Movin' on up

As of today I am a geographical orphan. My parents have sold there place and moved up to the interior after living here in the lower mainland for their whole lives. Their reasons are multifold, primarily to be more geographically centered for their traveling and church activities and also to be closer to my sister, with whom they have more activities going on with and has lived there for about 14 years. (We’ll call her deserter #1). They are also hitting their second retirement and want to start more traveling with their brand new motor home. So this is all well and good, I wish them all the best in this adventure. However it totally changes the dynamics of our family gatherings.

I have never lived in an abode with sufficient space for family gatherings and still don’t. My brother is slightly more equipped but still, we are urban dwellers with apartments, not houses. My parents place has been the gathering location for Christmas’s, Thanksgivings, Birthdays, and all other celebrations and holiday gatherings. It also provided a guest room for my sister and her family when they came down for a visit. So I can see my sister coming down even less now as well.

However, like all clouds, there is a silver lining, or my friend Pollyanna says. And I just scored a TV, DVD, VCR and stereo set, a cookware set and various other household bit’s n’ bobs. They have an old gramophone from 1910 or so too, with the old cylindrical cartridges and everything. Pretty cool if you’re ever in the mood for a waltz. Hello Canadian Antiques Roadshow! Oh, and if any of you aspiring DJ’s want a record player, got one of them too. (With a dust cover). I’ll even throw in my old Meatloaf: Bat out of Hell, Billy Joel: Glass Houses and the Grease Soundtrack (double album ya know) albums. Well hold on, maybe not Bat out of Hell. But don’t be sad. 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

Hair

I got my hair cut on Friday. Being something you should do every 6 to 8 weeks this is something most men should have down pat early on in the forming years of young adulthood. Not I, for whatever reason I have not been able to settle down and commit to a regular 'hair-cutter-person'. Be it a barber or a 'stylist. There are various reasons for this. Usually due to my geographical moves or hair stylists moving on or just not liking the cut so I seek another barber/stylist. This year I decided to make a definite effort to establish some consistency and have been going to a particular barber every time. Let’s call him Andrew, because that’s the name above the chair. Anyway, my whole point of this is that (are you ready) after going to Andrew 5-6 times consecutively I got a great haircut on Friday. So that’s all this is about. It may not seem like much but you would be surprised how many times I have come home from the barber only to have my (now ex) or a friend fix it for me. Just to drive the case home, allow me to offer you one glaring example.

It was the day where your hair goes from being OK, and in need of a haircut to, crazy I-cannot-leave-the-house-like-this hair. We all know this not a gradual thing. It just happens mysteriously in the middle of the night somewhere between weeks 7 and 8. So, not pleased with the last cut, (see above) I go to a new stylist in my corner shopping complex, all eager to commence a new relationship with a local merchant in my new neighborhood Okay, Okay, it was a Super Clips or Great Cuts or whatever so I was asking for it but still…. So it seems all of the hairdressers are busy so a woman who appeared to be the ‘hostess’ escorted me to the back to wash my hair. I say she was a hostess because she was dressed up like some Chinese dragon lady. Big hair, long nails and glam makeup. She looked more like a madam at a Chinese Brothel. So she washes my hair. Scrubbing the shampoo into my scalp with her 2 inch long dragon-lady nails. Now I think she was doing some serious damage to my scalp. Her nails were making grooves in my scalp and she resumes scrubbing in the same spot, she just kept digging the grooves deeper and deeper. I managed to survive with only grinding a few millimeters of enamel off my teeth only to see her get another dollop of shampoo and start again. And again grinding her nails in the same spot, just a needle on a record finds the groove, her nails slipped right back into the trench she had just dug.. I swear, if we could have looked at my scalp it would have looked like a cat scratching post. And it hurt!

Then she cuts my hair. And I thought the wash was a bad experience. I’ll cut to the chase as this is getting a bit long winded; it was THE WORST haircut of my entire life. Bar none. Seriously, this woman has no business working at a hair salon. Chunks of it were inches longer than others; one side was longer than the other, but only at the back. It is hard to describe it but I looked like some chemo-head post apocalyptic mutant. I just paid and got out of there as quick as possible. I considered exercising my consumer rights to get them to fix it but I just did not want her to touch me again. As I was leaving I swear I saw her cleaning my flesh out from under her fingernails. So I just headed home to fix it in the privacy of my own bathroom. Honey, I’m home. Get the scissors!

Andrew, I’ll never leave you again.

A blog by any other name….

..may not get so many hits.

OK, so I’ve had this blog since June 2004 and so far managed to write a total of zero entries. My friend Duder started her Blog in July (practically August) and has managed to amass a total of 42 blog entries to date. With her support, encouragement and threats of physical violence I have finally managed to create a post. Yea me!

Duder’s latest goading via e-mail informed me that 55 people have visited my profile only to find my blog empty. Checking myself showed 75 hits, either way that’s a lot of people coming to the D Spot. Kinda makes me wonder what they expect to find. So if you’re here reading this leave a comment. But I don’t take requests.

My resume post on Workopolis has (slightly) fewer hits and there’s actually something there to read. Which is kind of depressing because 50+ employers have read my resume and not one has called. Perhaps changing my resume title to The D Spot and calling myself Big D on Workopolis will help. It’s all about how you sell yourself. Er, market yourself I should say. Hmm, now I’m really thinking about that. A social experiment if you will. I’ll create a more, shall we say, alluring profile and provocative title and see how many hits I get. Perhaps I can even get a government grant. Hmm now the cogs are turning. I was watching ET or some entertainment magazine show last week and they did an ‘Ugly Betty’ test. They had some scrumptious blonde celebrity/actress/playboy bunny get professionally ugly Betty’d and then video taped people’s responses to her in public asking directions/help etc. They also of course taped her as her normal bunny material self in the same scenarios and of course people (men and women) were falling over themselves to help her. The ugly Betty version almost got trampled and treated rudely, and at best, simply ignored.

Off I go, stay tuned for Big D, the Resume!!!!