I'm a tad weird, I'm the first to say it. Mainly cause I tend to have an internal censor that is on a permanent coffee break and things just shoot out of my mouth. I rarely even attempt lying, even, because I just can't pull it off. My words flow and when I try to think too much to "make something up" I sound off.
Anyway, I want to explain a Nanism. This one is a classic example of a Nanism, or as my Mands will often say, an example of "everything happens to you!"
Oh and it also affected knitting so I am staying in the vein of my poorly updated blog.
A couple of weeks ago we were dealing with a massive ant invasion. This was the second time since moving into the house and by far the worst of the two. Plus it was in the kitchen so I was losing my mind with frustration. We emptied the worst affect cupboards and set out the natural ant bait that takes about a week to kill the nests. In the meantime I was thinking that plugging up the pipes under our front porch into the storage space might help too.
I had picked up some large gap expanding foam insulation when I bought the additional ant traps. I've used this stuff in the past, I wasn't worried. So I started slow, filling the pipes gradually, because the foam didn't expand THAT much.
This is where the story really takes off!
On days when my DH is working, I am left to putter alone in the house, the kids at their mom's and me singing and making plans for working around the house. Lets start the day with finishing the pipe filling!
All was going well. I had big poofy globs filling the rest of the pipes and had walked away to ride the stationary bike for a bit. I guess I went back in to check... instinct? I dunno. Well a gust of wind, or gravity or something had caused a glob to plop out and onto my Christmas tree stand, lying on a shelf below the pipe. This tree stand has the bristly stuff wrapped around it to hide the fact its a pipe... etc. Well I reacted, the tree stand being very important to me and all that, and grabbed the large baseball sized glob of foam... with my bare hand...
A second later I flung the glob, having realized what I'd just done and consequently, there is a permanent blob of foam on a box now. But worse than that, I had foam insulation all over my hand including between my fingers. Naturally I tried to rub it off, with my other hand...
So now I'm standing there with foam insulation all over both hands.
I didn't panic, in fact, I did what I normally do when I am faced with the result of my own Nanism, I sighed and shook my head then resign myself to my fate by reading the safety precautions on the can. Naturally, I should have worn gloves but seeing as I was done the spraying by then anyways, it probably wouldn't have helped me. It said contact with skin should be soaked in soapy water. Well a good hour plus later and my hands were still fully coated and the stuff had begun to cure. Soaking did nothing!! On a positive note, once it started to cure, my fingers stopped sticking together...
Soon I began to realize I was screwed. My hands had Hell's version of Elmer's glue all over them and it wasn't peeling off in one cool move. Picking at it, like one picks at their hang nails, made tiny painful windows to my skin and a LOT of mess on the floor. It became an obsession, and not surprisingly so, because I'm a picker as it is!
So now, hours later, I have swept the floor, done nothing and am still having trouble picking things up cause, oh yeah, its dry and everything slides out of my grip. I have soaked my hands a few more times as well and pulled large amounts from the lines on my palms but I'm still, pretty much screwed and am feeling pretty disheartened by the entire experience. I needed to relax and stop picking, so I picked up my knitting.
The tragic twist... I just kept snagging yarn... shredding it and couldn't hold the needles well. Well now I was starting to lose it. The only solution left to me was to wear gloves. Luckily, I had a stash of latex gloves snagged from a hospital visit. Why do we all do that?? Anyway, on go gloves and I could function semi-normally. Knitting was even possible, though awkward.
When my DH got home, I'd finally managed to make some food and found, working with latex gloves was great for cooking hehe
My tale of whoa was greeted with the usual exasperated laughter. We agreed, it really was a perfect example of a Nanism, just on a larger than normal scale.
It took me two more days but my hands were foam free and only scraped raw in a couple of places. Apparently a pumice stone is good on day two when the skins oils and some Vaseline have had time to work in the heat of the latex gloves. I still have patches on some of my nails but my nails are bad to begin with ...
What will I do next? I have to say, and do say regularly, it really is amazing I don't seriously injure myself more often.
