Life, I mean. It's trundling along as usual around here.

The bathroom needs cleaned, the laundry needs done, I still have a few ads collected in this morning's search of the job sites* that I haven't responded to, I have a stack o'stuff to take to the post office (letters, parcels, etc.), most of which are "late" and yet here I sit, writing boring blog entries.

That's so me these days. (Well, all days.)

So, what's new? Well, after last week's orgy of Going Out To Lunch, I've been very restrained this week. Not a single lunch out! I hit the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning and I've been gorging on Rocky Ford cantaloupes (3 for $6!) and watermelon all this week.

Still, it hasn't been an inexpensive week.

I spent $135 yesterday on my hair. I was sick to death of it, so I went in, had six inches or more chopped off, got it colored, and added (subtle) highlights). I'm not really sure yet if I like it. It's a pretty extreme change.

I've generally avoided having really short hair since that one disastrous cut that revealed that, sans long hair, I look very butch. (Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw my father looking back at me. How is it possible for someone to look exactly like their mother and their father?) This cut isn't quite that extreme and so far I'm loving the idea that I can dry-and-style in five minutes instead of 40.

If I had a job, that would be a massive saving of time in the morning.

(If you care? The Hair.) (Excuse the lack of make-up. I hadn't actually intended to share my face online today.)

The R.C. isn't mad about it. Her only criteria for "good" or "bad" in a haircut is whether or not any hair shows any potential for getting close to covering all or part of one of your eyes. She has a phobia about it or something. Since this cut features a swath of bangs that I need to practice styling to sweep across my forehead, but stay out of my eyes, she's not loving it. I can live with her displeasure, though, since I blew my new 'do dry in 3-1/2 minutes this morning. She knows what I look like, so she doesn't need to look at me.

Tomorrow I'm back to the dentist. To pick up the (grossly expensive) temporary "appliance" I have to wear until the tooth extraction site heals up fully (6 weeks or so) and to have a full set of x-rays so that Dental Man can figure out what else he might want to yank out.

Price tag for this visit: Unknown.

It's been an expensive week and I've barely left the house!

Sigh. I know at least two more have to go. It's very sad to contemplate the impending whack to my credit card.

Dental Man is also very, very anxious to finally undertake capping my front four (top) teeth. He's wanted to do that for years and to be honest, they need it. They're grossly crooked. But caps! So pricey. I'm not sure how to break to him that I really don't feel it would be wise for me to undertake $5k or more of dental work (some of which is cosmetic) before I'm employed. (And yet, looking better might help me get a job, age discrimination or not, no?)

I sure wish I'd gotten over my Dental Phobia at any point in the last ten years when I was employed and had the caps done.

The R.C. wants to go to Halfprice Books today. Part of me is salivating, it's my favorite used bookstore in Denver, and part of me is cowering in fear at the damage I could do myself even at half-price. I've been resisting a growing urge to hit the manga store for the last week. I've only had two new manga books since the Great Unemployment of '07 hit. And only two new "other" books--the coin one and the Hummel one, in the last six weeks. (Oh, yeah, and the Potter book.) I'm having some serious withdrawal pains. Five books in five months! That's a starvation allowance.

For me to avoid general shopping is easy. To try and avoid buying books is so difficult. Mostly I accomplish it by avoiding bookstores altogether. And amazon.com.

And, okay, I still have two or three books I bought before the GU of '07, but one of those I'm still afraid to read (Bradbury's sequel to Dandelion Wine), once I'm almost done with (LeCarré's Absolute Friends), and the other (Secret Societies) was just a "research" book for the novel I'm pretending to write and a waste of money, even at the sellout price of $2.99.

It's probably not a coincidence that most of my "hobbies" and leisure pastimes involve things I have to buy books for.

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* Did I mention that I had an interview scheduled for yesterday? I did.

But I didn't go. Monday evening I emailed and cancelled, a thing I almost never do. After researching the company's website and such, I had a bad feeling about it being a churn-and-burn sort of sales organization. I mistrust a company whose website focuses on hiring instead of the service/product they have to offer their client(s). No reputable company that could be considered a "good place to work" should need to do that much hiring.