Locks of love

Yesterday LL got a major haircut! Her plan has been, necessarily for some time, to grow her hair out enough that she could donate it to Locks of Love when it was chopped off. Logistically, this was a much more difficult process that you might otherwise imagine. Consider these constraints:

1) Locks of Love requires 10 inches of hair for a donation


2) LL wanted enough hair left on her head afterward to still look like a girl

3) LL had two big weddings to participate in recently (her sister and her roommate), for which she wanted, needless to say, freakin' awesome hair


4) As the months wore on, she wanted this done ASAP!


She worked all this out with her hairdresser, Olympo, and they came up with a strategy for getting it trimmed just before each of the weddings (enough to be manageable, but not so much that constraints #2 and #4 would be violated). And finally, our string of weddings ended last week, meaning this weekend it was time. Here goes...



Here she is getting a little pre-measurement done. Can you see why she was ready to chop it off? I mean, it's a beautiful head of hair, don't get me wrong! But such long hair is hard to manage and hard to dry. We're probably going to save several dollars a month on electricity now that the hair dryer and Chi don't have to run for 30 minutes, meaning we will recoup the cost of this haircut in just a few lifetimes.

Olympo first put her hair in a pony tail so that he could take another measurement and decide where to chop. He would end up close to the 11 inch mark, making LL a super-donator.

AHHH! Isn't that nuts! Olympo just sawed off my wife's hair. And "sawed" is probably the best verb to use as he had to work the scissors for 30 seconds or so to get through it all. Well...no turning back now.

Here's Olympo and LL. Something like an hour has past between the last photo and this one. Olympo cut off a lot more hair, as you can see below...

I think this is called a "bob." I don't really know where that comes from (I only recently found out what a "Rachel" was...you know, 10 years after everyone had one). It's a pretty dramatic change though. I think even I would notice without her having to say (in a completely exasperated monotone), "Clay, I got a haircut today. What do you think????" It also helped that I went with her to witness the haircut, so I could not later forget and embarrass myself by saying something like, "You look different. Are those new pants?"

So everyone make sure you tell her how much you like her hair!