bang you're dead
Well, this sucks: I find the one hairdresser in Seattle who consistently cuts my hair the way I actually ask for it to be cut, and then . . . she moves. Well, she opened a new Bang Seattle salon in Belltown, and for a while I thought that meant I could no longer have her cut my hair. When I had Casey cut my hair the first time, at the Pine location between 12th and 13th -- literally two blocks from home -- it was October 2014, two blocks from home. I learned yesterday Bang had been open for business only two years at that time; now it's been seven, and she has a newer location on Lower Queen Anne near Eastlake and she opened a Belltown location just this year. In fact, she was busy with the opening of that store and I could not make an appointment with her when I had my haircut in April, and . . . yet again, the woman I had cut my hair instead left it longer than I really wanted. It's harder to tell right when the haircut has occurred, but by yesterday, it was definitely longer than I typically want it to get after the requisite six months. But, I still only had to go to a salon two blocks from home.
Well, on my bicycle commutes home from work this past spring and summer, I happened to notice the new Belltown location, and rather than being inconveniently far from me as I had assumed, it's right there on 2nd and Vine, and I was riding right past it on my way home. It's not so hard to switch to that location after all. I made an appointment with Casey for this week and she cut my hair yesterday, for the first time in a year.
This may still be the last time I go to Bang or Casey though. Haircuts with her are really expensive; that first one in 2014 cost me $66 with tip; every haircut I've done since I have budgeted $70 for. It's the reason I stopped getting my hair colored professionally, so I could better justify such an expensive haircut, rather than spending, say, $160 for a cut and color.
I was rather dismayed to discover when I went to pay for my haircut yesterday, though, that the price went up -- to $81. That's before tip. I still gave a 20% tip and so that took it up to $97.20.
Now. There is one clarification to make here, which is that "long hair" haircuts have two-tiered pricing, one for "medium long" and one for longer; it's a difference between $63 and $81. I suspect in the past I was charged the "medium" price, which makes the budgeted $70 with tip sound a lot more reasonable -- by comparison, anyway. I already noted my hair was longer by yesterday than I ever wanted it to be, and the cashier even asked Casey if this was a "long" haircut and that's what I got charged.
But, these are all just details. And I get what Casey has told me about cost-per-square-foot rent for business in Seattle (she owns and operates the business). I even get when she told me about working at Rudy's years ago and how the $17 haircuts she gave there (Rudy's actually charges closer to the $30-$40 range now) meant she had to give like 25 haircuts a day just to pay rent and it was exhausting. Even with all that in mind, and even factoring in inflation -- nearl a hundred bucks for merely a haircut is honestly insane. I still struggle because she has always cut my hair better than anyone else in Seattle ever has, but I just can't justify paying that price again. I even really like her as an individual, but I also understand simple supply and demand: she's growing her business and doing fine; plenty of other people are clearly more than happy to pay her these prices. My not returning isn't going to break her. I will miss her, though.
Danielle once told me about a hairdresser she goes to in Renton she really likes, and I am now actually considering traveling all the way down there for my next haircut in April. Paying cheap prices often yields a "you get what you pay for" result, and that applies to Seattle where even the cheapest things are sometimes prohibitively expensive. I figure I can get nearly the same quality I am used to in the suburbs at a much more reasonable price. I mean, we'll see. But I'm going to try. I even put a reminder in my Google Calendar to book a hair appointment in April with Danielle's stylist instead of going to Bang.
My current budget isn't too horribly impacted, at least. That was $17 more than what I had budgeted, and Karen had to cancel both this week's lunch and the one on the 24th, but we scheduled a new one for Friday next week -- placing it barely outside my current budgeted pay period. Dinner with Lynn and Zephyr Monday night was about $8 less than I had budgeted as well, so my current budgeted balance is hardly altered at all between all these things. Well, except I did have to order another bottle of Resolve carpet cleaner from Amazon. Guru's hobby of barfing continues unabated.
Okay, So, I got back to my computer after eating lunch in the kitchen, and, as has happened several times at always unpredictable intervals, moving the mouse so the blank screen-saved screens come back just yielded ... nothing. I could do literally nothing to get my screens to respond, leaving me with no recourse but to press the power button continually until the computer shut off, and then turn it on again.
Today was a bit different, though -- as in, worse. The bitlocker PIN screen came up, I entered it; the swirling circle appeared as though "thinking" until regular startup . . . and then it's back to just the same black, unresponsive screens again! I went through this three times before the screen where I could actually put my username and password in came up. And then, even after that, it went back to the bitlocker PIN screen again! What the shit? I did pull out power cords from the back of the laptop before restarting that last time, though, and maybe that made a difference; finally it came back on again.
The thing is, though, by the time I finally had everything back and running properly again, fully half an hour had gone by. I would have had this posted half an hour ago if not for this bullshit.
There's not much else I can tell you anyway -- I walked the rest of the way home from Bang; helped Shobhit with the last of preparing for a salad so huge we had it for dinner as well as lunch today and probably lunch tomorrow; we watched this week's episode of Succession. After that I spent some time working on captioning photos from the Las Vegas trip, which I'm still not done with. That was a three-day trip, and I still have the third day's photos to caption. By far the most photos were from the middle day, though -- the one full day there -- so I'm almost done, at least.
[posted 1:11 pm]