It was one of those days today.
Started out wonderfully with a cool morning and the promise of high temps and clear skies. I had three things I wanted to do today: oil the teak chairs on the deck, run the cooked asparagus through the Hollander beater (and maybe pull a few sheets) and do some laundry.
I started by rinsing the cooked asparagus (it had sat overnight in the pot cooling down) and putting it aside, figuring I’d get to it shortly.
The chairs were next, although I could’ve put the load of laundry in at this point, but I forgot. Now, teak is a heavy, solid wood. We have this table and chair set which was on sale at the end of the season a couple years ago and it is just great. But it gets weathered. So the teak oil came out. Directions say to ‘flood’ the wood so that it can soak up what it needs. I thought I was being liberal, slathering it on pretty thickly especially on the seats and arms where it gets the most sun and rain action.
My love had mentioned putting each chair up on the table to oil it so I wouldn’t have to bend down. All fine and good if you are a strong man. As it turned out, I didn’t have too much trouble and even my abdomen muscles didn’t protest – good sign of being healed!
I had the last chair on the table and was down to the last bits of oil when I carelessly sloshed the brush, flipping the bristles thick with oil which it flung out and deposited on my right eye. My glasses were too far down my nose to afford any protection.
Immediately I went to the kitchen sink to rinse out the eye, using the sprayer for dishes. After a couple minutes of gentle spraying, I called the Poison Control Center (thank God for emergency numbers in the front of the telephone book!), spoke with a very take-charge Debbie who talked me through the best way to irrigate an eye, assured me the stuff wasn’t caustic and said she would call back later to check on me.
Ten minutes of serious flushing and the eye was feeling tight – and like there was an eyelash stuck. The bottom part of the eye was looking all red and angry. Debbie, when she called back, suggested I contact my eye doctor as that eyelash feeling was a sign of a possible scratch on the eye. Soooooo, the call to the eye doc resulted in a trip to the office to have the eye checked.
Leaving my driveway, I chose to go the southern direction hoping to avoid the men and machines who are installing a new water main down the middle of our road and I knew they were working on the northern end. What I didn’t know until too late was that they were also digging up the southern end today. My trip was a bit longer than expected.
Oh, and the water had been disrupted yesterday so we were under a water advisory meaning that we should boil all drinking water. I didn’t stop for that when I was flushing, so have no idea what bacteria were finding homes on my eye.
Fortunately, they took me right away when I got to the eye doc’s office. And sure enough, the white part of the eye has lost a couple layers – the cornea is fine, though! So, with the eye numbed and drops and a prescription for an antibiotic ointment, I was on my way, cowering under the brightness of the sun.
After the obligatory wait at the pharmacy, I came home by the northern end of our road to avoid all the mess at the southern end. Of course, they were in the middle of a major dig at that end and had both lanes blocked for some time. I thought about parking the car and walking, but….
Finally, I was home and squeezing the ointment on my eye – instant fuzzy! That settled down a bit so I went out to collect the asparagus – I didn’t feel up to running the Hollander anymore today and needed to put the cooked fiber in the freezer. When I went to rinse off the netting I had strained the fiber in, I discovered the water was off. Obviously not going to do laundry, either!
When I finally got around to wiping off the excess oil from the chairs, I realized there were a number of places missed (especially the tops of the chair backs as they were higher than eye level). And I had used every bit of the teak oil in the can so I couldn’t go over anything to finish it properly.
On top of it all, I had completely forgotten about lunch.
An easy dinner and a glass of wine has turned the day a bit better. The eye will take more than that, though, to recover – and it will.
