Adventures in Dye-ing

I've been dyeing my hair for almost ten years now.  I started when I was 18, on a Girl Scout road trip to NYC.  I've been through the gambit of colors, from that awful first one I chose (it was supposed to be a deep red but on my natural color came out more fuchsia and faded to a bright red)  to blonde, to dark, to really everything in between.  Most recently, I've been on a red kick.  I've been almost every shade of red, and truthfully I look best  in a coppery auburn.  At least that's what I've decided.  So please, tell me why, after nearly a decade of experience, I decided it would be an excellent idea to delve back into the deeper reds, and I decided it would be a great idea to not only dye my hair while drinking (don't EVER do that), but to do it without a mirror.  You know, because I'm super smart.  And my companions, wonderful girls who don't have a lot of experience in DIY dyeing, didn't think to stop me.  Probably because I was so confident.  So I did it, and it came out just awful.  The color was a purpley red and I TOTALLY missed HUGE chunks of hair.  So some was a deep purpley-red and some was brown.  Like dirty blonde brown.  And of course, I didn't have time to redo it, plus it was pouring down rain and we were leaving town.  So I had to go out like that.  Luckily I had also thought it would be a good plan to do little curls all over my head, leaving me with Shirley Temple-type curls the next morning.  That distracted from the million different colors residing on my hair follicles.  I'll tell you what, I was a hot mess. I'm surprised the people I went to lunch with (including my best friend's new boyfriend) didn't think I was insane.  So getting through Sunday was fun.  Monday, after work, before choir I RAN to Ulta to get a new color.  And what did I decide to get?  A dark brown.  Something different for fall.  So after choir, I rushed home and redyed my hair.  It looks pretty good, and I think as it fades it'll get prettier.  Right now it's real real dark, and I'm not used to that.  But everybody else seems to like it.   So lessons learned:

• Don't dye and drink
• Don't dye without a mirror
• Stick to the colors you know will look good.
• I don't look good in curls

Initial Color (don't mind the curls, that was an experiment)

Notice the several different colors spread throughout my head

New dark hair!  It looks darker in person! Or maybe it's just me

Edit: As of yesterday afternoon, I decided that my dark hair was just way too dark for me.  I felt like I was wearing a wig.  So I used Color Ooops and got rid of it.  Now I'm back to my pre-color, and my hair feels like straw.  I will be conditioning it over and over before I apply more dye to it.  My poor mistreated hair.