The Servant's Quarters

This morning brought more downtime. Rita started cutting hair, and the rest of us settled in for some reading, TV watching, game playing, etc. For myself, I grabbed the TV in the back bedroom and settled in to watch a movie on Lifetime. Ah, Lifetime - television for women. It's hard to believe that you could create an entire 7x24 cable network dedicated to women being abused, oppressed, neglected, taken for granted, endangered, etc. And getting even with the men who put them through this torture. This morning, I watched a docu-drama called, Death of a Cheerleader. All I can tell you is that Kellie Martin killed Torrie Spelling in retribution for Torrie doing something really awful to Kellie. Kellie went to jail for what she did, but not before pointing out the moral of the story - it's our paternalistic, male dominated society that caused Torrie's death. Kellie's just another victim.

Sigh.

Since the forecast called for thunderstorms in the afternoon, we decided to go indoors for our fun. We drove to Gaylord and made of annual vacation visit to Call of the Wild. (Or, Call of the Mild, as we say.) It's the premiere collection of stuffed animals in the midwest. For some reason, the kids always love it. It only takes about 15 minutes to go through the museum, but they're always enthusiastic. We also spend quite a bit of time in the gift shop, which is first rate.

Before leaving, one of the ladies working at Call of the Mild told us of a place up the road where we could check out a herd of elk. They were fenced in, but the kids would have no problem coaxing the elk to the fence with offers of grass to eat. Even though it was raining a bit, we went. Not only were there a large number of elk but a fair share of deer in the herd. As promised, both the deer and the elk came right up to the fence to eat out of our hands. The children were delighted.

Burritos for dinner, and Rita gave me a long overdue haircut. Now, I wouldn't normally mention this except for the...... unusual nature of this haircut. Everything was going just ducky for me and my head. Rita did her usual good job. She thinned my hair, lowered my ears, trimmed my sideburns. The works. I checked the mirror to see what I looked like. Not bad at all. She was just finishing up by shaving my neck with the electric clippers when she decided to go after some stray hairs on the back of my head.

rrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrr

She gasped and said, "Oh no." Isaac and Olivia ran over, checked out the back of my head, and started laughing hysterically. Rita couldn't stop apologizing. Philip came out of the shower, and Isaac whispered something to him. Then he ran around behind me, saw the back of my head, and started laughing.

&*$%!#

Liv loaned me a mirror so I could check out the back of my head. Well, I made a joke of it at first, complaining that Rita had given me a huge bald spot right on top. But there was no denying the true damage. Man, having a big bald head is bad enough. I mean, it doesn't really bug me, but I don't dig it either. But now, my big bald spot has a little friend.

Oh well. I got my money's worth for the haircut. (No pictures. Sorry. I'm not vain, but I'm not THAT easy going either.)