Really whingey complaining post; don't read it if you're looking for something cheerful or uplifting

Well, here's a sad thing. I don't like my hairstyle. I don't like the cut and I don't like the colour.

I liked my new cosmetologist, and it was all very soothing and enjoyable. And when I came away, I really really liked it. I liked it so much that I cried in the car all the way home, like the little pig. When I went to pick up the kids, everyone at school said it was too cute, so I still liked it.

Then I came home and looked at it more carefully, and all the shine fell off the day. For a start, the fringe/bangs isn't/aren't long enough, so the shape round my face still looks like a Playmobil character. The rest of it is kind of ok, but it's not very interesting. It's just sort of... there. What really irks me, though, is the colour. It was meant to be, after a long discussion, high lights and low lights. But as far as I can see, it's patches of purple. There are bits that are pure purple (and we definitely talked about red and never once mentioned purple), and then there are bits that are the black/grey that I was trying to cover, untouched. It's choppy, clumpy, blotchy. Highlights aren't meant to be like that. Are they?

Look, here's a picture.


See what I mean. Look at the Playmobil-meets-Medieval-Edmund-Blackadder shape at the brow. And look at the purple stripes. And there's a great big splurge of purple right at the front. See? It was meant to be a subtle effect, not an 'I've just dipped my head forward into a pot of purple paint' look.

The only good thing is that I can now go back to buying the odd DIY kit from the supermarket, and be happy with the result, and not feel I'm being cheap. I honestly think I do a better job. Most of all, though, I just want my old hair back, like I want my old body back, and my old life back.

And since I'm now doing a misery post, I'm going to add a few more things in. In no particular order, the following things are really getting me down.

I can't find a babysitter for Saturday night. Husband is away in England (Hi Honey), and there's a school fundraiser do. I really fancy going. This is quite big and brave, since of course it'll all be very couples-orientated, and I'll be on my own. I have tried all my usual babysitters. I have asked around, and people have asked around for me. The kindergarten teacher has asked her daughter. The school secretary's daughter (who is babysitting for someone else) has asked all her friends. Beyond simply going up to complete strangers in Target and asking them if they fancy pizza and a movie with three delightful children on Saturday night, I have really run out of options. I hardly ever go out, and I was invited to join a table of particularly nice bods, so this is a blow. Today was the last day for buying tickets. It's 11.45pm. I've still got 15 minutes. I suppose I could nip over to Target...

Our front lawn is covered in dinner-plate-sized spots. I suppose you could call it green highlights, but actually, it just looks very odd. Very odd indeed. Like some kind of attempt to produce a chess board of dark and light squares in our front garden. It's the work of the garden company who came and sprayed and fertilised the trees. They said "It'll be fine in 2 - 3 weeks, when your lawn starts growing for the summer, and the rest of the grass will be the same as the spots where we put the fertiliser". That was 4 or 5 weeks ago. I would post a picture, but it's dark now, and really, this kind of drivellous out-pouring is best just posted when you write it, rather than waiting for tomorrow's daylight hours.

I scraped another car in the school parking lot. The damage was minuscule. I had to rub the dirt off to make sure it wasn't just a spot of mud. Here's a picture.


I photographed it with the key fob for scale. The key fob is less than an inch and a half wide. I left a note, and was sort of expecting the car owner to say "Thank you so much for leaving a note, lots of people wouldn't have done. Don't worry about it. It's really a tiny mark, and as you can see, the car isn't in pristine condition". Or failing that, maybe "I'll ask my friend who runs a repair shop if he can touch it up". But no. The owner made it clear that I was causing inconvenience, and went and got a quote for stripping down and repainting the entire wheel arch, and mailed it to me, and it's $261. I did the right thing, but it's turned out to be a very expensive piece of real estate on the moral high ground that I'm occupying.

Not one of the FIVE people I emailed to ask to be proxies for my vote in the UK elections has replied. I guess I'm just a name in a spam mail folder these days. I've done my best, Emmeline Pankhurst. Well, I suppose I could phone as well, but it's kind of hard to pick up the phone out of the blue to people you haven't talked to for years, if you're after a favour, and if you're not even on their 'safe senders' list.

What else? Well, there's the tedious, and expensive, and aggravating, and bureaucratically demanding, process of medical examinations that we've had to go through for the purposes of getting permanent residency (which actually, in an ideal world, we wouldn't do, because we'd be heading back to Britain, but this isn't an ideal world...) I could probably write quite an interesting post about it. Some of it would even be quite funny. Like the 'every parent's worst nightmare' moment when the doctor asked about the bruise on my upper arm, and 6-yo piped up "it's from when her husband beats her up" (because I'd made a stupid quip about the bruise to her and 12-yo before the doctor came into the consulting room), and then I found myself on my own in the room, with the children waiting outside in the reception, being investigated for domestic abuse, except it turned out not to be, because THANK GOODNESS I decided to ask the doctor outright "are you investigating me for domestic abuse?", rather than go home and wonder for ever more what was written in my records. It turns out that part of the immigration medical is to check you for gonorrhea, which the doctor said was totally ridiculous "What are we going to do? Deport people for an infection that can be easily cleared up with a course of antibiotics?" and then he added that actually most of the medical exam was pretty much a formality, and I said "So why do they do it?" and he shrugged, and I thought "Best not pursue this line of enquiry, since I know why YOU do it, having just handed over a few hundred dollars to you for the privilege of being on the receiving end", and then I felt mean because actually he was very nice, and when I asked "Am I going to fail because I've had cancer?" he looked like he wanted to hug me.

Oh my word. I didn't know that whole immigration medical still rankled so much. And the whole immunisation thing. I get it, that every country wants to protect itself from foreigners bringing in diseases, but I've had mumps, I've been inoculated against measles and rubella, so did I really have to have that MMR jab? I've been living here over 3 years already. I don't think I could have been silently incubating any of those 3 diseases for all that time.

I think I am putting this one down as the Ultimate Bad Hair Day.

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Expats, are you voting?

I have to vote. I do. My grandmother impressed it on me. "When I was your age, I couldn't vote because I was a woman" she told me. "You must always vote. Always. It's your moral duty." So I do. I always vote. I vote because of the generations of women before me who were not able to. I vote because women fought, and were imprisoned, and force fed, so that I could. I vote because my grandmother couldn't until she was 29.

It's not difficult, as an expat. Don't use that as an excuse. You have to register, and then either choose a postal vote (unlikely to be workable unless you live in Europe, and even then, a little risky), or nominate someone to vote for you by proxy. You can print out the forms here. You'll need to be quick, as the forms have to be at the electoral registration office by April 20th, but you've got the time to achieve that if you want. The forms aren't difficult or time-consuming. The only part of the process that is likely to be an inconvenience is having to find another UK passport holder to witness your signature (can't trust any foreign johnnie to do that). I've got a bit stuck on finding a proxy, but I'm persevering. I couldn't look Emmeline Pankhurst or my grandmother in the face if I didn't. "Too much of a nuisance to keep on emailing" wouldn't impress them as an excuse.

Who to vote for is the next question. Brown, Cameron, or Clegg? I usually choose the one with the prettiest wife, because I always feel that says a lot about a man.

What about you? Are you living abroad but still going to vote? Or do you feel that if you're not in the country, you shouldn't have a say in its elections?

(And yes, I was joking about the wives thing...)

Post script

I realise on re-reading this post that it sounds as if my grandmother was a sufragette. She wasn't. Not as far as I know, anyway. But having been unable to vote as a young woman, she was very aware of the need to pass on what that had felt like to me.

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