Feeling like a real failure in the domestic goddess stakes

Today for the first time, I was actually glad that Mum won't be coming home from hospital.

Since Mum's admission on Friday last week, my usual daily pattern has been to go into the hospital in the morning, spend a few hours with her, in order to catch the doctors' rounds, have a pre-lunch drink from the Jolly Trolley*, eat her lunch (the meals at Greenwich Hospital are yummy, and Mum's not eating anything any more) and then sit with her for a bit before heading home in the early afternoon for a bit of a break (and to run errands, do some basic chores at home), and come back to the hospital in the late afternoon for a couple of hours.

Today I decided to get a haircut in my early afternoon break from the hospital, so popped into the hairdresser that Mum goes to, on the off chance (which paid off, as I was able to get a cut on the spot). When I got home, I decided to dye my hair.

Some weeks ago, I became a victim of advertising, and purchased one of those new-fangled home dye kits that involve mixing a liquid with a colour powder in a plastic shaker and shaking vigorously to mix it up. After all the shaking, the resultant colour treatment is a foam, and the advertisement says that this makes it easier to apply ("just like shampoo"), and less likely to drip than the usual cream hair colorants, and it's supposed to be kind and gentle on the hair.

Well, let me tell you what happened. Firstly, after shaking vigorously the number of times decreed by the instructions, when I opened the shaker the concoction had not mixed all that evenly, and there were numerous lumps of unmixed powder throughout the mixture.

The 'foam' was also not as stiff as I thought it should be (as it appeared in the TV ads), and in fact was a tad watery (and when applying it to my hair, it was in fact more prone to drip than the colorant creams I have used in the past... and drip it certainly did :-( )

But the worst thing was that with all the drips, I managed to get some of the dye on the sole of my shoe... (are you cringing as you anticipate what's coming next, dear readers?)

Yep, you guessed it... when I had finished applying the dye, and had wandered out to the loungeroom to sit down and wait for it to do its thing... I saw them... some spots on the carpet... on the NEW, plain beige, carpet... vibrant RED spots. The worst was just outside the bathroom, and another about a metre from that, and two small ones in the dining room. At first I sponged them to try to remove the dye, and they didn't look too bad... but then, after the dye time had elapsed for my hair, the spots were much darker on the carpet (understandable, I guess, as the colour had developed on the carpet pile over that time :-(

I had another go at them with a special carpet stain remover... but they are all still very obvious :-( 
(so, needless to say, I'm very open to any suggestions for getting the stains out of the carpet, noting that the hair dye is of the permanent variety :-/ ).

Oh, and I also managed to get a smear of the dye on the white trousers I was wearing.... and some spots on my purple T-shirt. Have just put them through the wash, with copious amounts of spray on stain remover, and napisan in the machine, but haven't looked at them yet to see how successful that was.

So today I am feeling like soooo NOT a domestic goddess of any kind, and have resolved that from now on, the only colour that goes on my hair will be put there by a hairdresser in the safety of a salon.

Like I said above, I'm glad that Mum won't be coming home, so she won't see how I've managed to so obviously spoil her lovely new carpet. I also won't be telling her about this incident, as I figure it's going to be my problem in the long term, so she doesn't need to be bothered with it now.

* Every weekday, just before lunchtime, volunteers at Greenwich Hospital bring around a drinks trolley to all the wards and day clinics, with all manner of alcoholic beverage, soft drinks, cheese and crackers, chips and chocolates. I was sure I'd written about this in an earlier blog entry, but can't find it.