My Oscar-winning haircut

The title isn't in my words, but my sweet friend's. I'll let you be the judge. What do you think?

Yes. I look sad. But I am refusing to smile with the braces on right now after the girl who lives in the basement condo below us asked if I was a high school student yesterday. Seriously? I do not look like I'm in high school (which I realize seems like an eternity away to this girl, who is probably about 11), and if I were in high school, where are my parents? I live with a boy in a condo and go to high school? Kids.

Anyway. I really, really like it. I'm still adjusting to it, and sometimes I miss my long hair, but it's curling up really nicely now and the short length is forcing me to actually style it. It frames my face, and I really can do a lot with it. I'm glad I chopped it off. Here's a view from the back:

See? Curly and fun. I actually had no idea what it looked like from the back, so I'm glad Andrew took this for me. In fact, I'm glad that it looks this good today. I had an awful morning in which I forgot to wash the conditioner out of my hair and then had to bend over the faucet to rinse it out when I was already almost late to work. Needless to say, it did not get the care it needed this morning.

It has been an interesting week. We've now had family with us off and on for a month. Fortunately, Reggie has made a full recovery and will be going home (hopefully) next week. We're happy that he's feeling so much better and are grateful for your prayers and thoughts.

One parting thought. I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker yesterday when I discovered a document with a bunch of spelling/grammatical errors that was about to go out in a divisional newsletter. The document had already gone out to one team, and she was upset that I would "waste my time" finding the original document, fixing all the errors, resaving it as a PDF and sending it back to the team so it could be uploaded to the Web again.

It bothered me because she absolutely did not care that there were errors in it and that a whole bunch of people had gotten an important document that was flawed -- and she thought that my job, editing, wasn't worthwhile.

I know that I am a grammar nazi and most people are not, but spelling and grammar are important. Imagine if your favorite book had no punctuation. Think about how you feel when someone misspells your name (OK, maybe that doesn't bother you, but it bothers me). It signifies that a person was too careless or in too big of a hurry or -- heaven forbid -- too ignorant to do something right. Our insurance agent misspelled my name on all of our documents even after we told him several times to fix it -- and guess what. We don't have that agent anymore. That obviously wasn't the only reason, but it was just one of the ways he showed us that he didn't care about us.

I'm not saying that everyone who spells something wrong or splices a comma is careless or ignorant. Sometimes you spell someone's name wrong because you have no idea how it's spelled -- or because someone told you the wrong spelling. But taking the time to spell and punctuate things correctly, on the other hand, shows that you care and you want whatever you're working on to be flawless.

OK, that's enough from Grammar Girl tonight. Just wanted to put that out there. My job does matter! :)