Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Coot Battles the Spider King

Good morning/afternoon y'all. I have another update for your reading pleasure, plus somewhat of a public sevice announcement. The real gist of it is: I'm pretty sure the Spider King is out to get me.

You may recall the mother of all spiders that I killed in my shower the other day. She was a doozie and as always, I feared retribution. I'm not sure if The Spiders are in cahoots with The Caterpillars, but I had a freaking whopper of a green caterpillar in my kitchen last night. No, caterpillars don't move quickly, and as far as I know they have no defensive measures. But it's not what I know that scares me; it's what I don't know. What if green caterpillars are capable of burning your retinas out with their laser-beam eyeballs? I wasn't taking any chances; if the cats wouldn't mess with this bastard, I wasn't going to either. I grabbed a piece of mail and scooped up the caterpillar. He curled up into a defensive ball, probably charging his flux capacitor in preparation to blast my eyeballs out the back of my damn head. I quickly ran to the door and flung him onto the neighbor's yard. My house was now safe!

Well, after that I was rinsing off some grapes I had bought on Monday. I didn't know from whence the caterpillar came, but I had the idea maybe he rode in on my grapes. I was in the process of giving them a thorough inspection (with eyelids ready to snap shut at the first sign of eyeball laserbeams) when an effin spider jumped out of the bunch. "Whaaaaa, shit!" I exclaimed as I threw the grapes into the sink (and spit out the ones I was eating), "God damn spider". He fell under the vengeance of my peanut butter jar, then scalding hot water to rinse him into the sewer where all spiders belong.

Needless to say, I threw those grapes the fuck out, along with the rest of the grapes I had leftover from last week. I was taking no chances with that.

So later on, I was making some Flan, which is fun to say. When I talk to the cats, I speak in rhymes (i.e. Nan-whores, kerplam-stores or Binners, Dick-skinners) so the logical step from Flan is Placatan. "Nan, do you want some flan? Placatan!" Yes, another quality use of the word! But I digress. The first step in making flan is to carmelize 1/2 cup of sugar. For those of you unfamiliar with the carmelizing process, you just melt it over low heat until you have an aptly named carmel-colored liquid. I was stirring it with a spoon when my finger brushed against the side of the sauce pan. The impulse reaction is to pull your hand away, which I did, which flung molten sugar all over the place, which hurt. I really lucked out that I only burned my hand in a few places, and not my face. Molten sugar is HOT, and it sits on your skin for a few seconds burning the hell out of you as it slowly cools from one billion degrees Centigrade to human body temperature. And if you're lucky, you get to rip the cooled piece from your burned flesh. Good times.

I'm making it sound worse than it really was. As of this morning, I only have two burns left. I'm not sure why I healed as fast as I did, but I'm certainly not complaining. Moral of the story, be extra careful when carmelizing sugar. Plus, the flan didn't even turn out that good. I probably won't be making it again.

So, had I not killed the spider the other day, The Spider King would not have sent his caterpillar and other spider spies into my kitchen, I would have been able to eat grapes for dessert. Since those were tainted, I had to make flan, which burned me. This was most likely all part of That Spider King's master plan; he has some real forethought. You won this battle, you bastard.

Don't mess with The Spider King,
Old Coot

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"Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him.' and I just took off." -Pre