Sow There!

Anyone who has attempted to use home clippers to cut hair knows that there are certain perils involved.
A while back my Mom bought my significant other Tommy a clipper set, with plans that I would learn how to give him a cut.
Tommy wasn't completely keen on the idea. He was perfectly happy spending $16 several times a year to keep up his boyish good looks.
But I urged him to give the home system a try.
My attempts to cut his hair were less than effective.
Frankly, I was too nervous that I would completely mess it up and then be blamed for him looking like Michael Snipe. So I trimmed minimally.
After a while, Tommy got the hang of it, for the most part. The back-up plan had always been that if his hair looked ridiculous, we'd go to the barber and have it cleaned up.
All was well for several months.
Then, one sweltering day, I was cooking in the kitchen when Tommy came in with a sour look on his face.
I looked over, and then did a double take.
There was a stripe of buzzed hair right down the center of his head, from directly between his eyes to the middle of his noggin.
There was really no way to "clean up" the haircut, unless he wanted to have some form of reverse mohawk.
I started to laugh, but from the look on his face decided this was not the appropriate response at the time.

After sharing his predicament (through a series of barely decipherable grumbles), he went back into the bathroom.
I could hear him cursing and was glad the bathroom door was shut.
I so wished he was in a better mood about the situation, because I wanted to break out the digital camera and document the moment.
Instead, I made potato salad and called up a friend to crack up about it.
For the next 20 minutes I heard the familiar buzz of the clippers.
Eventually, he emerged with a reluctant grin on his face.
Yes, it was funny, he agreed. He just had not immediately seen the humor in the situation.
The home hair clipper faux pas can't be an uncommon event. While we're at it there are likely many, many more inevitable mistakes, such as the home perm and self tanning.

I tried to give him soothing words including: “A lot of people actually get their hair cut like that on purpose,” and “Well, at least you have a nicely shaped head.”
That afternoon, a friend and I went shopping at a big-box store. Immediately when we walked in the door I saw an employee with the exact same haircut as Tommy. Either this employee had just returned from a tour in Iraq, or he actually liked his hair military-short.
During the next half hour of browsing merchandise, we counted four more men and boys with similar clips.
About a week has passed now and Tommy has “grown into” his new do.
He’s noted that he no longer needs to use shampoo, rather he can just drag a bar of soap across his head. The hairless globe is cooler with this hot weather and those patches of gray at his temples are less noticeably.
He still has a bit of adjustment to make, however. One night this week we were stepping out and out of habit he put a big glob of hair gel in his palm before remembering he didn’t have any hair to put it on.

New garden pest — ash
Gardening isn’t a total let-down right now, but it is far less fun to be poking around under these smoke-filled skies.
We’ve been madly tickling the tomato stems, which helps the flowers to pollinate for tomato production. The outlook is good.
However, on a recent tickling adventure I thought I might be getting white flies when a scurry of white showered down from the plants.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered it was ash that had inhabited the leaves.
One bright spot are the sunflowers I planted near a back wall of the yard. They were at their prime this week (when photos were taken).

Like puppies and fresh paint, sunflowers are only in their prime for a short time. A few days after this photo was taken, the stalk started to droop toward the soil.
Despite their relatively short life, sunflowers are some of the most rewarding plants to grow — especially in a place where nothing else is planned. They’re also a very easy seed to use to introduce small children to the joys of making things grow.