It’s time to ‘fess up. There are times when I do some pretty dumb things. Today I thought I’d share a few to tickle your funny bone.
RAIN-EX SAGA
Lisa and I bought spray bottles of Rain-Ex the other day. When she bought her vehicle last year, it had Rain-Ex on the windshield and she was mightily impressed with how well it worked not just to keep rain off the windshield but other elements that can obstruct or distort her clear view of what lies ahead as she’s driving around in the rain day and night.
We asked the customer service guy which of the various bottles of Rain-Ex we should get, and he immediately chose the one that we both ultimately bought. He cautioned us to be sure to completely buff the stuff after we applied it, and I assured him we would.
When we got to my place, I pulled out a step stool and went to work on Lisa’s vehicle as the self-designated windshield cleaner and chief Rain-Ex applications worker. (She spayed it on, I rubbed it in circles and finished by buffing it up “expertly” — ha ha ha ha ha! — with a dry cloth.) She commented while I worked, “Gee, I feel like Tom Sawyer (getting my friends to do my chores)!”
From my vantage point atop the step stool, everything looked good. Lisa got inside her vehicle and confirmed that, yeah, everything looked good to her from where she’d be sitting, too.
So we did the other side in the same way and I came down satisfied that I had done a terrific job.
Lisa drove home that afternoon without any problem.
OOPSIE!!!
But when she drove in to work the next morning, facing into the sunrise, she wasn’t as happy. She emailed me saying, “When you do your van, be sure to buff it out really really well, because I had a hellish drive to work this morning because the windshield was so smeary.”
Really?! Weird!
Well, I had already done my windshield, and I was due to pick up the goat supplies just a few blocks away, so I got into my van and headed into the sun. Sure enough, my windshield was smeary, too.
So, I came home and pulled out my orbital vehicle polishing machine and I attacked my windshield with it. It worked like a charm, so I emailed Lisa to say, “Drop by after work tonight and I’ll buff out your windshield with my orbital. Works great! I just did it on mine!”
Well…. by eight at night, it’s dark here this time of year, so I backed my vehicle out of the garage and parked it angled toward where Lisa would park her van when she arrived so we would be able to see what I was doing when I re-polished her windshield using the orbital polisher.
When Lisa arrived, there I was, ready, able and willing to re-do her vehicle. “Service with a smile!”
She laughed.
I climbed up on the step stool and went to work on both sides of the windshield. Did a great job because after she got home, I texted her to ask if the windshield was better now. She texted back, “OMG! It was so clear, it didn’t look like I even had a windshield!”
SUCCESS!!! So, the moral of this story is don’t rely on elbow grease to buff out your windshield after using Rain-Ex, and don’t believe your eye bones to let you know how well you did the job. It can look mighty fine right up until you drive into the sun or get confronted by headlights at night. Get a cheapy orbital vehicle machine (I think mine cost $40 including eight cloth/wool “hoodies” for the polishing disk) and use that instead. You will thank me for this tip!
POST ORAL SURGERY SAGA
I mentioned this yesterday or the day before in this space. But I want to mention it again.
Do. Not. Lay. Flat. After. Dental. Implant. Surgery.
That is, unless you want to wake up halfway through the night looking like a Hollywood makeup artist crept in while you were asleep to create a ghastly, zombie-like mask and somehow appended it to your face without you waking up to notice!
I got up to pee and could barely see with one eye. There seemed to be a red “lump” on my face beneath my right eye, obstructing my view of the path ahead. Thinking that mighty odd, I looked into the mirror and scared myself half to death: the entire right side of my face was swollen, distended and massively bruised! There was no pain, but it was still a shock.
I immediately consulted the Internet to see if this was something I should report right away. I looked up “post-op dental implant surgery care” and read what I should have been doing to prevent or limit swelling and bruising, one of which was, “Don’t lay flat in bed for a few days.” Other suggestions were, “Alternate applying ice wrapped in cloth to your face if it swells. 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off.
I looked for “post-surgery emergency complications after dental implant surgery.” Temp above 100 degrees. (Negative.) Fever or chills. (Negative.) Nausea. (Negative.) Vomiting. (Negative.) Rapid heart rate. (Negative, except for being scared initially!.) Atrial fibrillation. (Negative.)
So, I relaxed, iced my face and sat up in a recliner to sleep for the rest of the night. By morning, the only evidence that I had awakened to a zombie face were three telltale, small localized bruises on the right side of my face.
EVER NEW CHATTERBOX
And yesterday during the EVER NEW podcast, I was a chatterbox. I don’t think I let Hannah get a word in edgewise. Partly, this was because Hannah has only seen one western that De was in (SO FAR! I PLAN TO RECTIFY THAT WHEN SHE’S WITH ME NEXT WEEK!) and the podcast was almost totally about De’s westerns, but it was also because I drank a can of Dr. Pepper just before we went live (something I hadn’t done in more than a week) and the caffeine and the sugar rush put me into hyper-drive. I watched the show later and thought, “Good Lord, who is that?! I haven’t looked that energetic in ages!”
I guess the laughing gas or oxygen that I got during oral surgery blew the cobwebs out of my brain and uncovered the “old” me — the one who was effervescent and seemingly (naturally) “high”. You know, the pre-COVID me.
I thought I had lost him. Nope. He was just buried under a bunch of low-energy baggage, I guess!
