Feeling a bit discouraged...

and no, this is not a shameless plea for encouraging comments, or maybe it is? :-)
I don't think I realized when we first put our house on the market what a toll this whole experience would take on my emotions. Its really hard to get so excited about a showing only to hear that the buyers' didn't like my house. Jared tends to rationalize their dislike and say, well, we don't exactly love the house either or we wouldn't be trying to sell it. True enough, but I can't help but take at least a small part of their dislike personally. We may be trying to sell this house, but it is our home. We've lived here for close to 7 years now and have a ton of memories tied up in this house. Is it wrong for me to get just a tad irked at someone who walks through it for five minutes and pooh-poohs it? Probably so. But I just don't get people. Take this one buyer for instance, they came through a couple of weeks ago and liked the house fine. But they wanted to look elsewhere b/c our neighbors had a bunch of clutter underneath their deck. Thats the feedback we received from the agent, seriously. I still don't even know how to respond to that. Anyway, I know its only been 2 months and I know the real estate market is down right now, yada, yada, yada. I'm just on the down swing of this emotional rollercoaster at the moment and needing to vent.

So, I went to get my hair cut last week...

which is something that I rarely do. Rarely here means 2-3 times a year. I just never really think all that much about it b/c I like my hair long and don't usually have a whole lot of time or desire to do much with it. Getting out of the door somewhat on time with three little ones has a tendency to reset my priorities. Anyway, so last weekend on my way to the grocery store, I decided to stop and get my hair cut since it had been, oh, 6 months since I had last had it done. Now normally, I try and go to a "real salon" since I don't go very often. However since this was a spur of the moment decision, I stopped at the first "no appt necessary" place that I saw in Cahaba Heights. Probably not the best choice I could have made. I'm fine with what the lady did with my hair. Like I said earlier, I wear my hair long with long layers so theres not a whole lot any stylist could do to mess it up. I just walked out of the place wondering what the manager could be thinking. A salon is a place of business where people go to be groomed, for lack of a better word. A person goes in with the desire to come out looking somewhat better than he/she did when he/she walked in. One would think that the stylists' appearance would be one of the top priorities of such a business. One would think that the stylists would dress and present themselves in such a way as to instill into their customers a strong confidence in their ability to make them look good. Yes, one would think. Apparently this is not the case at the particular establishment that I went to last week. Take my "stylist" for the afternoon for example. She was wearing no makeup. Her hair looked as if it had not been washed that morning. Her roots were clearly showing as were a couple of her tattoos. Her clothes were wrinkled with a slight aroma of cigarette smoke. She also seemed preoccupied with her cell phone. (I found out later it was b/c her ex-husband was late picking up their children from her mom's house.) All in all, she definitely did not look the part of someone who beautifies other people for a living. Again, let me say that I am fine with what she did with my hair. [Its not exactly hard to trim two inches...Jared has done that for me several times.] I just found myself looking around the counter for a comment card the entire time. In her defense, semi-groomed seemed to be the standard for all the stylists. Even the "manager" was wearing an 80s pink pantsuit, had dry, frizzy hair, and a definite smokers' voice. Needless to say, 6 months from now when I get my hair cut again, I'll definitely be going elsewhere, where appointments are necessary.