Polar Vortex redux

Miss Nala was spayed this week  She was not a fan of her new head attire

Finally got my long neglected hair done, a two person operation, three if you include Steve running out for supplies

Too light though at least the dreaded gray is gone. Will have to experiment more with the color tubes

Winter has hit us big time cancelling school for 6 of the past nine days. We had that blizzard last week. Then we had a small blizzard this past weekend cancelling schools. The next day found me driving on ice through heavy snow to take care of a sick Daniel so his mom could work. Most school districts cancel school if the wind chill is below twenty below. Presumably yesterday it was forty below with the absolute temperature being -19. So all government buildings were shut down plus no mail or garbage pick-up along with some businesses, notably the hairdresser supply place. My dentist still was open though so out I went. In between the two coldest days, an alarm starts blaring through the headphones I fall asleep with. I had shut off Amber alerts so what could I be? Imminent nuclear attack? No, a request to use less natural gas as a major supplier had a fire and the gas was running low. So factories shut down too.

 No running outside between the deep snow and then the below zero temps and strong winds. But in a few days it will be 50.

Just biding my time until spring.

Much to my chagrin, my hairdresser cancelled my hair appointment at the last minute and said it couldn't be rescheduled until at least two months. In an ideal world, she should have worked me in during the next week. She is the one that I drove 60 miles round trip for an appointment only to find her not there and quite unapologetic about her mistake. She is going through some stuff I guess but the late cancelling is the last straw.  My friend was a hair dresser before she became too sick to deal with clients but became quite excited at the prospect of being able to fix me and all the hair mistakes I apparently make. I had to bring her all my supplies, none to her liking. It took a long time for her to cut my hair with me being very aware how tiring this was for her. As she is cutting her exposure to chemicals, she couldn't dye my hair but ordered supplies and wrote out detailed instructions for Naomi to do it which Naomi did yesterday and then she styled it with my new tools.

I am trying to be useful. I did organize my closet and now I am learning Dutch in anticipation of a trip to the Netherlands in a few months. To get a degree in chemistry, I had to have a reading knowledge of German as much of the literature was written in it (no more!!). German is very complex with all its declensions. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference between a direct object and an indirect object. Why would this be important? In chemistry, sometimes it is really necessary to know whether you are adding A to B or B to A. One misreading and you got an explosion. So far, Dutch looks like a cross between German and English with much simpler grammar and syntax than the former. However its pronunciation is giving me problems along with its spelling.

German: Ich bin eine Frau

Dutch: Ik ben een vrouw

Both are pronounced about the same though the German is more obvious