2010 So Far: Hot Sauce, the Common Cold, and Insomnia

This year has not gotten off to a great start for me. I spent New Year’s Eve with family in Louisiana and completely sober. There was not a single alcoholic beverage involved that night. Although I love my in-laws, they insisted on including the 12, 6, and 3 year-old grandchildren in our game of Taboo. This meant skipping all of the hard words. The highlight of the night was me forgetting how to say “umbrella” in English and yelling “parapluie” over and over while making some very suggestive hand motions. If you are having trouble imagining this, hold your fists out in front of you stacked vertically and mime opening an umbrella over and over. Then, I spent New Year’s day on what felt like the longest road trip ever. As far as traveling goes, it always seems that it doesn’t take long to get there, but it takes forever to get back home. Upon arriving home, Aquarius was instantly sick – soar throat, cough, congestion – a reoccurrence of the cold he had just after Thanksgiving. Maybe the holidays bring on these symptoms.

As part of my efforts to take care of the invalid, I attempted to cook dinner one night. Generally, Aquarius does all of the cooking. He was lying on the couch in a Nyquil-induced semi-coma. I was going to make omelets, or at least I think so; it’s all kind of fuzzy now. When I reached into the cabinet to get some oil, I inadvertently dislodged a bottle of Louisiana Red. (It’s basically the same thing as Tabasco.) The edge of the granite countertop broke its fall before it could even reach the tile floor. I never saw the bottle falling, and it took me a moment to realize what had happened. Shards of glass and hot sauce covered me, the cabinets, and the floor, but mostly me. I stood still in a stupor of disbelief and fear. I tried to rewind the whole scene in my head and put the pieces back together, not to pretend that it had not happened, but to figure out what I had done. Looking down at myself, I dared not move because of the tiny flecks of glass embedded in my clothes. My jeans were caked with hot sauce to the point that I could have rubbed my hands on my thighs, twirling my fingers around in the slime, and never have felt denim. The sauce began to soak through my jeans and slightly burn my skin. It was at this point that I began letting out muffled screams which awoke Aquarius. From the couch he asked me what had happened, but I was incapable of articulating my disaster.

Once I pulled myself together, I stepped over the spray of glass and the orange colored splatter to make my way to the bathtub. There, I pulled off my fluffy over-the-jeans boots. They had to be rinsed under the faucet. The same had to be done to my jeans while I kept my socks on as protection from the glass that was now floating in the shallow water of my bathtub. All of the clothes went into the washing machine, but the glass had to be cleaned out of the tub. There were orange streaks left on my legs and in the bottom of the tub. By the time this was all cleaned up, Aquarius had taken care of the mess in the kitchen. Inspired by the reddish splatters, his method had been to pretend that he was a CSI. Certifying each tile as glass-free, he worked his way to the scene of the crime. He deduced the exact point of impact by working backward from the sauce’s trajectory. He then cooked dinner for me. This redeems him from anything negative I may have said in the past about his inability to do housework.

Three days later, I caught his cold. This is odd because working in public school for four years allowed me to build up the immune system of a superhero. My powers must have been weakened by my new private school. I had to miss the first day of the new semester, which seems like a bad omen. Then, since I slept for three straight days while sick, I was incapable of sleeping the night before my return to work. I made my way through that first day back like a zombie on caffeine. I’m not really sure what I taught my students. Luckily, that night I was able to do some hard-core sleeping. I have been informed that my cats, Garfield and Nermal, played chase across the bed and across my belly without me flinching. The next day, I felt like I had risen from the dead. I am just going to pretend that the first two weeks of 2010 didn’t happen and that it all started with my resurrection.