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Thursday, June 01, 2006
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Episode #489723, In Which Melanie Finds Herself At Work...With No Pants.
Hi. :)
So you see, I was in the kitchen at work, making up a 12-pound batch of soap for matching loaves of Rose-Glycerine and Dragon's Blood. Everything is going as per normal. I have poured the oils and lye together and stirred them lightly, and I am now weighing out my fragrances into two separate cups so that they will be ready when the soap is at trace. I hear a crackling noise, and I see a thin stream of caustic soap batter oozing out of the bottom of my 25-gallon plastic pail. This is one of the pails that my cocoa butter comes in, so I thought it could withstand a *little bit* of heat, since the cocoa butter has to at least be hot enough to pour when the buckets are filled. My soap batter is only about 90 degrees. But anyway, it has cracked the bottom of my pail and is oozing out. I quickly grab a large enameled bot and place it next to the bucket, then lift the bucket to pour the contents into the pot.
Another crack. The entire bottom of the bucket comes off in one piece. 12 pounds of caustic soap batter pour out, drenching my counters, my walls, my floor...and completely coating every part of my body from the waist down. I set down the bucket, walk about five steps to the big kitchen sink, hop in, and start washing. The mixture is quite greasy, so it's not coming off very well. I grab a bottle of Ajax dishwashing liquid and start slathering myself with it, getting the caustic oil off. Off comes the apron, and surprisingly, it has protected my white linen shirt from any harm. I pull off my shirt and hang it on a nail in the wall to keep it dry. I pull off my skirt and my shoes and drop them into another section of the sink, to deal with later. I'm standing in my sink, at work, in underwear, in a natural soaps store, scrubbing with Ajax. I just wanted to make sure I compiled all the various ironies together there in one spot.
Well, I finally stop feeling any slimy places on my skin after about forever and a half, so I teeter on the edge of the sink and reach a long spatula over to another table so that I can grab a roll of paper towelling. I make a few dozen little pillows of paper towelling to cover a walkway across the floor so that I can exit the kitchen without stepping in caustic soap batter, and I make it to the hallway where I'm able to grab some cardboard for a sturdier walking surface. I go check on Storm, who is playing her Gamecube in my office.
"Storm?"
She looks at me, soaking wet, in my underwear. At work. She doesn't seem phased. "Yeah?"
"I had a lye accident in the kitchen, that's why I'm naked. I'm okay, though. I got it all off. No burns."
She looks at me very seriously for a moment. "Ok." Then she goes back to her game.
Wow. I'm boring, apparently. I trundle back to the kitchen and tiptoe across flattened cardboard boxes to the sink, where I start working on getting the lye/oil out of my skirt. It seems to come clean, but of course it's soaking wet. Now what?
I sneak into the front of the shop and message misterx while I try to figure out what to do. I kind of need to go home, being as I have no pants. But the car is around the back of teh building. And it's broad daylight, on a major street with lots of traffic, and there are a bunch of guys from the tattoo parlor next door who are playing frisbee in the parking lot. Um, no. Misterx suggests that I at least have Storm turn the store sign from "Open" to "Closed", but she can't reach it.
Aha! There are vintage bedspreads covering the tables in the other room of the store. I crouch past the huge picture windows in the front of the store and run over to the other room, where I take one of the bedspreads and wrap it into an improvised sarong. It actually looks so nice with my white linen skirt that I go ahead and stay and finish working. We go out to dinner later. My skirt is still hanging in the hallway, drying. The kitchen is a war zone, but considering how soupy and greasy everything is, I'm leaving it until the morning before cleaning up. It will have turned to soap by then and will just serve as a good, thorough washing. It doesn't appear to be hurting the linoleum or the other surfaces it landed on. Even me: I'm pretty dried out from the Ajax, but otherwise, no burns.
Whee. The End.
7:29:50 PM 
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© Copyright
2006
Melanie Teegarden.
Last update:
6/29/2006; 3:36:13 PM.
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