First, I woke up feeling like I'd spent the night wrestling a 20 lb porcupine and having my nipples nibbled by a piranha. So that set the stage nicely.
I chopped down the bumblebee forest that had grown up around the deck. You know what's great about a month (June) where it rains every morning and the suns shines every afternoon? I don't have to water the garden! You know what's bad about it? Crazy steroidal weeds and maple saplings taking over the earth! So that was some overdue bush whacking.
The house had reached that stage of messiness where the mess creeps into my consciousness and makes me feel vaguely homicidal, so Mr. Ibis and I cleaned. It took about four hours. Five hours? Oh, did I mention the Unicorn had diarrhea all over his back end the previous day so Mr. Ibis had had to give him a full bath? That necessitated buying a drain snake (and by the way my husband's growing affinity for As Seen On TV products is starting to frighten me) so drain snaking was part of the day's fun too.
As some point during the day I was playing with Miles on his blanket on the floor, and I left for a minute to switch over some laundry in the basement. I was directly below his room and suddenly I could hear grunting and foot stomping. I had a bad feeling about it and yelled up to Mr. I, "Is he okay??" He said yeah but went to check anyway... Miles had pulled a blanket over his face and was struggling to get free. SCARY. God it's scary how quickly something bad can happen. For the record if Mr. I weren't there I would have run up to check him myself. But good lord.
On the topic of scary, in the early evening I gave Miles a bath. Lately I sit on the edge of the tub and talk to him while he just splashes around for a while because he likes that. As I was sitting there the goddamn curtain rod fell directly onto my head. I screamed, scaring the everloving shit out of Mr. I, who was downstairs trying to have some quiet time on the potty. It hurt, yes, but more than that having something heavy fall on your head while sitting in the bathroom is a bit of a shock. I am glad I was sitting there because if I weren't it would have fallen on Miles... is the universe trying to kill my baby??
Or maybe it's trying to kill me. Because then there was dinner, yet another fiasco. Breakfast burritos. Sounds great. I make them all the time, almost once a week in fact, for dinner. I just made one little change in the usual recipe: I used one of the peppers my mother-in-law gave us. I just chopped that sucker up and added it to the burrito filling. Because it was a jalapeno... right? RIGHT?
See, my mother-in-law is the sweetest person you could imagine, but she A) knows nothing about food and B) is nearly blind from diabetes (see A) so can no longer read. She grew some container tomatoes and peppers this year and was quite proud that they bore fruit. On Father's Day she showed my sister-in-law and I her plants... tomatoes and "jalapenos." Sister-in-law and I remarked on how the peppers did not resemble any jalapenos we had ever seen, but my mother-in-law insisted, REPEATEDLY, they were some "other" kind of jalapeno, DEFINITELY JALAPENOS, she was sure of it, yes indeed.
Perhaps you see where this is going: they are not jalapenos. First let me tell you that I was very hungry yesterday, and Miles conveniently fell asleep just as I finished dinner so Mr. Ibis and I sat down with an episode of True Blood, plates full of tasty burritos, and two nicely chilled delicious microbrew beers. Try, if you can, to imagine the anticipation of pleasure in this tableau. And then imagine as we both bit into our burritos and instantly burst into flames.
PANIC at the disco as Mr. Ibis ran around stuffing bread into our mouths and I dissected our burritos to pick out every single diced up piece of pepper. I drank pretty much my entire beer in one gulp, which I could not taste as my mouth was in flames, and dinner was ruined. A little googling revealed that what I'd put in our dinner was in fact a HABANERO.
For comparison, the average jalapeno is about 4,500 "Scoville units" of hotness, whereas habaneros run up around 100,000 to 350,000 units. So assuming even the most mild habanero, it was more than 20 times hotter than the jalapeno it purported to be. Mr. Ibis called his mom and she was all.... "oh, well I couldn't really read the sign at the store. So it's a little hotter." A little hotter my ass, that pepper tried to incinerate me!
Finally, I think Aunt Flo may be lurking around the corner, but that's another post entirely.
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