Good Morning

Today I woke up to find that The Bloggess had found my church shoe buckle story funny enough to retweet, which is the high praise. Also if you haven't read some of the other hilarious / embarrassing stories people have been sharing with her, read this post from her blog.

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And if you can't remember this story from my childhood, read a longer version here. It is simultaneously the funniest and most embarrassing thing I have ever done in church (or anywhere else). It continues to haunt me almost two decades later, even though my mother stopped telling the story as soon as I asked by bursting into hysterical tears at my grandmother's house.

When I crawled out of bed, my neck had locked up and hurt like mad. I carefully took out the heating pad, trying not to move my head, and then figured I'd get cleaned up before I curled up to relax my neck muscles.

I grabbed my shampoo bottle, LUSH I Love Juicy, and opened the lid. It is one of those lids that open when you press down one side and close when you press the other, like a seesaw. When it clicked open, it spat several droplets out, one on my arm, a few in the tub, and one in my left eye.

I Love Juicy is made of fruit juices. Also other things, but lots of fruit juice goes in there. It's a bit acidic, which makes the whole clarifying thing happen. Unfortunately, when you get an eye-full of citrus, pineapple, and various other juices, you FEEL it. It was like the time I cut a bunch of chilies and then took out my contact lenses. It was like I imagined an eyedropper full of  sulfuric acid would be like. I half expected there to be a chunk of eye missing. My eyes teared.

I tried to flush my eye with water, but I forgot I had the faucet on hot, so I scalded my burned eye before I managed to turn the handle to cool. I also used up half a bottle of eye drops flushing my eye out. It was the sort of red of the apples stereotypically given to elementary school teachers. It took me over a half hour to manage to keep my eye open. Almost another half hour before it stopped feeling like my eyelid was made of sandpaper.

Now, of course, I want safety goggles for the shower, and I'll never trust this particular shampoo bottle again. Stupid life. Stupid burned cornea. And what was I thinking, not having a white button-down shirt? I would so have worn boots and black pants and an eyepatch and gone to work as a pirate today. The kids would've loved it.

In Which Laura Is Viciously Attacked.

I took a week off from work to help Mum with some things she's been working on around the house. Also I wanted to be free of work, since the summer reading program has ended, and now is a good time to detox from the crazy schedule we keep during summer activities and settle back into the normal library year, school visits, ordering books, preparing story hours, and so forth.

The first official day of my vacation, I got the air conditioning fixed in my car. This was brilliant. Now I can drive all over...except I can't because my rear brakes are making a clicking noise. Why all the noise, car? Why so much clicking? Mum and I spent the afternoon picking up color samples for paint and laminate to go on the top of the new bathroom vanity/sink thingy. Also we scheduled someone to come measure for said vanity/sink thingy.

Then yesterday we decided we would scrape one side of the house, prime, and paint it. This was an easy job because our house is only one story. So we set to work. The Brother and I did awesome. We laughed. We had a good time. The cabinet man came to measure. We kept working. Darcy came out and sniffed a plant. We kept scraping. She avoided crossing the line of plants to come see me, but we kept scraping. Then I took a step to the right and felt something stab me.

And then I was covered with wasps.

There were at least twenty just on my leg, and a cloud of them surrounded me. I took off screaming a high-pitched soprano scream, running like mad, using all the speed training I did during the miserable winter on the treadmill.

I was very lucky.

I did not stand ON the nest. Our work must have disturbed the wasps, but it did not involve us putting a foot into their hole in the ground. It was still early morning and quite cool, so they were more sedate. Only part of the hive came out, and most did not pursue me in my mad dash across the yard.

I was wearing long pants. The wasp stinger had to get through dense Lucky Brand denim with NO STRETCH. This meant they didn't hit me quite so hard as they could have, if I'd worn shorts to work on the house.

I, while covered in wasps, was only stung three times. THREE. That is so lucky. They were all over my legs, on my shirt, in my hair, and I only got hit three times with their nasty butt-daggers. I am allergic to everything and the last wasp sting I got made me long for the hospital and a Benadryl drip, but I got one minor sting, one medium sting, and one severe. Just one.

We were also at home, so I could strip, jump into a bathtub filled with baking soda, take Benadryl, use my inhaler, and make a baking soda paste to stick on the stings when I got back out of the water. By the afternoon, I was doing okay. By dinner time, I was back to normal. After dinner, I went on a long bike ride with Mum and Dad.

It could have been so much worse. Even if now I'm afraid of everything that makes a buzzing noise, including small electronics.

Canning and Super Glue Stitches

Yesterday I was making an omelette. I discovered this year that I actually like omelettes, but only if they have some kind of acidic component to balance them out. So I looked for tomatoes.

(Let's just ignore the fact that I'm tomato intolerant, and they cause me lots of problems if I eat them. I like tomatoes. They don't like me, but I like them.)

We were out of tomatoes. Then I thought, huevos rancheros have salsa! Eggs and salsa! So I reached for a jar of salsa. I had made salsa, you see. I made it, I put it in jars, and I canned it in the jars using a hot-water bath. So the jar was a canning jar. It had a flat metal disc for the seal, and a threaded ring you put on over the seal to protect it.

Exhibit A.

The thing about a jar like that is that unscrewing the lid does not break the seal. No. You need a fancy tool to pop open the top, but we do not have that fancy tool. No. Instead, I did what I always do in such circumstances, I pulled out a butter knife.

You probably think you know what's going to happen. But you don't.

I put the edge of the butter knife against the seal and used the edge to break the seal. It was a stubborn seal (which is good, because no salmonella), so I had to work at it. When the seal finally popped open, the jar lid sprang loose with great intensity.

And then it scissored me open like a filet knife. You thought it would be the knife that got me. Nope.

Every once in a great while, I actually hurt myself. See, mostly, my injuries are wimpy bruises, tiny cuts, scrapes, bumps, and so forth. The only thing that makes them of any importance is that they usually occur in ways that are amusing or humiliating (or both). But once and a while, I'll be working in the kitchen, or I'll fall down stairs and instead of blushing or laughing until I cry, I get that weird adrenaline chill that comes when your body tells you, "Hey. This is bad."

It took twenty minutes to get the bleeding to stop. During that time, I pitched my omelette, because no one wants a bloody spinach omelette. Well, maybe vampires, but not me.

I went to a baby shower, I went for a run. I kept my band-aid dry, and I thought I'd be okay. But then I opened a drawer and started bleeding again. Stupid finger.

This led to me yanking open the kitchen junk drawer and giving myself hospital-style liquid stitches using a tube of super glue. Didn't know you could do that? You can. Here's how it works. CLEAN your injured area. Open the super glue tube. Squirt the glue on your cut. Let the glue dry. Have a nice time.

The only problem with this was that I turned on a light this morning and split my finger back open and had to repeat the super glue application. But the glue is waterproof, at least, so I got to wash my hair this morning. There's that.

All the Broken Pieces (of My Family)

So, my family is falling apart. Pieces of us are breaking. It isn't just me anymore. It's contagious. We are clumsy in my house. And my family will all tell you that I am the most accident-prone of the bunch. But this week I was not alone.

Dad had to go to Colorado this week. I got a text message soon afterward that said simply, "One of my teeth just completely fell apart." Yes. Dad was eating popcorn and he was chewing what he thought was a particularly resistant kernel, when he discovered that it wasn't a piece of popcorn he couldn't bite through, it was a fragment of tooth.

He was pretty lucky though, because the tooth had been worked on before, and a piece of filling was still hanging on, keeping the nerve from being exposed and causing him immense pain.

My immediate response was this: "YOU CANNOT TRUST A TOOTH."

Just when you think your teeth are there to help you, they betray you in the worst way possible. You bite into a candy bar and think that it has glass in it, and that the settlement from the candy bar company will pay your way through the college of your choice, and then you realize that it isn't glass in your candy bar, it is tooth. And the tooth is yours. And instead of paying your way through college, you have to pay your way through major dental reconstruction and THEN pay your way through college.

That might have happened to me.

Dad gets to go to the dentist today.

Meanwhile, he left his cell phone in Colorado, and his sister dropped it in the mail, so hopefully it will show up today, too.

Just when you think that with the wasp sting (which has finally deflated but still itches and burns like it is filled with poison ivy) and the broken tooth, we've been plenty destroyed. But no.

Mum was walking across the house on Thursday and bumped her foot against a chair. It didn't hurt too badly, but when she looked down, she saw that her pinkie toe was lying on top of the toe next to it. She was on the phone with The Brother and leaned down to touch her toe. The Brother then got to hear what sounds a human makes when they notice their toe is dislocated and then accidentally relocate it.

Mum's poor toe. She can barely walk. She keeps touching it and saying she'd feel better if it would just "lie down." Meaning, if the swelling would just go down a bit. Poor Mum.

Awesome artwork on this post is not my own creation. If it belongs to you or you know where it came from, let me know and I will give credit where credit is due.

The One About Laura's Weird Feet (and How Easy It Is to Break Them)

It is possible that I shattered my own bone yesterday. If I did not destroy the bones of my left big toe, I did some other damage to it, because I have never woken up mid-scream before.

See, yesterday I was putting on my shoes to take Darcy out, and as I did so, my left big toe felt odd. It usually feels nothing, because due to my freakishness, my big toes actually lean toward my index-toes. This means when I line my feet up, instead of having my big toes parallel to each other, they instead point away from each other. If you were to trace a line alongside each big toe and then close the top, you would end up with a nice triangle.

These are not my feet, but this is what it looks like. That picture is from this blog post that talks about the horrors of high heels with narrow toe boxes. That was not what caused my toes to be weird. I always wore classic 90's clunky boots with huge toe boxes, so how my toes ended up snuggling together is anyone's guess. They have been this way since I was a kid.

Toes are so gross. Once I went into a Borders with a close-up picture of a bunch of people's feet lined up hanging on the wall in the cafe. I am convinced that it was why the Borders chain failed. Who wants to eat a scone when they're looking at gross feet? No one, that's who.

My big toes have two main problems (1) there is a space along the top of my big toes that is essentially numb and (2) sometimes my big toe joints crack or pop, which I always assume is their way of going back where they belong. They do this on their own. All my joints crack and pop, so it isn't really abnormal for me. Still, I'd rather none of my joints ever pop. That's just a personal preference.

As I put on my shoes yesterday, my left big toe popped. It made an audible snapping noise, the kind of noise a twig makes when you crack it.

The noise was not immediately followed by pain, so I continued with my day, went to sleep, and woke up to my alarm this morning.

When the alarm went off, I rolled over as I always do to turn the thing off, still half asleep. What really woke me up was the howl of protest from my left big toe. My alarm and my scream woke me up the rest of the way. Fortunately, the scream was muffled by pillows.

It does not seem to be a bone problem. I still can bend and move the toe normally. It is not bruised and does not appear swollen. But oh, my. The last time I was in this sort of pain, I had been scissored open by a doctor and chunks of me were removed and thrown away. I don't know what tendon or muscle snapped or popped free, but it had to have been something important, because putting on socks brought tears to my eyes.

I drove to work holding my left foot up off the floor so that nothing touched it, because no one deserves that much pain. I considered taping up my toe, in the hope that it would help, but the only tape we have at home is latex surgical tape, which would kill me. So instead I sit here, waiting for my toe to just finish falling off the rest of the way so I could move on with my life.

Oh it hurts. Please send English toffee and lots of ibuprofen. Maybe send ice, too.

Random on a Tuesday

Yesterday I took a box from a shelf and accidentally cut/scraped my wrist deeply on the shelving unit. Sunday I gave myself a second degree burn. Saturday my own fingernail cut me and drew blood. Today I woke up to discover an inexplicable bruise on my other wrist, the one that wasn't already injured.

Can I have an outfit made of bubble wrap? People keep saying I need one and I agree. I think it would look good on me, plus, with all that plastic, it's bound to help me slim down just like wrestlers do, only I will not have to wrestle anyone afterwards.

During all of this, I have picked out three different colors of Butter London that I want. Here they are.

Who am I kidding?

I finished two knitting projects this weekend. I did this to avoid working on a special project. I am making a shirt that is the Maurauder's Map from Harry Potter. Mostly I am making it to have a shirt that literally IS the Marauder's Map, or would be if my Hogwart's letter had ever come and I had learned to enchant things. But it didn't and I haven't. I was inspired by this project I saw on Pinterest, but since I have no desire to wear a short dress or reveal my décolletage, I instead purchased a men's work shirt, tea-dyed it, and am painstakingly reproducing different panels of the Marauder's Map all over it. This will be my Halloween costume until I die. Also it will mean I can go to (potentially) a comic con or maybe someday (if I am lucky), Leaky Con, with people who are in full costume without looking as though I 1) do not belong or 2) am not normal enough to be allowed out in public with the rest of the population. I am weird enough as it is. I don't need to give anyone a real reason to put me in an institution.

I mean, I am a danger to myself (see paragraph one). We don't need to give the men in white coats a REAL reason to lock me up. There's no yellow wallpaper here. Everybody's nice and stable. Ish.

I'll have pictures of the Marauder's Map shirt, too. And then you will all stop making fun of me for creating a hugely intricate Harry Potter costume (because it will be too cool to mock) and for being a cosplay girl, because when you see it, you will realize it does not count as cosplay. It isn't cosplay if you can take off a layer and you are no longer in costume, the same way as a rubber mask or wearing vampire teeth with your normal street clothes does not count as a Halloween costume.

Really, I will me mortified to even wear my Marauder's Map shirt. But I am trying to be brave and to try new things. It's hard. I figure since this is Harry Potter, I will be able to cope with it better and maybe avoid having a panic attack on my doorstep and running back inside to change. Maybe. Wish me luck.




I also want everyone to know that this exists:




If you know me well, you know why it matters to me. (Hint: it is only partly due to Tom Hiddleston.) Really, if you take anything from this blog post, let it be the image of Tom Hiddleston wearing the best of all accessories, the headlamp. Gosh, I love headlamps. (Also Tom Hiddleston, but not in a creepy way.)

Garage Doors, Library Etiquette, and Cutting Your Own Hair at Work

Francis has gone hillbilly. It is so upsetting. Our garage door glitched out somehow last night--none of us are sure what happened or how--but it started closing on its own and then changed its mind when it realized my car was backing out, but the decision came too late. As it went back up, it caught Francis' rear spoiler, and pulled one side free of its moorings. And it scratched the paint. Stupid garage door.

It is the freakiest thing. The door was open. Mom saw it was open. I saw it was open. None of us touched anything, and yet, spoiler disconnected, then reattached with duct tape until I can get Francis to a body shop to have him repaired.

Needless to say, there were tears.

Stupid garage door.

In other news, this morning was my last day of house-sitting, my last moments with the chickens, which I have discovered are very soft animals. Chickens are SOFT. They are like clouds. And they love bread and corn and other things that aren't snow. They are afraid of snow. It's pretty adorable.

Right now I'm really being distracted by this guy in the lobby. He is playing a LOUD game on his cell phone and coughing like a dying man. I would go over and tell him to shut off the phone, but it sounds like TB out there, or chronic lung fungus, and I don't want to die.

Fine. I talked to him. Still hasn't changed the volume. 

People. The library is not for cell phone video games, loud arguments, dying of highly communicable diseases, hiding from your parole officer or the police, free babysitting, or explicit internet searches. I don' t even know why I have to write that. 

The library is, however, for cutting your hair, because yesterday was the third time I ended up in the break room bathroom during my lunch hour, trimming my bangs. This time I did not use craft scissors. It was premeditated, so I went down to the store and bought hair scissors, or shears, or whatever their official name is. They were designed for a teenager, because they are white with neon polka dots, but that beat tiger print, and it was way less expensive than the plain black pair (which I wanted) because the polka dot pair didn't come with a full cape for elaborate hair cutting. Who needs a cape to cut bangs? Not me.

I have improved greatly at bang-cutting, to the extent that now I am able to 1. make them look relatively even, 2. use the technique my hairdresser always uses (meaning not cutting horizontally, but making tiny vertical snips that keep your bangs looking natural and not blunt and terrifying, and 3. I can even keep the angle to them. These are all great accomplishments.

If you're interested in learning how to cut your bangs, you can use this tutorial, which is fantastic (as all Kate's tutorials are), or if you're lucky, you can ask Jennifer, the way I did. She has also trimmed my bangs, and she has skills.

One last thing of note--the Benefit eye cream is awesome. It really does decrease puffiness, and I've started using it in the morning as well as the evening. I love it.