Happy Searingly Hot Friday (and an office-ish special)

OMG, it is SO HOT.  I am not the kind of person who likes insufferable heat; who willingly frolics and bakes in it, who tans... no.  I have the fair, fair Hungarian skin (my sisters got the lovely olive tannable tint from the Puerto-Rican genes; I got the skin so white, you can see my veins underneath it...).  I get heat stroke like that ::snaps fingers:: I burn in only a short time under moderate sun into a searing red which sometimes, in particularly powerful sunlight like San Diego or Mexico, blisters up into huge water-pillows (yes, ew!) and then pop and peel away to reveal the same white skin beneath... Not even a slight tan for the suffering! The injustice! I might as well be albino.

Belgium was ideal for me... brief, warm summers, lots of rain and grey skies, but sadly, not a lot of snow. ::sigh:: I *thought* Oregon was similar to Belgium, but I was wrong. It is to some degree... at least the valley between the coastal and cascade ranges are during part of the year--the coast has its own climate too. Everyone thinks all of Oregon is rainy all the time everywhere; but only a third of the state is like that. The rest of the eastern side of the state is high-desert like from the cowboy movies... it's a common misconception that it's coniferous and green and rainy everywhere.  Oregon has a tremendously varied landscape. There's amazing, hilly farmland, conifer forests, high mountains, sheer hills, deserts, canyons, huge rivers... everything is grand and huge. Belgium, minus the Ardennes, is as flat as flat can be.  It's divided up by walls of poplars to soften the winds across the crops... You can ride a bike forever and hardly feel it.  Oregon is green and lush through spring and winter... but come summer it just stops raining and everything, even in the valley goes dry and brown.  And it can get REALLY HOT. At least it's dry heat, not like the Northeast, where it's 80% humidity--but at least that is broken by the T-storms. Oregon rarely gets good T-storms like New England does. The nights remain insufferably hot and only cool down in the early, early morning.

I'd still prefer a milder climate... more rain... but I'm settled here for now.  I cannot say that when I'm driving home and looking at the magesty of Mt. Hood rising up against the sky, that I am not overwhelmed by how amazing this place is... but damn.. IT IS SO HOT!!!! BLARGH!  I can't believe I just wrote all that about the WEATHER! I'm losing it.

Technically, my Friday Office Special is only a half-way office special.  I drew it at lunch at WeiWei; a panasian restaurant.  I got Udon noodles all over the front of my shirt I was so busy sketching.  I coloured it on Arcsoft. It's a quick and dirty job, but hey... fifteen minutes, cut me some slack.  Well, I'm off to get my hair cut by a real hair stylist.  I haven't done that in YEARS.  The last person I ever trusted with my curls was a 5'2 Lebanese man who was crazy about me, and really inappropriate... I suffered his advances because he was one of the only people who knew curls and what to do with them... sometimes he'd blow-dry my hair straight and soft, and I'd get a glimpse of what it feels like to have flowing hair.  Nobody has ever been able to match his skill, and the few times I've put my hair in the hands of anyone, they had no idea how to deal with curls.  They always cut it too short, and then my hair, when it dried and sproinged up into the tube-curls, would look like a bozo-do.  Since my mother mercilessly hacked off my hair as a child out of sheer laziness, always giving me a boyish style, I am almost irrational about keeping its length today.  I refuse to find myself washing my hands in a public restroom and have some lady come in and tell me, "young man... you're in the wrong bathroom" never again!  The humiliation!

But my problem is, I have very thin hair, and no volume.  It looks like a lot of hair, but it really isn't, and it needs some lift on the back of my head.  S-II swears by this stylist, and says she's very good with curls, so if it goes wrong, you know who I'm going after....... with a pitchfork.  We shall see. ;)

Have a lovely weekend. Happy Friday all.