Hair bear bunch

I had my hair cut today - about two thirds of it is gone, meaning it is no longer down to my arse, but just below my shoulders. I was a bit terrified, but the girl who cut it was, as I always find with hairdressers, really nice. She pandered to the fact that I kept saying I didn't know what I wanted, she didn't seem too put out that I turned up looking like an angry tomato after a rather brisk walk down from the office, and she cut my hair (as far I can tell at least) very well. I got back to the office and everyone was very nice about it, which was also a good sign, and none of them believed that the Boy Wonder wouldn't notice the change, and in fairness, I wasn't as confident as I sounded. I got home, with hair tied up (thinking I would make it a bit harder for him!) and spent a few minutes doing nothing out of the ordinary, then a few more minutes turning my head away from him so he could see the teeny tiny ponytail I had. When that didn't get a comment, I took it down and started flapping it about before going in for the kill with a request to scratch my back. As he was scratching my now hairless back, he actually made a comment about someone's hair on TV - I did give him a few seconds to make the connection, but was too impatient to wait any more, so I finally said 'I'm guessing you're not going to mention the fact that I have had nearly all my hair cut off' which apparently triggered the synapses which deal with observation, prompting him to say 'I was just thinking that your hair was different!'. I have to say, whilst I think I am delightfully low maintenance, even I was a little surprised that he didn't notice, but not at all offended, which I think is hard for other people to understand. But I am happy to live with someone who isn't observant about my looks - it means I can get away with wearing a pair of paint-covered pyjama bottoms around the house most of the time, leave my crazy hair to do what it wants, lie around unshowered with greasy hair when I'm hungover and prance around in clothes with holes in them without worrying what he thinks, which I think is well worth the somewhat-less-than-annual hair-noticing debacle!

What do cows hunt?

Last weekend, the Boy Wonder and I toddled down to Brighton to visit our friends, and, save for a slight delay while we dealt with the antics in Naughty Pets Corner, we made it down without any difficulty. We arrived at about 2.30, had begun drinking by 3 and were down on the pier feeding 2p pieces into those moving shelf machines trying to win more 2ps and the occasional packet of sweets. We then moved on to more advanced machines which pay out in tickets, and having won over 400 tickets (largely due to impressive precision on the part of the two doctors on the team) we chose to redeem them for a 'Time Projecting' Batman watch which, as one might imagine, projects the time and the Batman logo onto a wall not more than 1.5 meters away, and only in complete darkness. We returned home to a lovely meal (which was very grown up - roast duck, fancy veg and everything!) and post prandial entertainment in the form of 'parlour games' (as described by our gracious host). On the grounds that neither the Boy Wonder nor I can draw to save our lives, we opted for 'Articulate' over 'Pictionary', which was a good choice as it offered plenty of opportunity for fun describing words and concepts to each other. Widely regarded as the favourites (and both from the slightly inebriated mouth of our surgeon host) were: 'Cows have them' 'Horns?' 'No, they wear them' 'Bells?' 'No - something cows hunt' 'Wha....?' (The answer turned out to be 'Sheepskin') and, possibly even less helpful: 'Hit me with your...' 'Rhythm Stick?' 'No.' (ongoing silence until we look at the card to find that he was trying to describe 'A Plank of Wood'. We were also asked if we wanted to 'quiche' out, a term which we assume is derived from the original verb 'to crash out' but was admirably styled out by our drunken host who explained at some length that he was referring to a state of existence similar to that of a quiche, before trying to encourage us to go out clubbing at 2am before falling asleep in all his clothes. Fortunately his wife is well used to these antics and didn't hold it against us that we did encourage him more than was strictly necessary...

Naughty Pets Corner

Having had the hedgehog for over six months, we thought we have experienced all the varieties of naughtiness he was capable of, but (as we always find when we think an animal has been as naughty as it can) we were wrong. We were due to go down to Brighton for the weekend to see our scarily responsible doctor friends and as usual, the getting up and getting going stage of the day was taking a bit longer than expected. So while the Boy Wonder was in the shower I went down to clean out the hedgehog so he would smell as fragrant as possible on our return - I took out the heating pad, towel and bowl to wash and it was only once they were out that I realised that there was a suspiciously small array of places where he could still be. After a little frantic scrabbling through poo covered newspaper and some curious thoughts about how a hedgehog could accidentally shrink down to a size which could still be sheltering in the box, I was sure he was officially missing. I shouted up to the Boy Wonder who was a little confused as to why I was shrieking up the stairs and went back to being frantic around the kitchen, searching under the gas fire, down the side of the dishwasher and contemplating whether he could have got into the pan cupboard and down the gap between the kitchen and the cellar. I searched under the sofas and looked into every crack and crevice that could house a spiky little escapologist. I even considered the chance that he may have been stolen, imagining some vigilante looking through the window, misunderstanding the situation and 'liberating' him. Fortunately the Boy Wonder came down and, with his usual calm, collected approach to things, started rooting around under the furniture with the broom handle. A few seconds later he started laughing as his poking revealed that Hoggle was curled up inside an old slipper of his which has been under the dresser for at least a couple of years. Somehow he had managed to get out of his box (didn't know that was an option - he'd never done it before!) and make the heroic two meter journey to under the dresser where he clearly felt some synergy with the Boy Wonder's stinky slipper and decided to make it into a sleeping bag. I was worried that he was trapped due to the direction of his spines, but after I spent a careful five minutes cutting the back of the slipper open and peeling him out, he spent the following five minutes snuggling himself back in there like a big grey banana. This little routine meant that not only did we have the best excuse for being late ever ('Sorry we're going to be late - the hedgehog's escaped'), but also the fun of clearing everything off the dresser which was almost entirely offset by the cutest pictures even taken of a really dusty floor.

Uneccessary specifics of dreams

Last night I had my usual round of peculiar night time experiences, but this time with an odd emphasis on the specific: At one point the Boy Wonder took some salad out of the fridge to eat, and I was a bit worried that it had been in there so long that it would have gone bad, but I didn't want to say so in case I gave the impression that I thought he was incapable of working that out for himself. A colleague of mine asked how fast a person could walk a mile - I answered that average walking speed was 4mph, but then said a mile should take 20 minutes to walk. As I sat there, I wanted to correct myself to say 'of course, at 4 mph a mile should take 15 minutes, but I meant that he should allow 20 minutes to be sure' and when the moment passed, I was really annoyed with myself for not speaking up. I sometimes wonder whether my night brain is trying to make me the sort of person who pays attention to detail that I sometimes want to be whilst I am awake. But if this is all it can offer, then it can bog off as I already have the ability to worry about tiny details that I am pretty sure (objectively) nobody else would even notice - it's other details (remembering dates, tasks and information) that I need to brush up on. I also seem to remember something about sharing the details of your dreams and how fascinating it can be for others...

'Suck it and see'

Is there a more annoying phrase for people to use at work? I mean, there's plenty of management speak that really pisses me off, but something about the image of my most repugnant colleagues sucking anything makes me want to tear my eyeballs out and pour bleach through the holes into my brain.