but booger-freezing cold. So cold that when you step outside your boogers, even if you didn't know you had any, freeze into solid boogercicles. When it's that cold it's easy to let a few grooming habits, like leg shaving, go by the wayside. After all, don't Polar Bears have a layer of hair close to their bodies that traps the heat in the dead airspace? Aesthetically speaking, who is actually going to see my legs anyway? It's winter. I'm in long-johns and jeans or long-johns and scrubs. Who cares if my leg hair gets a little on the long side? And if Happy Hubby has too big an issue with my prickly legs he can just sleep on his own side of the bed.
So during the last cold spell, I ignored the leg shaving for a week or so. That was about as long as I could stand sleeping with my own prickly legs. The weather finally warmed up to freezing, literally we got up to 32 degrees, and I'd had enough of sleeping with my own prickly legs. Into the shower I went, armed with shaving cream and fresh razor.
I took care of the basic shower duties: hair wash and rinse, body wash and rinse, armpit shaving. Life was good, time to take the hedge clippers to the legs. I squirted the shaving cream into my hand, leaned over to slather it onto my legs and, oh shit *blech* there *blech* were two *blech* loose hairs from my head *swallow, swallow, don't puke* stuck to my *gross* leg hair *oh God, I'm going to puke*, which was acting like velcro.
See, I've got thing thing about loose hair. It grosses me out. Loose, wet hair? Well that's just a puke-fest waiting to happen. In fact, I can't even watch this commercial...
I had to have my husband preview it for me before I posted it, as just the thought of all that *blech* wet *swallow, swallow* hair makes me want to puke. Some people would accuse me of having trichophobia, an unnatural fear of hair. I'm not afraid of it. It just makes me puke.
What I really have is Trichous inductus vomitus, hair induces vomiting. Attached hair is fine.
Loose hair = dry heaves.
Wet, loose hair = puke fest!
Oh boy, I'm a ton of fun at a public swimming pool. And the pool deck when I took Scuba diving lessons - that was a deck full of potential landmines as far as I was concerned. I'm pretty sure I was the only one who mastered getting her airtanks on while standing on tippy-toe between clumps of hair on the deck. It's been years and the memory still makes me gag.
The thought of a nice, long, hot soak in the tub? No way, Jose. Do you know what goes down the drain? Hair. Do you know what floats back up into the tub? Hair. No effing way! A nice, long, hot soak in the tub, for me, involves duct tape. After the drain is closed and before the water starts running, there has to be some of this involved...
...covering the drain or a bath ain't happening!
I'm not sure where my affliction came from, but it hasn't gotten any better through the years. In fact, it may have gotten a tad worse. One of RockCrawlinChef's biggest jobs is to "save" me from any loose hair in the shower. When he hears, "ooo, oo-oo" like a monkey and sees my hands flailing about helplessly he has to come save me from the wet hair that has attached itself to my body before the dry heaves start. The worst, by far, is fingers and toes. Again, just thinking about it makes me gag.
Sadly, during the shaving incident a couple of weeks ago, RCC wasn't around to save me. I had to do it myself. I pulled down the shower head and attempted to just rinse the loose hairs away. Have you ever tried to rinse hair out of velcro? Doesn't work. In fact, it just makes it worse. Whereas before, I had two hairs hung up on the velcro-like leg hairs, now I had the loose hair stuck to both my leg and the leg hairs. I had no choice, I had to do it. I had to actually touch the hairs with my fingers and pull them off of my leg. I took a deep breath, clenched my jaw against the impending puke fest and resolutely plucked the hairs off of my leg. I tried to ignore the dragging sensation as the hair pulled off of my leg and tried to ignore the feel of it between my fingers, but to no avail. I did manage to sort of save myself from the hair, but I spent the next five minutes bent over the shower drain with the dry heaves.
I managed to get my dry heaves under control, quick shave my legs and get out of the shower before the dry heaves started in earnest again. I spent another ten minutes bent over the sink, praying that there was something in my stomach to puke up rather than the rhythmic contractions of the dry heaves.
I learned an important lesson from having to save myself: don't let the leg hair grow long enough to become velcro, no matter how cold it is outside! It just ain't worth it.
