Let’s start with the light things. Here is the phrase that German’s have for the Schwaebish that I learned from Diez:

“Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue” which translates to “work,work, build your house”

It’s true too.

This is the Stewardess Hat I was telling you about last week. Fabu, eh? This is my ‘Coffee. Tea. Or me?’ look.

Remember http://www.jamesryananderson.com ? Well the logon to his personal pages is texas and the password is bull. He gave me permission to tell you that. He’s had some entertaining adventures and interesting facial hair, so take a look.

Please check out my KAOS page to take a peak at some satisfied cookie eating customers. There are Jean-Francois’ children Chloe, 6 and Lucien, 11. Chloe’s unbiased opinion of my cookies was ‘Oh, des cookies! J’adore!'(pretty self-explanatory even in French). Lucien’s reaction was a bit more 11 year-old boy, ‘Je peux avoir deux?’ Roughly translated as ‘I can have two of them? ‘ Jean-Francois was one of my team members on the HUM project that went live this month. He is a great project manager and I learned a lot from him, though I bet he didn’t notice. He is a cool guy in general too. VERY cool hair.

Please also take a gander at my HAIR page as I have a shot of Figen, my colourist and her lovely assistant Philip. OK he isn’t officially HER assistant but he is a pre-graduate assistant who helped with my colour this time. They did a fine job dealing with my little colour mistake this week. I brought them a pink that was simply not pink enough and they didn’t want me to leave until it was fixed! So I came back and we tried again and now it is just fab. Philip has an interesting story too. His parents are hairdressers and he swore as a child that he did NOT want to follow in the family biz. But when he was 16 he went to a Toni & Guy show in Berlin with his dad and was knocked off his feet. When Anthony Mascolo came down the stairs the crowd went wild and Philip saw the amazing beauty in the work that Toni & Guy does. OK so he probably won’t do exactly what his parents do, they live in a village between Lake Constance and Stuttgart, so you can imagine their cliental, but he will keep the profession ‘Friseur’ (German for hairdresser masculine ) in the family. He is really cool and his English is just perfect. Figen has been all over German and took master classes at Vidal Sasson up north even. I speak German with her because her English is very limited and she is VERY nice to me about my German skills. I was trying to explain how we thought it would be really funny if Jack Osbourne came home one day and declared himself a born again Christian, but I couldn’t quite get the concept across. She’s very talented with colour and I highly recommend her.

Had a strange dream on Friday morning. I was at a school, it felt like college but very small. NIN was playing on campus and I had a ticket to go. Some people I knew wanted to trade tickets because they wanted a friend to sit with them. It was just an equal swap, they said, and since we weren’t friends, I just knew them, I agreed. The seat I got was F10. I remember that specifically. Anyhow, the seat ended up being like right up front! Some how. The weird thing was NIN had a brass section at this point. So there are playing and everyone is cheering and dancing and then on the last song, Trent jumps into the audience and disappears. And then the show is over. At this point, myself and another girl, whom I didn’t really know, are looking for Trent. Or rather how he got out. We sort of followed a path under the chairs that we think he crawled through. We went out one set of doors and it was the parking lot. Lots of people hanging around, not many people leaving. So then we go back inside and look at the path again only this time we go out another set of doors and find ourselves along the path the band takes to and from the buses (buses because remember NIN has a brass section now). Two bouncers rush up to us like they are going to throw us out, but they don’t. They get all smarmy and put their arms around us. Next the trombone player from the brass section comes out and walks over to me. I am still looking for Trent and can see him walking off toward the buses. The trombone player, who’s name I didn’t get, and I start talking and walking towards the buses. I am telling him about being a bando in High School and college and he is talking about being a trombone player in NIN. He is very sweet and seriously cute, so as we are walking along, we sort of lean over and kiss lightly. From behind me I hear Trent yell. ‘Heather and Blank sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G’. I turn and he is sitting in a convertible with a baseball cap on laughing at us. I sort of give him a dirty look and keep walking with the trombone player. It is so weird that he didn’t really have a name. Anyhow, the dream ended there. I woke up and thought ‘got to remember that’ and went over it in my head.

OK, so now, about my mom. She and I aren’t communicating real well right now. In fact, not at all and I am seriously pissed off. You all know about the boyfriend drama. Well, I am completely willing to admit that I feel threatened by him (not him the guy since I have never met him but him the concept because it has put my mom’s behavior in a new light) but I don’t think it is fair that my feelings and insecurities are being treated as if they are insignificant and wrong. I was actually told to go see a therapist while I was in SB over Christmas (so what if it was my brother’s idea, thanks Andy). None of us have seen this man professionally in over 15 years and why the hell do my feelings, as strong as they are, mean there is something wrong with me and I should see a therapist. Typical of my family to want to avoid dealing with each other and deal with a therapist instead. I have always been the confrontation type. Black sheep. Anyhow, I have been trying, on several occasions, to establish some special mom/daughter contact. I have offered to pay for a spa in Europe and a day at the spa in SF or just a trip to SF, a flight to NYC for Thanksgiving and for all these things I have gotten excuses. Once I got a comment of ‘it would be nice to go to the city with you’ but nothing of real substance. No commitment. A lot of talk about money. Pardon me, but I seem to think that I offered to fund most of this. No, ‘oh I want to see you but I can’t afford it, but if you were willing to buy the ticket, we could go X week in X month’. That would have been nice. That would have said ‘when I say I love you and Andy more than anything, I mean it and I am willing to back it up’. Of course I am going to get the criticism, ‘why does love have to mean money’. This has nothing to do with money. It has to do with time. What I have always asked from my parents and never got from my dad and seemed to get from my mom but on her terms and now when I ask for a little reassurance, I get excuses. It hurts. Terribly. A few years back, in our marriage, Patrick and I had a problem because he said that he loved me, but he wouldn’t actually do anything. He would just sort of sit there and wait for me to do something. Oh, but he loved me. It felt like he loved me like one loves a picture or a statue. I was there and thing for him to love and adore but not interact with. That isn’t a relationship to me. Might not even really be love, but that didn’t really matter because the problem wasn’t our love, it was out relationship. We solved that problem and now Patrick and I have all sorts of fun. Is my mom’s love like Patrick’s was? I am quite sure if something really significant happened to me, she would be at my bedside in a heartbeat, but does it have to come to that? Don’t people always regret not making the effort after that significant event has happened and it is too late? She said after she and Ken broke up and then got back together, that he articulates himself well and she doesn’t and it’s hard, etc. She made the effort with him. Why won’t she make the effort with me? Sure, I want to believe in the words I hear, but I learned young and continue to learn most days at the office, that talk is cheap and it is action, effort, and behavior, that really means something. So I am asking for some action, some effort, some behavior, on my dime if need be. I want to hear something like, ‘I really want to go to the city with you and be girls, let’s do it this day and I want to go here and there and maybe you can see if you can find a spa on-line cause I haven’t found anything and it’ll be great.’ I want to hear that instead of excuses. And I won’t even go into the other flat out rejections I have felt since the boyfriend appeared. We won’t go into the staying at the house thing or the ‘you better not come home’ comment. I’ll be willing to chalk those up to misspeak if I could just hear something reassuring now. See the effort now. If not. Well. Cheers.