Friday is supposed to be a good day. It’s the fun day of the
week I look forward to. This particular Friday was one I was really looking
forward to. The weather was nice and I anticipated a house full of kids and
teenagers for our annual pumpkin carving. I couldn't wait to get off work and
prepare for the party.
In spite of my excitement, Friday was not cooperating.
Nothing I had touched had gone quite like I expected. The cake pops that were to be dipped ever so elegantly
in candy corn-colored layers had instead become unsightly orbs coated in glops
of melted chocolate. I had decided to
just go with the flow and I had adopted a rather whatevs attitude. Friday just wasn't what I had hoped, but I pressed on.
I was boiling sugar into caramel on the stove while also
trying to direct my young herd through a last-minute power cleaning of our
well-lived in home. You know, multi-tasking, which always works out SO well. I picked
up a few scattered hair bands from the sofa and flung them in the bathroom drawer
on my way through the hall. I shot a sideways glance at the bathroom floor and
noticed multiple rolls of toilet paper thrown in the floor (why kids, why??) and
immediately my frustration level grew.
In my extreme frustration, I slammed that bathroom drawer.
Hard. Very hard.
A bottle of bug repellent lined itself up ever so perfectly
in the drawer so as to align its spray nozzle in such a way that my slamming
the drawer depressed the spray nozzle and sent a stream of bug repellent
directly into both eyes and my nose in a split second of pure horror. I was
BLIND.
I’m not sure if I was blinded by the actual chemical or just
from the sheer pain, but I was unleashing a torrent of profanities and indistinguishable
screams that could probably be heard on the next block. I was near a sink, but
I was not thinking clearly and I began to run blindly toward my own bathroom
sink slamming face first into every door frame along the way. Every door frame.
I plunged my face into the sink and began flushing my eyes with water which had
the effect of intensifying the burning sensation three-fold.
I could not even fathom what had happened. I had just shot
myself in the face with bug repellent. For the love of all things! How in the
hell could that even have happened? I wandered, still half-blind, back to the
kitchen to check on my caramel and then back to the sink for more eye washing.
In the meantime, a well-meaning family member reduced the
temperature of my boiling caramel to less than a boil. I decided it looked caramelish enough and we began dipping bite-size pieces of apple. I was so very proud of
myself. I had cooked my own, made-from-scratch, caramel and the Fish and I had coated
the most adorable bite-size apples ever complete with little bat and pumpkin-shaped
food picks.
About twenty minutes later, those
cute little apples shed their caramel coatings in an act of pure defiance. I said very
ugly things. Very, ugly.
But, Friday marched on as it does. Kids arrived with pumpkins
to carve and I soon forgot my irritated eyes. There were ugly-but-delicious
cake pops to be consumed. There were friends to converse with and hot dogs to
roast. There were leaves falling from the trees and ooey-gooey roasted marshmallows
being eaten around the fire pit in the back yard.
It was perfection, this Friday with all of its challenges
and torments. Absolute perfection.
If I had my stuff together, and had not sprayed myself in the eyeballs with bug repellent, and had not adopted a whatevs attitude, perhaps I would have actually taken photos of the pumpkin carving party. Alas, I didn't have it together. I did poison my own eyeballs. And I did say "whatevs, people. Whatevs." I did not take photos of our annual pumpkin carving party. But, I did take this last-minute pic with mah friend. So there you go.
