Day in the Life of an Idiot

Perhaps you've heard that I'm planning on cospalying at Anime Detour? I might have mentioned it once or twice. Detour is finally upon us. I have a date tomorrow to paint on my tattoos. Today, I dyed my hair.



I bought this lovely kit at Walgreen's. They didn't have a lot of choices for red. The guy I'm trying to cross-play has fire-engine red hair. Crimson. Scarlet. Ruby red. This package says, "raspberry." I thought the color looked vibrant enough, at least. Regardless, it was the best I could do.

Yes, it includes bleach. I kind of like the irony/appropriateness of having to bleach my hair to cosplay a Bleach character.

Here's me with bleach in my hair and a plastic bag on my head. I think I look startlingly like my grandmother Mouse in this picture.



Because Mason wanted to see how "white" my hair would be bleached, I took this picture of the top of my head:



And, then I applied the red. Below is a series of pictures for you get a sense of the color. I think it looks... fuschia or possibly a hot magenta. Not exactly the color I was going for. Though, at one point during the process, I was pretty sure it was going to end up hot pink, so, as you'll see, it's not quite THAT.

The whole process took me a couple of hours. I spent much of the day reading the proofs for Fallen Host, which arrived some time ago, but which I finally had a large chunk of time to read. What a great book! Apparently, I needed to wait a decade to appreciate my own writing. What's startling to me is that a lot of the story takes place in Japan, in Tokyo, and it still reads pretty well considering how much MORE I know about Japanese culture now.

Okay, the final product looked like (drum roll, please)....





On Saturday, I'll attempt to use product to get it to stick out of my top knot in stiff spikes. Between that and the painted on tattoos, it'll be clear who I'm TRYING to be, even if I don't pull it off... which is likely, given how little I look like this:

Yesterday was the kind of Monday for me that you might see featured in a Garfield strip. I didn't quite get a pie in my face, but it was a lot like that in spirit.

I should say, though, that it wasn't AWFUL. It was... inconvenient, frustrating, a little messed up -- though never seriously, which kind of made it that much more annoying, you know?

It started the moment after I dropped Shawn off at work. I had a sudden flash of insight. "Uh, Mason," I said. "Did we remember your lunch? Your backpack?" Nope. So we had to make a quick trip back home before getting to school, which we did, with time to spare before the first bell.

As I was leaving school, I thought to myself. Well, that was entertaining. I should call Shawn and tell her all about it. I opened my phone and watched as the battery blinked out. Phone was dead.

At the coffee shop, Facebook decided to flake out. It pulled up, but decided that I'd read everything of interest. At the top of the status update section it proclaimed, "No new updates" and refused to give me anything, not even so-and-so's latest Farmland purchase. I decided it was a sign to go home and work on my revisions (which I did.)

Everything went along fine for a while, but then at lunch I thought I might like some tomato soup. I grabbed a can and pulled the top off. I looked down at it and realized, "Oh crap, it's cream of chicken." I shrugged and added some turkey bits from the freezer, and it was really pretty tasty. Just not what I'd been looking forward to.

I'd been hoping to go to kuk sool wan last night, but Mason came home with a headache.

See, like I said... not TERRIBLE, just sort of "meh."

Last night as I was falling asleep, however, I decided that I'm going to make another New Year's resolution. I'm going to try to get ebook versions of the AngeLINK series out in time for CONvergence. Considering I'm planning to pay to have someone else to most of the putzy work for me, this shouldn't be an impossible task. The big thing I need to do is fix the messy file of Archangel Protocol that I got from Torrent.

It just seems like I may find a few new readers at CONvergence, and it would be nice to be able to point them to e-copies of the out-of-print books.

Also, I'm going to try to be better about having promotional items on hand for my Tate books.