Jealous....green not grey?

Jealous...hell yeah!  My odd, but ever-so-deserving parents, are off on an overseas European holiday and, yes, I'm extremely jealous (who wouldn't be?).

Whilst this is the long awaited meander down memory lane for my father, who did the big OE (when the Ark was still a forest), it is the first really big OE for my mum.  Being the art/history/cultural buff that she is, I know she's going to love every tour-guided, trudging, step. With the highlight being pilgrimage to Haifa. I, of course, would love to revisit some of the cities they will be spending time in, as I was either working, being "guided" or just too young to appreciate the history/culture I was seeing/experiencing. I know my wife and daughter would also like to go for the same reasons. My son, well, history's not really his thing.

So green covers the whole jealousy thing but grey???

I had my regular hair cut the other day and couldn't help but notice, sitting caped in the chair, how much of my hair I could see against the black of the cape. Wasn't my hair black? Apparently not. Not even close. Remembering back to my senior art years in high school, I was pretty sure you need some black to make grey. Trouble is I seem to have only 'some' black.

So when the hairdresser (that's right, no barber for this metro) finished cutting/shaving and asked if I'd like anything else, I said "Can we loose the grey?". She took me to the counter and happily sold me some ebony (not just black - ebony!) hair dye (and of course all the paraphernalia that goes with it - including formulas for mixing that most bio-chemists would need to look twice at).

So off I wondered, slightly happier and ever-so-poorer, to home where I advised my daughter that she will be dying my hair that evening (she did Bio and Chem at school). As the evening rolled around I began mixing the concoction that to the untrained eye still looked white, even after several minutes of vigorous mixing. I then handed all the gear over to my daughter who proceeded to 'throw' most of the mixture in the right direction with some of it actually landing on my head, some even on the hair.

Once all the goo had been dispensed, I sat down to wait the 30 minutes for the resulting change. It was then discovered that the dye not only works on hair but skin as well. How my daughter managed to dye her hands "through" the gloves will, of course, remain one of the many mystories challeging the great minds of our time.

Washed and rinsed, my grey hair has now been restored, albeit artificially, to it's previous blackness. But I fear this is but the first ritual, of many, in the now new past-time of 'maintaining' my appearence.