Wonderin' If She'd Changed At All, If Her Hair Was Still Red

Sooo... cut my hair yesterday.

Kind of happened like this:  I've been overly annoyed with my hair at least four times per day for the last three weeks.  Which generally means I should probably cut my hair.  (I base this on the like four years that I've actually been cutting my hair, rather than just keeping it long.)  And oh goodness, I had a good experience and that made me so happy.

I'm very lucky in some ways because my hair is very straight and it is capable of being very low maintenance.  This is good because as I've mentioned I don't "do" my hair so much as my hair continues to exist on my head and I wash it and that's about it.  But I've had some really bad haircuts in my day.  I also have a really bad hair memory.  Like I've tried to have bangs roughly 72 times and this is what happens (in 11 easy steps!):

Step 1)  Bangs come "back into style" (for the fifth time that year) and I start thinking to myself "man, everybody looks so cute with bangs, I wish I looked cute like that."
Step 2) Brain turns off.
Step 3) Hair envy sets in.
Step 4) I start thinking "I would be cute if I had bangs."
Step 5) Repeat step 4 roughly 807 times.
Step 6) Completely overlook everything I have ever known about my hair and my ability to maintain it.
Step 7) Get bangs
Step 8) Bask in the cute bangs glow until my hair dries after the first time I wash it post-salon
Step 9) Watch as the cowlick at the top of my forehead points 3/4 of my new bangs to one side and the rest all over the place.
Step 10) Realize I'm going to have to learn how to do my hair in order to fix this.
Step 11) Spend next 4-6 months berating myself daily for falling for bangs again until they grow out.

The bangs trend is starting to have a new, related cousin too - the bob.  See this one is dangerous because at first bobs do actually look pretty cute on me.  And they can be kind of low maintenance.  Except for the part where you have to get them recut every six weeks (at most) and the second my hair starts to grow out from a bob even in the slightest little bit I have a pronounced duck tail sticking out of the back of my head and it appears as though I've grown myself a hair-textured helmet.  Not cute.  But I keep getting lured by those first few minutes right as I leave the salon going "wow, I look cute."

Aside from all of that I'm also frequently very intimidated when I go get my haircut because they all the girls in the salon have super cute hair and look like they actually put some effort into it and all that.  Me not so much.  Pretty much whatever happened naturally after I got out of the shower.  Plus I rarely have any idea how to talk about my hair or what I want done with it.  Particularly I'm usually so fed up by the time I actually go get my hair cut that I end up just sitting down in the chair and saying the hair equivalent of "I don't know, you deal with it."  I.E. "Just make it cute."  Which they do.  By cutting and styling it, and I've neglected to mention that I don't do that styling part and it just goes back to normal.

So I actually looked at some pictures before I went last night and tried to be honest with myself about how my hair works ("look away from the girls with the pretty wavy hair, it's just not going to happen.  Do not use this as a guideline.") and did actually have some things to say when I got to the salon.  I also went to a different salon than I have been going to for awhile.  (My stylist at that place was very nice, but very quiet and kind of overpriced for using my chin as a guideline and cutting all my hair to the same length.) My new stylist was, again, very nice and also very talkative.  This is a great quality in a stylist in my opinion because they do a lot of the work in the conversation and that makes it easier for me to be talkative too.  Also that's the stereotype and when I get a quiet stylist I get all nervous and start thinking "Am I doing this wrong?"  So it was like "well it sort of naturally parts down the middle, but I'd like to do something a little to the side - I do have this cowlick and a little bit of added body would be kind of nice."  "I had a bob, but I was pretty bored of it and I just got engaged so, even though I'm not getting married for quite awhile yet, I don't want to cut it all off again."  (Note:  No, we don't have a date set yet.)  "I wash my hair and let it air dry.  Sometimes I add in some mousse.  I've used a blow dryer twice this year and they were both for weddings.  I'm sure you'll style it before I leave and it will look lovely.  It will never look that good again, so I would really like something that looks decent as is."  And she sort of looked at me and was like "Totally.  We can do that."

And well, long story... upon review of all of the above, vaguely less long - then she did.

New hair, new hair.  La la la la la la.  (BTW, in my head that was to the tune of the "no king" chant by the hyenas in The Lion King.  Don't pretend you have no idea what I'm talking about, you know you do.)  Apologies for looking less than... bubbly here but the whole taking a picture without looking thing is a lot harder than it... looks.  Damn, that just didn't work out did it?

A slightly more side view:

Also pictured:  my new(ish) shower curtain (replacing the one that was officially more brown than it was when we bought it.)  (Upon reflection - that is very close to my "what the hell are you doing" face.  Which makes sense since I was trying to hit the button correctly backward - mirrors are hard!)

Even today it was still cute by my standards - way less volume due to my utter bewilderment at the sight of a round brush and all - but still cute!

By the way - the title today has a little bit of a story.  One of my secret joys of going to get my hair cut is because I know one or all of the following phrases will be uttered by my stylist at some point (and I'm a total sucker for any kind of praise.)

1) Your hair is so healthy!

2) This color is so pretty - do you color it?  No?  This is natural?  Wow.

3) Your hair is so pretty, I wish I had your hair.

I realize they probably say this to every single person they see.  I don't care.

Also - I almost went with simply "Tangled Up In Blue" as the title.  But then I was all like "Get it? Tangled.  Like hair gets tangled." in my head over and over and suddenly realized I was going to have to make that part of the title too and that would kind of kill the joke.  And even in my head the joke wasn't that funny.  Yet here I am, typing it out anyway.  Clearly time to stop.

Live at the Gaslight*

One of the cool things about living in St. Paul is the history of the place.  It's a very old city and there are historic buildings and neighborhoods aplenty.  I've been reminded of this lately since I've change my route on my way home from work.  The technically shortest (least amount of miles) way for me to get home is to simply stay on the freeway until I get to my street.  A few months ago, tired of sitting at a complete stop for twenty minutes everyday, I tried an alternate route that turned out to be much faster.  Rather than staying on the freeway and dealing with everyone pouring out of downtown St. Paul, I'm getting off at Grand Avenue and sort of veering around downtown on surface streets.  I get off of Grand almost immediately but the area is very old, and gorgeous.  Every day for the past several months I've been driving past the intersection of Dale St. and Summit Ave. and looking at the buildings on all four of the corners thinking "man, I'd like to take a picture of that."

I've found taking pictures while waiting for a light to change is not an easy thing to do.  Especially at that intersection.  I once got honked at for not moving for the green light quickly enough at that intersection.  I thought it was reasonable to wait for the person who ran the yellow light waaaaaaaaaaay too late to finish turning left in front of me, rather than voluntarily getting into an accident.  The luxury sedan that was behind me (and had been forcibly inserting that BMW logo into my exhaust pipe for several blocks) apparently felt differently about the situation.  All I can really say about that is unless that guy really, really had to poop, he's pretty much a d-bag.  Anyhow, the overall point here is that I haven't attempted to take pictures of that intersection from the car.

Yesterday I finally headed down there with the specific intent of walking around and taking some pictures.  Let me tell you, it was a good idea.  I've been feeling kind of burned out lately.  Between getting sick (and convincing myself in a fever state that the mosquito bites on my legs was actually the Chicken Pox - that's a story for another time), work sucking, a killer three-day migraine, work sucking some more, and some old emotional shit that's been reared up again I just haven't really been feeling good about myself or anything I do.  Which of course makes it harder to put up something here and be like "Hey, look at this, isn't it neat?  Except I don't really think so and, Jesus, I'm a fraud, why even bother.  Etc. Etc. Etc."  ... Kay, that just got a lot heavier than originally intended.  The point, anyway, was that I was feeling very inspired yesterday while I was out taking pictures of pretty houses.  I felt calm and happy and even a little creative.  I really only covered about a mile and a half of Summit Avenue, but I took more than a hundred photos on my regular camera and also hauled out my analog 35mm camera and shot up a roll of real live film.

And I discovered I have no fewer than two new obsessions.  Wrought iron and lamps.  Perhaps they're unusual obsessions, maybe not.  Either way, I'm very excited about them and I'm pretty excited to go out again and find more.  And I'm excited by what I came away with yesterday.  I'm most excited by this pair of door lamps (I don't know - are they still sconces if they're outside?  They're those lights that you see on either side of a door on a house, building, etc.) that were actually on the outside of an otherwise not very remarkable (comparatively, anyway) apartment building.

I don't know these are copper or iron that has naturally acquired that patina or if they've just been painted that way, but I'm absolutely in love with that color.  It's just absolutely amazing.  Furthermore I've always loved any kind of swirling pattern/scroll work.  So I just adore the shape and the flow of these.  I'm not normally a fan of yellow (and especially yellow glass) but it fits with the greenish color of the metal so well that I'm kind of in love with that too.

Lets take a closer look, shall we?

(We shall because I say we shall and I'm the one putting up the pictures.  But I like to be polite about it.)

I should mention that I found these right after I totally got nailed by a condo owner.  The building right before this one - I was taking a picture of the door and this lady walked up and said "thinking about buying that unit?"  "Oh no, just taking pictures of architecture."  Yeah, she kept watching me for a good three or four minutes.  I'm pretty sure she was calling the cops by the time I finally got out of sight.  Downside of taking pictures of houses people are living in I guess.  But isn't that scrolling on top of the glass just kind of... peaceful.  For being a seriously busy piece here it's just so elegant.  Guh, just love it.  I think I would marry these lamps if that were possible.  And if I weren't already engaged to a real, live person and such.  

A closer look at the scrolling closer to the wall.  Man I hope that's natural patina because that's just so much cooler.

Finally what I feel is a real cool angle shot.

This one just does it for me.  I can't say for absolutely certain but I'm pretty sure this is a photo that's going to be on my wall very soon.  (That means I like it a lot.  And I'm proud of it.  Not something that actually happens very often.)

I have loads of other pictures to share.  A whole collection of other lamps.  Tons of wrought iron that totally knock my socks off (but I hate socks, so it's definitely a good thing) and just bunches and bunches or really cool architectural details.  I'm pretty excited about a lot of them, I even have a whole bunch of pictures from two different churches (risking lighting strikes and brimstone just for a cool photo) and, of course, a couple flowers and animals from my walk.  Stay tuned! 

I might even stop mentioning Bob Dylan all the time.  I kind of doubt it though.

*This is also not a Bob Dylan lyric.  But it is the name of a Bob Dylan album.

Stillwater At Night*

Going backward in time a bit - Steve and I spent most of the 4th of July out at his aunt and uncle's house enjoying the (incredibly) hot weather, great food, and some 4 square (the game you played at recess when you were 8.)

Later in the evening we headed in to Stillwater to watch the fireworks.  We've done this before so we knew it was going to be ridiculously crowded.  To try to avoid some of that hassle, we parked on the Wisconsin side of the river and walked down from there.  We found a pretty sweet spot right on the Stillwater lift bridge that ended up being near enough to where they were setting off fireworks that they were exploding almost directly above us.  It was awesome.

We also got a really cool view of Stillwater at sunset, that just happened to be a really dramatic sunset that day.

*This is not a Bob Dylan lyric

Early One Morning the Sun Was Shining

I have to wake up very early in the morning.  So far as I have been able to tell, there have been no worms.  I do not see the benefit of being an early bird.  I like night time.  Night time is nice.  I'm productive at night.  In the morning I'm a crabby person.  I HATE waking up early.  I also get the added fun of driving in a Eastward direction for a good portion of my commute.  This is not generally a reality I'm pleased with.  The odds are quite good that I'll be doing a fair amount of squinting in the morning anyway, sun not required.  Sun just exacerbates the situation to the where I feel like I'm trying to drive with, like, half of one eye or something.  

I like cloudy mornings.  They suit my mood in the morning and also make it easier to see while driving.  (I am exaggerating this whole driving tangent at this point, please don't worry about me and those who share the road with me.)  

Once and awhile I break out of my curmudgeon morning mood to appreciate that morning skies can be very pretty.

This is not a picture of my street this morning.  It is a picture of my street some morning about a week ago or so.  (I'm now trying to remember why on earth I would have taken my camera to work with me last week.  I have no answers for myself.  I am now annoyed.  damn.)  I thought it was a very cool mixture of sunny and cloudy.  I also liked the variation of cloud types happening that morning.  This is the kind of morning I don't mind.  It don't make me all squinty, which is nice.

I'd like more of this kind, please.

I did warn you (if you're here via Facebook anyway) that the Bob Dylan references were likely to continue.