Yes, that’s right. Construction workers.

At the time I saw one, we were on the bus from Shikoku back to Kobe and I was a little tired and drained, so all that happened was Boone and I commenting on the samurai guy on the scaffolding in a magazine we were reading. The advert at the bottom of the page had a URL for tobi.jp. Sadly the website was all in Kanji, and I tossed it aside for later.

Later on, I found PingMag.jp, who had an old post on Construction Worker Fashion! They pretty much explain everything, so the only thing I have to say is that I am so jealous! The clothes those guys wear are totally awesome! Can you picture life in Chicago with our construction workers dressed like that? No more butt-cracks!

The shoes are called tabi and the pants are sagyo gi. The workers who wear this outfit are called “tobi”, after the pole used during the Edo period in Japan. The shape of the pole looks like the bird, Tobi, and as with all things, the nickname stuck and now scaffolding men and women, who work in high places, are called Tobi,

The Flikr stream has a nice run of the images that will probably explain why Boone and I found them so fascinating.

How Often Do You Cut Your Hair?
Since I’ve been in charge of my hair (which is to say the last 11 years I’ve lived on my own), I have been as regular as the two years I got my haircut on the second Tuesday of every month, and as lax as this last year (2008) where I think my hair was cut twice. My schedule depends on work, as hair cuttery is low on my list of things to do, and how much I feel I look like Rod Blagojevich. Thanks to his recent impeachment, I promise to keep it short.

How Do You Decide How Short To Cut Your Hair?
I don’t. I walk in, I say I want it short, and I live with what I get. I’ve found I get about the same results everywhere from the $200 salon (they also dyed my hair) and the $5 place around the corner. I really have no great perferances when it comes to my hair style past ‘Out of my eyes’ and ‘The back should be straight, with no natural hairline.’ Sometimes they use clippers, sometimes not. Either way, in about 4 weeks someone will tell me I need a haircut, and I’ll start thinking about it.

Worst Haircut Ever?
The bowl cut I got at 20. Seriously a mistake and it grew out into a baby mullet, which my best friend chopped off me. In my defense I was growing out the worst dye job ever. Blonde. BAD idea. Since then, I’ve only ever gone to ‘highlights’. And black. Second worst dye color ever.

Best Haircut Ever?
Aveda Salon. Seriously, I looked awesome and it was the best $50 I’ve ever spent. Second to that is Charles Ifergan, which will cost you about $60. I agree these places are worth the cost, but in this economy, the cheap-o $5 First Lady near my apartment will suit me fine. When we’re all rolling gold again, I’ll go back to Ifergan, probably.

The last two gifts my mother purchased for me were clothing, from Brooks Bros., and a Tivoli radio. Both gifts, though suggested by me, were a blend between her and me, and they fit me perfectly.

I need to thank my mother for suggesting I wear pink, by the way, because now I embrace and love the pink (unless it’s being worn by that hack who plays Lana Lang on Smallville, which, by the way, is all but dead to me except that I groove with Allison Mack, so I may tape it and fast-forward a lot). I own two pink shirts, a peach shirt, a pink vest, and a candy-striped pink/blue shirt from the GAP, which I got on my own and I totally rock, if I do say so myself. Cult of Girl, indeed. My mother was also a little surprised when she realized I use facial cleanser, daily, instead of soap and water (less zits!) and that I moisturized daily. I think she was pleased.

On the clothing issue, other than the shirts, we’re still at mild logger-heads. I hate skirts and I’m more stocky than anything else, so a lot of ‘popular’ clothes aren’t for me. I like preppy and ‘funky’. At work, I’m a consistent collared shirt and chinos girl. At home, I’m generally jeans and a t-shirt. We went out to a birthday dinner and I wore my nicest jeans, a black blazer, and my Girl from Double F Ranch shirt. I love glarkware, and if I could always wear his shit, I’d live happy. One of my favorite shirts from him is one that reads ‘Khaaaaaan!’ and it’s lovely to wear around the town, since you spot the real Star Trek Fans, give ‘em the Trekkie nod, and then move on without having to be all gushing nerd-girl.

And this is a nice segue into geekdom.

The birthday gift, which came just the other day, was a Tivoli RadioCombo. Now, Ipstenit has been making all sorts of annoyed faces about it, because it’s a ‘sing-y button thing’ and she’s essentially a Luddite. She doesn’t like new. She doesn’t like different. She also doesn’t like the blonde wood of the Tivoli, and she says the sound isn’t that much better. I (politely) disagree, but I acquiesced and left the old Sony boom box in the cabinet so she could use that if she wanted to. The only advantage of the boom box is the tape player, IMO, but that stereo doesn’t have decent audio output. I wanted to record the tapes onto my Mac and make them MP3, and my cousin offered to lend me his portable tape player so that I could record. So yay! I’ll do that this weekend.

Setting up the Tivoli was pretty easy, though I still don’t know how to open the fucking remote for the CD player, so I’m hoping the battery never dies. I don’t need the remote, so I’m not too fussed about it. The directions show you a graphic of (1) slide the battery holder left and (2) pull the tray forward. I can’t figure out how to do (1) and neither could Ipstenit, who’s better at those things than I am, so we said screw it.

I finally decided, by the way, when my clock radio dies, that I’m replacing it with the Songbook, also by Tivoli. I adore their Model 3 Clock/Radio, but I’m just not sold on the functionality of my mornings with it. It is prettier, though.

Once the stereo was set up in all its glory, Ipstenit headed out to a book club and I was left with the last step. A few weeks back, I mentioned the idea of a home theater system and how it wasn’t what I really wanted. What I do want, and what I now have, is a way to play music from my computer to my stereo.

The simplest way to do this, when you’re a Mac user, is Airtunes. Get an Airport Express ($125, but I had an Apple Store gift card for $75), plug it into your network, configure it, plug an standard stereo MINI 1/8″ to 1/8″ connector from the Airport to the stereo, and pull up iTunes. Bam. You’re done. There’s a jack for ‘Mixing’ on the Tivoli, but there wasn’t on my old stereo, damn the thing. Mac wants you to buy Monster Cable‘s products, but I did it all with Radio Shack for $20, instead of their $39 ‘stereo cable kit for Mac,’ and I also picked up a network cable. More on that in a moment.

Why is this important? It’s not really, but I have a lot of music on my spare hard-drive that I don’t have anywhere else. MP3s, soundtracks I’ve ripped off DVDs (that’s not illegal unless I sell it), and other digital recordings. A lot of these I do burn to CDs so I can have them around, but I spent all the time ripping my CDs so I could put them on my iPod and, damn it, I want to have them accessible. I also like the Tivoli speakers better than my crappy computer’s (seriously, my speakers are from 1980). And one more thing. Internet Radio. iTunes lets you use Shoutcast internet radio, which isn’t so much the wave of the future, but a nice way to listen to stuff your local radio stations don’t play. Moved to Saskatchewan and can’t listen to your favorite NPR station from Santa Monica? Now you can! I like internet radio, since while I’m a local NPR supporter, they pretty much only play Jazz at night, and sometimes I want to listen to Radio Persia.

The funny thing about all this, is that it took me about 40 minutes to unpack the Tivoli, read the directions, put it together and have it working. Most of that time was spent rearranging the audio cabinet to fit both stereos and moving the plugs a bit so the power strip was okay. It took me an additional 20 or so to wire the Airport and hook that all up, and then 10 more to use the ‘Setup Assistant’ on my Mac to teach it about the Tivoli, lock it down so only people with the password could get in, and at that point, I had KCRW on my radio.

That was funny because I don’t have a single computer with wireless capability, and I spent 45 minutes at the Mac Store arguing with the Floor Person about how I could too use the Airport without wireless. See, she was totally convinced that there was no way I could set up and/or use an Airport without a wireless card in my computer. I argued that didn’t make sense, since there was an Ethernet connection on the Airport, and I could just plug that into my hub. No, no, she said, I had to have a wireless card and an Airport hub for all that to work.

I stood there looking perplexed at her for a while. Inadvertantly, this gave her the oppertunity to wash over me the cheaper concept of using my giftcard for better headphones and just dragging my audio-out cable to the stereo. Well sure, that’s fine. I used to do that all the time. Until I scared the fuck out of myself when a webpage went ‘beep’ and my stereo blasted the sound and work up my flatmates (this was college, and I wonder if they ever forgave me for that…). Separation between music and ‘computer’ audio is a good thing.

In her world the setup can only go thusly: Plug Airport Express into wall. Airport Express auto-detects the Wireless Hub using Bonjour. Use your Mac’s wireless connection to connect to it via your wireless hub and configure the Airport Express. Walk through the setup (which is Apple so it’s easy), secure the connection. Open iTunes and enjoy.

My setup, which is correct, is as follows: DSL modem connects to Network Hub. Hub connects to Airport Express. Airport Express to stereo. ALSO, Hub connects to Macintosh. Once Airport and Mac are on the same hub, tell the Mac’s setup tool to find the Airport Express. Walk through the setup (which is Apple so it’s easy), secure the connection. Open iTunes and enjoy.

The reason I knew I was right was not just because I read on a Mac Forum that someone else had done it, but because I could comprehend what their own help page said. On the Airport Express main page, down under Extend your network, Apple says the following:

If you already have a wireless network in your home and would like to extend its range, AirPort Express is your answer.

There’s one word that should be your key to why I knew I was right. The word IF.

Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish and I know the lyrics to Dayenu, but that sentence means to me that Airport can be used without a pre-existing wireless connection. ‘If’ means ‘in the event that’ or ‘allowing that’ or ‘on the assumption that’ or even ‘on condition that’. If is a great big whether sort of statement. IF you have this, then you can do that. If Apple had only meant for you to use, set up, etc the Airport Express with everything wireless, then they’d say, explicitly ‘Airport Express can only be configured by a computer with a wireless network card.’ The fact that they have an Ethernet plug denies that. See, there’s no way in hell you’d make this without a way to plug in a wired only object. Like an Ethernet printer (which we have). You have to be able to connect wired and unwired. In fact, the Airport says outright that if you want to use it in a place without wireless (like a hotel room), just connect the wired cable to your Airport and then set up Airport to carry on.

Now, I admit, there was a chance that I was going to be wrong. That Apple was going to be phenomenally stupid and make it so that you could only set up an Airport with a wireless enabled computer. But I took a bet on Apple being smart enough to know that you may want to configure your Airport with a wired computer (let’s say the laptop died and all you have left is the old Power PC? Hmmmm). It’s safer, it’s more expandable, and it just makes sense.

And I wasn’t let down.

All I need now is a hot-pink Ethernet cable to make it all complete.

And, of course, those rumors of a remote control.

I started wearing them to work the next week, when I got home, and everyone complimented me on them.

And I liked it.

I liked the color, I liked the way it made me look, I liked all of it. God help me, I like pink. I even went and bought a pink, striped, shirt from GAP.

This is a big deal. I generally avoid patterened shirts. Not anymore.

I think I’m growing up.