Chewy Chewy Fixed-Term Contract

I kept waking up in the night and feeling annoyed, to the extent that on more than one occasion I found myself chewing the pillow, Homer Simpson-style. Still, by the time I fired up the work computer, Mariella had read last night’s entry and was online to assure me I wasn’t an oversensitive nelly, which helped. Even the harvestparents, to whom I related the story of my unexpected loss of temper, thought feeling pissed off was justified, and they are the barometers of caution and it possibly being my fault when it comes to emotional uprisings.

But waking up grumpy didn’t mean the day was lost, as I spent a portion of this morning getting new hair, or rather, getting the same hair changed, changed utterly, so that I now (according to harvestdad) am wearing it curly, short and with red and white stripes.

The decision to try something different came after a phone conversation with Mariella last week in which I mentioned I was wearing my hair in a bun a lot these days. Now, when you are twenty, as I was when I last had long hair, a bun is a quirky retro sort of thing to do with your hair, but when you are thirty, bun-wearing carries with it a rather higher risk–that of evolving into a genuine middle age university woman with her hair in a bun.

It’s a gateway coiff, and it had (as Mariella said, with emphasis) to go.

I feel a lot lighter for my outlay of time and money, and my head a lot cooler without all those layers of fine heavy hair just sitting there. The curls that previously subverted what were supposed to be long elegant locks are the friend of this cut, and since it’s a messy do, I don’t need to mind if I get windblown. Plus my bath will no longer be decorated with the knotty coils that fall out when I’m shampooing. So long as the red and white stripes stay in for at least a little while, I’ll be a happy camper.

I have assignments to mark and a lecture to write this evening, when I’d really rather be drinking wine and eating curry. My day’s labour ended early today, or rather, was taken to another location: the bank. I have restructured my mortgage for the next two years, with the fixed-term and floating sections of the loan smooshed into one chewy chewy fixed-term contract. Were I to continue thus for ever, the bank would make over 112 thousand dollars off me by 2025. I’d say I was their bitch, except they have thousands of such bitches, male and female, all over New Zealand and its western neighbour.

But damn, I do love living in my house with its doggy sentinels, and all the domestic adventures these nearly-three years here have brought me.

Tomorrow: taking the car to the Ultimate Car Wash! Union branch training day! Lecture on theories of autobiography! Getting my nails painted! (It’s ‘sclaimariffic!)

And if that’s not enough excitement for all my gentle readers, on Friday Gladdie and I set sail for our Mission to Middlemarch, for which we are naturally keeping a very open collective mind (plus I bought these shoes, in red).