My hair is orange.  Not really carrot orange… more like an I-tried-to-dye-my-hair-blonde-and-it-didn’t-really-work orange.  I should have known better, considering I have never really dyed my hair myself and I have heard nothing but horror stories from people who have tried to lighten it themselves at home.  But no… I didn’t listen.  Stephen likes blondes, so little old brunette me decided – hey, I’ll go blonde!  So, ignoring all my better instincts and trying to keep the bitterness from rising in the back of my throat by telling myself “This will be fun!  A new change!  Do something adventurous for once!” I bought blonde hair dye.  So, Tuesday afternoon I tried it.  My hair got a little bit lighter and a little bit redder… it seemed like quite a noticeable change to me but I didn’t love it.  But I didn’t tell Stephen that I did it, and when he came over after work he didn’t notice or say a word so I guess it wasn’t as noticeable to him.  The color dye I had used was a medium blonde – so I though (which seemed rational) that if medium blonde made it just a little bit lighter, than light blonde would make it noticeably lighter, right?  I had gone conservative with my first purchase, the medium, because I figured better to be not-light-enough than too light.  I could always lighten some more.  So I went to the store and bought light blonde dye.  And I’m afraid it was all downhill from there.

So now I have to figure out what to do with this pumpkin I call my head.   My options are:

1. Leave it as is (which I don’t really want to be an option.)
2. Try to dye it again myself (Then need to decide whether to try to bleach it lighter, dye it darker, etc.)
3. Suck it up and pay to get it done (Then I will have to find a place, since I’ve never even gotten my hair cut in CA, and pay a lot of money.)

The first thing that Stephen said when I told him that my hair was orange was, “Well, call the number on the box.  They must have a phone number that you can call for help when something like this happens.”  I totally laughed at him.  What did he think this was, a cereal box?  But sure enough, I looked on the box and there was a number to call for expertise and advice.  So I called it.  After basically telling me that I was an idiot and that someone with medium to light brown hair should NEVER use the light blonde color that I tried to use, and that I used completely the wrong blonde color because I needed one with “ash” undertones since my hair naturally has some red undertones, the woman actually gave me what I hope is some pretty good advice.  I need to get color #81, Vanilla Malt, which is a medium blonde with ash undertones.  She said this will get rid of the red.  I don’t think it will make my hair lighter, which is what I ultimately want, but right now I will settle for non-basketball-head.  So hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get the new color and de-orangify my hair.

Aside from that, today went ok.  I had breakfast, I had eggs scrambled with laughing cow cheese, which is always a good start.  With my coffee, of course.

Then my turkey salad for lunch, and cereal as a snack.  For my second afternoon snack, I finished off the Trader Joe’s sour cream and onion rice crisps along with an apple and some blueberries:

I worked for a little longer and then had a Pure Protein bar:

Then I picked up Stephen from the train station and we went for a run.  I changed around our marathon training schedule a little bit – rather than having really long runs once a week and ramping up the distance quickly while doing crosstraining and really short runs during the week, I am trying to spread the mileage more throughout the week.  We will still be doing the same number of miles per week – in fact, we will be doing slightly more – but I have been reading that this makes you less susceptible to injury which I am afraid of for both Stephen and myself.  Don’t get me wrong, we will still have long runs.  Just not quite as many and not so so far in advance of the marathon.  So tonight we ran six miles.  The garmin results are posted here:

6 miler

It was a good run, perfect running weather and neither of us had any aches and pains.  Although Stephen was a little sore before the run and super sore afterwards from his little bout with the stepmill on Monday.  Wimp.  Afterwards we drove to his apartment, where his parents had been making us dinner!  They had the table all set up beautifully with dishes and even wine glasses (all of which they had bought that day, because Stephen didn’t have ANY of that in his house before they came!!!)  They had chips and dip, and a bunch of fruit  – these teeny bananas, peaches and fresh pineapple.   Then the main course was chicken curry with rice, and pita bread.  It was delicious and spicy (although I didn’t eat much rice because I don’t really like it.)

Hmm… as I posted these pictures I realized that the chicken curry is about the same color as my hair…….

And then my obligatory swiss chocolate for dessert, milk chocolate with hazelnuts   Yep… ate the whole bar.