Gorgeous Me

I forgot a funny that happened to me Thursday evening.  When I left work and mounted the bicycle for the trip back to the parked car, it was so warm I left my sleeves rolled up, used my handkerchief as a neck-shield stuffed in the back of my helmet, and dug out the tube of sunscreen and slathered it on my arms and exposed face liberally.
After I got back to the car and started home I stopped at Sams Club and Wal-Mart for a couple items.
Now, when on the bike I'm always wearing the ugly bike helmet.  Otherwise when outside and walking around invariably I wear my much better looking straw cowboy hat, which makes me one of a dwindling minority nowadays.  This day I noticed several women looking at me interestedly as they passed me, and after several had taken a seemingly unusual interest in looking at me as they passed, I thought "Must be the cowboy hat, they don't see many of those these days."  I was back in the car and backing out of my parking space when I happened to notice my reflection in the rear-view mirror:  I had BIG splotches of white sun-block in odd spots on my nose and cheeks.  I looked rather like a clown that had applied his face paint while intoxicated.  Heh.  So much for my good looks enhanced by the cowboy hat.
Which reminds me of a typical guy-geek story several years earlier:  My supervisor up at Los Alamos was attending a singles dinner at his church.  He had gone home from work, noted the time, and realized he had time to do a little work on his race-boat out in the garage.  Donning goggles and gloves, he set about using a bench grinder and wire wheel to clean a set of intake and exhaust valves from his disassembled Chevy race engine from the boat.  When it was time to go to the dinner, he went in, cleaned up, and showed up at the dinner.  As he made his way through the chow-line filling his plate, he noticed all kinds of people looking at him strangely.  He was newly divorced and thought all the attention must be due to his newness to the group.  People continued to stare at him while he ate, so he finally got up, went to the restroom, and looked himself over in the mirror.  To his chagrin he realized he had cleaned everything up except his FACE:  He looked like a raccoon in the mirror.  His goggles had protected his eyes but the rest of his face was almost black with grease and grime..... (sigh).  What can a fellow male say about such a thing?  It's not like it's never happened to US