ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Tonight I went over to my next door neighbor’s house and chatted with her a little about this and that and the other thing, while the storm sirens were going off. When I went back home it was raining like the dickens and I sprinted all the way across to our porch. I sat inside for a little while, and then my boyfriend, who was out on the porch with the dog, rapped on the storm door to get my attention. He does this sometimes and it always means something terrific is going on, like a groundhog is doing something interesting, or the dog has treed a raccoon and I should bring a flashlight to see it.

In this instance the person of interest was a small snake, which had crawled up from the flower bed to get out of the water, and was climbing up our chain link fence. I was extremely charmed by the small snake and I ran back inside to get my camera. After taking several pictures of it, I danced excitedly on the porch and sang some kind of nonsense about how there was a SNAKE, SNAKE! AND IT WAS ON THE FENCE, THE PORCH, away from the WATER! I felt very excited about how resourceful and sensible the snake was.

The snake climbed up the fence and began to climb onto one of the wrought iron porch columns, so I took another picture of him with his tongue out. I think the flash upset him, because he immediately turned and retreated in the opposite direction along the top of the fence. I wish I had thought to use the macro setting on the camera, because I was upset that the picture did not focus, but really I was lucky to get an action shot like this at all.

I also got a haircut after work today, which I liked much better than my last one, but the snake event sort of took precedence over that. My friend referred me to my new stylist, and when I was ready to leave I told the new stylist that this had been my singularly most fulfilling salon experience to date. I find people with the stereotypical stylist personality type to be difficult to talk to, since frankly I just have a hard time thinking of things to say about makeup and boys and the other topics that stylists try to bring up with me. This stylist was very different than all the others, and we quickly fell into a conversation about our mutual opinion that spending a lot of money on an expensive wedding is very silly. She also said the word shit in front of me, quietly of course. This endeared her to me immediately. She is the opposite of high maintenance. I never want to go to another stylist in my whole life.

And she also spent 20 minutes teaching me how to specifically style and dry my hair for different effects. I am going to get my hair highlighted for the first time this summer, and I want her to be the one to do it.

OH!  And she told me that my face is not actually round, and that it is more of an oval overall, which is something I have puzzled over for years.  She is the first person to ever tell me this.  This got us off on the right foot immediately because I love the idea of being more oval than I am round.  See, losing 50 pounds gets you more than just the smaller clothes thing!