Over the last several days I have been receiving an unbelievable amount of spam on this blog. Each day the number increases dramatically to the point where today alone my email inbox had over 5,500, yes I said 5,500 comment notifications which were spam (so far anyway, I haven’t checked in the last couple hours, I guarantee there’s about 400-500 more in there already).
In the hopes of slowing this attack down, I just installed James McKay’s Comment Timeout plugin which will supposedly close all old posts to comments. As of 11:50 pm, it’s not working and comments are still being allowed in. I also need to figure out how to delete zillions of unwanted B.S. comments from just about every post I’ve written, not that it actually matters in the grand scheme of things but they bother me, a lot.
Frankly, I’m ready to just delete the whole f’n blog entirely and call it a day. It serves no actual purpose, so why bother.
I spent Easter weekend with my sister in NYC. The main purpose of the visit was to take advantage of the birthday present she gave me which was an appointment at Devachan Salon in Soho. So what’s the big deal about this salon you may wonder, well it is devoted to the cutting and caring of curly hair.
This place was worth the trip and I can’t imagine what a let-down it will be to get a haircut from a regular stylist now. Why more places haven’t developed specialized methods for cutting curly hair is beyond me. It was so weird to step into this place, look around, and see only people with curly hair. There was one fool getting her hair styled straight and I couldn’t figure out why you’d bother when you could have that done at any old salon.
Here’s my sister getting worked on:
Dorky me, taking my own before photo while I was waiting.
The way they cut and style hair is completely different from any haircut I’ve ever gotten. The attention to detail is amazing as they cut each curl individually. Equal attention is paid when it is time to style it. I’ve never left a salon thinking they did a good styling job before, but I left this place thinking “crap, I won’t be able to recreate this” instead.
In conclusion, if you have curly or wavy hair and are going to visit or live in NYC, go to Devachan and get yourself a haircut. Your hair will never look or feel better.
I don’t have a good after shot, this dressing room mirror reflection was the best we did and it was after we had gotten wind-blown all afternoon. The only downside to the haircut is that I lost four or five inches so it doesn’t make it into a ponytail now:(
It was fun, although freezing cold, out at the duck pond today. I’d like to say Alex enjoyed feeding the geese and ducks but it actually made him mad because he kept trying to eat the stale old duck bread and had a fit if you tried to take it from him to give to the birds.
I got a lot of cute photos of Mama and the wee boy, but when it was time for a photo with me, what did we get…..
Yes, it was time to have a fit. There was no more bread and how mean were we for ending the fun. We’re evil I tell you, evil.
We distracted him from the ducks with a bridge and had some fun there until I couldn’t feel my fingers any more. When it was time to go, there was another fit and at least ten minutes of screaming and tears on the way home. At least it would seem that he had so much fun he hated it ending, it was probably worth the trauma (not to mention the 5 lbs of goose poop stuck in the tred of my shoes).
Well it was a day full of words for Mr. Alex. He was a talking fool and tried his best to copy words I was saying which he hasn’t really done that much of up until today.
He was all about “Piggy, doggy, mommy, cookie, cheese and knees” to name a few.
My father has recently experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss. One day, out of the blue, he just totally lost the hearing in one of his ears. This has disturbed him greatly and frankly who wouldn’t be a little upset.
The thing about it that’s making me very sad is that it seems to have changed him. I don’t know if it’s a permanent change or not, but he’s different. He’s normally a pretty feisty bastard but over the last few weeks he’s been somewhat soft, very kind, warm and I hate to say it, but almost sweet. If it weren’t brought on by the fear of death I would think it was fantastic. The conversations we’ve been having make me miss him so much.
Even though he’s only 72, I know it is because he sees this as a step toward the inevitable physical decline into death, a reminder that he’s in what he’d see as the last phase of life. My grandmother (his mother) was similar. I remember from the time she was in her 60’s until she finally died near 90, when I saw her and it was time to say goodbye she’d hug and kiss me, give me some piece of jewelry she had on and tell me it may be the last time we’d ever see each other. That’s about 30 years of predicting your death. Wow that must be exhausting, not to mention a strange burden to put into a child’s mind.
So I’m feeling a bit nostalgic and wishing I could travel back in time every now and then. I’m wishing I was laughing in the backyard being tossed around by my father and getting to ride on his shoulders.
Ever get a beautiful piece of carrot cake only to find a disgusting raisin in there. Ruined! Mmm, an oatmeal cookie, but wait, what’s in there? NO, a raisin! Ruined.
The only thing worse than a regular raisin are those golden raisins. Just the sight of one makes me wince and think “uh, who sneezed?”
A close second to raisins is the date. The only reason the date is in second place is that they’re not found in as many things and therefore don’t have the chance to ruin as much food as the raisin does. If they were to start to show up in more places they’d shoot to the top of this list faster than you can spit out a bite of cinnamon raisin bread.
Figs are gross and unappealing but again, not found in many things. I remember seeing them in a big bowl every Thanksgiving at my relative’s house. I never saw anyone eat any of them and wondered if they just stored that bowl of figs in the basement only to wheel it out every holiday with the hopes someone would finally take one.
You’d think next on my list would be the prune, but I don’t have a problem with them or any other dried fruit that I can think of. There are dried fruits I personally don’t like but wouldn’t put in my “so disgusting they ruin everything” category. I briefly went through a phase where I couldn’t get enough dried apples once, but when it was over I never wanted one ever again. I wonder what that was all about?
Dried apricots—bring em on, but you can keep papaya and pineapple, that’s just lame trail mix filler. And finally, I like dried bananas, but they don’t like me.
Awhile ago I posted a John Lennon video. When I found it I thought for sure it was supposed to contain a scene with a rowboat but it didn’t. This made me doubt my memory and assume I was totally mistaken.
But I am vindicated now as I have found the version of that video that does contain the rowboat. This is the video that I remember and my memory is saved:
