A Hairy Situation

When I started working in the autumn of 2004 I found that getting up at 5:15 was rather exhausting. It meant for 8 hours sleep I had to be in bed at 9:15. That's a really hard schedule to maintain. I started getting lazy and looking for corners to cut. I got lazy with shaving. I would normally shave every two or three days, but it ended up being a weekly affair.

After a while I noticed that, unlike my earlier years, my facial hairs were growing somewhat consistently and evenly. I have never been able to grow a beard before. Even though my dad's two brothers have both had beards for as long as I can remember, dad was never able to grow a beard until later in life. And even then, it wasn't as nice as his brother's beards. This time my hairs came in somewhat evenly.

I was never really sure if I liked the beard. Since I'm really lazy and didn't perform any maintenance on it it got pretty disheveled looking. At first I would ask people what I thought of the beard. I was looking for a majority to either like it or not like it. That way I could get an obective answer to the question "Does it look good or not?" But it was pretty nearly a 50/50 split. It seemed as though for every person that liked it, there was someone who didn't. But as it grew and got messier the scales tipped towards those who didn't like it.

So I decided to shave it.

Now, gentlemen, here's a little tip in case you wish to grow a beard, then decide to shave it. First, get some scissors and trim your beard down, and throw the hairs away in the garbage. Do not attempt to shave the whole thing they way you shave(d) every morning, letting the little hair bits go down the sink. Because that's what I did, and let me tell you it took forever to shave.

Furthermore, the sink got clogged. This, btw, took place shortly after the bath tub incident. We just finished getting the tub cleared and now the sink was all clogged up. Just before I had shaved, Bruce had cleaned some paint-stained items in the same sink. I figured it was a combo of the paint and the hair. (But after my next attempt at a beard over a year later and clogging another sink I realize it was just the hair.)

So, back to Hans to borrow the snake. The snake didn't work as well. Of course I spent a lot of time with the plunger. Lots of ugly stuff came up, even some bits of plastic. But the sink wouldn't drain any better. It was still draining, but really really slowly.

So, off to Zellars to get some liquid plummer. This time I bought a few bottles knowing we'd probably need some in the near future. I bought some of the regular Liquid Plummer as well as the Industrial Strength Liquid Plummer. I had to use the industrial strength stuff because I was pouring it into a sink with standing water. This did clear the sink up.