Tag Archives: head shave

Looking For a Rest

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I had a look at Contemporary Haibun Online (CHO) yesterday. It is always worth a read, and I make a brief appearance. Regular readers may recognise the events from last year when Julia’s stumble in the garden became the subject of legends at the hospital, with one of the junior staff saying “Yes, I’ve heard about you.”

This month I only have one submission marked. Sometimes the calendar falls like that. I intend using the time writing and catching up with myself.  The journal in question only accepts one poem as a submission so the pressure is on to produce something really good. It always feels like only having one chance makes acceptance less likely, as does their policy of using guest editors.

Old habits die hard, and I am still inclined to write for an editor to increase my chances of acceptance. It’s hard if you don’t really know them, or their work. It often worries me when I search and can’t find anything they have written. I can normally find something online but not always.

The other problem, and the one which meant I missed submitting last time, is that the submission window is only two weeks long 1st April to 15th April. Last time I forgot that and switched on about a week too late. I’d better get on with some work.

Tomorrow I have blood tests. I hope they do them this time as taxi fares aren’t cheap.

Meanwhile, having let my hair grow for a couple of weeks I couldn’t decide on a trim, an electric shave or a wet shave. I went for electric shave. Bad choice. I really must go back to a regime of two or three shaves a week.

 

Back to Basics

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Onions and celery

I’ve let things slide a bit over the last year. The last few months have seen my writing and my diet fall into disarray, and my personal grooming could do with some attention.

The last one was easy. Julia bought me an electric head shaver as an early Christmas present and a few days ago I gave myself a good going over with the trimmers then had a go with the head shaver. It doesn’t produce a smooth and shiny bald head like a wet shave, but it’s quicker and easier and, let’s face it, safer. There is always a danger, when impersonating an octopus and wet shaving my head, that I’m going to do a quick van Gogh impersonation. When you see what some people can do to their chin with a wet shave and a so-called safety razor, you have to wonder what I could do if I slip whilst contorting to do the fold at the top of my neck.

Tin and label

I just had a look on the internet to find the correct term for this. You’d think it would be easy enough, but it’s a bit tricky. I don’t want to get it wrong, so I’ll just say that the back of my skull has a prominent ridge of the sort associated with thugs, gorillas and cavemen. It’s supposedly a sign of neck muscle attachments, but to me it’s a sign of deficient social skills and a slightly lower position on the evolutionary scale than I would like to occupy. It’s strange that of all the deficiencies in my body and appearance, I fixate on the back of my head. Apart from that, it’s not easy to shave. A smoother skull would be a definite advantage in head shaving.

I realised, when reading about skulls, that although I am familiar with many of the names of skull parts from my viewing of CSI, that I don’t actually know where most of them are. There are 22 of them, all with long names – parietal, occipital, temporal, sphenoid, and ethmoid for starters. I’m going to admit defeat on this – I really don’t have time or brain cells to assimilate it all. If I ever need to describe a head injury to a doctor I will stick to simple terms like front and back and trust that they know the rest.

Simmer

Anyway, that’s what it is. Next, I will trim my beard, but I like to take my time over that.

The writing is a permanent mess that never seems to run well for more than a few months at a time, so we can leave that for a while.

So it’s diet now, and as the title suggests, I’m starting from scratch. Soup.

Last night’s soup was tomato. Onions, celery, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of water. If you use boiling water it saves heating the whole pan again, and also makes it easier to take the label off. Hand blender. Note I used a steel saucepan after my casserole misadventures. Today I will make broccoli and blue cheese soup, and use the leftover tomato as the base for tonight’s curry sauce. Sweet potato and chickpea curry tonight. A simple staple that we have drifted away from after discovering biriyani seasoning in a kit from TESCO. That’s the thing about getting organised, it makes things easier. It’s also cheaper than buy seasoning and sauce in a box, and contains fewer chemicals.

All done

And a tuna sandwich garnish . . .

Hands free can opener – one of my devices for coping with arthritis. Most days I am OK, but some days I just don’t feel like wrestling with a can. JML also made my head shaver. They seem to be the modern RONCO.