• Location: Fernley, Nevada
• Mood: relieved

A Little Off the /T/o/p/ Back

Barbers have been recently allowed to reopen here. My regular shop, A Little Off The Top, has a single-seat shop located in a converted motel room. She put up signs with all of the rules she has to follow: no waiting in the shop, one customer at a time, extra time between customers to allow her to do extra cleaning, all customers (and her) have to wear face coverings, and so forth. She made time for me today, after her normal work hours, for which I'm grateful. Her shop is only a five-minute walk from my house, and she was running a bit late, but I waited outside without complaint.

Now I don't have a lot of hair, especially on top, but the amount I've been accumulating on the back and sides made me think that if this goes on, by the time we're allowed to go to plays and such, I should be ready to try out for a production of 1776 as Benjamin Franklin without having to wear a wig for it. Not anymore, though.



Perhaps I exaggerated a little bit about the Ben Franklin look. You may need to click through to the Flickr photos and zoom in to see how shaggy I got on the back. Taking a photo of the back of my head isn't an easy thing!



This is much more comfortable, especially with the hot weather we've been having this week. (The thermometer at our house read 38° C at 10 AM today.)

I was wearing the last of the face masks we bought in Iceland when we were there last summer. Lisa caught a bad cold in Ireland and we bought some face masks at the apothecary around the corner from our hotel in Reykjavik so that when she did feel up to going out, she wouldn't be sneezing over people. This was the last unused one, which I needed to use because our other masks are the elastic-around-the-head type rather than the around-the-ears type, and obviously I couldn't wear the latter if I wanted a haircut!

I tipped my barber $20, which was 167% of the cost of the cut. I told her that I felt I should be generous to people whose jobs stopped happening during the lockdown, considering that I've been busier than ever and relatively fortunate, so I paid for the haircuts I couldn't get when she was closed.