Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Jen's hair dryer

When we get out of the shower recently, my wife has been blow-drying her hair. I can't say that I really blame her for that. She is growing it out, and it has gotten pretty cold around here. Her hair is now just past her shoulders, which is the longest it's been in ages, and it looks sexy and wonderful! It's also thick, and tends to hold a lot of water for a long time. I would really feel terrible if she went out in the below freezing with a sopping wet head and caught pneumonia or something. I'd feel bad.

We have a teeny tiny little house. I've seen smaller and I've known people who lived in smaller, but this place feels crowded. We do have what they call 'a bath and a half.' I was not familiar with this term prior to shopping homes. This is when they started to build a house with two bathrooms, but they got lazy or ran out of concrete before they were able to pour that last ten square feet that a bath tub or shower stall would take. So, it's got a full bathroom and a half-assed bath room, hence 'bath and a half.'

The full bathroom is where we shower (obviously) and that's where the kitties take care of their business, since Jenni taught them to use the toilet (well, mostly) because we didn't want to deal with a litter box. The outlet in there has an intermittent supply problem, so we keep electronics like my shaver or Jenni's hair dryer in the 'half' bath. We keep the kitties' food and water in the larger one, and pretty much keep the kitties shut out of the bedrooms. The little half-bath is also where our tooth brushes live, as nobody wants to brush their teeth with a tooth brush that a cat has knocked into the toilet and then pooped on.

So, Jenni has this hair dryer that you could bake bread with as long as you could block the wind so the dough wouldn't blow away. It's enourmous! Do you remember the hair dryer in Space Balls? Yeah, it's pretty much just like that but purple. This beast moves about 1,700-cfm of air heated across a 19,000-btu burner inside of it. I'm pretty sure that it was forged in the depths of Mordor. I imagine that you have seen such monstrosities before. Like, if Elvis wanted to keep his hair dry during a concert, this would do it, except for the fact that it produces about as many decibels as a 757 coming off the runway, so you wouldn't be able to hear him. They should have had one of these to do extermination duty in the Tribbles episode of Star Trek.

By comparison, the 'half' bath, as it is so known, has become the Grand Central of getting ready in the morning. The kid brushes his teeth in there because I don't think that any of us should have to brush with kitty poo (although with 9-year-old hygiene, sometimes his breath smells like it). Nobody should have to brush with kitty poo. They have thought that waterboarding was okie-dokie, but they never made any convicted terrorists brush with kitty poo. That's just nasty. Jen and I brush our teeth in there, I shave in there, and Jenni uses her enormous hair dryer (which I can't remember whether it was made by Garrett or Boeing) in there.

The bathroom is fifty-two inches by fifty-five inches - literally. I am not exaggerating or making a joke there. In less than twenty square feet, the toilet and sink taking up most of it, with kiddo doing a light, once-over on his teeth and me running my aging electric shaver over my face, Jenni is producing a small, heated hurricane under that miniscule patch of eight-foot ceiling. About ten seconds into her switching it on (which dims the lights - no exaggeration), my eyeballs start to dry out on the outside and shrivel up from the inside. My throat goes dry and my teeth recede. I imagine a knight of the crusades standing in my bedroom saying "He chose poorly."

Please allow me to back-peddle for a minute. I don't blame Jenni at all. (1) She pretty much has to dry her hair before we leave in the morning, and one of the big reasons that she's growing her hair out is because I like it long. (2) She pretty much has to use the hair dryer in the half-assed bath rather than the... I was going to call it a full-size, but even the bigger bathroom is still more like a compact, but that's not the point. (3) We are not morning people. Time is of the essence, as we must maximize our efficiency when we wake up, because we will milk every precious moment of sleep that we can prior to soccumbing to the cruel will of dawn, and all that she brings with her. Therefore, she has to use the most efficient method possible to dry her hair, i. e. Giant Purple People Blower. Furthermore, she has to use it while the rest of our little clan are in the same closet - water closet that is!

So, I'm torn. I'm very annoyed with my nemesis, Jenni's Turbine of Death, especially when used in the smallest room in the house with the entire occupants of the Evyl Robot Empyre crammed in there. On the other hand, there's no other choice right now. One day, maybe there will be a wing of the house that has a wind tunnel with a furnace at one end. That would come close to matching what she's using right now, and I could be in another room altogether. --and that would make me happy. I like to be with my wife and son for a lot of stuff, but I could never see that hair dryer again and be perfectly happy. It is to Jenni's hair as kitty poo is to kitties; I may hate it, but without it, kitties would explode. The lesser of two evils, you know? Well, I'm running low on whiskey and at the risk of going dry, I'm going to wrap it up here.

I'd like to again thank both of my readers to reading the nearly incoherent rantings of somebody that just doesn't know when to quit. Ah, I... Iah rilllly gove you luys!
*crash as I hit the floor*

2 comments:

instinct said...

What you need is something like the Cone of Silence but with a hairdryer inside one half and Jen inside the other half

just a thought...

Or, you need your own custom built lightsaber, just because you can do it. :D

Anonymous said...

Uhhh--I bought a pretty good travel dryer at (of all places) HEB a couple of years ago--1800 watts, decibel levels that don't require OSHA-protection, and a $12 price tag.

Hell, brandy-covered cherries cost more.

As a Scot, I'm all about thrifty, but sometimes there's a greater good to be had.