Pinterest Fails!

I’m always skeptical about the hair pins and tutorials I see on Pinterest, because I think most of them are actually done by professionals and if they are just pictures showing the models “doing” their own hair I tend to think they are staged. Call me cynical. But it’s really hard to work on the back of your own head and get it to look right.

( Original Pin Picture )

Also, despite having waist-length hair, I have very little patience for doing much of anything to it. Victorian hair taping is pretty much as fancy as I get, and that’s less hairstyling and more sewing.

Still, I have hope that some day a cute and super-simple hairstyle will come along and I’ll master it. This, apparently, was not my day. It might have helped if I hadn’t just picked a pin that had no valid link, no instructions, and fairly small pictures. But it looked fairly simple?

Try 1 was a disaster. I was left with a floppy mess that looked like a rabid squirrel had decided to nest in my head. I tried to fix it by pinning the central part in place, but that was only marginally successful from a completely back view – the side still showed a very sad, droopy floof of hair (also, pardon the rather bad pictures, cell phone camera + mirror pictures are apparently fairly small and grainy, and I couldn’t really retake them once I realized…).

( Try #1 )

I was all set to completely vilify the pin when I took a closer look at the pictures. Specifically, picture #4. What I first thought was just her straightening and fixing to bow was, I think, her bobby pinning it in place. Now, bobby pins and I have a long and not at all friendly history. We have agreed to keep our distance. I have successfully used Good Hair Day Pins and Spin Pins, but regular bobby pins just never seem to hold my hair well. Yes, even when you cross two of them.

But I tried. By now my arms we very tired of being held way up and back behind my head (that really is a weird angle and my shoulder joints are not what they used to be). But I stuffed two bobby pins on each bow loop, then a few more through the center. And… it was a bow! Sure, it was a little lopsided and you could see the bobby pins on one side, but technically it worked.

( Hey, look, a bow! Sort of... )

Then I turned around. Seems all that tugging and pulling and pinning had made the pulled-back hair lump and stick out in weird ways. Kinda like after you’ve slept on a pony tail. Not pretty.

So I pulled it out, took ten seconds to slap a pretty clip in my hair, and called it fail. Sure, with a lot of carefully tweaking and fiddling and really strong arms you could probably make it work. But it’s not for me.

(If you're wondering why am I trying random hairstyle pins - "pins tried" is one of my 50/50 goals, and they're one of the fastest things to try...)

Either it's a freak of science, or we have a very weird poltergiest

I was tidying up my bathroom counter and looked at my ring holder - which has sat on about the same spot on the counter since we moved in... what, six years ago? This is what I saw:



Note: there is nothing laying on it that would have fallen on it. The pieces are separated by a fair amount. One chunk is completely broken off on the back, and there are a few glass shards in that area.

I last looked at it yesterday, I'd say, and it was fine.

Now, once before I was completely freaked out when I discovered a bizarrely broken vase on the mantel in our pool table room. That was up against a brick fireplace, though, and it was thin glass, and the break was at the back... And I'm not in that room often, so it could have happened on a really cold day - temperature differential could easily have explained it. I told my husband about it as such, marveling at how cold it must have gotten. At which point he said "oh, yeah, I meant to tell you about that..." So, pool cue + glass = broken vase. I asked why he hadn't just thrown it away, I probably wouldn't have noticed. It was a stupid little thing I'd gotten goodness knows where, and it didn't do anything.

Of course I asked him about this, though I rather doubted he'd have had occasion to break it. It's my bathroom counter, he doesn't really go near it. And he swears he didn't. And I believe him, because he'd tell me if I did and I really can't see how he would have.

And then I remembered something weird. This morning, as I was sitting at the computer, I heard something weird. Later I found the louvers to the attic fan in the yard, and I assumed that's what had made the noise - maybe an animal had dislodged them (erm, that's something else weird that happened, though that's happened before, mostly with wind). But I remember it being a startling sound, one that alarmed me in some way. Like something breaking - of course your mind flies to someone breaking in, or the dog hurting herself on something. Maybe that's when it happened. Still doesn't explain why, but... it certainly exonerates hubby.

Or maybe we have a weird ghost who just doesn't want me to have a place to put my rings and likes to yank the louvers off our attic fan.