Public hair dying

I have a 31 flavors approach to hair color. I like to dye my hair and after a brief stint of normal hair color in Victoria I went red just before we started cruising. Red is a tricky color to make last especially if you are lazy about such things like I am and I packed black hair dye on the boat which I intended to use on sections of my hair when I found the right opportunity.

Tofino was the first public dock we had stayed at since Sidney that had amenities like showers, and bathrooms and such. The difficult bit from a hair dying perspective was that rather than a large women’s restroom with showers, there were two unisex toilets and one unisex shower which were not connected to each other.

The comedy commences…

I picked one of the toilet-sink combinations long enough after breakfast that most people would have already used the bathroom and the shower. I thought I could use one of the bathrooms for the multi-stage process of pinning up my hair, using a paint-like brush to add the color where I wanted it, and to wait the 30 minutes it took to process. Then I would sneak across the porch to the shower with my hair all pinned and slathered, rinse my hair, and meet Carol back at the coffee shop where he was waiting.

As soon as I had my hair pinned and was brushing in the first strokes of dye, someone rattles my door knob. I freeze, listen and hear them rattle the other bathroom’s door knob. SHITE! Someone is in the other bathroom too. 2 minutes and 1/3 of the dye job later they rattle my door knob again, and rattle the other bathroom’s doorknob. SHITE! Someone is *still* in the other bathroom. I finish the dye job quickly and debate going outside looking like a freak to free up one bathroom but my internal debate becomes moot when someone leaves the other bathroom. Every 5 minutes someone rattles only my doorknob and now my soothing beauty salon moment is turning me into a bathroom-hogging stressball. Finally, with 10 minutes still to go on the dye I peek out the door and seeing no one I run across the wooden porch to the shower, frantically punch in the door code and lock the door behind me. No one bothers me once inside the shower and I start to relax. As the time to rinsing nears I realize…I only have one loonie.

The shower is run on loonies. One loonie (dollar coin) operates the shower for 2 minutes. Fine, I think. I only have to rinse the dye out. If I can condition my hair, bonus. I get everything ready, drop the coin in at the last moment, jump in with my eyes shut tightly to protect them, and begin spastically rinsing out the hair dye, quickly slathering in and rinsing out the conditioner. Conditioned, rinsed and feeling proud of myself, I finally open my eyes and realize the ENTIRE shower is splattered with black like a shower stall murder scene in a black-and-white horror movie and I have seconds left on the water timer. With cupped hands I splash water around the shower rinsing the walls and finish just as the shower stops.

As I come out of the shower I see that the person rattling the bathroom door every 5 minutes must have been the marina staff member who had been waiting patiently to clean the bathroom. *sigh* So much for my timing.