04.14.09 - 10:22 am

i failed to record two other events that were particularly important.

the masseuse.

she was a tiny woman, probably mid forties. lorinda smith. she had lived all over the country; just packing up and moving until her mother died. she was given her mothers beautiful wooden chest, and thats where her travels ended. it was too big to tote around in her car. phoenix is where she stayed. i told her julie and i were looking to buy a house in carefree. we had moved from oregon to capitalize on the poor housing market. knowing that houses cost upwards of one million dollars in carefree, when i told her that i owned a marine fish maintenance company i wonder how ridiculous it must have sounded to her.
regardless, my first massage was awkward and yet enjoyable. compliments of julies expertise in seeking out deals for online packages, i let her talk and talk while her hands did peculiar things. for the first ten minutes of my thirty minute massage, she just laid one upright palm on my neck and the other on my lower back. and just held them there. like she was creating some invisible goal posts. eventually she really got to work and it was very enjoyable. soft music, dim lights, wet hot towels. it sounds much more hypoerotic than it really was.
meanwhile julie got her haircut and had lengthy conversations about my hair loss with her gay stylist. he would later sit next to me and ask me why i was only using the nioxin shampoo and not the conditioner as well. according to him, when the bottle says "it gives 9 out of 10 men the PERCEPTION of thicker hair" it really means its scientifically proven to regrow it. pffft.

the speller.

julie and i had tentative plans for what to do next with ashton as we left the swimming pool. the zoo was on our list. maybe a movie. but both were to be sort of a pleasant surprise to him. so while discussing them outloud with ashton at our feet, we used their spellings to decide what we were going to do.
and that little boy, with his exponentially increasing ability to read, listened to us spell out Z O O and M O V I E and was able to decode them. he excitedly asked us if we were going to the zoo and the movies. i was shocked, surprised and pleasantly proud of his internal reading skills.