The end of the year is here and it is my absolute favorite time and not just because I’m taking a couple of weeks of well-earned recreation. The beginning of a new year is an annual challenge to make of yourself a better person than you were the year before. We promise ourselves we will use that damn gym membership more, we will eat right and we will practice patience with everyone. Many succeed in wiping the slate clean and starting fresh and that alone gives me optimistic hope for my own modest goals in the coming twelve months.

Some may disagree, but I’ve made a concentrated effort to think before I speak, so as not to fire from the lip some hurtful or offensive comment. As I am an excitable and passionate person, this has not been honed to a 100 percent perfection rate, but I’m getting closer every year, and it is an annual challenge I make to myself. I’ll be perfect when I’m dead, but while still breathing, life is a series of challenges.

This is also a time of year when you look back at your accomplishments and failures of the previous year. Most try not to duplicate our failures and try new things that may succeed or not, but the joy is in the trying.

If you failed to quit smoking last year, here is a new opportunity. If you did not live up to your potential as a mother, father, sister, brother, wife or husband, there is another chance at improvement. That’s a gift we are given every day—to be better than the day before.

All of us have people we look up to for a variety of reasons. I greatly admire those people who never seem to get ruffled, emotionally or literally. It would be easy not to like those people who won the genetic lottery and are not only great looking people, but also never look mussed or sweaty or any of the other things we mere mortals contend with. Every hair always in place, clothes unwrinkled, makeup perfect, ties knotted securely and straight, cuffs clean, nails trim and tidy, and an air of supreme confident coolness when the temperature is 95 and the humidity absolute. How do they do it?

For the rest of us, we mainly concentrate on our best qualities and try to build from there. I’m not one of the cool confident unwrinkled people, but I try to dress nicely, even in casual clothes, and I am particular about my hair. I have good hair that waves on its own, has sufficient thickness, and is color highlighted by nature.

Given the roundness of my face, short hair is my best look. Ever since arriving to these shores, I’ve been looking for the person who could cut my hair in the way I knew it could be cut. The right cut puts no burden on me to do anything but keep it clean and before coming here the same person cut my hair for 12 years. When cut right, my hair falls into place as it dries with only a bit of finger combing on my part. I have endured a series of horrible haircuts (one particularly inept person actually cut a design in the back of my head). It became so ghastly that for more than two years, I just let it grow and piled it up on my head.

Recently, however, this has all changed. We got a new customer in the form of Karin Petersen and her LaRenaissance Day Spa & Salon. The person who had been cutting my hair modestly well departed, so I decided to give Karin a try.

Listen up people, she is an artist with a pair of scissors and maybe a therapist as well, since she first took the time to listen to my complaints about what has been lacking in my haircuts. She noted the cowlicks and special idiosyncrasies of my hair growth before cutting one hair. When I left, I knew I had “the cut,” and that’s a great way to start a new year.

Errata: Sigh. I almost made it through the entire year without having to acknowledge I’m capable of error. In the last edition of the paper, I mistakenly printed that John Mayer would be playing at Baytowne Wharf on New Year’s Eve. He will not be there and I regret the error.

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