Hang onto your hat, Frugal Scholar! 😀 Yesterday evening while perusing the Times, I was reminded of Frugal’s recent post on small recurring costs, in which she remarks with amazement on the recent coffee pod phenomenon. This increasingly popular method for preparing a cup of coffee—just one!—entails making room for a coffeemaker the size of an infant stegosaurus and feeding it expensively prepared, vacuum-sealed single-serving “K-cups” of coffee grounds. “Do these have any redeeming features?” wonders she.
What's not to love?
Hilariously, there are caffeine delivery systems that make the coffee pod look like the soul of common sense. Almost. NYT writer Frank Bruni’s column on the subject is one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever read. Shamed by foodie friends over his reliance on his trusty Mr. Coffee (to which he had recourse after a Chemex spat in his eye), Bruni goes in search of a tonier, less bourgeois method of brewing an acceptable cup of java. Working against him: a burning desire not to have to work very hard over his morning eye-opener.
Maybe better not to know...
Along the way, he discovers things that look like something from a chemistry lab (well—the Chemex looks a bit that way, but these contraptions are straight from Isaac Newton’s alchemy lab). He learns that hot water may not be dumped unceremoniously over one’s freshly ground, shade-grown, fair-traded coffee beans, but must be drizzled lovingly through the grounds, only after one has released their “bloom” with a delicate pre-pouring through a carefully rinsed and placed filter.
Poetry in glass, plastic, and stainless
He also learns that the French press, my preferred way to generate a decent cup, is teetering on the edge of obsolescence! Heaven help us.
All I want for Christmas is a lifetime supply of French press carafes. They can reside in the closet with my stashes of incandescent lightbulbs and dishwasher tabs that still wash dishes. A French press produces something akin to cowboy coffee: strong, thick, bracing, and richly flavored. It does not turn the brew to battery acid by holding the coffee over a hot plate for hours. Nor does it have to: believe me, coffee made this way will not sit around long enough to get cold.
After what must have been days of journalistic research, Bruni arrives at a conclusion that surely will warm the cockles of Frugal’s heart: “For me personally, was the pleasure of a higher grade of coffee worth the price? In this instance, couldn’t I depart from the orthodoxy (nay, tyranny) of the artisanal? . . . The current generation of automatic drip machines preserves the [Mr. Coffee] tradition while improving, I’m told, on the product. Gastronomic guilt be damned, I just may put one on my Christmas list.”
One of my students wrote a paper in which she ruminated, in passing, on the menu at the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. By way of checking her facts, I discovered that she was right in saying they had no beef (and why would they? what room would they have had for a bull and a cow on the Mayflower?), and of course, turkeys having been domesticated by the Aztecs, some distance away from the Plymouth colony, they had to make do with the scrawny wild version.
Ever think about what the Founding Parents must have had for dinner that first year? Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to create an authentic, original Thanksgiving meal! A wild turkey, if you can catch one, is a great deal tastier than a modern-day bloated, chemical-filled, brine-saturated, fake-butter-injected domestic variety. On the other hand, the Pilgrims’ kitchen would have been, shall we say, bare-bones.
Modern-day recipes on the web tend to look like this one from a site for wild game recipes. But, alas, the half-starved survivors of a transatlantic crossing wouldn’t have had celery, garlic, parsley, salt, or pepper. Chances are, too, they wouldn’t have roasted the turkey. More likely, they would have boiled it, following something like this recipe from Lorna Sass’s To the King’s Taste, a cookbook describing medieval cuisine.
Fowl in Hotchpot
(Hotchpot was simply a “hodgepodge” of various ingredients)
1 wild turkey, feathered, gutted, and cleaned, including feet, neck, and giblets (the Pilgrims also had duck, geese, and swan)
water to cover
1 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons minced parsley
1/8 teaspoon dried sage
12 cloves garlic, peeled
3/4 pound grapes, preferably seedless
garnish of nutmeg, crushed anise, or fennel seeds
For New-World authenticity, hold the garlic, hold the salt, hold the garnish, and hold the sage.
Scald the bird with boiling water. Remove any fat from the cavity opening. In a large pot, bring water and salt to a boil. Stuff the bird with garlic, herbs, and grapes, and place it in the boiling water. Return to a boil, cover, and lower heat. Allow to simmer until the meat is tender. Shortly before it’s finished, add the remaining parsley to the broth. Cut the cooked bird into portions, and serve together with the stuffing and liquid in soup bowls. Sprinkle each serving with with nutmeg, crushed anise, or fennel seeds.
They probably would have snared a few rabbits. These critters were popular in Europe as well as in America, an abundant source of protein:
Take blanched Almondes, grinde hem with wyn And gode broth of befe and Mutton, and draw hit thorgh a Streynour, and cast hit into a potte, and lete boile; and cast there-to pouder of ginger, clowes, Maces, and sugur. And then take a Conyng, and seth him ynogh in goode fressh broth, and choppe him, And take of the skyn clene, and pike hem clene And cast hit to the Sirippe, And lete boyle ones, And serue forth.
Translation: Simmer some blanched almonds with a good beef or mutton broth. Grind the almonds with the broth and run through a strainer. In a pot, bring this to a boil, adding some powdered ginger, clove, mace, and sugar. Gut, skin, and clean a rabbit; cut it into serving-sized pieces. In a pot, cover the rabbit with the broth and boil it until tender. Serve it forth.
Authenticity check: Hold the almonds, hold the ginger, hold the clove, hold the mace, hold the sugar. Substitute venison broth for the beef or mutton broth.
We’re told the Indians brought some venison for the feast. A sixteenth-century cook would have prepared it along these lines:
Take Rybbys of Venysoun, and wasshe hem clene in fayre water, an strayne the same water thorw a straynoure in-to a potte, an caste ther-to Venysoun, also Percely, Sawge, powder Pepyr, Clowys, Maces, Vynegre, and a lytyl Red wyne caste there-to; an thanne latte it boyle tyl it be y-now, & serue forth.
Translation: Wash and soak some venison ribs in clean water. Strain the water into a pot and place into it the meat, some parsley, sage, powdered pepper, cloves, mace, vinegar, and a little red wine. Boil until tender and serve it up.
In the good old days, they would save the blood and add it, at the last minute, to thicken the broth. Remove the pot from the flame so that it’s not boiling. Mix in the reserved blood to thicken, flavor, and darken the broth.
Authenticity check: Hold the wine, hold the vinegar, hold the parsley, hold the sage, hold the pepper, hold the cloves, hold the mace. Let’s hope the natives urged the Europeans to spit and roast a deer over an open fire.
The original Thanksgiving feast was heavy on fish and shellfish, something strangely omitted from the modern tradition.
Take almondes, and grinde hom, and drawe hom up with swete wyn, and put hit into a pot; and do therto hole culpons of eles, and clowes, and maces, and raisynges of corance, and pynes, and ginger mynced, and let hit boyle, and colour hit with saunders; and in the settynge doun do therto a lytel vynegur, medelet with pouder of canelle, and serve hit forthe.
Translation: Grind and mix some almonds in sweet wine (probably sherry). Pour the mixture into a pot and add fileted fish, cloves, mace, currants, and ginger. Bring to a boil and cook until done, coloring it with sandalwood. Serve up on plate garnished with a little vinegar and cinnamon.
Authenticity check: hold the cloves, mace, ginger, vinegar, and cinnamon.
Mussels in broth
3 pounds mussels, scrubbed and bearded
3 cups boiling water
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons finely ground bread crusts
salt to taste
1/2 teaspooon saffron
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
minced fresh parsley
Plunge the mussels into the boiling water. Cover and cook over high heat just until the shells open (less than a minute). Removed the mussels with a slotted spoon; strain the broth through a fine strainer. Meanwhile, saute onion and garlic in butter in a heavy skillet; return the broth to a pan and add the onion and garlic, bread crusts, vinegar, salt, saffron, and pepper. Simmer, stirring until smooth and well blended. Remove the mussels from their shells and add them to the broth. Cover and simmer about 15 seconds. Serve up in soup bowls, garnished with parsley.
If they had cured venison, they might have made this rather special side dish:
Pescodde
In new peas cooked to be eaten in the pod, you must add bacon on a meat day: and on a fish day, when they are cooked, you separate the liquid and add underneath melted salt butter, and then shake it.
Translation: To new peas cooked in the pods, add bacon (on a meat day) or fish (on a fish day). When the peas are cooked, pour off the liquid and add salted butter; mix well.
Authenticity check: hold the butter; use cured venison or salt fish.
Of course they had pumpkin and other squash, dried maize, and beets. The squash and root vegetable they probably would have boiled. Chances are they made something like Johnny cake with the corn:
Johnny Cakes
Make a dough of cornmeal, salt, and water. Set on a wooden slab or barrel stave at an angle in front of the fire to bake.
Authenticity check: Hold the cardboard box.
Yum. Here’s something for which we can all give thanks: we were born in the 20th or 21st century!
Have a wonderful (and tasty!) Thanksgiving holiday!
Okay, now that the desk is shoveled off, the question is how to shovel out the incoming clutter in the e-mail in-box. Am I the only employee or quasi-employee of an institution that engages in an ongoing campaign to strafe the entire planet with pointless, irrelevant messages? You can’t block them, because some of them are very relevant, indeed. But those relevant messages come along once every three months. In between times, you’re hitting the “delete” button thousands of times.
Truly. Over a hundred messages come in every single day.
• The menu for the campus cafeteria at Phoenix College, where I do not now teach and have not taught for a good ten years.
• A chatty P.R. newsletter emanating from the Phoenix College president’s office.
• The weekly crime report from the Phoenix College campus cops.
• The program guide for the district’s low-wattage local cable station.
• Endless, endless, endless pitches for the district’s United Way campaign.
• Announcements for various public service courses and minicourses at campuses around the Valley (a “caregiver class” at Scottsdale; “Safe Space” training at Phoenix; Life-long Learning: “Preparing for Finals”).
• Reminders to hourly workers to submit their time & labor reports.
• A “Happy Thanksgiving” message from the district’s employee store (and BTW, they’re offering “special discounts for our valued MCCCD employees!”)
• A bottomless pit of employee training sessions (two sessions to help with the FSA online enrollment process, whatever that is).
• Announcements for stage, open-air, and athletic performances at every campus across the Valley.
• And scores of e-mails from individuals who just want to share with every employee in the vast district: someone sent a photo of Saturn; a coach crowed that the Paradise Valley girl’s soccer team won a championship and a dozen people sent kudos to every single soul on the college’s mailing list. Just this minute, one of my colleagues sent photos of a trip to Greece to everyone at his college.
Some of this stuff is apparently going out to more than one mailing list, and lucky me, I somehow got on two of them. About half of it arrives in duplicate.
Sifting through all this trash is amazingly time-consuming. You can’t just point and click “delete.” Your cursor has to come to rest on every. single. message, and of course when it does it opens the damn thing. When you’re busy and you have, say, 25 more papers to grade (as I do today), even a couple seconds per message is a distraction and a minor aggravation. I have enough minor aggravations in my day, thank you.
An occasional message is one that needs attention, but not now. If I let it sit on the server until I get time to deal with it, then it quickly sinks beneath the waves of the oncoming tsunami of junkmail.
MacMail allows you to sort incoming messages into various subdirectories, including the trash. If you send something to the “trash” directory on Apple’s servers, it gets deleted automatically every few days, which is nice. However, some of it, I don’t want to have deleted. The guy who sends out his hobby photos, for example, occasionally emits an important message that I don’t want to lose. And among all the chaff that comes from the district are job announcements. Yes. Announcements for real, paying jobs. I still do apply for full-time positions, even though it’s a forlorn hope.
The aggravation rises to the “major” level, though, when the confusion spawned by the constant static leads you to overlook messages that you do want to receive: student papers, e-mails from colleagues that matter (like the occasional valuable messages from the photo buff), incoming from clients, reminders from your calendar.
My answer to this conundrum has been to set up a passel of subsidiary in-boxes, direct certain classes of messages to those, and then check them every few days. If nothing that matters appears, I can then Command-A to select all and send them into the ether.
Most of these sub-mailboxes hold messages I need to hang onto for various reasons. E-mail to and from problem students, for example, needs to be kept until there’s no risk of any later repercussions. Some messages from clients ought not to go away for awhile. Some of the blog carnivals are now set up to forward submissions to the host’s personal in-box, an awful nuisance (and one reason,in addition to the astonishing workload, that I’ve quit hosting so often).
Two or three weeks ago I started marking e-mail addresses that send me totally irrelevant messages so that everything that comes from them goes straight to the trash on Apple’s server. This derails a lot…but it’s quite a chore, since an enormous number of offices and individual employees in the District send out nothing but trash. I’ve now marked fifty-six senders’ e-mail addresses this way! And more keep sifting in.
That doesn’t count the general announcements that are likely to contain job ads, which go into the “CC Announcements” box.
These automatic side-tracking boxes add to the drag-and-drop categories, such as “Act on These ASAP,” where I can stash things that I need or may need until I can get to them.
The goal is to leave the in-box only for those incoming messages that matter and can be dealt with right now and then deleted. This plan is working to get some of the trash out from under my nose. But it’s not perfect:
And I need to get up, feed the dog, feed myself, and start reading papers. 🙄
This lovely Brazilian musician, Rossine Parucci, sings with our choir. He’s finishing his advanced studies at the Great Desert University and soon will return to his family, home, and promising career in Brazil. He has a fantastic tenor voice, a talented man all the way around. We’re going to miss him a lot, all of us having come to love him during his time here.
So it goes.
This morning I got a bug in my proverbial bonnet:MUST CLEAR OFF DESKTOP. MUST GET SIX-FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS OFF DESKTOP!
For as long as I’ve worked off a small conference table elled against a big old six-drawer desk, I’ve kept a row of reference works atop the desk, within arm’s reach: Chicago, APA, MLA, CSE, and AP manuals, Webster’s, Roget’s, Larousse, Harper-Collins’s Spanish dictionary, plus a three-ring binder holding a printout of my rolodex.doc file. And assorted miscellaney.
All very handy…except when they flop over and threaten to slide to the floor, which they do several times a day.
I tried to keep them in place by gluing some of that sponge-rubbery shelf liner, the stuff that looks like one of those anti-slide mats you put under an area rug, to the bottoms of a couple of metal bookends. This worked for, oh…about thirty minutes. Soon the whole lash-up was again flopping over to the east or the west, depending on which book I pulled out.
Today they flopped their last flop.
In a decluttering frenzy, I pulled everything out of the three-shelf bookcase across the room, damn near choked on the clouds of dust, moved the case goods, vacuumed up the heretofore hidden dog dunes and dust bunnies, rescued part of a picture frame that fell off the wall and slid under there months ago, cleaned the shelving, and shoved the thing back in place. Piled up books into mounds: some for M’hijito, some too precious to toss (why?), and some that have gotta go.
I find it difficult even to contemplate throwing out a book, let alone actually doing the deed. What is a book, other than an icon of our culture, a capsule of human intellect to be cherished and preserved and handed down to the next generation?
Okay, well, what indeed? A dust-catcher, that’s what.
My lifetime book collection, which fills walls in three rooms, used to be a working library. When I was writing actively, early in the Internet’s dawn as a cultural icon of its own, I used my reference works, my nonfiction, even the novels and short-story collections, all the time—every day. Now, though, I hardly ever crack a book. When I need to look something up—which is still all the time—I google it or go to one trusted site or another. On the rare occasions when I do have to search out something in hard copy, I barely have the patience to sift through an index and scan my eyes over pages of print to find what I’m looking for. It seems so clumsy. So…tedious.
All right: the decision made. Some of the stuff has gotta go, to make room for the occupants of my desktop.
What to throw out, what to keep?
The Paul Mace Guide to Data Recovery. Out
Frederick Turner’s Of Chiles, Cacti, and Fighting Cocks. Seminal, without a doubt. Out
Judy Jones and William Wilson, An Incomplete Education. (Barnes and Noble 10% OFF!!!!). Fine bathroom reading (why hasn’t it been in there?). In.
Elementary Basic. Out
Turabian’s Manual for Writers…4th edition! 1973. Out
Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, eds., Thus Spake the Corpse. Just the thing for my son’s library. To M’jihito.
Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect. Dare I throw out a seminal postmodernist? I dare. Out
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature. {grumble} There’s a limit, I guess. In
Chicago Manual of Style, 14 edition. The 15th resides on the desktop, and it’s out of date! Out
Howard M. Zachar’s A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. Why haven’t I read this?… Hm. Eight hundred and eighty-three pages of ten-point type, that’s why. Possibly of interest to M’hijito? Possibly not. In, provisionally
Land of Enchantment: Memoirs of Marian Russell along the Santa Fe Trail. Hm. Liberated from the Arizona Highways library that time when its finest editor, Merrill Windsor, decided to do a little decluttering of his own. Never got around to reading it. I should read this. In
Even with more In than Out, at the end of an hour two and a half shelves were completely cleared. And clean. This created plenty of room for the desktop collection, and then some: enough space to stash the laptop, too! And to move the big Spanish, French, and Italian dictionaries out of the closet (to be replaced therein by the Anglo-Saxon and Latin dictionaries) and into the little bookcase. Hot dang!
The desk still isn’t free of all clutter. Several piles of paper remain for me to plow through. The stuff grows like some sort of vertical, leafy fungus. Two file folders full of paper are sitting on the desk while the negotiations with the insurance company continue—today I had to dig out the deed to prove to the guy that I actually own the house free and clear…he was about to write a check to me and to First Horizon, a long, long-ago lender.
Tomorrow, though, I’ll get it shoveled off. For the time being, though, it’s 10:30 at night, and I’m going to bed.
Am I the only unemployed person on the planet who’s working like an animal so as to get a break from working like an animal?
Under normal circumstances, I’ve been working 14 to 17 hours a day on my various underpaid enterprises. Since Fall semester began, I’ve had to let FaM slide, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the work I was doing on the blog and keep up with three classes and edit arcane copy from the academic set. It’s all I can do to crank one idle essay, not very personal-financeish, each day; I’ve minimized the Alexis toolbar; and I never did figure out how on earth to get into the Yakezi site, so I’ve presumably fallen off that outfit’s rolls. People keep tweeting me that they’re following me on Twitter, and if they’re clearly PF bloggers, I’ll return the favor…but who has time to post on Twitter and Facebook???
{whine!}
So, by way of resolving this whine, I’m determined to give myself a vacation during the winter break, instead of spending the entire month between mid-December and mid-January working nonstop to prepare courses. It takes days to get one of these things lined up, each day planned for, a 15-page syllabus written, a three-page calendar constructed, and everything set up in the endlessly difficult Blackboard.
I’m almost done with the spring English 102 sections, both of which are in-class face-to-face sections. I’ve come up with a number of strategies:
1. Make almost all the learning exercises and quizzes zero-credit affairs. Tell students it’s their responsibility to learn the material, that they’re expected to demonstrate mastery of the skills and knowledge imparted, and that if they expect to get decent grades on the papers they’ll be well-advised to do these things.
This will relieve me of a vast amount of ditzy grading and score-keeping. It cuts the number of grade-book columns from twenty to nine.
2. Convert the exercises and quizzes from open-book homework to in-class activities. Have students spend half the endless class period working them and then use the rest of the time to discuss them.
This turns every no-credit exercise into about 75 teaching moments. It relieves me from having to figure out how to keep them entertained to fill 40 hours with lecture.
3. See to it that the only graded assignments are those that are required by the district: the drafts, the peer reviews, and the final papers, representing the so-called “recursive process” applied to three required papers.
Why give myself extra work if it’s not required? Especially since I’m not paid to do extra work!
4. Load the final paper, which is 2,500 words long, with three times the credit of the two shorter papers, each of which is 750 words. Their final paper will carry 300 points and the two lesser papers 100 points.
Believe me when I say this will get their attention.
5. Require that drafts for the two shorter papers be at least 300 words long, and the draft for the final paper be at least 500 words.
This will eliminate the conundrum of what to do with students who slop together half a paragraph or a crude outline and expect me to waste my time assessing it.
6. Up the score value of the peer review exercise to 50 points, the same as the drafts themselves. Require students to follow a page-long set peer review guidelines to get full credit.
This will make it clear that I don’t have to assess the classic one-line “peer review” that says, succinctly, “This is very good. I saw a few grammer [sic] mistakes.”
7. Create a simplified grading rubric for drafts and peer reviews:
50 points: author does an honest job of filling the assignment; peer reviewer follows the entire set of guidelines.
40 points: author comes somewhere close to 300 words and at least looks like she or he is trying to get a decent start on the assignment; peer reviewer follows most of the guidelines.
35 points: half-baked job.
30 points: inadequate, but at least the person turned in a few words.
0 points: couldn’t be bothered to turn in anything.
8. Lose the computers delivered to the classroom. Limit in-class computer activities to drafting and peer reviewing, cutting the number of computer days from thirty-two to nine.
Having laptops delivered to the classroom turned out to be quite a hassle. And if the class consists entirely of 18- and 19-year-olds and does not have the counterbalance of older students, laptops in the classroom represent an invitation to party.
9. Remove all due dates from listings and descriptions of assignments online.
Contrary to what we’re taught by our course designers and urged to do by the administration, posting elaborate “modules” does little for the students, who don’t read them, and creates vast amounts of extra work for instructors. To recycle a Blackboard course, you have to spend untold numbers of hours combing through each section, subsection, and sub-subsection finding and changing the dates you stupidly inserted.
After this, there’ll be only two places where dates will be visible: the syllabus, and a week-by-week calendar. I have to rewrite those each semester anyway. This will make it simple to recycle courses; effectively all I’ll have to do is copy content from one BB shell to the next and then add the current syllabus and calendar.
10. Lose the endlessly annoying G.D. Blackboard quizzes! Convert them to ungraded in-class exercises.
These hateful things, while they conveniently provide machine-generated grades, are difficult or impossible to copy over and take hour after hour after interminable mind-numbing hour to reproduce each semester. Turning them into hand-outs to be used as the basis of in-class discussion will bring a stop, also, to the quibbling over scores on the things.
11. Combine the entire semester’s worth of hand-outs, quizzes, exercises, syllabus, and calendar into one gigantic PDF package, and send it to the copy center before the start of the semester.
This will eliminate countless fillings-out of copy center forms and countless trudges up and down the stairs to the copy center.
I can’t even count the number of hours I’ve spent trying to accomplish these steps—hours crammed in around the other hours devoted to keeping up with the courses, editing, and blogging. But I think it’ll be worth it: massive simplification should cut the amount of time I have to spend on teaching next semester, with little or no effect on the students’ learning. If anything, it may actually improve learning, since the students will have to focus on learning exercises in-class, rather than flaking off with them whenever they feel like it. Over time, too, it will cut the amount of work needed for course prep, since it effectively puts the courses in tin cans—all I’ll need to do in the future is write a calendar and change the due dates in the syllabus.
Hope it works.
Meanwhile…time to grade papers!
Image: Turda Salt Mine, Turda, Poland. Roamata. Public Domain.
A few weeks ago, I called to make an appointment with the wonderful hair stylist I’d stumbled upon, only to find that she had left the salon! Of course, they wouldn’t tell me where she’d gone.
So I had to sign up with yet another new stylist. Feeling broke, I elected to go down a tier in price. Judee was in their top echelon—sixty bucks, plus tip, for a cut and style. That’s still lower than my original great stylist, whose pre-tip price had gone up to $70, but after the Summer of Desperate Penury, I hoped to find a younger (read “lower-paid”) stylist with talent.
Fail!
I like to get my hair cut really short so a styling will last a couple of months. Most short women’s hairstyles have to be redone every four to six weeks; my hope is always to squeeze eight weeks out of a styling. This presents a challenge to the stylist.
Judee manufactured a cut that stayed good for more than eight weeks, which is some sort of miracle. But I’m happy if I can just skip a month between expensive stylings, bringing the annual cost down by half.
Well, the new kid produced a style that was just barely OK. and I mean just barely.
I hate bangs. They look shaggy and stupid on me, and I truly dislike hair flopping in my face. Hate it hate it hate it.
And that’s what I told the new stylist. Not once. Not twice. But three times!
What did I come away with? You got it: bangs.
Within two weeks the style started to look shapeless. By three weeks it looked shaggy. By the day before yesterday I looked like the wrath of God.
Tried to get in with my last stylist in Tempe, much as I don’t ever want to watch the campus of the Great Desert University and its grungy surroundings heave into view ever again. But no: Thanksgiving coming up, she wasn’t available. So I called the nearby fancy salon and asked for a better-quality stylist. Got one! Seventy bucks, when the tip was included. But it was worth it.
This time I dragged in a few photos of short-haired celebrities nabbed off the Internet:
Not bad, eh? Notice that none of these women are sporting damnable bangs! We decided the redhead’s hair was a lot straighter than mine; not doable. I happen to love Dame Judi Dench‘s look, she being only a bit older than I (by about a decade). And that’s just what the new stylist produced.
So. I had to pay through the schnozzola to get it, but now the hair is really short, it looks sharp as can be, and I shouldn’t have to go back for a month and a half or (with any luck) two. Penny-wise and pound foolish: if I imagined I wanted to look good, I should’ve paid the fare.
Take-away lesson: You get what you pay for. You have to decide what you want to cut corners on. What depends on your personality, your taste, and your circumstances…but some things are just not negotiable.
