Four Stories: "Hairdoo's" (update)

LA over at FreckledNest.com does a fun thingy I just discovered called "four stories". You can all join in if you like, there are instructions HERE and you can see all the ones she's done so far HERE.

ONE: The terrible perm

I was in grade two. You hear me? Grade two! I know this because I have naturally straight hair but I've seen the curly-head school photos and on the back, in my mother's handwriting it says "Nova. Grade two." I think I thought I looked really pretty though with the perm. So ... good for me. I don't remember much about this hairdo, but those photos still come back to haunt me once in a while. Not only did I have a (bad) mushroom-cut perm, I also had gigantic red-frame glasses and buck teeth. Yikes.

But seriously, who gives a seven year old a perm?

TWO: The blond

Around the age of thirteen or fourteen my mom remarried and we all moved from the city where I had relatively no friends to a small town. I got contacts, I got braces to straighten whatever the hell was going on in my mouth at the time, and I was finally allowed to dye my hair. Oh it did wonders for my social life, I tell ya. I also grew it super long. I kept this bleach blonde "style" into my early twenties, and at one point my super long hair was almost down to my butt. Here's a picture of blonde me really enjoying a hamburguesa in Tepoztlan, Mexico. 

You can see how long my hair is if you look really hard at my back. (That's what he said?)

THREE:The dreadlocks

Honestly, I finally made the connection to a lot of the sexual harassment I was getting, and people assuming I was dumb, to my long blonde hair. I was going through a transitional period where I took a year off of University, and for a while lived in a truck with a man and a cat and drove around Northern B.C. and Vancouver Island. Oh, and took a train across Canada. Like, for months. With no job really, except helping my mom remodel her basement for pay and I worked as a beekeeper until it started snowing. 

I actually really liked having dredlocks and just cut them off a couple years ago. They were fun because they were easy and I didn't care about having "healthy" hair so I was free to dye them all the colors of the rainbow.Manic Panic even used photos of me on their website in exchange for free hair dye and a t-shirt, and I was all like "Yes! Free stuff". I'm totally a model now. Here's a super fancy montage of photos I whipped up from my Facebook photos.

FOUR: The short

I'm searching everywhere but I can't find the photos of the day(s) I decided to comb my dreds out. 

Trust me, it was NOT easy. But it was also not impossible like you may think. It helps that my hair is naturally bone-straight, probably. Anyway, one day I was just like "meh, I'm bored of having this hair" and cut my dreds to shoulder length. Many people asked what I did with the hair. I threw it in the kitchen garbage can, that's what. I'm not one of those creepy people who saves their dreadlocks in ziplock bags.

(YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!)

I walked around for two days with weird half-combed out dreadlocks, the "saved" hair was so weird! It was all kinked and broken and some stuck out at right angles from my head. Finally, thanks to my fantastic bosses who paid for me to finally "get a haircut, you hippie" (that's what the card said...it was a major occasion that warranted greeting cards and everything) I was introduced to Ashley at The Lab. I haven't gone to anyone else since except for that one time when someone gave me a terrible terrible a-symmetrical thing. But we won't go there. 

After my first haircut I looked like this at the bowling alley:

And, to the relief of pretty much everyone I know, the dreds are gone. 

I haven't had long hair since then.

Short hair styles are more fun.


********UPDATE*********

I found a tiny photo of me holding my dreds
as though they were a mustache

directly after I cut them off.

Ta daah!

It's official!

I saw my first inflatable Santa Claus today. 

November 5

Who ya gonna call?

In a series of uninteresting events, Ryan and I ended up sleeping on mattresses in the middle of the living room last night. I woke up disoriented and scared because I heard a noise, and looked towards the fireplace. Where there was a ghost.

Okay well, I actually think my top and bottom eyelashes were kinda glued together with gunk and what I saw was just the streetlight shining into the living room window and reflecting weirdly off my eye gunk, thus forming some kind of irridescent orb-y thing that looked vaguely human. Also? I was probably still half dreaming.

Anyway the point of the story is this: I kicked it and it disappeared.

My first instinct wasn't to rub my eyes, scream, wake Ryan up or run. It was to kick the ghost. And it totally worked. So I hope that phantom learned its lesson and never sneaks up on me again.

Halloween is over but I love these photos from Galey Farms and you have to look at them now because I said so.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. 

Yes, that includes Christmas. 

There's something about candy combined with creepy Halloween decorations, haunted houses, corn mazes and ... other weird crap ... my favorite thing on earth is the juxtaposition between cute and creepy. (That must also be why I like artists like Mark Ryden so much as well!)

That's also what makes me love Galey Farms more and more every year. 

It's totally silly, it's crazy, it's so much fun!

Basically it's the can't-miss place to be in October. I have no idea what they do the rest of the year but I know you can go there and get a pumpkin or whatever in the daytime. Isn't it cheerful?

Images from here here here and here.

But you really want to go at night. Trust me. They have a pretty huge corn maze you can walk through, they have kids train rides, and they have haunted houses; one for kids (which is actually kind of scary) and an adult one (called carnEVIL, lol!) that costs an extra ten bucks to get into. 

I went into carnEVIL one year with Ryan and a friend of ours to surprise her for her birthday and ... yeah it was actually kind of terrifying. We actually ran through, pushing Ryan ahead of us and screaming.It's very well done.

They also have little dioramas set up of creepy scenarios all around the farm. Some of them you have to take the train to see, some of them you will find by exploring the corn maze.

CHECK OUT SOME PHOTOS I TOOK

 on October 30th. 

 (excuse the blurry ones, I refused to use flash the entire night)

1. Random shots 

2. View from the very middle of the corn maze. 

As you can see, there is a gigantic sphinx. Here it is up close.

And inside it...MUMMIES!

2. The 'graveyard' can be found by walking to the very end of the corn maze. It features a whole lot of wailing and things jumping (very comically) out of the ground and a wishing well. Also? Weird shadowy figures in the distance. 

3. The train ride. You buy your ticket and line up for sometimes up to half an hour. There's nothing particularly scary on the ride, but it is rather creepy. The train tracks run around the whole place. There's trees decorated with Christmas lights, the pitch black pumpkin patch, a man in a monkey suit that jumps onto the side of the train and grabs children, an entire old-West town, and...well... and more. Here's some of the stuff we saw from the train.

4. My personal favorite, the 'dioramas'. You walk through a sort of 'town' constructed out of old sheds, and in each one there's a little scene going on. For example, the butcher shop, a restaurant, the blood bank, and more! It's so funny and there's so much to look at. I love this place! 

This is also where the kids haunted house is. 

So great, right? It's just the perfect balance between silly and scary.

p.s. 
If none of those pictures creeped you out, then check this out!

AAAGH!