The only thing we have to fear is beard itself

I don't think I've mentioned this to more than a couple people, but my boss - effectively out of nowhere - decided that we should have a beard-growing contest at work. Yeah, I don't know either, but if there's one way to guarantee my participation, have a stupid contest that I can be good at without having to do much of anything. As you may already be aware - check out some cola or root beer taste test pictures from last winter if not - I'm pretty hairy, particularly on my face, but aside from the goatee area I've never gone more than a week or so without shaving. So this should be interesting. And probably itchy.

We're taking weekly status photos, so I figured I'd post them here. Gives me some actual Flax-related content for a change, instead of complaints about shitty writers or goofy news commentary.

Week One

One of the guys had the idea that we should hold up that day's paper; I'm not sure why, since you can't even read the date and I'm not sure how anyone was supposed to be "cheating." It'd be one thing if I held a beard contest on this site and made people hold up that day's paper to prove they hadn't shaved ahead of time to get a growth head start. Everyone in the contest works in the same office, so I don't think anyone was really going to be able to pull that one off. It just makes us look like hostages. Note that even though I had shaved maybe five hours earlier, you can already see a five o'clock shadow.

Week Two

I think it's just the shirt, and possibly the way I'm standing and/or my distance from the camera, but doesn't it look like I put on 20 pounds in a week? Awesome. And yeah, this is me having gone a mere week without shaving. Considering this is as long as I let it go before shaving in any normal situation, I'm a little scared to see what it's going to look like in another week. I'm just hopeful I don't get mistaken for an escaped primate and dragged off to Brookfield.

Here's where you, the viewers at home, come in. This isn't merely a growth contest; at the end of a month, the rest of the department will vote on whose beard is the best, including such elements as style. Simply trying to out-hair (what?) the rest of the crowd isn't going to be enough (especially since, improbably, I may be only the second-hairiest guy taking part). So feel free to make suggestions in the comments as to styles I could perhaps use at the end of the month. I'm not sure if I'll have enough hair by then to accommodate all possibilities, but I'd like to know what's out there.