How not to make an apricot-blueberry pie

I am frugal by nature. So when my mother-in-law sends me a bushel of apricots and apricot products from her mid-summer harvest, I set about to use it.

I also had in my possession a pint or so of ripe, sweet blueberries, so I decided to make an apricot-blueberry pie. I did a google search to see if recipes for such a thing exist, and lo-and-behold, they do. As it was 4th of July morning, I scanned the ingredients to make sure I had them all on hand, and found that I did, with one minor substitution. I did not have the necessary apricot preserves, but decided the homemade apricot syrup my mother-in-law sent would work well for the additional sweetness and flavor. Huzzahs all around, I would have the perfect complement to our celebratory independence day barbeque.

I sliced my apricots. I measured my ingredients. And last of all, I pulled out the apricot syrup to add to the pan of simmering fruit.

Dude. Really? 

I twisted the lid, and the glass sheared off completely, slicing through the flesh of my left hand as it did so.

(This might be a good place to mention that I’m left handed.)

It’s an odd sensation to have a glass jar twist apart in your hand, and as it did I thought ‘Huh. That can’t be good.”

I looked down at the big gash in the webbed area between my thumb and index finger, and confirmed that no, it was not in fact good.

(This might be a good place to mention that I don’t react well to the sight of blood).

My husband was in the backyard firing up the grill for the burgers. I ran toward the back door and yelled “Help!”

Annoyed, he turned toward me and said “Help with what?”

I held up my bloody, dripping hand in response, then sat down on the floor to keep from passing out.

As he got a towel to wrap around the cut so I wouldn't bleed all over the car on the way to the emergency room, an odd barrage of thoughts passed through my head:

At the scene 
(nope, this ain't fiction, folks)

Well, that’s going to need stitches.
Did I sever a tendon?
How do I keep the dog from trying to lick the blood?
What are we going to have for dessert now?
Did he put the burgers on yet?
I really should clean up all this blood before we go to the ER.

While he wrapped the towel around my hand, I relayed the thoughts that seemed relevant, asked him to turn off the stove and the barbeque, and put out the dog so she wouldn't lick up the syrup and the glass. Then I went into my bedroom to put on a different pair of shorts, because, you know, seriously.

And that's when I nearly passed out.

(This might be a good time to mention I’m prone to panic attacks.)

I was cold, my chest was constricting, I could barely breathe, and the world seemed three inches deep. I told myself firmly “This is just a panic attack, you’re fine, just breathe.” I forced myself to take long, careful breaths, and the world stopped closing in around me.

I grabbed a pair of shorts out of the drawer and realized I couldn’t close the top button with only one functioning hand. “That’s okay” I thought, “they tell you to loosen clothes on shock victims anyway.” So unbuttoned it stayed.

Although I don’t actually remember doing it, I apparently also grabbed my kindle. My heart swells with pride to know that even on the verge of unconsciousness, my priorities remain intact.

I walked out to the car and called to my husband to bring a bottle of water. He answered me; although he was only a few feet from me, his voice sounded very far away, like I was listening to him through a tunnel that had water whooshing through it. Despite the white fuzzy spots in my vision, I reached the car—only to realize I didn’t have my keys. I decided it was a good time to sit on the pavement and wait with my head between my knees.

When my husband came out, I got into the car and told him “If I pass out, let them know I was having a panic attack.” You know, because they wouldn’t have been able to figure that out on their own.

I don’t remember much of the drive to the hospital; I was focused on breathing and not throwing up. However, I do remember the moment when I thought he was taking the wrong exit and I yelled ‘NOT KAISER!!’, before I realized we were headed the other way off the off-ramp.

The intake nurse took one look at my pasty, blood-free face and buzzed me in immediately. She took my blood pressure and expressed professional surprise that I was still alive with numbers that low. She put me in a wheel chair and took me directly to a room where they plugged me into a miniature army of technology.

They asked me a bunch of questions that I now understand they are required to ask everyone, but which were very confusing in the moment:

“Do you feel safe at home?”
Yes, I don’t think the jar is going to come after me in my sleep.
“Have you been homeless or incarcerated in the last year?”
How the hell bad do I look? I made sure to change my shorts!
“Any medication?”
Aren't you supposed to make that decision? You’re the professionals.

Then they asked me what happened, and I explained that a jar of apricot syrup broke when I opened it.

“What brand?”

“My mother-in-law made it.”

“Oh, your mother-in-law.” They exchanged knowing glances and laughed. Apparently mother-in-law-induced injuries are not uncommon in the ER. I found this disconcerting, and started to wonder if I was safe at home after all.


They did their thing, very effectively and professionally, with grace and humor and top-notch care. It turned out I’d been extremely lucky; I hadn’t cut any tendons or significant nerves. They stitched me up and I left feeling well-cared for and excessively silly for succumbing to shock-and-or-panic-attack, taking up everybody’s time, and ruining my husband’s 4th of July.



So what’s the moral of the story? I think it’s this:

There’s a reason we have apple pie on the 4th of July.

The Volcano Death March

(When I posted my 'ABCs of Me', I mentioned I hiked up a volcano, and got a few questions about that, so I thought I'd tell the story of it here. My apologies that the pictures were taken before I had a digital camera, so these are pictures of pictures. Otherwise, enjoy!)

I’m not a big fan of helicopters or small planes. I’ll fly in them if I have to, but only if there’s no other option.

So when my husband and I were picking the day trips for our our cruise to Hawaii, I didn’t want to do anything that involved helicopters. We knew we wanted to see one of the active volcanoes, and there were two ways to do that—take a helicopter trip, or take a hike.

“Let’s do the hike!” I said. “We’ll see our volcano and work off some of the buffet food at the same time! And we’ll get an authentic, real experience, see all different parts of the volcano, not just be dropped off at the top!”

It sounded like a good idea at the time, and we signed up for the volcano hike filled with optimism and joy, then held hands while we peered over the side of the ship into the sunset. Ah, to be so naive again.

On the day of the hike, they distributed waivers for us to sign as we rode out to the site. I’m pretty particular about reading everything I sign, and read through the extensive list of injuries that we might sustain, including death.

Death.

That’s a pretty intense word, and my husband pointed to it with eyebrows raised.

“They have to put that in there.” I said. “Even if it were a nature walk to look at butterflies, they’d make us sign that. Don’t be such a wuss.” He narrowed his eyes at me and shrugged.

A group of five guides met us when we arrived. The leader gathered us together and told us to listen up:

“If you have any injuries or heart problems, difficulty breathing, this hike is not for you. The bus driver will take you back to the ship and refund your money. If you think you’re in good physical condition, this hike will redefine your idea of what it means to be ‘in shape’. And if you’re not in good physical condition, this hike will help you find religion.”

Ha ha ha. Very funny. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t take that seriously from a group of five guys who were all chain smoking.

“We normally work on a very tight schedule, and today it’s even tighter because your ship has to leave an hour earlier than usual. So we’ll be moving quickly, and you’ll have to keep up.”

Wait, what?

“You will be given a pack that contains five bottles of water and two energy bars. You will need to eat at the midpoints to keep your energy up. If you can carry extra water, please do so.”

Okay. At this point, I started to get a little frightened. But still, I told myself, I work out, and I know my body—I know when to eat and how to hydrate. Five bottles of water for a day hike will be just fine, thank you. Carrying more is just plain stupid.

We headed out; for about twenty minutes we hiked down a paved road that was almost quaint; surrounded by solidified lava flows on either side, you could see the remains of road signs here and there embedded where the lava had wiped out everything in its path. 

Seriously, this is what you're trying to freak me out about?? Come on. I can do this with one foot tied behind my back. 

This is what all the fuss was about? I began to scoff internally. My elliptical back home is way worse than this! What a bunch of ka-hooey!

And then $*^# got real.

The road ended, and was replaced by trails of lava that extended forward and upward as far as the eye could see. Over each ridge of lava was another ridge of lava, because the flows pile up on top of each other in dreadlock-style rivulets of textured rock. And you have to climb these, up, up, up, to get to the top of the volcano and the site of the active flows.

Looks like you just have to climb over this, right? Nope. It kept going like this for two hours. 

This development did not please me. When I think ‘hike’, I assume there is some sort of trail, not just clambering up endless piles of black, unforgiving, volcanic rock.

This is also when the air started to get hot. I know what you’re thinking—well, duh, you’re climbing up a volcano. To a place where there are active lava flows. Which are made of molten rock. Of course it’s gonna be hot!

You’re right. You are. And I have no idea why that never occurred to me, but it didn’t. So this is where I should probably mention that my body and heat do not get along. You know how every year something like four or five people die in Arizona of heat exposure? I’d be one of those people if I lived in Arizona, even if I never left the air-conditioning.

And, to top it all off, we didn’t get any real rest breaks, because we were racing to complete the ‘hike’ in five hours instead of the normal six.

To sum up: I was on a 2.5 hour Stair-master trip directly to hell, which was very confusing for me, since I had always been taught that hell was found in a downward direction.

Yet, I am nothing if not stubborn. There was no way I was going to let our guides be right—I was gonna make it up that volcano if it killed me. I’d show them.

So I climbed. I trudged. I stumbled. And as I did, I drank water almost constantly. At one point, my husband poured a bottle of water over my head and you couldn’t even tell, because my clothes were soaked through with sweat. There was no way my five bottles were going to last even until we got to the top, let alone the trip back.

By the two hour mark, I needed all my focus to continue climbing. My eyes fixed directly in front of me, constantly searching for the next places to put my feet. I lost track of my surroundings completely, saw nothing outside of my direct path of vision. With every step, my body told me I couldn’t go any further, and my mind had to keep lying to my legs: just one more step, we’re almost there.

By the time we reached the top, where the flows mostly leveled out, I was done. The heat was coming off the ground in waves you could almost touch, like we were inside a convection oven. About half of the group had given up and turned back long ago, and I was still in the first 20% of our group to arrive. But that didn’t matter right then; my body had had enough, and I sank down to sit on the ground.

My husband, who had been a little bit ahead of me, came back to my side.

“Don’t stop now! The active flows are right over there!” He said.

“I don’t care.” I said.

“No, seriously, not more than fifty feet!” He said.

“That’s awesome for you.” I said.

“You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss this!” Said he.

“Bite me.” Said I.

But he was right, and I knew it. So I took some cleansing breaths, and I reached down deep inside to I don’t even know where. I stood up on legs that felt like overcooked ravioli, and began to move toward the flow, forcing myself to take every step.

Then, a voice rang out.

“STTTTTOOOOOOOPPPPPPP!!”

I stopped, and looked around to see which idiot was doing what stupid thing.

Predictably, the idiot was me. I was so focused I hadn’t noticed the patch of silvery ‘rock’ that indicated a live flow that was only just starting to crust over. I had stopped only inches from stepping into molten lava so hot I probably would have literally pulled back a stump and nothing more.

The one I almost stepped on didn't have any orange, just that smooth silvery look. 

The heat coming off of these was so intense, it actually messed with my camera. 

In light of this, my husband decided it was a probably a good idea to walk alongside of me for a while, and I managed to make it safely over to the red-and-orange active flows. 

I could not get closer than this to the lava, it was simply too hot. Even this was too much--as soon as the picture was taken, I bolted away from it.

They were truly awesome, in the original sense of the word, as in 'awe-inspiring'. And in the distance, the trails flowed all the way down into the ocean, sending up huge plumes of steam where the water met the liquid fire. It was beautiful, it was amazing, it was a monumental demonstration of the power of nature and the wonders of this earth. It was worth every bit of the torture it took to get there, and I don’t regret doing it for a minute.

But next time I’ll take the helicopter.

©Michelle M. Chouinard, 2014. All rights reserved.

DestructoLog

DestructoLog, Cat Date: Meorw, 8014

So far, operation Mommy Insanity has been unsuccessful. On day 1, we planted a mouse under the floorboards in the bathroom. When the boards were torn up during this hellish construction project, the mouse popped out, right in front of Mommy. When she wasn't scared or angry, and only made a joke out of it, we knew we had to bring out the big guns.

So yesterday, we designed what we thought was the perfect plan. We released another of the mice that we'd previously trapped, directly out into the dog's cage. When the dog behaved in her predictably annoying canine fashion, we deployed our coordinated ambush. We scattered fiercely around the room, taking out any and all strategic targets that we could reach--we even exceeded our grandest hopes and exploded our prime objective, her Starbucks mocha. I was particularly proud of Agent 004, who left behind a path of urine as the ultimate final insult.

Yet still, she retained her calm, and refused to release us from our cruel imprisonment; we rotted in this tiny room with her until dinner time.

I'll admit it--we started to despair for a time. If she was going to remain steadfast in the face of even that destruction, what chance did we have?

We stayed up all night trying to brainstorm a new plan. We sent Agent 001 to sleep with her, so she wouldn't be suspicious of us. Then, right as the sun was coming up, Agent 002 came up with a brilliant idea, tactically nearly as old as Catkind itself: we would use her Achilles' Heel to take down the rest of the her, bringing the beast crippled to its knees, and our imprisonment to an end. She would have to surrender to our demands.

We waited patiently as she started her day, and as she worked through the morning. She saves her work often, so we had to work out the timing carefully to be sure we would cause her to lose as much work as possible. We took turns being both cute and mischievous, thereby keeping her totally off guard. After about 3 hours, we saw our moment, and we sent in Agent 002 on what might have turned out to be a suicide mission.

Agent 002 crawled up on her lap and looked lovingly in her eyes. She nuzzled up to Mommy's head, and then snaked about her neck to the other side of the chair. She jumped up on the desk, and reached over to give Mommy a butterfly kiss. Then, ever so nonchalantly, she wound her way around the back of the laptop...and then SPLOOSH! She knocked the Starbucks mocha over the laptop keyboard with admirable precision.

There was no great joy in watching Mommy scream, and jump, and run for a towel. There was no happiness in watching her dab furiously at the keyboard, trying to soak up the liquid before it was too late, knowing that she would never be successful. We took no pleasure in it. But you see, sometimes in war, you have to take casualties. You have to break some eggs if you want to make an omelet. And when it comes right down to it, we didn't start this war--she only has herself to blame.

First, her touchpad went out, and she realized that something was very wrong. Still she kept dabbing, and then the screen filled with static. Her face filled with horror as she realized her motherboard was shorting out.

When she was on her knees, shaking her fists toward the ceiling and sobbing 'why, why, why??', we knew that we'd won. But we did not rejoice.

I must stop writing now, because I hear her footsteps coming to surrender, and to liberate us. So I will sign off now, refusing to gloat in my triumph.

Wait, what's happening? She's doing something on her smart phone...she's posting an ad on Craig's List...if I could just...make out what it says...wait...

"Four cats seek loving homes. $50 per cat--we pay you."

NNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!


[Human note: This is a dramatization of a TRUE story. Well, except for the Craig's List part. But yes, my computer is dead, and I have to buy a new one. I love my cats. I love my cats. I love my cats...]

Mama said there'd be days like this...

Do you remember the Tasmanian Devil? The one who hung out with Bugs Bunny and when he got annoyed he'd start going 'bbllrrabbbllllrrraapppprrr!!' and turn into a tornado?

I want you to keep that image in your  head. We'll be coming back to it.

I'd love to say that the day started out well, but it didn't really. Today is day two of my pipe-replacement journey, and for the second day, I woke up at 8 am. Now, for those of you who don't know, I am a night owl, and I tend to be up working until at least 2am. Most often, I'm up until 3. So before you get all judgy and play the tiniest violin in the world for me, realize what that means--it means only 5-6 hours of sleep, at the most. If you get up at 6 am, imagine having to get up at 3am, and that's the equivalent. Yes, both nights I tried to go to sleep earlier, but I wasn't able to fall asleep earlier, and I just laid awake unable to fall asleep until it was actually farther past my bedtime than normal. So, to sum up, I'm a little sleep deprived. And I don't wake up well on a good day, when I've had plenty of sleep--I used to have a mug that said 'Just hand me my coffee and back slowly away.' You get the picture.

I got up, and prepped the house. What that means is, the dog has to be out in her dog run, and the cats have to go into a room with me, because 1) they can't be allowed outside, and 2) they'll get in the way of the workers. So I brought them into my 'office' with me, where I sat down to get some work done.

I was excited today because I was going to attend a webinar about writing. I made sure everything was all set up, I had my coffee, and I even had a cozy blanket wrapped around me. Ah, the benefits of working from home. Then the seminar started, and I began to listen. I think these things always start out slowly, which was good, because I hear the workers talking about how the stuff we ordered to put the bathroom into place again won't fit, and new stuff has to be reordered. I don't even have to know how or why, I just know it's going to be expensive. Ah, well, c'est la vie. You have to have working pipes, and that bathroom has to be reassembled afterwards.

I turned my attention back to the webinar, and ignored the chatter. Suddenly, the dog started to bark about something. I don't know what--maybe she saw a cat or a possom or a raccoon in the yard. Maybe some bird was taunting her. Maybe that episode of Cosmos she heard in the background the other day finally registered and she was suddenly hit with the vastness of our universe and the absurdity of life when seen from that context. Who knows.

The point is, she went nuts barking, and then, BAM! There's a huge crash against the side of the house. Perhaps it was the cat or possom or raccoon escaping. Perhaps it was a canine suicide attempt in the face of deep philosophical questions about why we're all on this planet.

Whatever it was, it scared the booboo-jeebies out of the cats, who all jumped simultaneously. Keep in mind that my cats are ninjas, and when they jump, they don't just jump--they leap up walls and furniture. So, when they jumped at the scary noise, the fear was reinforced by the sight of three other cats leaping around them in their peripheral vision. So they each understandably tried to run away from the other cats that were leaping and jumping around them.

Okay, now is when I want you to call in that visual of the Tasmanian Devil.

There were  four cats, all trying to out-run each other, and all doing it up at the top of the room. From the top of one bookcase to another, off the lamp, off the top of the desk, banking off walls, off the top of the shoe rack hanging from the back of the door, all faster than the eye can see and the brain can register. Knocking everything down that was stupid enough to be in their path--pictures, printer paper, the shoe rack and all the shoes, small tchotchkes, magazines, my phone, and most important of all: my beloved Starbucks mocha.

I waited for a few seconds assuming they'd each find a spot of sanctuary to hide behind, before realizing that nope, this tilt-a-whirl was self-sustaining. While each thought the other three were chasing them, they were gonna keep running. And leaping. And destroying.

I should probably mention that this is a pretty darn small room, and I am sitting in (roughly) the middle of it, while four cats are dashing around my head at hyperspeed, claws extended, freaking out. And all I know is that if I move a muscle, I'm most likely going to be shredded. Or peed on. Or both.

Let's pause for a moment to do a little math. Each cat has four paws, each of which has five claws. There are four cats. Four times four times five = eighty. 80 claws, all whirling around my head. I've never been so glad in my whole life not to own any polydactyl cats.

I have no idea why I thought this would work. In retrospect, it was probably a fairly stupid thing to do, but you know how it is at the spur of the moment. I put my hands up and said sternly, in a loud voice just below a yell: CALM. DOWN.

And they did.

Holy crap, they actually did. 

They each went to their metaphorical corners. I looked at them, and they looked out at me with accusatory faces, like I'd been the cause of the whole thing, and I owed them an apology. They looked around, and I swear if they'd been able to speak, they would have said "Damn, what a huge mess! You better get to cleaning this up!"

And they did have a point, so I got to cleaning. I sopped up the mocha, started picking up all the things they'd knocked over, and realized that one of them had voided their bladder while in flight. There was a series of little puddles all around the edge of the room, like the trail of bread that Hansel & Gretel laid down to find their way back home, but only if it was incredibly disgusting and led directly to the depths of hell. For the next half hour, I fell in love all over again with my old friend, the Lysol spray can.

After that, I pried one of the cats off the far corner of the bookcase where he'd tried to become one with the wall, and attempted to bring him out of his dissociative fugue state with a can of his favorite yummy noms. Bupkis. He stared at me like I was the devil and he wanted to shred my face. He is still, at this very moment. It's very disconcerting.

What's the moral of the story? I believe it's this:

Thank goodness the webinar was free.

© Michelle M. Chouinard 2014 All rights reserved.

Black Widow: The Prequel

The following was originally published on another platform on April 29, 2007. After I posted my other spider story, I had a few requests to elaborate on my previous experience with black widows...so I did. To be clear: yes, this absolutely 100% happened to me.

Enjoy! :)

***

Black Widow: The Prequel

I’ve had several requests for me to tell the story of the black widow in my garage that pre-dated the spider in my fireplace…So here goes.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (the California Bay Area; a land normally blissfully free of black widow spiders), Brian decided it was time to buy a new car. After much thought, he picked out the car of his dreams and decided that he wanted the car to be teal. Unfortunately, there was only one of the model he wanted in teal—and it was in a land even farther away: Redding.

So, the dealership drove the car down from Redding, and Brian and I picked it up. It was beautiful beyond words, and we stood staring at it in wonder, holding hands and thinking back to simpler times when life itself was as enchanting. Because it was so beautiful, we parked it inside of the garage; no way were we going to let the elements beat down on its perfect, awe-inspiring body. 

What we didn't realize was...it had a hitch-hiker in it.

We went about our business, doing the things that life demands. A few days later, we went in the garage to load up the car for a trip.

Have you seen the movie ‘Arachnophobia’? In it, there is a scene where a woman finds a huge 20-foot spider web hanging ceiling to floor in her barn. She is stunned by its beauty, and takes pictures of it. Only later does she discover the web was made by a monster-death-spider from hell intent on killing her and her entire family.

(Source)

When we went into the garage, we saw that web. From the top of the garage, to each side of the garage, to the floor of the garage, all around the car, touching various parts of the car: a huge, intricate, intense, 20-foot web.  

I looked at the web and said “Holy S***. I don’t EVEN want to KNOW what made THAT web”. Brian, ever the practical one, said “Um… I think I DO want to know what made that web.”. So, we began to trace the web to its most dense point; this turned out to be the passenger-side wheel-well of the car. Brian took a flashlight and looked into the wheel well. He said ‘It’s a black widow’. I said ‘No way, we don’t have those here. Let me see’. I bent down, and he told me to look where the light was. “I only see a white pod-like thing”, I said. “No, he said, to the left of that.”

I don’t remember making a decision to leave the garage. In fact, I don’t even remember actually leaving the garage. All I know is that the next thing I knew, I was standing in farthest end of the backyard, screaming “Kill it!!! KILL IT!!!!!”. (To this day, Brian says that he’s never seen me move that fast, ever. Even when it involved chocolate.)

So, Brian got some bug spray, and gave the black widow a shot directly in the face. It didn't. Even. Phase her. He gave her another shot, and that didn’t phase her, but it broke the web that she was standing on, and she dropped to the ground, and started to crawl away. Her big mistake was crawling out from under the car; as soon as she did, Brian stomped on her, squishing her little poisonous body.

“Yay!”, you’re thinking, “Brian rules all! He has defeated the dreaded monstrous Shelob-like black widow!!”.  And that’s what I thought, too. Until Brian took a second look at that white pod-like thing. It was a nest…and it was broken open: the babies had hatched out of it. With a feeling of intense horror we stood up slowly and started looking around. Sure enough, there were hundreds of little tiny white spiders walking along the never-ending web that had been spun all over our garage.

(Source)

From the backyard, I found myself again yelling. This time it was ‘We have to bomb the garage and the car! We have to bomb the garage and the car!!!”. Brian said he was worried that the bug bomb would ruin the new paint on his new car. I said he had a choice to make—he could stay married to me or he could keep his car bug-bomb free. Thirty minutes later, after he’d made the pro-con list for each option and come to his informed decision, he decided to bomb the garage and the car.

Since then, we have had no black widows in our Bay Area home.

But fate, with her infinitely dark sense of humor, has sent me to the Central Valley, where black widows roam free, and graze upon the angst of lost souls. Son-of-a-B****.

© Michelle M. Chouinard 2007 All rights reserved.

Spider Mis-adventures...

[This was originally posted on a previous, now-defunct blog of mine on April 23, 2007. Enjoy!]

*** 

Who's married to the moron?

My husband is. 

In case you didn’t already have it, here’s proof that not only am I a moron, I am a special brand of moron.

When I got home tonight, I noticed what looked like a black widow spider near my fireplace. When I went over to it to see if there was a red hourglass on his nasty little black body, he ran away, under the fireplace, where I could no longer see him, nor crush him into oblivion.

(Source)

For those of you who have not heard of my arachnophobia-esque black widow horror story, and for those who don’t know I’ve previously found 2 black widows in my Central Valley garage, I should probably explain my spider philosophy. I love spiders, I think they are great, they eat all kinds of little pesky bugs, and so I generally leave them alone. However, if the spider is black with a red hourglass or brown with a violin marking, well, then, one of us has to go.

I ran through my options. The aforementioned crushing was out. I couldn’t lift the grill and squash him, because that sort of thing (putting your fingers where a black widow might be) is exactly what gets a black widow pissed off, and guarantees a bite. I couldn’t spray under the fireplace because it uses both electricity and gas (don't ask me to explain, I can't), and I don’t need it exploding and blowing up my house just to take out a black widow (although I did consider this option very seriously for about 5 minutes before rejecting it). So, I came to the conclusion that we’d just have to live in tentative harmony. Black widows usually don’t seek people out anyway, so, live and let live, right?

Yeah, that lasted for about 10 minutes, until I started to have visions of black-widow spiders crawling up my bedspread in the middle of the night and biting my face while mumbling ‘think you’re gonna scare ME into hiding under the fireplace b*tch?!’. These visions of course began to play over and over in my mind, on a seemingly endless loop.

So I called my go-to-guy, and asked him what to do. He told me he had bought some special bug stuff that you spray around the bottoms of walls and such to keep insects from coming in, and I should just spray some around the bottom of the fireplace. 

Genius. Sunshine and happiness reigned over all. *Cue choir of angels.*

Off I skipped...I got out the bug spray, and was impressed by how cute it was—it was a big ol' container, with a hose coming out of the side of it, and a little spray nozzle attached to the end of the hose. I carried it over to the fireplace, pointed, and pulled the trigger. 

Nothing happened.

“What do I do now?” said I. Um...Oh yeah. Probably reading the instructions might be a good idea.

Derp, I forgot to lift the release mechanism, and to twist the nozzle in order to open it up. So I lifted the mechanism, and then looked at the nozzle so that I could see how to turn it. Then I turned it, and it definitely opened up—and sprayed me directly in the face with a full shot of bug pesticide. Right IN THE MOUTH.

Luckily I don’t go around with my mouth hanging open (usually), so the pesticide didn’t go inside, only on the lips and the surrounding area. But still (I’m thinking), that can’t be good.

I went to the bathroom and washed my face 10 times. Now when I opened my mouth I tasted chemicals, but I didn't know if what I was tasting was the pesticide chemicals or the soap chemicals, because I was so panicked that I used the hand-soap to wash my face, and I wasn't familiar with what that tastes like. So I brushed my teeth, and rinsed with Listerine™. Now all I was able to taste was the Listerine™, so I didn't know if the pesticide was gone, or if it was just being covered up with the freakishly strong taste of the Listerine™. Son-of-a-four-legged-prostitute.

As an academic, I place high stock in the written word, so, I went to read the warning label on the bug-spray. The bottle had all kinds of stuff about what to do if you get the chemicals in your eyes, but nothing about what to do if you ingest them. All I could think was, "Wait, huh? There’s ALWAYS at least one warning about ingestion on everything! WTF??"

So, I called the emergency hot-line number listed on the bottle. They were closed for the night: apparently, if you have an emergency after 8pm EST, you’re on your own.

Now I started to feel a panic attack coming on. In my mind, I could feel the chemicals burning my mouth, and I could sense them being absorbed into my bloodstream. How long did I have before my veins started to collapse? How long before my heart shut down? Did I have enough time to send an e-mail to all my loved ones telling them I wish I'd spent more time with them? Would it be a painful death? Or would it come on silently as I slept?

Just as I was about to throw the phone across the room, the phone voice says ‘if you’d like to be connected to the poison control line, press one’. Do I? Do I?? Whoo-hoo! I’m saved!

Luckily, the main poison control line has this cool thing where they can look up the UPC of your product and tell you if you’re going to die in your sleep because you sprayed it in your face. So I gave the guy the number and told him what happened, and to his credit, he didn't really laugh very much at all. In fact, he told me it’s pretty common for people to leave the bottle out and have their dog come along and eat off the nozzle and ingest the pesticide. 

(Wait, did he just tell me I’m about as smart as a dog? Couldn’t he have pretended that some other human has done this?). 

He also told me that I’m not going to go into convulsions at any minute, and all I have to do is wash my face and rinse my mouth. And I’m pretty sure that I only imagined him saying ‘Hey Lou, you gotta come hear this one!’ as he was hanging up the phone.

Crisis averted. What a relief! 

Funny, going through something like that can really make you come close to peeing your pants. Okay, maybe only if you're an anxiety case like me. The point is, I had to visit the ladies room, now that my life had been saved. 

And that’s when I discovered that my toilet was plugging up.

I decided it might be smart to hold off on trying to fix that tonight.

***

[Addendum: When I first posted this, one of my friends posted a comment in response that said 'Congratulations! Your life is a scene from an episode of the Simpsons!' For your viewing pleasure, I have linked a few seconds of that scene for you here. I've been assured it's much funnier when you haven't lived it. ]

© Michelle M. Chouinard 2007 All rights reserved.