stop. start. stutter.

Vegas was very nice, and I enjoyed it very much! Now we're off to Disney. No, my life is not usually this hectic.

In preparation for a visit to the House of Mouse, of course, I am in the process of doing a touch-up on my hair. See, my hair has not been its Natural and Normal Color since ... probably around 1999 or so, when I switched locations in my Boring Corporate Job and moved away from customer service to tech-geekery, where I would never (praise Jebus) have to come face-to-face with a customer ever again. (Night shift! Server monkey! NOC monkey not crazy, just proud.) My boss at the time, when asked if I was permitted to dye my hair weird colors, blinked at me and said, "Sure. Why not?"

(I think he got some mysterious cachet in the departmental-VP sweepstakes out of it: "my office freak is cooler than your office freak".)

After a few years of attempts, I finally settled on Special Effects hair dye, which comes in an awesome range of colors and which lasts the longest out of any of the "weird color" dyes I've tried; it also doesn't stain as much as the others. (There are several pillowcases that I still have kicking around that look sort of like a tie-dye, and I had a problem for a while in that every time I touched my hair I would then rub off on whatever else I touched. You could tell which side I hit the space bar with, for instance, by the patterns of purple on the keyboard. We do not use that dye anymore.)

For a while I flipped back and forth between Blue Mayhem and Wildflower. Occasionally, when I got bored, I'd bleach it all out and do patchwork-peacock hair (using those two and Fishbowl and Deep Purple and Sonic Green, all the various leftover bits of dye I had and a few that I'd gotten specially for that purpose), and once I did the hair framing my face in Ruby Red and the rest of it in Wildflower. I do not have pictures of many of these, alas.

In the past year or so, I've mostly lacked the energy to wrangle my hair; I bleached it entirely last summer in preparation for dyeing it again, and then never got around to it. So, for a good year or so, I was blonde. Very blonde. The straw-wheat gold blonde you can only get by stripping your hair with peroxide and then not doing anything else to it. It was a very funny look on me, as I am dark-colored like the fine Mediterranean woman I am (yeah, the last name's a bit misleading -- my dad's family is Italian, my mom's family is Irish; I'm using Mom's maiden name as a nom de guerre because it's easier to spell and to remember -- also, the domain name was available). My hair grows fast, so for a little while I had dark roots, and then for a little while longer my hair was pretty much 50/50, and then the last time I got annoyed with it and hacked it all off in the bathroom with scissors, I was left with my natural dark hair with blonde tips.

You know where I'm going with this, I hope.

So a few weeks ago I dragged out the leftover Deep Purple and did the tips. It took very interestingly; it lent my hair a sort of purple shimmer, but it faded really quickly, since the hair wasn't as porous as it would have been if I'd just bleached it.

This time, the experiment is: without re-bleaching the Deep Purple out -- most of it has faded to a sort of steely gunboat grey, which is really interesting but looks accidental instead of deliberate -- I have added Blue Mayhem atop it. I am, therefore, sitting here in my raggedy hair-dyeing t-shirt with a shower cap on my head and a bunch of hair-clips holding the hair underneath it. I can't wait to see how (if) it takes.

A point of pride: after eight years of turning my hair weird colors, I have finally mastered the art sufficiently that there are only specks of dye on my inner forearms, and the only part of the bathroom that is now blue is one tiny spot on the toilet lid. Go me; usually by this point I'd be hauling out the bleach and muttering under my breath the whole time. I can't swear to the fact that all the little flecks of color were what lost me the security deposit in my last rental, but I've got a pretty good sense that it contributed.