I sit here about a half an hour removed from what just might be the most boneheaded and aggrivatingly preventable experience of my life.
It was around seven thirty PM in southern New Jersey. The twilight had made for a perfectly serene setting. Looking out the window would immediately leave one staring and staring, thinking on the deepest of subjects and pondering over the greatest of humanity’s troubles all while enjoying the peace and serenity of a world so beautiful that it defies words.
I decided to get some soup.
A small side note here, to set up the events I’m about to describe. When yours truly makes soup, he tends to keep it boiling at the highest possible temperature for almost ten minutes, so as to get rid of as much excess liquid as possible. Growing up in a heavily Italian/Irish family will kill any appetite you might have for any soup less thick and chunky than peanut butter. The laws of thermodynamics and heat conductivity aside, if you boil something as small as a can of soup for ten minutes, it tends to stay pretty toasty for a while.
Oh, and another side note. Gravity pulls things <i>down</i>.
On with the story. I take this soup that has now become hotter than the fires of Hell (or at least a double-noodle chicken subdivision of Hell) and place it into a fairly large bowl. These bowls are great, people. There’s about a two inch lip all the way around, meaning it takes nothing less than an act of God for you to actually spill anything out of them. Yours truly looked at the bowl of scrumptious soupy goodness before him and pondered all of the different ways it could be enjoyed. <i>Perhaps</i>, he thought, <i>I could enjoy this soup at the computer, while reading the SDMB and listening to Colin Hay. Yes, that’s the ticket.</i>
The ticket, indeed.
The trip to the den (where the comp is) was rather uneventful. However, it’s when I actually reached the den that things…<i>took a turn</i>. For some reason, I had suddenly remembered something that I needed to grab back out in the kitchen. I placed the bowl down, making sure about fifteen percent of the surface area of the bottom of the bowl was in safe contact with the desk that would act as the support.
It wasn’t long before I realized something was wrong.
Those of you who still aren’t caught on, please refer back to my second additional note, about gravity. Immediately, the bowl began to tip over at a horrible sickening pitch. You see, I enjoy soup. And yet, here I was, about to love the fruits of my labor. While these bowls could stop an act of God, they are no match for an act of stupidity. Nevertheless, in a desperate attempt to save the chickeny goodness, I reached out with my hand to stop the bowl’s progress.
I again refer you to a previous note I placed in this post. The one about how I like soup to get <i>really hot</i>.
The pain wasn’t immediate, I suppose. At the moment, I was too concerned about losing so much soup. I managed to save about half of the bowl, and finished it quickly. It was after I had finished and put the dirty bowl away that I realized my hand really frikkin’ hurt. Looking down at it revealed that it was, in fact, burned pretty badly. Oh, and the carpet and chair had taken their fair share of soupy abuse as well. Cleaning this all up took a whole lot of paper towels, but I managed.
To sum up this whole thing:
<b>I spilled soup on my hand. It hurt.</b>
Feel free to share your own “short stories made long”.