Smooth Talker

Hello World,      Well, in so many ways, it seems like I've just gotten back from my vacation, and yet here it is, almost the middle of August already. Time certainly does just go charging along, when you can't be bothered paying attention to it, and suddenly whole months have gone by, and you don't know where you're at anymore. I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't done any camping laundry, even now, and everything I brought home from the campground is still piled up in the den, or outside in front of the garage. This is still very much a work in progress, and it's obviously going to take a considerable amount of work, before we can see any real progress in the whole picture, that's for sure. Realistically, I think the time has come to have a separate vacation crew that takes care of all of the pre-event planning and post-event wrap-up, so I can just focus on going to the park and enjoying the week, without all of the headaches that go along with it.     One thing that I actually did get done after vacation (and that can only be chalked up to Bill, in reality) is that I went to the hair salon, and their very competent professionals made short work out of my frazzled and woe-begotten hair, until I was ready to face the world again. Coming back from my week in the woods, my hair is nothing but an ugly tangled and ratty mess of too much sun, salt water, seaweed, soap, sand, and worse - and even more so, grabbing it all together, and putting it up in one big plastic clip, with no thought for the details. After a week like that, there's no managing it once I get home (and the Reunion as an extra additional on top of everything else was no help either, believe me) and I throw myself on the nice ladies at the hair salon and hope for the best. Frankly, I don't know how they do it, but they somehow manage to get all the knots out - plus the accumulation of seaweed, insects, leaves, twigs, and other campground paraphernalia, thank you very much - trim off the disreputable split ends, manhandle it into shape, and make me look like a super model walking out the door of the shop, rather than the derelict vagabond that walked in at the beginning. In fact, I mentioned to Bill that after their attentions, my hair was so soft and smooth (like a pampered bunny rabbit) that the plastic clips wouldn't even stick to it, they slid right off onto the floor, which somehow manages to be both good and bad at the same time, thanks not.     In other local news of the post-vacation sort, one unexpected happenstance was an oddly rag-tag gathering of young nerds holding down a conference room and hallway off the side of the Crowne Plaza's main entrance. If you came in the front door and took the elevators up to your room, you would never have any idea they were even there. But if you parked in the hotel's parking garage, as we did, you would have no choice but to fight your way through them every time you came in or went out - and after 3 days, that really lost its charm, I can tell you that. Little by little, we found out they called themselves Defenders of the North, and were based on a television show running on a cable channel for young people. Mostly it just looked like a sea of humanity in hoodies, but it also turned out that they included some costumed characters as well (selfies with Dude Man, anyone?!) and it can't be denied that for 3 whole days, they seemed to be having a great time. I can't say if it was expensive or not, but they certainly didn't seem to lose anyone over the course of our stay there - and I can also state quite confidently that all of the regular hotel guests, who ran the gauntlet of them in and out from the parking garage, found them extremely diverting and often worth a trip over there for no particular reason at all. In retrospect, this is one of those things I would describe as an unexpected but powerfully addictive secret ingredient, which might make all the difference.     Meanwhile in recent work news, I had sent a spare copy of an open invoice from 2016 to one of our property management big-wigs, with the hope that he would do something about it. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but getting it paid would be the ideal situation in my estimation.) His email service at work had kindly and promptly responded to my note, and very carefully explained that he was on vacation, and would be out of the office from Monday, July 30th, and up to Friday, July 10th (???) and expecting to return on Monday, July 13th. (Not without some sort of cartoon time-travelling machine, I'm thinking.)  In the rosy bloom of innocent expectation, I had sent the message to him during the previous week, on July 27, and received an automatic broadcast email back from his account on Monday, July 30th instead. Frankly, I was fine as far as it went, but after that, things went a bit haywire on the whole email front, and without any of the year markers to narrow it down, I couldn't piece together when he actually intended to return afterward. Unfortunately, the next time I found a Friday the 10th and Monday the 13th after August would be May 2019, and that really did seem like too long to wait for this way overdue invoice from 2016 at this point. It's now a couple of weeks later, and I have not heard from him yet, and although I am resisting giving way to despair, I admit that I don't care for the whole direction that things have been going in, I can tell you that. Luckily for me, I figure that I can turn to the professionals at the barbershop if all else fails, and those ladies would soon have everything put to right and caught up to date. He'll have to find a way to hold onto his own hair clips, though. Elle