Annual Haircut

A couple of pictures from my "annual haircut" and then back to my "4th of July" series.

As you can tell, I take this very seriously. Well, I have lightened up a bit in the past couple years.

A little background: on June 29, 2003 my best friend of 13 years died from non-smokers lung cancer. July 16, 2003 would have been his 32nd birthday.

My friend loved life, his wife and his girls and I still miss him. A lot.

Immediately after my friend's death, I felt compelled to do something to express my grief. Being who I am, I did some research on bereavement traditions in different cultures.

I found that, after the death of a loved one, people in one ancient culture would let their hair grow. That just didn't seem drastic enough. Then I found that people of another ancient culture would shave their heads. As it turns out, a short time before my friend died we spoke on the phone and he told me that chemo had made him "completely hairless" and he was tired of the side effects so he wasn't going to take any more treatments. So on July 16, 2003, while my wife and daughter were vacationing with my parents, I shaved my head, moustache and beard.

Now each year my "drastic tradition" continues to evolve a bit. Each year it is less about me and my grief and more about marking a date but getting on with life.

My wife gives me an initial haircut and trim and my daughter takes pictures.

Each year my wife and daughter have been more and more involved until, this year, I just told my wife "I want you to cut my hair as short as you can stand it. You don't have to shave my head, just cut my hair short."

You see, last year she cut my hair and gave me a trim and then I shaved my head. She didn't really take that as a compliment somehow. Go figure.

Even though she knew that "the haircut" was coming up, my wife has been nagging me for a couple months to cut my beard. Her line is "It makes you look old" and then she'll call me "viejo" or some other Spanish term of endearment. This last pic is basically how the beard looks now. I said "You're not gonna shave it off??" and my beautiful wife says "No, then I'll look older than you!"

One final note. Do you notice both my wife and I are slightly out of focus but the pitcher (several feet behind me and in the center of the picture) is in perfect focus? This is exactly why I hate autofocus cameras. (I know you wanted to know that :-)

Happy Un-birthday to Me!

Well I'm almost forty and I've been married (to the same woman) for almost thirteen years and she can still surprise me! For two weeks my wife and daughter have been planning a surprise "un-birthday" party for me. My birthday isn't until next month and she really played up the "Big 4-0" angle. Black streamers, a "Welcome to Over the Hillville" sign on the front door - she is great. I had no clue what was going (believe it or not) until I saw the front door.

My wife finishes her day at 4pm. Some days I don't get done at the office until 6 or 6:30. Many times I have talked to her on a Friday afternoon and her conversation has been something to the effect of "Hurry it up, man! I want to go see a movie!"

Yesterday I was having a bad day (SO ready for the week to end - hardware problems, software problems, staff problems - oy!) then to top it off, I got a sinus headache. Naturally I called my wife and, wouldn't you know it, instead of the usual Friday "just sneak out of the office" pep talk, my wife was giving me a "you can hang in there" pep talk! (But I didn't get what was going on)

She told me "call me when you're really really leaving work and I'll tell you what to pick up for dinner because I don't feel like cooking". No prob. Before I went inside the pizza place, I called to find out what she had ordered - I was in no mood to get home and find out I only had half the order (or whatever). Do you know what she told me? "Three large pizzas, one black olive, one pepperoni and one supreme. I don't feel like cooking all week." I know. You're thinking "What dunderhead would fall for a line like that?" In my own defense, I consider pizza to be its own food group and I have, more than likely, eaten enough cold pizza to fill a dumpster. So the prospect of eating cold pizza for a week was fine by me. The only problem is that I think my wife is just waiting for the next time I call her with a sinus headache...

She pulled off a Great surprise party with some of our closest friends. I had a really great time just eating pizza and chocolate cake and talking with my friends. It was the best un-birthday I've ever had!

Deskercise and Chocolate Fiber

In a little over a month i will hit a landmark birthday for me. It's not such a big deal, really; but the reason its landmark *for me* is because this is the age that i thought people got OLD. But what did i know?

Back then, my first computer cost three times as much as my first car. It had a color monitor. All computers back then had color monitors - you just had to pick the color, yellow or green. Ours was green. Back then, the cases were any color you wanted, as long as it was beige. (Can you say "DOS" ? I knew you could.)

Did i mention that one of my first conscious memories is being at a political rally? We were all in an airplane hangar in Tulsa, OK. I was on my dad's shoulders and everybody was looking at the man who had just stepped out of the airplane and shouting "Four More Years! Four More Years!". (Thats not a joke - and before you throw stones, he was *the* foreign policy president. No president in either the 20th or 21st century even comes close to him on that.)

But i digress...

I am, frankly, out of shape. ("Do these jeans make my gut look fat?") One friend even told me "Oh get over it!" (you know who you are ;-) so i guess, being as old as i am, i should just "grow up". That's why i'm glad there's "Deskercise"!



Now with a happy bowl of Kellogg's Special K chocolatey delight Naturally and Aritifically Flavored Crunchy Rice and Wheat Flakes with Chocolatey Pieces "Losing up to 6 lbs in 2 weeks Just Got Easier". Gosh, with this and the Deskercise, i'll just be a shadow of my former self ;-)
[warning to youngsters - any time a man is obsessing over his weight, something is wrong. He's liable to shave his head or exhibit other "age defying" behaviors]