Bits for Sunday, September 2, 2007

My life is nothing if not comical. Some of you have already heard this story, so for the repeat, I apologize. But for the rest of you, well, I hope you get a good laugh!

This past Tuesday, I had an appointment to get my hair overhauled: cut/thinned/shaped/dyed – the whole deal. I wanted to start off the school year not looking like a senior citizen in training.


So after work, I donned the famous purple “hair shirt” and drove to my appointment. At the end of the hair overhaul, she also shaped up my eyebrows a little bit. As I prepared to leave, she told me I still had some wax in my left eyebrow and I’d need to go home and massage my eyebrow with a soapy washcloth to get the rest of the wax out. No problem. I drove home with my waxy eyebrow and prepared to face my evening.



As I tell you this next part, please know that I am not a bad housekeeper. I clean every week, but even the cleanest house occasionally gets an issue, right? Well, this week, my issue was the appearance of at least one flea. My cats are indoor cats all the time, so I know they didn’t start it. And I had carefully combed through their fur and found no trace of fleas. But somewhere a flea got in. And all it takes is one. That one flea, so small it can never be found, will bite me until I look like I have chicken pox. It’s ridiculous. It’s probably been five years since a flea has taken up residence in this house, but of course it picked this week to return.

So my plan, after coming home from my hair overhaul, was to find that stupid flea and kill it. I was convinced that it was upstairs, so my plan was to wash all the bedding, give the cats a flea bath (just in case) and then use the flea fogger overnight to fumigate the upstairs. I came home, with my freshly cut hair randomly sticking to my waxy eyebrow, pulled all the sheets off the bed, and threw them in the washer. I retrieved the flea bath bottle from the closet and cornered Braeya. That went well. I got the flea bath, and she ran away, her back resembling a drowned rat. The attempt with Kaegan didn’t go much better – and all the while, my hair kept sticking to the wax every time I bent over.

The washer cycle ended, so I stopped to move the sheets into the dryer. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Not when the top sheet is stuck underneath the agitator. That sucker was not moving. I pushed and pulled and tugged and rested and started all over again. My agitator has threatened to eat clothing before, but usually I can pull it out. Not this time. I tried to see if I could figure out how to remove the agitator, but I couldn’t get anything to budge.

Did I mention this is my only set of sheets that fits my bed?

I laughed. What else could I do? I mean I had a waxy eyebrow, residual flea bath still on my arms, and then my sheets firmly lodged in my washer.

Resigning myself to a night on the couch, I headed to the computer to catch up on life online. I perched on the wooden folding chair that serves as my desk chair (since I’m too cheap to spring for a real one) while chatting online, sending emails, and catching up on blogs. I didn’t move, I didn’t lean over, I didn’t shift in any way. But the next thing I knew, I was on the floor with the back of my head cracking into the hardwood and my toe slicing against something (the nearest I can figure is that it caught the metal strip on my keyboard tray).

My chair broke.

No creaking. No wobbling. No warning. Just BOOM – gone. I sat up, reached up to the keyboard tray and resumed my chatting. What else could I do?

After that, I decided to take care of the waxy eyebrow because I did not need one more mishap. I also made the executive decision to not run the fogger overnight – just in case it would in some way poison the air for the cats and me. That’s all I needed. Paramedics showing up to find a dead girl with a semi-waxy eyebrow, a busted chair, and sheets wrapped up in the agitator – and two cats strewn throughout the house.
The story has a happy ending, though. My hair is no longer gray. My sweet parents came over late Wednesday evening and Dad took apart the insides of the washer to save my sheets. (They were completely sucked up into the agitator AND stuck in whatever is underneath the agitator.)

I used the fogger while I was at work on Wednesday and I think it successfully killed the offending flea. And for now, while at the computer, I’m hanging out on a dining room chair – hoping for the best each time I sit down.

Here’s to hoping the week to come is slightly less eventful!