The Unfortunate Salarva Faux Pas

Did you ever have one of those days when everything is kind of off? That you drop anything you try to pick up, and that it lands in the most inopportune position?

Yeah. Yesterday I kind of had one of those days. FRIG II's freezer is kickin' my butt. EVERY time I get ice, a cube gets loose. No matter how close or far I hold my cup, a cube escapes. Sometimes it even goes IN the cup, and bounces back out. ALWAYS. And yesterday, every time it happened, a piece managed to break off, and even though I picked up the main crescent-shaped cube to toss in the sink...the fragment camouflaged itself on the linoleum, so that I stepped on it with my sock foot. Which hurt. And made the fragment freeze to the sock so I had to pry it off, or walk around saying, "OWWWW!" until it melted and left a wet spot on the bottom of my sock. Believe me. I had plenty of opportunities to try both solutions.

It reminded me of another such day last week.

I'd escaped the shenanigans of FRIG II's freezer with only a single ice cube to find and pick up. Once I got to my dark basement lair (most recently with illumination due to upstairs mystery thumping), I leaned over to turn on my underdesk heater. Something dropped onto my rectangular metal lunch tray.

I carry that tray down to the lair every day. It holds a paper plate with my lunch pinwheels. Also an individual bag of chips, usually Barbecue or Sour Cream and Cheddar. And a ramekin of green olives. I really like them with my pinwheels.

What in the world could that be, dropping onto my rectangular metal lunch tray? A spider? It's happened before down in the lair. One just rappelled down from the ceiling like a paratrooper from a helicopter. Of course, that one broke its web and exploded into a million baby spiders on my woofer speaker box. Let's not think about that now, though! Maybe it was just one of those little flying bugs that sometimes appear out of nowhere. Tiny. Gray. Kind of spotted like a ladybug, but as small as the head of a pin.

Nope. Whatever dropped onto my rectangular metal lunch tray was not moving. OH NO! It was SALARVA! From my own mouth! How does that even happen? I had inadvertently drooled onto my rectangular metal lunch tray! Oh, I know it's called saliva. But way back, when I was still teaching the at-risk kids over in an upstairs classroom (that used to be my best ol' ex-teaching buddy Mabel's storeroom) at Lower Basementia...one of the kids called saliva by the name salarva. So it was a thing with me and the boys. Salarva.

But that's not the worst part. Not only was I drooling without knowing it. Even worse was yet to come. I was laying out my evening meds. An aspirin. An ibuprofen. An acetaminophen. I always take the aspirin, and depending on the day, one of the other two. I was replacing the acetaminophen that I'd used up the day before. I always lay them over by the phone on my desk, so I know if I've taken them or forgotten.

The aspirin comes out of its own bottle. The other two come out of a big Pepcid bottle, though it's actually The Devil's Playground brand of Equate. I keep a stash of them down in my lair, and I don't need a whole slew of bottles taking up my counter space. Anyhoo...as I shook out the pills, a small round brown ibuprofen, a long white acetaminophen, a fat round pink Equate antacid...I had difficulty sorting the different sizes and shapes through the mouth of the bottle. I grabbed a long white acetaminophen and pulled it from the lip of the bottle, laying it on my rectangular metal tray.

You know where it landed, right?

On the drop of salarva, which I knew would start digesting it immediately. That's what salarva does. It has an enzyme, by cracky. I grabbed that acetaminophen and wiped it on my old raggedy baby blue sweatshirt. Not that the cost of one destroyed acetaminophen would hurt my bankbook. Nor the wiped salarva hurt my old raggedy baby blue sweatshirt.

It's just the principle.