Thursday, July 31, 2008

Does this mean summer is over??

Sigh. The pink highlights are gone. They had faded to blond mostly a couple of weeks ago, so I had started getting my hair wet in the pool which sped up the process. When I noticed on Tuesday that the pink was finally gone from my bangs, I knew that I had to dye my hair back. Paul says me reverting back to my natural color signifies that summer is really over. I think he's right.


Yesterday I bought some "soft black" hair color at Walmart. Today LaRae helped me to dye my hair back to its natural shade. I'm not sure it even looks natural. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what natural looks like on my hair right now. I think the perm then the relaxer and then the summer sun had lightened my hair a little. Not helping matters, when I first got the pink, the girl bleached in too many highlights and covered some with brown. Yes, you read that right -- brown, not soft black -- thus creating hot pink and brown lighter than my natural hair color highlighted chunks. It wasn't too noticeable, and so I loved it! Anyways, my hair obviously looked a LOT lighter after the highlights. Now since I've had the blond highlights (chunks) for a couple of weeks, my hair has looked really light, so going back to black is really weird. What do you think?
In a sense, I look in the mirror now, and I think, "ah, there you are! It's good to see Joanna again." Already though (less than 12 hours since the dye job), I am missing the girl with the hot pink highlights. I am missing the looks I would get walking through a store. I still giggle thinking about when I flew into GA right after I got the pink highlights. I was walking through the airport with Sprinkles (in his awesome Ed Hardy-esque dog carrier) in his bag on my shoulder and listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my iPod when I noticed people kept looking at me. Perhaps it was my cool grace, my confident stride, my amazing bag they all envied (after all I was "the girl with the amazing petflys dog carrier), my sweet puppy sticking his nose against the grates on his bag, or even my sweet little pink iPod shuffle that caught their attention. I didn't figure out why people were staring until my mom's eyes immediately zeroed in on my hair when I walked up! I was so used to it already that I was clueless. I can't believe it, but I miss the attention. I miss feeling like I was daring enough to finally do something totally out of the norm for most people -- something that would prompt people to say things like, "that totally rocks my face off" or "I've always wanted to do that but I'm not cool enough to pull it off" or "wow that's awesome!", etc. Always good reviews. (On a side note: I'm not cool enough to really pull it off, I just have always wanted to do it and went for it!) It was nice. Black hair doesn't exactly turn heads though, does it?
That expression doesn't quite have the same fun effect that it did in the picture of me with the pink highlights a few blog entries lower than this one now does it? Oh well, I'm embracing weird faces for the camera though -- here's another:
I'll get used to being normal again. I honestly really do like the black shade that my hair turned out. There's a bit in my bangs that still has a hint of red tones if you look closely, and in the back underneath there are a couple of blondish patches that don't show unless you dig for them. The cover up job was a success! Thank you, LaRae! The giggles that ensued from coloring my hair built a fun memory that made it so much easier to say goodbye to crazy fun hair color (even though it had already faded out). I love you! Thanks!
Finally, for those skeptics out there who don't believe that the color in these pictures is my natural hair color, I'm going to put up one more picture. This one is me student teaching my last semester at HU. (I was 22.) Ignore the horrid bags and shadows around my eyes. I was soooo busy, sleep deprived, and stressed at that point. I'd recently had surgery on both hands and was still teaching after only a week of recovery, so it was a bit crazy there for a while. :-)
Now I feel like I'm ready to go back to teaching. I'm ready to dive into putting my classroom back together and to delve into Geometry (which I'm teaching this year -- hurray!). Well, let's take baby steps actually -- I'm ready to start getting ready to go back to work. Give me another week to be ready for kids. :-)
On a quick side note - the assistant principal in charge of dress code is using a lot of my pics of my pink highlights for the slide show about what is NOT ok to wear. :-) She said she'd try to work in who it is in the pictures to give me some advance "street cred" with my kiddos. LOL. I'll also have the pictures up in my screen saver that ends up coming up during class, and I know they'll be in the staff slide show of our summer fun at in-service, so at least more people will get to see that I actually went through with it and was daring!
I'm signing off for now. Hopefully I can keep my blog up to date a little better. I've been spending a lot of my time lately learning PhotoShop and making designs for t-shirts for the DISboards. I know it's a silly excuse to not update, but it's been really fun! The link to my photobucket with my designs is in the last blog entry -- I've added a lot, so go check it out!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

I'm a Moron!

It's 1:23 am. I am sitting here with Sprinkles asleep beside me, except for when he is woken up by me giggling or exclaiming over what just happened to me. I have to share with the blogosphere -- he doesn't understand English. :-)

I've been spending a lot of time learning Photoshop over the past week or so. LaRae got me started looking at designs (DISigns) on a Disney message board, and while some DISigners will make t-shirt DISigns for people for their trips, I decided to try my hand at making my own. So I've got this handy trial version of Photoshop CS3 on my computer, and I'm hardcore learning the ropes. We're talking made my DISigns for t-shirts for EVERY day of my trip, stayed up numerous nights until 3 am, and dream about new things I want to try and do once I do go to bed. (Here's the link to my DISigns if you are interested... notice multiple albums. I AM NOT selling these designs. I am using them for MY personal shirts. I do not produce them in mass, nor do I sell the shirts. Just thought anyone reading this should know... lol.)

I have finished my DISigns for our Disney trip in January. (I want to make my shirts before summer is over, so they'll be ready before I start really working again.) Tonight I'm just playing around in Photoshop while watching TV. I'm big on keyboard shortcuts, so I am using them but not paying super good attention. I finally figured out how to make Tinkerbell "sit" on my name without lots of trouble, and I go to type my text layer of "Joanna" and the "J" and the "O" will not type. No space, no nothing... will not type. The lower case "j" and "o" are showing as "1" and "6" though. Hm... I try it again... still not working. I figure Photoshop has a glitch, so I open Word. Nope, still not working. (Mark it -- time is about 11 pm at this point!)

Panic is starting to rise! (I bet some of you have already figured out the issue, haven't you??) I decide to try to type all the letters on the keyboard (upper and lower case), and the 7, 8, 9, -, u, i, o, [, j, k, l, ;, ', m, ., and / are not working. They are however typing numbers instead of some letters and making my cursor jump about the page. (Oh yeah, some of you really just figured it out, eh??)

I am in full on panic mode now! I am envisioning taking my district-issued laptop to the hell that is summer tech support. They do a great job, but in the summer time, if you have a laptop issue, you might as well kiss your laptop goodbye because work orders take a while! Can I stop and mention that I am actually really tech-savvy? I am good with computers! I pick up computer stuff really fast! So I decide I can fix this on my own. Granted, I can't just try restarting because my logon uses a lot of those "missing" letters, so I start doing virus/malware and spyware/grayware scans figuring that one of the fonts I downloaded might have had a virus. Well that's taking FOREVER, so I decide to search on my control panel, figuring that somehow the key assignments for my keyboard have been messed up. Keep in mind: I can't really type; all I can do is click with my mouse!

Ah, the panic! I am in a cold sweat. I have sat up completely on the couch - this is serious...no more lying about! I am trying to think of ANYONE who might be up at midnight (mark it!) that could possibly help me... no one comes to mind. I decide to persevere.

Wait! I recall and find the character map. I use it to slowly "type" out my search query for google, and I search for an explanation of what has happened along with a solution for how to change my key assignments back. By 12:30 I still have not found anything. I am honestly spazzing HUGELY internally! In my mind's eye I am running circles waving my arms about my head -- in reality, I'm sitting on the couch frantically typing and clicking away whist exclaiming to Sprinkles that his mommy is a moron and has broken her computer! I'm also betting that my computer will come back from tech support minus a lot of files I need, so I'm really starting to panic that I have to fix my computer myself!

Eureka! As I'm speed reading around 1 am I see something about keys with letters that have numbers on the front or something... What?! I look at my keys -- moron! Your keys on a laptop have the ability to "number lock" them to have the number keypad. I never use this feature because I have a USB number pad that I plug in for entering grades and such. If you haven't guessed it by now, at 1:20 am I pressed one simple key, the one that says "NumLk" on it and turned off the number lock thus enabling me to type normally again. Yep. I'm a moron. Right as I pressed that key, my virus scan popped up to tell me I did not have any malware, viruses, spyware, or grayware. Hurray! My computer is safe and usable!

So here I sit fully awake (because that freaked me out) and feeling stupid. Sprinkles is asleep draped over the edge of the arm of the couch. He woke up for a bit after I laughed (a bit maniacally) when I figured out the issue. He doesn't really care. Oh well. I guess it just goes to show you that the biggest problem on your computer can be something super simple. :-) Or that for a smart girl I can be sort of dumb sometimes.