A haircut and a laundry crisis - aka My Weekend, by Me

On Saturday, I got a deep conditioning treatment on my hair, and had it blow dried straight. I've got a new stylist, since the woman I was going to (whose illusions I shattered regarding "Renaissance hair") unexpectedly left the salon to find a job down in St. Pete where she lives. They're giving me 20% off all services and 10% off all products for the first 3 visits with the new stylist, and this new woman talks a lot less than the first one, so I figure I'm ahead of the game.

On the down side, my washing machine broke mid-load last night, on the last load of laundry. So after I dropped John off at school, I took the sopping wet laundry, in a bucket, into the local wash/dry/fold and will be picking it up at noon.

Now those durn furriners are ruinin' us....

.. by not bein' here.

But, as a co-worker points out, there's this perception that *we're* doing *them* the favour when they come here and pick the food that we've decided we must have.

Piles and piles of rotting fruit, due to California labour shortages:

Some economists and advocates for farm workers say the labor shortages would ease if farmers would pay more. Lake County growers said that pickers’ pay was not low — up to $150 a day — and that they had been ready to pay even more to save their crops. “I would have raised my wages,” said Steve Winant, a pear grower whose 14-acre orchard is still laden with overripe fruit. “But there weren’t any people to pay.”

The California Farm Bureau's take:

Kelseyville, where much of Lake County's pear growing and packing is centered, has a total population of about 3,000. During the harvest that's just wrapping up, Scully said the community pitched in to help in the crisis. Retired people, stay-at-home moms and high school kids have been filling some jobs in the packinghouses, but she said the picking on 12-foot ladders needs to be done by experienced workers.

If the border crackdown continues without a guest worker program, she said, "most family farmers around here will go out of business."

"Do people want to maintain the high-quality food supply we have in this country?" Scully asked. "If they do, then they need to recognize that some agricultural areas need a way to get skilled workers, particularly from Mexico.

"These people aren't immigrants. They come here and work and then go home to their families and the country they love."

Memo to the PTB

No-one needs to be able to keep meat in their boardroom. Nor cheese, either.

I'm now drinking hot chocolate. In September. In Florida. After going outside to thaw out post-meeting.

I hate being a lizard.