Kids, Don't Try This At Home

New year, new blog...The Hollerin Chef was going to be the name of mine and Lee's cooking show, but we could never get beyond the conceptualization phase so this idea fell into the same pile as the idea for the restaurant for dogs.

Lee and I are getting old. I can't believe it has actually happened, but when we weren't looking, we both turned 40+. Now more friends than not have some kind of diagnosis and, sadly, many of our friends have either buried parents, or they have parents who have become ill. The fifteen years between 25 and 40 flew by at light speed and now I find myself in this demographic and I'm not sure I am preparred to be in it. Five years ago everyone was having babies. That time between having babies and becoming middle-aged was condensed in our generation because we all waited so damn long to have kids. Anyway, I digress...

I think everyone agrees that an unwritten, but understood part of every longterm relationship is patrol of the other person's unwanted hair growth. Making sure that there aren't unsightly hairs growing out of your partner in unorthodox body parts is part compassion and part self-serving. To forego this critical duty is not only careless and thoughtless, it is grounds for reconsideration of the whole partnership. If you can't rely on your mate to tell you when you aren't properly groomed, you are operating at a level beneath primates. I tell Lee when his ear and back hairs are reaching maximum density and he tell me when I've forgotten to pluck a stray chin hair or upper lip whisker. Imagine my horror and dismay when I realized I had been walking around all day with a long, white hair sticking out of my nose. With every word I spoke or breath I breathed, it danced in the wind, but I didn't know this until after I had been to the bathroom and reported back to him that I had just encountered the most unsightly hair protruding out of my left nostril. Instead of faking like he didn't know that it had been there, he said, "Oh yeah, I saw that this morning and forgot to say something to you." As if that one incident wasn't bad enough, while putting lotion on my legs this morning I noticed pubic-like hair on the back of my right mid thigh. It was a small patch, but it was there, beneath the level of most shorts and certainly visible to the naked eye. Hair grows back differently after chemotherapy. It crops up in strange locations and with different textures. I'm not sure which was worse, letting me walk around with nose whiskers or short curlies on my thigh, but we had a "come to Jesus" after that and he knows that unless he wants small birds nesting in his ears, he's got to improve his surveillance skills...

Which brings me to my last insight for the day...Don't ever try on your dog's choker collar. The choker collar has spikes directed into the neck so your dog won't go nuts when she sees other dogs/squirrels/cats while you are taking her for a walk. If the dog starts to chase or run after something, the spikes dig into her neck-it gently reminds her to stay in-line. Well, Lee and I decided it would be a good idea to try on Star's choker collar ourselves. Lee's neck was too big for the collar, but guess what, my neck was just right! Yup, we snapped that baby on and it was much easier to put on than it was to remove...I have about a dozen spike marks in my neck to prove it. So, even though we are both old, we are still stupid.