Archive for July 16th, 2007

16 Jul 2007 The Long And The Short Of It
Author: Gail |  Category: Gail at Large  | 3 Comments

Behold the Long:

19 and living out of a bag
19 and living out of a bag

From the archives: May 1992

Standing on a termite mound somewhere along the coast between Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. I’d been on the road for about six months by then, and was travelling with a Scottish guy and a Dutch guy in a combi van. Crazy times.

Obviously, I was too poor for a haircut…

Not the longest I’ve grown it, but pretty close.

Behold the Short:


glassy-eyed thinking about all the money I’m saving with this Young Persons Rail Card

From the archives: February 1994 (age 21)

British Rail ID card so I could get discounted train fares. My hair had grown out a lot by this point — I had it razored down to less than an inch in Los Angeles a month or so before. A Cuban stylist used a straight blade instead of scissors, and I loved what he did with it but it only lasted a couple of weeks.

David said the haircut was very “Mary Lou Retton”. Argh.

Right now my hair length is medium length and quite wavy because I stopped blowdrying the heck out of it in the mornings. I had quite a bit cut off a week before Iceland, and the new ‘do is lower-maintenance. Now I just dry the top to get the cowlicks down and just enough on the rest of it so I don’t look like a drowned rat upon arrival at work. I used to have straw-straight hair as a kid and my mother permed it, permanently sealing my fate as the gradeschooler who looked and dressed like a senior citizen ready for her weekly bingo outing.

Strangely, my hair started curling as I was finishing high school and by the time I was living in Australia it was such a bird’s nest I was even considering dreadlocks to neaten it up a bit. The thing about dreadlocks is that when you’re tired of them, you have to cut all your hair off and by the time I wanted to try it I was getting ready to head from the tropics to damp, cold London in February. No thanks, I needed to keep my neck warm somehow.

In the past year I’ve suddenly grown thatches of white hair but I’m not colouring it out — no, I’ve earned them! Every single one!

16 Jul 2007 Live Music and Korean BBQ Rescued the Weekend
Author: Gail |  Category: Food + Drink, Music, Out + About  | 4 Comments

strobed
Jason rocking out at Clinton’s

I have to thank James for saving me from squandering a perfectly good weekend on wielding screwdrivers (the non-alcoholic kind), IKEA shelving assembly, and a whole lotta cleaning. All necessary, mind you, but after two days of not doing anything else I was ready to make a break for it. At 8pm Sunday I was wrestling with an Allen key and a stubborn bolt, and I tossed it all aside to get cleaned up and head for a pub called Clinton’s where James said his nephew’s band was playing at 8:30.

I met up with James and some of his family at the pub, but apparently there was a double-booking of bands that bumped all the starts to later in the evening and shrunk the set times. The band wouldn’t get on stage until 9:30.

So what do we do? Why eat, of course:

it hit the spot
tasty tastiness

yum!
yum!

If you’ve never tried Korean food before, you are sorely missing out. Some of the dishes might be a tad spicy for Western palates, but it’s easy enough to avoid the chili peppers. I don’t know a lick of Korean to read their menus, but I’ve never eaten any Korean food I didn’t like. All you have to do is look at some photos and ask a few questions if you’re not sure, but you really can’t go wrong if you keep an open mind (and mouth). And you can’t go wrong with the price, either: all of our food, two main dishes and all those appetizers, came to less than $20! You just can’t beat that, and it’s not fast food… although, our food arrived incredibly quickly.

“It’s like they were waiting for us,” James remarked.

OK, back to the music.

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