Spring? Christmas?
Summer?
Autumn
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If you met yourself from the future, what would you ask your future self?
What if they wont tell you anything?
A long time ago I went around three months between haircuts. I guess you could have called them "seasonal".
My theory behind this scheduling was that I didn't like haircuts, mostly due to the awkward conversations with hairdressers that came with them. My strategy was to have my hair cut short (which looked bad) and let it grow to the point I couldn't put off getting another haircut (which also looked bad).
It seems rational that somewhere near the midpoint there would be a period where my haircut looked reasonable. Unfortunately this wasn't true due to a combination of factors. I have thick hair, a strong cowlick, a prominent crown and the propensity for my hairstyle to turn into a mullet overnight. Unfortunately this was back in the time that mullets were not ironically fashionable.
Now with decades of experience I think I'm getting my head around how to order a haircut. For posterity, I will record it here in my narcissistic journal. Presume that the starting point is hair everywhere.
The back and sides should be shaved with a blend of 6mm and 10mm clippers. Any stray hairs growing below the natural hairline and around the neck should be clean shaven.
The hair on top should be cut to around two inches of length with scissors, before being thinned vigorously.
Around the crown and the sides of the head the clippers should be used to shape the longer hair around the edges, removing any prominent sideways growth which doesn't possess enough weight to fall closer to the scalp.
That's it. That's my haircut. It sounds really simple, but it took me a lot of living to realise that a haircut wasn't about going for an extreme, or a uniform length. It was about taking the best of one thing (long on top) with the seemingly opposing trait of another thing (short hair).
And that's a lot like Autumn. The best of one season (warm days) with the best of another season (temperate weather).
Yes, I did get a haircut today. That was after a sunny afternoon walk where I wasn't sweaty when I reached the barber's chair, and before a fresh evening breeze that didn't make me cold because of a naked neck.
Many years ago I was in a coffee shop when I overheard someone say that they were happy it was the start of March because autumn was their favourite season.
I was almost offended! Autumn signified one thing to me: the death of summer.
Summer was my favourite season. Days at the beach. Beers every night. You could go from Christmas Eve to Valentine's Day without even knowing where your jeans were. The fact anyone could be capable of not being in mourning, let alone celebrating this juncture in time seemed crazy to me.
I'll also point out that even more years further back in time than this, I used to hate summer. I even wrote a pre-online journal entry about it. I hated the heat and the bugs and the television stations switching to their low ratings period schedules. So, I'm not judging anyone for not liking summer. Or winter. Or autumn. In fact...
Autumn is the best season of the year. It's 2021. I'm 36 years old. I've realised the truth. Autumn is summer without the heatwaves and crowds. Autumn is winter without the constant freezing and darkness. Autumn in Adelaide starts with Mad March, offers plenty of social activities around town and then its onto BBQs and football and NBA playoffs. The UV is low enough to actually enjoy the outdoors during the day, and the evenings are cool enough you can slip into some fluffy ugg boots while still wearing shorts.
Plus the leaves are pretty and you don't need to worry about your grass dying or if it's too hot for the dog's feet on the pavement.
I'm planning to enjoy every single day of Autumn, the greatest season Adelaide has to offer. And I'm planning to share a lot of that in this journal.
PS - If you'd like to re-live my last Autumn you can check out the video.
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Tonight I went to a 60th birthday party at the zoo with canapes and birthday cake and I was served four different animals.
A constantly trickling water feature is one of my favourite relaxing energies in life, but the maintenance of such a simple object is a nightmare and perhaps a microcosm for home ownership itself.
Nature abhors a water feature; man was not supposed to control the elements in such frivolous displays of self indulgence. The consequences: Too much sunlight and the algae grows like crazy. Not enough sunlight and the irises die. Run the bubbler too much and all the water evaporates. Don't run the bubbler enough and mosquitoes propagate like sunlight-infused algae. Whatever you do, the pump filter needs to be opened up and cleaned every few days - an experience that will leave you wet, mosquito-bitten, algae-covered and minutely dehydrated.
I recently bought a new algaecide which directed me to apply 1ml per 38 litres of water. I didn't install this fountain. I had no idea what capacity it had. I considered that I could search the bigbox hardware website for similar water features and hopefully they would specify the volume, but before I even fired up my little pocket computer I realised I'd need to measure my pond first, to be sure I was looking at the same thing. And at that point it occurred to me that if I had the measurements of the pond then I could apply high school geometry and calculate the volume of water within it! I'd need to also calculate the volume of the three small pots submerged inside the water, combine these results, and deduct this from the main initial volume. I'd then need to divide by 1000 to convert from cubic centimetres to litres. Solve for V
This could, I believe, be the first time I've applied mathematics from high school in my actual life. And so for me to truly be able to calculate the volume of a cylinder I knew I would need two things: my Texas Instruments 2002 Graphing Calculator, and tall can of Woodstock Bourbon and Cola.
While searching for the former I felt the urge to confirm that the correct formula for calculating the volume of a cylinder was indeed pi multiplied by the radius squared, multiplied by height. So I pulled out the calculator that my teachers told me I would never always have in my pocket and Googled it. Yep, I was right, and with a height of 12.86cm and a radius of 3.4cm the volume was indeed 440mls. Sadly, I also found a bevy of online cylinder volume calculators where I just plugged in my pond's dimensions of 85cm diameter and 8cm depth and got the result. So technically I didn't get to use high school mathematics, but I did get to use primary school maths to add together three lots of plant pot volumes (3x 4 litres) and deduct that from the pond's volume (105 litres) giving me a total pond volume of 93L. This means I will need 2.5ml of Algaecide to kill the algae in my pond (and 0.012mls to kill the algae in a can of Woodstock.).
Next time I won't even need to measure the pond I can just search for this entry.
The problem with pandemics is that my regular tinned legume consumption can look to the average observer like I'm panic buying.
Daytime temperatures are still warm. I like trading an hour to escape into a salad and a book. After a morning of exceptions being thrown by proxy services and hamstring tendons I had been looking forward to disappearing into one of those giant bowls when I realised I'd eaten through all my four bean mix during the past heatwave and my collection of corn cans too. Depressed; I made a toasted ham and cheese sandwich with the leftover 40c banh mì I bought yesterday from the Vietnamese bakery.
Now this bun was tiny. A slice of tomato poked out both sides, but I figured I would roll with it. My strategy was to crush the bread as flat as possible and then ensconce it in aluminium foil before its execution in the sandwich press. This actually worked out incredibly well! At last, after almost a dozen slices of Colby, I satisfied the craving I've been having for proper ham, tomato, and melted cheese in bread.
I guess missing my salad did have a silver lining.
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