Yes, "fanatic" is in my vocabulary

Quite a long time ago, my daughter Emily and I were on Sparks Street, or maybe it was the Byward Market. And what is wrong with me that I even thought that was a necessary part of my intro?

At the place where we were, there was a young man with a violin, which he quickly told us was a fiddle, and he threw himself into the music with such joy, toe-tapping and talent that we both forgot to breathe for about 4 minutes.  Or so it seemed. It was wonderful, and we bought the CD, went to each our home and, at least on my part, played it again and again. 

It's going to be wonderful again because at Bluesfest, which is about 200 steps from my place, Dave and I are going to be able to see Ashley MacIsaac.  Not from up close, because we can hear Bluesfest from start to finish from the patio, so we'll walk up the sidewalk that goes by the Bluesfest site. If we're lucky we'll get to actually see him on the huge screen.  Wow!

Look him up if you like to lose your breath while listening to music.

one of my favourites pictures of him

Too much candour?

So today, I saw something in my bunch of photos and thought it would work in the blog to show that I used to be a blonde, first naturally and then assisted, since I'd heard from one of my granddaughters that she didn't recognize pictures of me from when I was blonde. That, and the photo I'd found led to this story:

About twelve years ago I had grown my l'Oréal-assisted blonde hair down past my shoulders and made a strange decision to get curls added to my look.  It was not really a success, and as I soon had about two inches of uncurled, uncoloured hair next to my scalp, I'd decided to remove both colour and curls from my presentation by having everything "not natural" cut off.

The person who did it for me actually tried to talk me out of the drastic decision into something that would be not so different, although she used the words "necessary for your age" and "mumble, mumble well-thought-out". That approach led me to a very "it's MY hair" thing, and she went ahead and cut off all the hair that was not natural-as-birth, like I'd asked.

Did you know that grey hair can look more like very shy brown, and that getting your cut all one length of less than 2 inches doesn't really give you a style, unless you're looking for "wrong choices for 60 year-olds"? I certainly didn't  know that, but I made a start to save the whole thing by buying several pairs of the kind of earrings that make people just focus on them rather than the hair that wasn't hiding them (so I hoped). Also, given that my dad's hair turned beautifully silvery and my mom's was totally, shiny white, I was a bit depressed and felt they'd done wrong by me, but new earrings can almost always change my sad days.

Dave and I have always been careful not to make comments on each other's looks as a rule, but when I came home, he smiled very warmly and told me he liked my hair. (I'm sure it was for the first time, and really, it knocked me over).

Which takes me back to this photo, taken when I was 20, teaching school and spending lots of time and money for a look that, when I see it now, just says "Take a good look, young Julia...blonde!"

And I didn't even swear

I just wrote a long post about which is better, chicken or beef.  That post just decided it didn't intend to be read (maybe because I forgot to take my bracelets off before I started to write, which every once in a while means I lose everything on the screen)

The fun part was that I ended the post with bacon.