OOPS!
I love Ann. I really do. We’ve been married for more than 14 years now and we still find ways to laugh about life. If you listened to the audio of our squirrel buddy, that was Ann laughing in the background. I love to hear that laugh.Ann has taught me a lot about life and has helped me to not be so thin skinned. It’s been good for me. I’m not so serious all the time, and I now seem to laugh all the time whenever one of life’s little knocks comes along. Life is great. Sure, it has its rough times, but it’s a lot easier to get by when life throws you a curve ball if you laugh about it.
So as you know from yesterday’s blog post, we’ve been snowed in. Pretty strange weather we’ve been having - first snow that really accumulated, then freezing rain. We don’t get that much around here so basically it looks like Godzilla took a stroll through our neighborhood and knocked over a bunch of branches. Other than worrying a bit about all of our Japanese maple trees, we spent the day inside being lazy. Very lazy. Ann made pancakes, we had a bunch of coffee, and we both started messing around on our computers.
I had a bunch of backlog photographs from our trips to Finley National Wildlife Refuge, the North Umpqua and even Opal Creek that I had to cull through to select the best images to keep, tag them and basically get caught up on photo organization. I still have to work on quite a few of the images, but at least I’ve done the heavy lifting of filtering out the bad ones and figuring out which ones I’m going to try and take to the next level. Ann spent her time working on individual images and watching Lightroom videos to pick up some developing techniques. Every so often she’d call me to come over to look at an image and to offer my advice on how to improve an image. Basically it was a really relaxing day with no pressures to get anything done - every so often we’d take a break and chat about something, joke about this or laugh about that.
Being the total bums that we were today we didn’t get around to taking showers until early afternoon. I got to a good stopping point on my images and started getting my clothes ready and stuff. Ann asked me if I wanted to get my hair cut - I’d asked her to do it a couple of times already, usually in the form of “Hey, can we remember to cut my hair this weekend . . . ?” while we were in the car. I said sure, and started getting stuff ready for my hair cut. I went into her room to grab a chair and she asked me a question about photography. I gave her a fairly lengthy answer as I then grabbed the vacuum hose and rolled the chair into the bathroom. She’d already moved the floor rugs and, when I finished my comment, she asked me another photo question. The next answer was pretty short and then we started a back and forth with some small questions and answers about processing images, what makes a good black and white image as opposed to a color image - all the while I was pulling out the hair clippers, plugging them in, removing the safety cover and then sitting in the chair, ready to finally get my hair cut. Ann stepped behind me and I handed her the clippers.
Ann started responding to my comment about how black and white images need extreme tonal differences to show texture, form and depth - that there are many color images have similar tonal values, yet different colors to help the eye distinguish detail that, when viewed in black and white, look flat and lifeless. The clippers turned on and she started cutting my hair.
I remembered thinking, “Ann really likes to just zoom up the back of my head when she cuts my hair” when I heard an, “OH SHIT!” I looked in the mirror and I thought Ann was going to die. Then my mind registered what was going on, and that I’d forgotten to add the spacer bar to the clippers before I gave them to Ann. OH SHIT! Ann and I looked at each other in the mirror, and then just started laughing.
By the time we’d pulled out a mirror for me to see how bad it was, Ann was almost crying with laughter . . . and apologizing over and over again. One look with the hand mirror and I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. Now, I don’t have much hair to begin with, but the yard doesn’t have to be too overgrown to see a single mow down the middle of it. Every time we looked at it, or discussed what we might do to fix it, we broke out laughing again, faces turning red and eyes starting to yellow. Face it, it was too late to do anything about it . . . and it was my own damn fault! Not that Ann will admit it, because she thinks she should have caught my mistake.
Well, in our efforts to try to “fix” it while laughing our butts off, we forgot to take a picture of the strip. It would have been a good one. In the end we tried cutting with the 1/8 inch clipper spacer (we usually use the 3/8) and . . . well I still had a strip. So off went the spacer bar and we went with the straight clipper.
I guess if anyone asks, I decided to go for the Russian gulag look in honor of the Sochi Olympics. That’s if I can speak in-between the laughter.
