Toxic

Yesterday was the Great Spray. The exterminators came over in the morning and started taking all the outlet plates and switch plates off the walls so they could spray inside and I took my dogs and my son (the cat was locked in the garage, which prison she promptly escaped) and left. The dogs went off to the vet's for daycare; the son went off with some of his hoodlum friends and I went to work. The exterminators assured me that I could come home after work no problem.

Wrong. I picked up the dogs and went on home and was smacked in the face as I entered by a wall of fumes: industrial strength Raid and lots of it. I consider myself tough and ignore such trivialities, however, so I started running around setting up fans and opening windows (opening windows in my house takes a lot of strength and energy; I have gotten to the point where I lust more over pictures of replacement windows than I do over Playgirl, if there still is a Playgirl, that is) and putting weird hypoallergenic zipped covers on all the mattresses and so on. This would have been fine and dandy except I started feeling progressively weirder. I got dizzy. My head hurt. I was so tired it seemed that there would be nothing for it but to lie down on the porch with the dogs and sleep. I kept taking longer breaks on the porch but nothing really helped and I became sad. So sad, so tired, so dizzy and the back of my throat hurt and tasted funny.

I went down to the garage and thought I would take a little nap, so I lay down on top of all the garbage bags full of clothes. They were not uncomfortable, if a little slippery, but as I lay there I began to think that Miles might find it a bit odd when he came home if his mother was asleep on a pile of garbage bags in the garage. I mean, okay, I've never been exactly the poster child for Ideal Parenting but my kids have never found me passed out in the trash, either. That was the point - well, that or all the mosquitos - where something in my brain finally went BING and said, look, either you're going insane or you are about to succumb to severe pesticide poisoning: either way you had better get the hell away from this house altogether and go to the Admiral.

I didn't want to leave, because all the doors and windows were open and I was afraid that either I'd get robbed or possibly the dogs wouldn't be smart enough to go out the open doors and would just die, but finally I made it down the street to my home away from home, where my friends expressed alarm at my condition. Yet again, I have the best friends: they sat me down and Helen got me a beer and Charles went to pick up Miles and Susan told me that the dogs and Miles and I should sleep at her house. Oh and Kyle had a birthday, which guaranteed that I would find them all right there where I needed them. Therefore I started feeling better and within an hour I was back to only the usual level of dizziness and insanity and Miles and all the dogs and I went on over to Susan's, where we figured out the DVR and watched True Blood and then got some - but not, alas, much, thanks to True Blood - sleep.

Anyway, that is my story of pesticide poisoning. I really hope that the house is now clear - it had better be - and if you are ever so dumb as to get your house fumigated (I now wish I had just come to some kind of gentle diplomatic understanding with the bugs rather than this full out nuclear war) then I suggest you wait at least 24 hours before going home. And hopefully I will not have any kind of horrible lingering death terminal illness from all this because, among other things, that will cause me to RANT SOME MORE ABOUT THE LACK OF HEALTH CARE IN THIS BENIGHTED COUNTRY. Which we do not want.