The Mighty Q-tip

Something kind of funny happened this morning. I was cleaning out my ears with Q-tips, same thing I have done every day for the last 15 or so years. This time, however, as I improperly inserted the Q-tip into my inner ear canal, something I have also done every day for the last 15 years, the Q-tip end stayed inside my inner ear canal upon Q-tip extraction. I stared dumbly at the naked end of the Q-tip for a moment, contemplating the embarrassment of explaining to the staff in the E.R. that an incompetent 27-year old has just jammed a Q-tip into her ear and was unable to get it out. It's one thing if you're a quirky 5-year old child who is experimenting with the number of peas that can be inserted into various bodily orifices, but quite another to be a (quasi-)functional adult doing the same. Not that I was shoving Q-tips anywhere else but my ears, of course. Hey, this is a g-rated blog, people!

Anyway, I walked around my apartment for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. When I moved my jaw around, there was a kind of a muffled squish sensation in my left ear and I heard everything through more of a fuzz than usual. I was suddenly really glad that I had health insurance in case the doctors discovered that I had jammed the Q-tip right into my brain. And then I would have cotton fuzz floating around in my cerebral cortex! And then the surgeons had to perform a risky brain surgery to save my life! No, seriously though, it was kind of funny. I propped up one mirror to another mirror to see if the Q-tip was visible in my ear - to no avail. It had disappeared into the chasm.

Suddenly, I thought of my tweezers! I made a bargain with myself. ONE TRY, and if I couldn't get it out, Chris and I would grab a couple of good books and spend a long, pleasurable afternoon waiting in the E.R. while the doctors first attended to those with real emergencies. I carefully inserted the tweezers into my inner ear canal (when will I ever learn?? 'Cause when you jam one thing into your ear, the perfect solution is to jam another thing into your ear to get the first thing out.)

So, dearest reader, I am sure you're on the edge of your seat with excited anticipation, awaiting the climax of the story. Can I have a drum rollllll please?

SUCCESS! E.R. trip avoided! Embarrassment saved! Q-tip lesson learned! All this without one single second of panic. I feel endlessly wiser than I did pre-Q-tip-insertion.

Typical.

A nice family photo, made better by a certain someone's insanity.
It must be contagious, because the next pic I snapped looked like this:

Wreath Whoops

Hahahaha! Okay, so Cameron, Chris and I were standing in the hallway outside my apartment (Cameron lives across the hall from me) and we were quasi-laughing at my old lady neighbor's wreath hanging on her door. We're standing there kind of staring at it and it dawns on me that the overly-large and completely bare wreath has a string of Christmas lights attached to it. Not only that, but the wreath is hanging treacherously from her doorknocker by the end of the cord on the string of lights. Mind you, the lights are not plugged in, so we are talking about a large naked wreath with a string of old, unused lights awkwardly wrapped around it. Of course, since I have to touch EVERYTHING I see, I went up to the wreath and kind of jostled it a little bit, just to see what would happen. You know where this is going, right...the wreath CRASHED to the ground in one fell swoop. I backed away with my hands up, as if to alleviate responsibility from myself. We all stood there for kind of a dumb second or two, looking around like we had been caught with our hands in a cookie jar. At least, this is how I manifested my feelings at the time. I absolutely refused to put the wreath back on the door, because of course she would have opened her door the NANOSECOND I attempted to reattach the godawful wreath. And that would have been quite an interesting explanation. **Editor's note: After reading this post, Chris demanded I mention that he swooped in to gallantly save the day and reattach the wreath. So, from me to you, Chris: I Thank God for your supreme superhero likeness. :-)

On a side note...the other day, Chris noticed that the plastic white bird that had previously been cutely perched in MY appropriately sized & wonderfully decorated wreath had gone mysteriously missing. Who in HECK steals a plastic 3" bird from someone's CHRISTMAS WREATH???? I mean, it's not like it could be re-gifted. Or even used as a cat toy. Revenge, p'raps? By a certain elderly woman whose wreath was violated? The truth will forever remain unknown...

Airport awesomeness

Amazingly awkward conversation Chris and I had while waiting for our (delayed) plane to arrive at Chicago O'Hare airport:

2 small children who don't know each other were playing "Ring Around the Rosey" nearby, very loudly and cutely, among a throng of 176 passengers waiting to board flight 730 to BWI.

"That's so cute!" I said. Chris looked over at the two kids and nodded.

"That's funny, they just met and they're already playing together!" I exclaimed. "I wish adults could do that. I think WE should start playing with random strangers in the airport."

Insert long, awkward pause.

"Hmm", I added, somewhat hastily. "That sounded really, really wrong."

A nearby passenger burst into laughter.

"Well, honey," Chris retorted, "At least you didn't say we should play with strange CHILDREN in the airport."

I really think we should work on our quiet voices.

Jesus....Shaves?

This is great....just great!

Haha...this is so much fun. By "this" I mean Chris of course. Awesomeness.

The Flood

I was semi-hoping that my days of toilet embarrassments were over; alas, I endured the motherload of all awkwardly mortifying moments 2 weeks ago. As you can see, it took me some time to recover enough from The Incident to write about it, so with much trepidation and anxiety, here goes.

So Chris and I are visiting his parents in PA for the weekend, along with his younger sister. Now, I'll just say right here that if I didn't feel comfortable around his family or had just met them, this story would rate a lot higher on the mortified scale. But, you'll see that regardless...it's pretty awful.

Anyway, it was Saturday morning. We've all eaten a delicious filling breakfast, and that very breakfast was on its way through my system and ready to meet its end in the ceramic throne. I headed to the bathroom to do just that. Now, this toilet has a tendency to, shall we say, overflow. Knowing this, I reminded myself to perform a courtesy flush "halfway through". This was successfully performed; I completed my business (trying to keep out the details here, but falling short of rated G), closed the lid, flushed and started the shower. Somewhere between taking off my shirt and stepping over to adjust the temperature of the shower, I noticed I was standing in what felt like a small ocean. Glancing down, I saw that the toilet had, in fact, become a small waterfall. Now, I could have done one of several things here. I could have run into the hallway, shirtless and screaming for help. I could have simply grabbed the towel I had laid out, threw it around myself and run into the hallway screaming for help. But no, my brain insisted that I must first turn off the shower. Then my brain insisted that I locate my t-shirt and put it back on even amid my panic. If you have never attempted to get dressed in a panic, I wouldn't recommend it. Suddenly you become extremely uncoordinated, as if you had regressed to the age of 2 and were attempting to clothe yourself in a snowsuit. Needless to say, my delay was costly. After successfully re-dressing myself, I then ran into the hallway screaming for help. Meanwhile, the toilet waterfall continued to gain in speed and volume like a stream aspiring to become Niagara Falls. Chris responded to my call for help, racing down the hall and immediately went for the shut-off valve behind the toilet. (Now, why didn't I think of that?) Alas, the valve was stuck, and it took a few tries before it was successfully shut off and the flood stopped its momentous rush. At this point Chris opened the toilet lid before I could warn him that there was some solid matter still floating gleefully inside, post-courtesy flush. He gagged in revulsion and scrambled for towels to start mopping up the ocean of poopwater.

The aftermath of The Flood went something like this: 2 inches of water covered the bathroom floor & linen closet, flowed into the hallway and into one of the nearby bedrooms and cascaded like a summer rain through the floorboards and into the basement where Chris' sister was splashed in the eye while attempting to catch the fallout in a large bucket.

But hey, at least I had my shirt on!

Blueberry Beetle

Happily eating blueberries...about 3/4 of the way through them...happened to glance in the container and spotted THIS...

Yup...a dead beetle... *gag*

Sidebar

Isn't it just GREAT when you're sitting around with a group of people and your pastor is talking about something or other, and you suddenly feel the unquenchable need to have a ridiculous sidebar that makes no sense at all in the grand scheme of things, but somehow you just can't stop yourself?

Me: *burps quietly* Excuse me.

Shaun: (whispers) What?

Me: (whispers back) I said excuse me, I just burped.

Shaun: Oh.

Me: (quietly) At least I didn't fart. (laughs)

TJ, our pastor: (stops mid-sentence) What's going on over there?

Me: Oh, I was saying...uh, at least I didn't fart.

Group of people: (Stare in silence)

Me: (incessant need to explain EVERYTHING no matter how ridiculous, knowing I can just say never mind, carry on but somehow those words just don't come out, instead, I must explain how I burped and said excuse me and then said at least I didn't fart, etc. etc., enduring the awkward silence and some embarrassed laughter, at least, it seemed embarrassed, it could have been pity laughter, but same diff, because either way, I said at least I didn't fart, and how many ways are there to react to that announcement.)

Cringeworthy

Sometimes I should just not talk. like, ever.
Gchat convo, my sister and I:

me: is it awkward to ask someone how their fetus is doing?

or is that just weird.

Janis: uh yeah, sounds a liitttllleee psycho.

me: oh, ok, i won't ask that then. i was just trying to think of another way to ask someone how their pregnancy is coming along.

Janis: hmmm

hmmmmmmmmmmm

How's that bun cookin'?

me: haha, well, i ended up just asking her how she and the baby are doing.

Janis: BOR-ing....