Since going vegan and my husband and son eating a mainly vegetarian diet at home, our food bills have been reduced by at least £15 – £20 a week. Yes – somethings I buy are expensive, but that tends to be the mock meats and overly processed junk. If I keep that down to a minimum, it’s a cheap and healthy diet.

Lessons learned this week.

1. Red hair is an utter gitbag to get rid of.
My bright idea this week was to try and get rid of my red hair and get it back to a dark blonde/light brown shade which I think is close to my natural hair colour. I say I think, because I haven’t been my natural hair colour since I was 15.

“This will be easy peasy” I thought, as I toddled off to Superdrug and bought some super-duper strong bleach and a nice ash blonde toner (to remove any ‘brassiness’ – now that’s a laugh.) Once home, I roped my husband into mixing up the strange blue powder and white creamy goop and then smearing it all over my faded, gingery hair. The burning and stinging wasn’t too bad at first, but once Bri had wrapped my hair in cling film and a towel, it started to feel like there were insects burrowing into my scalp. I had to suffer this for 90 minutes, as the goopy blue mess did it’s thing, generating more and more heat as time went on.

When the time was up, I skipped to the bathroom, eager to see my new golden tresses. I was a little disappointed to say the least. Instead of golden blonde hair, I got a mass of frizzy, orange hair with white blonde roots.

“Hmmm.” thought I. “Maybe I just need to add the nice ash blonde toner and all will be well.

All was not well. The orange was as orange as before, the white was as white before, and the frizz was even more frizzy, and more than a little bit crispy. In fact, in some places, the hair was breaking off, my hair felt as damaged as I have ever seen it.

So, at 9:45pm, I had to make an emergency journey to ASDA to get two packs of dark brown permanent hair dye. I was so embarrassed by my hair, that I demanded Bri came with me as moral support.

Now my hair is a more socially acceptable colour, but in such bad condition that I’m wondering if I should just chop it all off and start again.

2. Your children don’t always care about your feelings.

My lovely son’s reaction to my distressing hair condition? He managed to keep a straight face for all of 15 seconds and then collapsed into a fit of laughter for around 30 minutes. Charming.

]]> http://www.crustygeek.co.uk/2010/07/dont-try-this-at-home/feed/ 0 http://www.crustygeek.co.uk/2010/07/corgis-ftw/ http://www.crustygeek.co.uk/2010/07/corgis-ftw/#comments Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:29:27 +0000 CrustyGeek http://www.crustygeek.co.uk/?p=78 YouTube – The Best of Sparky Kibble Dancing.

Pink!

Now I’m not a real girlie girl – I’m a Comp Sci graduate with a huge love of the tech and a Sci Fi and Roleplaying nerd. I wear big boots (vegan “Docs” or Para boots) and when not at work, pretty much live in T-shirts and jeans or combats.

But I still like pink sometimes – though I prefer hot pink rather than the weedy looking powder pink.

So, thanks to Ben Ward, I exported my Tumblr site and imported into my new WordPress site.

There were a couple of hiccups – with Tumblr, many of your posts have no titles, so I had to fix that. And the categories were all messed up. It took maybe 15 minutes to fix my 20-odd posts.

So, we’re up and running again. The apps are installed on the iPhone and iPad and Blogo is set up to post to WordPress.

Now all I have to do is wait for the plugins to be updated and take a look at how the new themes work.

Singing Kitties (via rathergoodstuff)

Now this is what autotune was made for!

This is an amazing stop motion animation!