Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Rainy Days and Tuesdays

My sister and niece are doing the "100 Days of Happiness", and I've been updating my "Jar of Happiness" file fairly regularly, but I thought I'd post here today instead.



It's raining outside. Pouring. I mean, cats and dogs - which always confused me when I was a kid. I mean, why would people say it's raining cats and dogs? It sounded really cruel of God to make the little animals fall from the sky like that!

Anywhoo - raining a lot. I'm a bit of a pluviophile, so I rather enjoy this weather, but it really is coming down in buckets! It's finally gotten warm here in DC -- i.e., supposedly, Spring has sprung -- but the temperature is supposed to drop about 40 degrees by this evening and possibly turn this precipitation into snow. But currently it's just raining. A lot.

Rain, rain, rain...
http://nowiknow.com/making-it-rain/


Did I mention that it's raining?

It's gray and dark, and people are bundled against the rain, blindly following their broken umbrellas down the sidewalk, paying no heed to the people walking toward them. My favorites are the ones with the giant golf umbrellas: I mean, really? You can house a family of four in one of them, so you really think it's appropriate to hoist one up to cover your teeny self while smacking lesser mortals into the street or poking them in the eye?


Sometimes you see some really modern person (usually Japanese tourist) with a new-fangled umbrella, but mostly, you get the umbrellas from CVS or Target, usually black, with one broken rib, with occasional breaks of color or a pattern sneaking in. None of them are nearly as cool as this one:


You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (aka Amazon.com)


That's not my umbrella. I just wish it were!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I had a physical therapy appointment this morning, so I got to walk down K Street a few blocks to catch a bus to walk a few more blocks to get to work, during rush hour in the rain. So I got to enjoy this unremitting deluge along with quite a few other members of the proletariat. Trudge, trudge, trudge. I got some coffee and breakfast on the way, so I was weighed down with my laptop in my backpack, my Washington Nationals purse hanging off my shoulder, umbrella (broken, of course) in one hand and my coffee and breakfast in the other, as I lugged myself just one more block to the office.

I looked up and saw a Mom telling her little girl, dressed in a brightly coloured raincoat and wellies, to "Come onnnn!"

But the little girl had a mission in life: There was a puddle. It required stomping.

STOMP!

And then there was another.

STOMPITTY SPLASH!

Giggling, the little girl looked up in absolute delight and saw me smiling broadly, and she giggled some more. I caught her Mom's eye and smiled, saying, "Thank you! You just made my day!" Her mom sighed and gave a tired smile.

I'm sure that Mom was having a hard enough time with her daughter trying to wrangle every puddle in the sidewalk, but I hope the fact that they made my day just a little bit brighter helps her day get better too!

And I hope I never get too old to find puddle-stomping fun! 



(Plus, I want kid's rain gear fashions!)





Saturday, April 5, 2014

Age 25

One of my friends did one of those meme thingies about an age. I decided to change it somewhat from the original. Instead of just listing facts, i thought it would be more fun to write an anecdote of my life at age 25. So... here it is!

I made a momentous decision when I was 25.

It all began when I started getting gray hair at the age of 13. It was pretty cool actually -- my hair looked brownish, but it was strands of different colours, black, brown, red, blonde, silver. I had the "wings" hairstyle, so it looked like I had a streak of silver through my brownish hair. (I didn't realize it at the time, but that's probably why I *never* got carded when I was underage!)

Fast-forward to age 25. I was adamantly not dying my hair because I kinda liked the the streak of gray. But one Halloween I decided to go as Lucille Ball, so I did one of those "shampoo out" hair dyes: Titian Red. I spent all Sunday washing the colour out, and it got most of the red out, but it still covered all of the gray. I went to work on Monday and people came up and said things like, "New glasses? Contacts? Did you lose weight? You look great!"

And then this woman, a nosy parker type, said, "Wow, you look ten to fifteen years younger!"
"I look ten to fifteen years old?" I asked, being 25 and all.
"No, you look 20, 25!"
"I *am* 25!"
(Oops!)


So, she thought I looked about 35-40 years old. And I was 25. 

So yeah, I decided at that point that I needed to look into colouring my hair on a more permanent basis!

Funny thing was that once I did dye my hair (red, because I should have been a redhead), I got carded ALLLLL the time! So now that it's a few years later (just a few!), I'm thinking of letting it all go gray again. Or white. Whatever it is now. And then I'll get a really cool streak of bright red or blue or something! Yeah, that's it!