Entirely too late to be considered appropriate, the reveal of my purple hair!

The truth is, I’ve been sporting it for about six weeks now, but the sheer lack of moments when I wasn’t working, wearing a ski helmet, or sporting pajama pants meant that I never got a picture of my violet locks before they faded into oblivion.  So after Kyle did my dye-job last night, I was insistent that I get a picture.

Here it is!

I know, it’s hot, right?

Another truth: having hair this dark still kinda throws me. For those of you who remember what my natural hair color is, (please don’t try,) you’ll remember that it was dishwater-blonde; not quite light enough to be considered blonde, not quite dark enough to be considered brunette. And the pink was pretty fucking bright as well. So I’m used to seeing myself with light hair; it looks natural on me, even when it’s pink. But the purple, by comparison, is dark. Especially if I’m in light with a cooler color temperature, the blues really come out and the color almost verges on black. And I’m not really used to it yet. When I look in the mirror, I look twice, and it doesn’t feel quite as natural as the pink did.

But despite my slight weirdness over having dark hair, I went back to purple for one huge, gigantic, as-responsible-as-you-can-be-with-purple-hair reason:

It wears really fucking well.

Yeah, for the first two weeks or so of purple my hair is a little darker than I would like. But after that, something magical happens: it starts to fade to almost a bubblegum pink. But it doesn’t fade perfectly evenly, instead it does so in streaks and chunks that look like wicked cool highlights. So instead of just faded purple hair, I have purple and pink  streaked hair, and it’s super hot.

Pink straight out of the box was hot; it felt like the hair color that I was supposed to be born with, and I freakin’ loved it. But after two or three weeks, my lovely fuchsia locks faded to lighter pink with super-faded highlights that almost had a tinge of orange in them. It was still pretty, but it didn’t have the saturated color and vibrancy that I loved and it kinda looked…worn. So I spent two weeks loving my hair and another four counting down the seconds until I could dye it again. But with purple, it’s the exactly opposite; I spend two weeks being kinda “eh” about my hair and the four weeks being all “Dude, this shit is hot!”

And so, I’m learning to embrace my grape-headedness. The purple wears sooooo much better, I’m digging the fact that I can wear red and orange again, and you have to admit, that color is glorious.

Now if I can just get Kyle to quit calling me Pinky…

(Well, not creeps so much but you get the point. It was the comedic effect I was going after.)

This post is one that I stole from Allison over at Allison Writes. Only she calls hers (adorably) “Blips of Life,” and includes cute pictures of cupcakes and squirrels and short little captions about each one. Well, I’m not that cute, nor can I sum things up so easily in so few words, hence the title. But the concept is the same: small moments of my life as of late, captured in photo form. Just chunkier.

Here we go.

A few weeks ago, Kyle and I finally had the first part of a Saturday off and were able to participate in our first Saratoga Springs Chowderfest. Which was wicked fun and full of delicious chowder. I loved getting to taste all the different offerings, and celebrate some of my favorite local restaurants. Plus, with 47 businesses offering chowder and 4oz servings, it became kind-of a strategy game to make sure that we didn’t waste our precious time and stomach space on anything other than the best.

Kyle sampling chowder. Not sure what the suspicious look is about…//Kyle hates this picture of himself. I think it’s adorable. You be the judge.//Comfort Kitchen may have been only my second favorite in the chowder department, but they definitely had my first favorite Chowderfest poster.//Love me some chowder!

(Oh, also, you might have noticed that I dyed my hair purple. Yeah, that happened. Due to life and its current over-abundance of sixteen hour work days, this is actually the only picture that exists of my current hair color. Terrible I know. When I first went purple, I wasn’t really sold on it; it felt too dark and masculine and a little emo. But now that it’s broken in a little and the color’s softened some I’m really digging it.)

As always, work. Work. More work. Lots of work. Enough work to challenge my health, my sanity, my relationship, and my waistline.

I forgot to pack a fork with which to eat my pasta, so I dug up a plastic fork, took some diagonal cutters to it, and fashioned myself a spork. Wouldn’t win me any awards in grace or etiquette, but it got the food to my mouth.//This is quite possible some of the sexiest lighting I’ve seen in a while. The LD for Grace Potter and the Nocturnals took two Sharpy lighting fixtures and focused a hard edge at two $10 disco balls. It looked like a star exploded. Sooooooo cool!//Thanks to my kickass boss/husband, we got to demo some LED lighting fixtures for the governor’s big speech. It was so amazing to work with units that didn’t have uneven optics and wouldn’t get hot no matter how long we left them on. I may or may not have cried a little when we had to send them back.

And our seasonal standard counterpart to work, skiing!

I tackled my first double-black diamond run last week. Successfully. Without being hauled off on a sled by ski patrol. //Victory!  (Also, I swear that hill looks way scarier from the top than the bottom. I promise you, from the top it was terrifying.)//I know it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at, but this one is actually Kyle successfully navigating a black diamond run covered with bumped up snow. It’s really hard to do without wiping out and ending up in the trees (like I did), and I’m very proud of him for kicking that hill’s ass!

And our Little Monsters.

Allyse being caught in the most undignified position a cat can be in without actually licking her asshole.//Keeping watch over the backyard. //Mila was sleeping on a pile of towels while I folded laundry, so I tucked her in. In other news, if karma is a thing I want to come back in my next life as my cats. Bitches have it too fucking good.

With all the talk of babies and the desired lack thereof as of late, I felt that the recount of a story about birth control would be appropriate on the back of my last post. Enjoy. 

It was the spring of my senior year of college.

I had phone call that I didn’t want to make.

The phone call was to my local Walgreens, and I didn’t want to make it because I was terrified of the answer to my question.

See, I’d been on birth control since I was 18. Originally it was to help reduce my acne and regulate my period, but at 22 it was also serving its intended purpose: keeping my ass baby-free. My current pack of pills was running out and I needed more, but for the first time this process of obtaining new pills was complicated.

Because six months before my dad had been laid off, and I was totally without insurance.

I didn’t know how I was going to get my birth control pills, but going without wasn’t an option. It wasn’t just about the no-baby part of it, either. (Though Kyle and I both agreed that this was a large portion of it.) By that time I had been on the same birth control for four years, and I worried about the hormonal turbulence that would descend upon me if my body suddenly wasn’t getting the same hormones and chemicals that it had come to expect. Frankly, I didn’t want to find out.

So I looked at my options. I knew that buying them outright would be expensive and we were broke as hell. Like, the-only-reason-we-could-afford-our-rent-was-because-our-landlord-had-quit-paying-our-water-so-we’d-quit-paying-our-rent-and-were-now-squatting-in-our-own-house broke. Broke-broke. So that was considered a last-ditch option. I  know I looked into Planned Parenthood, but for reasons that I don’t remember that wasn’t a usable option; if I had to guess, it’s because they couldn’t or wouldn’t give me the three-month cycle pills (11 weeks of active pills, one week of inactive period pills) that I was (and still am) taking. I looked into buying them online, but they were still quite expensive and the websites that sold them looked as if they may or may not also sell free-range babies. So I finally made the phone call that I didn’t want to make and asked the question that terrified me:

How much would it cost to buy my birth control without insurance?

When the pharmacist that I was speaking to gave me the fateful number, it surprised me. $120 for three months of birth control; still a lot of money for a college senior with only a part time job, but less than half of what I had feared. I exhaled quickly and said without thinking, “Oh! Is that all?” The man on the phone laughed and said, “Yes, that’s all!” Then he asked me if I would like to go ahead and refill my prescription right there on the phone. I gave him my information, and he told me that it would be ready in about 45 minutes.

A short time later, I was walking into the Walgreens. Now came the other hard part.

I walked up to the pharmacy and gave the woman behind the counter my name. She typed my name into the computer and asked me, the words coming out by rote, “Okay, any change in your insurance?” My eyes dropped to the counter. “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t actually have insurance anymore.”

The silence that followed was probably only a second or two, but it felt like it stretched out over days.

I felt the woman pharmacist stop short, fingers frozen above the keyboard. I felt the sympathetic gaze of the mom at the window next to me, her eyes reading, “Oh, you poor dear.” The pharmacist behind  coughed softly. “Oh. Okay, well, not a problem,” she said in a sweet voice that was a little too high. “Just give me a sec to get your new information in the computer.”

I know I should have been comforted by the intended kindness that I was being shown, but it actually felt worse than if it had been animosity. I could have fought back against that, but their pity disarmed me completely. Under their sympathetic eyes, I was even more humiliated than before. I felt about an inch small.

The woman pharmacist turned away from the counter and knelt in front of the tub labeled with a giant “D” and rifled through the envelopes of medicine. She got to the back and started again at the beginning. Then she pulled the tub out of shelf and peered behind it. A male pharmacist appeared at her shoulder. “Whatcha looking for?” I instantly recognized him as the owner of the voice I spoken with on the phone a few hours earlier. “I can’t find her prescription,” she said, indicating to me. “Last name, Dietrich.”

“Oh, I got this one,” he said, and immediately turned to the other wall. He reached up and grabbed a paper bag sitting on a high shelf all by itself. I didn’t know why the unconventional packaging or the solitary location, but in my misery I assumed that it had something to do with my shameful uninsured status. That was the sprinkles on my mortification cupcake, and I could not pay and grab my paper bag from him fast enough.

I practically ran out of the store, and I felt their pity chasing me the whole way.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, after I was back home and dinner and a drink had begun to sooth my injured pride a little, that I attended to my hard-won prize. Sitting at the kitchen table, I opened the bag for my three-month pack of pills, but when I saw what was inside I couldn’t breath.

Inside that bag was a box, assumedly the one that the pill packs came shipped in. And inside that box were three three-month pill packs.

I called Kyle into the kitchen and showed him the contents of the bag. I retrieved the crumpled receipt from my coat pocket and checked the total, but I’d only been charged for the one pill pack. Yet, here were three. I couldn’t believe it. My first theory was that in a rush, the pharmacist had mistakenly thrown the whole box into the bag, thinking that there was only one pill pack inside. But Kyle quickly pointed out that pharmacists generally don’t haphazardly throw prescription medication around like that; you probably don’t get to keep your job too long if you do shit like that. But that meant…

He must have heard it in my voice. He must have heard the fear in my voice when I asked the question, and the relief in my voice when I heard the answer. And he must have known that I was young, probably tight on money, and just trying to get my birth control. So he grabbed a whole box, threw it in the paper bag so that the larger mass wouldn’t be noticed, put it up on the shelf so that none of his coworkers would notice it, and handed it directly to me before anyone could ask questions about it. I can only imagine what kind of risks he incurred in doing so, but I was beyond grateful to him for being willing to do so. I wanted to thank him, to somehow acknowledge the incredibly wonderful thing that he’d done for me, but Kyle pointed out that by bringing attention to his actions I might be costing him his job, which is kinda the opposite of what I wanted. So I did nothing but silently thank him from the deepest part of my heart.

To this day, I don’t know whether his kindness grew from knowing what it’s like to be young and broke (my theory) or a fierce political belief that all women should have access to birth control (Kyle’s theory), but either way, it doesn’t really matter. The compassion that he showed me that day was so deep that I still have trouble understanding it. Those pills that he gave me got me through the next nine months, and by the time they ran out I was married and solidly on Kyle’s insurance. They got me through a period when I had very little money, a whole lot of debt, a wedding to plan, and a life outside of college to actualize. I had a lot of worries, but thanks to that kind pharmacist, birth control wasn’t one of them.

I never did get to repay that man for his selfless compassion, or even thank him. But someday, I will pass on his compassion and generosity on to someone else. I will be his kindness to someone who needs it as badly as I did then.