Ever have one of ‘those’ days? The kind where as soon as you wake up, you can sense that something is just a bit off? That maybe a bit of suffering might be in your immediate future?

Superbowl Sunday was just such a day for me. I woke up with that eerie feeling, so I did the only sensible thing. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

All I really had to do was clean up the house a bit, and catch a 2 PM flight. Flying would take up most of the rest of the day. But, since the sports team from my area wasn’t in the big game, I didn’t really mind missing the spectacle.

Anyway, I woke up again, and – feeling of dread or not – I had to get going, or I was going to miss my flight. I stumbled to the bathroom, noticed a grizzly-looking mountain man staring back at me in the mirror, and decided to give my beard a little trim.

I grabbed the trimmer, turned it on and started on the right side. After the first stroke, I gasped in horror. OH SHIIIITTT!!! I’d broken the number one cardinal rule of beard trimming – CHECK THE TRIMMER SETTING FIRST. Normally I set the trimmer to a comfortable ‘3’ , but somehow the damn thing was set to ‘0’!

And for that moment of inattentiveness, I had a nice smooth stripe of pink skin where my goatee used to be.

Great.

Well, now I had two choices. Leave things the way they were and walk around like a nutter recently freed from the loonie bin, or finish the job I’d accidentally started.

Before

After

Nobody likes a quitter. So in five minutes, I removed the rest of my facial hair. For the first time in over 11 years, I saw my chin. Yeech!

Between flights, I stopped at a bar in the Minneapolis airport to watch the halftime show. Ordering a beer, I was carded for the first time in 11 years! Hmm… maybe this clean shaven thing isn’t so bad after all.

That good feeling quickly faded when the bartender carded a 65 year old man that sat down next to me. Yeah, everyone gets carded at that bar.

Ah well, it’ll grow back.

Author: frenchy