Would you like a little caveat with that?

Okay.  So I have not answered comments as I have wished to.  I have not even answered email.  I have spent the last month doing – I don’t know what – at about seventy miles per hour, which may be why all this dumb stuff has been happening. Good things: 39 rides on the colt.  We just moved Chaz into her new college apartment.  Bad things: colt tore a hole in his leg.  We just moved Chaz into her new college apartment.

So what I am writing here is a series of small warnings, based on recent experience.  Perhaps I can save you some small suffering.  Not suffering, maybe, but waste and aggravation.  I should add to this: unplug EVERYTHING in your house when you are not using it for fear of having it blow up when the energy people send spikes your way.  Or better yet.  Go off the grid.  Heat your water in the sun and get a goat.  I’m sure it’s a very healthful way to live.

::For Your Edification::

Caveat One: clean out your nozzle

Yesterday, I shot myself in the eye with conditioner.  In the shower.  All of the conditioner bottles are lined neatly up on the window sill, and when I pushed the pump for the Aussie Secret Moisturizing, it shot me in the eye.  If I’d been aiming at my eye, I’d never in a million tries have hit myself. 

Caveat Two: never trust tape

When you take an institutional sized Sam’s club bottle of finely ground black pepper out of the cupboard (assuming that you have not used to fill actual pepper shakers yet) in order to put a little pepper on a chicken breast you are about to cook in a George Forman Family Sized Grill, do not assume that the Scotch tape someone has used to seal the spooning-out half of the top of the bottle (which, once opened, never closed right again) will hold.

And if you do make this assumption, do not allow the mounds of finely ground black pepper to remain on the grill once they are there.  Even though you are tired and hungry, do not leave them.  And if you do leave them, do NOT plug in the grill.

It seems that grilled finely ground black pepper pretty much fills up the air of every room in the house AND your lungs when it is heated.  And it smells, really, really terrible as it chars.  Especially over time and repeated grilling.  Maybe a corollary to the caveat: clean your grill at least once a year.  With a soft cloth.

Caveat Three: nothing lasts forever

When the “check tire pressure” light goes on in your car, try to remember—once you have brought the vehicle to a full stop—to get out and actually look at the tires.  Especially if several weeks go by and the light does not turn itself out.

Checking the tires yourself is preferable to, say, having your husband find the great big shredded hole in the back left tire.  Or to having the tire blow up when you are driving through the blazing hot and desolate southern Utah desert, which actually happened to me once.  But that was, like, decades ago.  At least.

to be continued . . .