Spelchek in my computer doesn't know the verb to scunge. It keeps trying to change it to skunk. The dictionary in my computer says that scunge is an Australian noun meaning dirt, scum, or a disagreeable person (also in the Oxford Dictionary), related to the verb to scrounge. Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary (of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words) doesn't list it. It goes from scumble to scurfy without a pause. (My predictive editor is going crazy.)

Well, my father used the verb to scunge to describe the inactivity of a lazy person. One who scunges is one who lies abed in the morning, or who lounges around all day without doing anything. Anyone who knows me also knows that my father demanded that I justify my existence each day, so scunging was a very important word to him, defining how not to spend one's time. Scunging does not justify one's existence. However, sometimes it is very pleasant and even necessary. Even my father acknowledged that. For instance, I was allowed to and also encouraged to scunge the day after I finished exams. Of course, there are different levels of scunging: there's creative scunging, desultory scunging and hopeless, miserable, unhappy scunging. I like to think my scunging today has been creative. Besides, it's Saturday and if that weren't enough, tomorrow is Mother's Day.

Have a good one.

Well, it took over three hours but I have a new head and I'm very pleased with it. I asked for a student at Sassoon's (they have a school) because I wanted some time and attention and I got it. The student, Melina, was not a beginner. She works in a salon in Montreal and she took a course with Sassoon here in Toronto last year and came back for more. So she was already skilled and high motivated (her boss paid for the course). And the instructor, Paolo, was fantastic: gifted and attentive.

First, they cut off three years of an unwieldy length and I now have two hanks of hair to give to a cancer patient, have to find out where to take them. Then they chose a style; I received The Firefly. It's an interesting cut. Melina was careful and Paolo was meticulous , checking and setting the pattern at every layer she cut. Know what? I look better than the model in the style book, if you don't look at my face. She, of course, is younger and unwrinkled. But my hair has some natural curl to it so even after three years of being dragged down, it popped up into waves. I really do feel light-headed.

Isn't it delightful how something as ordinary as a haircut can lift your spirits and put spring in your walk? I was waiting for spring and now it's here. Aldous Huxley once said that man's hope is his capacity for irrelevance. Woman's, too. What could possibly be more irrelevant than a new arrangement of hair? It works for me.

I am so grateful to Melin and Paolo.