Everybody starts with a first BlogHer post.  This shouldn't be a scary thing.  But it is.  I populate web pages almost everyday at work.

 I've written online training courses and instruction manuals.  I’ve written newsletters for a writers association.  But even just filling out my member profile and my list of favorite things was hard.  In the box for my favorite blogs, do I put the URL?  Or just the name of the blog?  After I press Submit, where does all that stuff go?  And what does it look like when it gets there?

I've had my own blog - http://achaessawrites.wordpress.com/ - for almost two years now, but pretty much kept it to friends, family, and lucky surfers.  The CTO at my company found it in November and he's been prodding me ever since to step into the Real World of Blogging and pointed me to BlogHer.  Well, here goes.

I moved to Mexico City in October 2006 with my husband.  I've moved so many times in my life (something like 43 places by the time I was 48) that I figured this would just be one more move only my new address would be in Spanish.  I had planned for this move for 8 years.  I spoke the local tongue with an accent so authentic that Mexicans in Seattle asked me where I was from in Mexico.  I had visited my in-laws every year and the adoration was mutual.  I got along with my step-daughter, what little we could sneak to see of her (that's another story, this particular scorned Mexican woman is a breed apart).  I even learned how to cook the basics - red salsa, green salsa, pozole.  Miguel and I had a joyful, stable relationship.  I did some networking and secured a remote job with a Silicon Valley company.  I had all my bases covered.  I was healthy, happy, and ready for adventure.  I was Ready.

How wrong can wrong be?

Seriously.  How wrong can wrong be?  How was it that I didn't have a clue about what a drastic change this would be?  A friend who has lived abroad said she'd be interested in seeing how my priorities would change after a year.  Little did I know how on target her question was.

Miguel is Mexican and his family lives here - and his 11 year old daughter.  We got married in 2000 but the deal was that we would stay in Seattle until he became a US citizen and then we'd move back to his family's neighborhood.  I wanted to be here when his daughter hits adolescence because her mother is really abusive and if the daughter decides to run away I wanted to make sure that her dad was here for her to run to, instead of ending up on the street.  So, anyway, Miguel became a US citizen in May 2006 and we sold our house in July and moved here in October.

It's hard to make a move for any reason when it means leaving a place as beautiful as Seattle.  That's been the biggest adjustment - there is nothing beautiful about the northwestern edge of Mexico City where we live.  It’s not like those calendar photos with buildings painted in colonial blue, golden yellow, terracotta and whitewash, quaint lanes with bougainvillea spilling out their purple blossoms over wrought iron fences, balconies stuffed with blooming pots.  Here it’s all unpainted concrete, bad roads, few trees, severely polluted rivers, open sewers (yep, those same rivers), trash everywhere.  And the people!  The ones you meet personally are really nice, but as a society they're pushy, rude, and really scary drivers.  Imagine 28 million people, no urban planning, and no traffic engineers.  It gives the phrase “urban sprawl” a dimensionally different meaning.

Last month we moved into a third-story flat that we designed and built on top of Miguel’s sister's house and it has returned me to sanity.  I have a real office instead of working on the kitchen table.  We have space to move around in (we left a 2200sqft home in Seattle to move into a 347sqft box in Mexico - the new flat is 1200sqft, so it seems huge).  It's on the third floor and in a different neighborhood than where we were renting so there aren't any open sewer smells or street-level dust covering everything. 

And my priorities?  I've gotten used to showers with bad water pressure, and the lack of insulation and single-paned windows.  And I even understand the need for so many road bumps everywhere and the tossed spaghetti layout of the streets - they keep the maniac speeders from driving 90mph in a residential zone.  But the funniest change is that I really missed having a good kitchen even though I hardly ever cook (the place we rented had no kitchen, and we had to install a sink on the patio just so I could wash dishes) and I absolutely had to have a real washer and dryer.  The first washer we bought and installed in the back yard at the rental was like my sister-in-law's – a plastic contraption with two side-by-side boxes and instructions written in Spanish and Arabic, with a manual transfer from the washer to the spin-dry centrifuge and then hang to dry on the patio.  It wouldn't have been so bad except for when it rained - and the local laundry service folded the clothes so that they wrinkled as much as possible.  Underwear and socks folded so neatly the creases stayed in when you put them on, but pants and shirts so badly folded that it was easier to re-wash and hang them out on the patio than to try to iron them. 

Honestly, it was the wrinkled clothes from the laundry service that pushed me over the edge.

I was really depressed until January this year because of all the things I missed about Seattle, but apart from the environmental changes, my own changes really caught me off guard.  I’m married to a gorgeous, adoring 35 year old Aztec . . . and I’ll be 50 this year.  I thought I was prepared for that, too. 

Wait, wrong can be even more wrong . . .

I never thought I’d miss my hairdresser the way I do.  I yearn to go to that place with sparkling stainless steel, burnished tile floors, padded hydraulic chairs, hot water pouring over my scalp as I lean back in a curved ceramic basin.  I miss that time under the dryer with warm air caressing the edges of my face, current fashion magazines to browse, water with lemon on the side table. 

I miss my hair.

When Miguel and I met I had waist length sable hair.  Two years later a systemic staph infection turned my hair 80% white from the crown forward.  I started coloring my hair.  By 2006 I had finally gotten it to where I liked it – dark streaks scattered across the white just enough so I didn’t look washed out.  I loved my look. 

Conceding the fact that I have never been to a hair salon in a tourist area of Mexico, I will make the broad declaration that in Mexico even the best hairdressers aren’t talented enough to accomplish that kind of magic.  They’ve also never heard of foiling, so highlights are still done by ripping strands of your hair through a plastic cap with a metal crochet hook.  There are no health inspectors, either, so the majority of the salons give me the willies.  It’s not so much that the floors aren’t swept clean after every cut, or that the rinse water is sloshed over my head with a bowl dipped in a 5 gallon bucket of water warmed by throwing an electrical appliance into it.  It’s the brushes.  Assorted brushes.  Jammed into a plastic jug.  With other people’s hair still in them.  Almost as bad, they don’t take appointments.  You have to just go and wait until they get to you.  You can’t even pay to get an appointment.

The first time the highlights came out okay, but the second time not so much.  I decided to forget the highlights and do my own dye job from a box.  I went to the local equivalent of Fred Meyer and bought a box of Preference by L’Oreal.  I even recognized the picture of the model on the box of Dark Brown Permanent color.  This was known territory.  An hour later my hair was black.  Pitch black.  It was so black that at the street party we went to that night the adolescent Goth Girls all decided to hang out with me to show their moms that Goth isn’t so corrupting after all.  See, Mom, this old lady does it, why can’t I?  I crawled back to the salon on Monday.

The hairdresser’s eyes went wide when I walked in.  The highlights were gone. “Yes, well, you were busy when I came by on Friday and I got impatient, and, well . . .”

The stylist just smiled politely, sat me down and stripped my hair.  After two hours of chemical assault on my lungs I came out with dark brown hair.  Two days later I came out of the shower and my hair was black again.  I don’t know what happened.  It certainly wasn’t on purpose.  I went back to the salon and just pointed at my head.  Another strip and re-dye job and my lungs were as fried as my hair.

I waited until I couldn’t stand the roots anymore and I found another salon.  This one across the street from our house tacked onto the front of a neighbor’s house.  Señora Juanita and her one-person salon with a matching plastic jar of hairy brushes.  Her daughter does manicures on the weekend.  My hair came out dark brown and I was happy.  The second time, not so much. 

I thought I’d give the box another shot.  This time a different brand.  Maybe it was a quality control issue.  And Light Brown.  Yeah, light brown.  An hour later and my hair was black again.  I decided I could live with black.  In fact, by this time I’d been looking around and noticed that in Mexico you have three choices of hair color if you don’t want to be a bleached blonde – black, blacker and red.  Yep, I could live with black.

But then – surprise – my roots came back.  I felt old with those white roots.  My husband and his sister told me I was crazy.  “It just looks like you have a really wide part in your hair.  Like more of your scalp is showing.”  Well, that was just what I wanted to hear.

My sister-in-law sent me to her hairdresser.  Nice lady.  Cleaner in-home salon.  Same jar of brushes.  Now I have to bend over a cement sink on the patio for the rinse water.  She wanted to make me a blonde.  After the strip and re-color my hair is now a golden copper colored.  Not quite the red that my mother always colored her hair, and that I swore I would never do to myself.  But now even that is seeming like a good idea because this copper color has definitely got to go. 

It’s a good thing I work over the Internet.