hairdresser's holiday

My hairdresser, who is half Italian, is off to Italy this Saturday for three and a bit weeks to see her family.  This has meant that all her clients who would normally have been due for a haircut while she was away have had to go in early, or push their appointments back until her return.  It sounds exhausting, and she'll probably need a holiday just to get over the stress of going away.  My next haircut fell pretty much in the middle of her break, and as it really wouldn't stretch to eight weeks between cuts, I ended up going in only a month after my last appointment, while my hair was still quite presentable.

I don't understand the appeal of pampering as a leisure pursuit.  From my point of view, having to get myself into Colchester in the middle of the afternoon, clean and tidy, is an unwelcome distraction which cuts the day in half in a most unsatisfactory way.  It's very hard in this heat to get back into the swing of gardening afterwards, especially as I'm going out later, and the afternoon feels like a lost cause.  I read an article the other day about eyebrow grooming, and thought it was no wonder that I kept reading other articles about how we were all so time poor nowadays that nobody had time to cook, or read books, or teach their small children to talk and go to the loo unassisted before dispatching them to primary school.  But I have to reluctantly admit that even I can't stretch it to more than six weeks between haircuts without looking as though I were wearing an entire sheep on my head.

The Systems Administrator has a new laptop.  This is not a cause for rejoicing, since it was not a voluntary upgrade but a replacement for the old one, which suddenly died.  Fortunately the SA is fairly disciplined about regular backups.  The local PC repair firm, having initially been quite optimistic, after a fortnight said that they might be able to retrieve most of the data, but that would be it, so a new one it had to be.  Setting up a new computer is such a fraught business, what with the unwanted adware they seem to come packaged with before you start, and the aim of Microsoft, Apple and Google's Android to achieve world domination through slugging it out with incompatible software until only one is left standing.  Waves of stress have been emanating from the SA's end of the sofa, and I shall be relieved when the new machine finally has everything installed on it that ought to be there, and everything uninstalled that the SA doesn't want.

I had another look at the brown butterflies on the oregano, and they do have neat black spots on their front wings.  I still haven't worked out what they are, though, after another desultory flick through the Butterfly Conservation website.  And I saw our temporary dog out for a walk as I was driving into Colchester, still for the time being attached to her lead.