Kitchen Knives Vs. Marie

   When I lived in Florida, I worked in a store that had a fresh fruit bar, and I was the cutter. Everyday, I had to go into work, and cut up trays and trays of things like watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe, pineapple, kiwi, and other fruits into bite sized pieces. In all that time, I never suffered an injury; never had the knife slip, never had an issue with witch's knives or steak knives and Easter bunnies, but since I moved to Washington, the problems have been abundant.

   Then there was yesterday - my day off - and I was calmly cutting up potatoes to make myself some baked potatoes wedges for my lunch. A day off is a day where you get to rest and rejuvenate, or if you are a working mom, frantically manage to clean the house in the morning so that you can rest in the afternoon, but I did not find myself resting. What I found myself doing was slicing deep into my thumb as I was cutting up potatoes. Then I found myself holding wads of paper towels to my thumb, and then changing that wad out after I bled through, and continuing that until I managed to get the bleeding to stop enough so I could get a band-aid on. Now, I did consider going to the ER, but for crying-out-loud, I had just cut my thumb. Deep, sure, and it had bled a lot, but extremities and head-wounds tend to bleed the most, and I could not conceive of going to the ER over a cut on my thumb. It's not like I cut the fricking thing off. So when the blood  started seeping through the band-aids, I just changed them out, proceeding to use up my daughter's supply of sparkly, blinged-out band-aids. So when I went to pick her up from school, I just stopped at the store real quick and picked up more. No big deal.
   What is a big deal: not being able to use your thumb. You never realize how much you rely on that sucker until you have to avoid using it. By the evening, the cut had stopped seeping, but anytime I touched something with my thumb the thing would throb, and even more alarming, bleed a little. Try fixing dinner without using one of your thumbs. Try putting the laundry in the dryer, with is stacked above the washer, and so tall that you have to stand on your tip-toes to reach into it. Try folding and hanging up clothes, and try doing the dishes. FYI: my clothes didn't get put away, and my dishes are sitting the sink still, and this morning I didn't make my bed. Typing is good, because instead if two thumbs resting on the space bar, I only rest one, and hold the other one up. I have to work tonight, but I think scanning will be fine as well. In any case, much like the ER, no way I'm causing a ruckus over a cut thumb. And there is no more bleeding at all, this morning I tested it by grabbing something and checking to see if there was blood. None; the band-aid was all white and alright.
   But this does lead me to the conclusion that all the knives in Washington must have some sort of conspiracy against me. I went for years without ever cutting myself; I move and BAM!!!!! The attack of the kitchen knives. Are you kidding me here? Like I don't have enough problems without the revolution of the kitchen knives on my hands. I see you, knives, I see you.

Easter Bunny Blues (Not For The Faint Of Heart)

   Easter is coming closer and closer and I'm getting ready for the holiday because this is a big one for my family. There is Easter candy all over the house for weeks and the kiddos are all hyped up and jumping around and excited because that old Easter bunny came.
   One Easter, my mother brought home this giant Easter bunny that she got from Seattle's Best Chocolate, and I mean, this thing was huge. If you had set the Easter bunny on the floor, the thing would have reached my knee at least, and although it was hollow, the chocolate was thick. Too thick to easily break off with your hand.
   This was our first Easter in Washington, so it was just myself, my daughter, and my mom in the apartment; my sister and her daughter were still living in Kansas and her son was not yet born. It was a good thing that my sister was not around, because she is a tad bit squeamish.
   You see, this Easter bunny was too big to break off pieces by hand, and the chocolate was really good, so my daughter was always wanting a piece. Nor was I smart about breaking the pieces off; I used a steak knife to kinda pry off pieces of this bunny. Not my most genius moments.
   One evening, after dinner, I was prying off a hunk of chocolate for my daughter when the knife slipped. I didn't even feel pain for a minute, and I stared at the knife sticking out of my hand in shock. The knife had gone in at an angle, and it had gone in til only half of the blade could be seen. If the knife had gone in straight, it would have gone clean through the palm of my hand and out the other side, but instead, the knife buried into my palm and went down towards  my wrist.
   I stared at this thing in shock, and then I grabbed the handle and yanked the knife out. Immediately a stream of blood followed. Now, this blood did not just flow out: the blood shot out. Like water might burst out of a busted pipe or a punctured hose. It sprayed up into the air in a thick, red arch, and spattered everything with gore. There was also this hissing noise that I will never forget, a kind of "scwhhhhhhhhhhh" sound that accompanied the escape of the blood from my body. Really, it looked and sounded like a bad special effect in a movie, except it was real.
   I ran to the kitchen to grab something to put on the cut, and my daughter watched all this with big, freak-out eyes. I held the towel on for a minute, to see if applied pressure would stop the bleeding, but when I lifted the towel, blood sprayed out and got all over the kitchen. Both the dining room and the kitchen were covered in blood; the apartment looked like a crime scene.
    "Go get Grandma," I ordered my daughter, and she ran upstairs to get her. Grandma had been asleep, but after seeing the disaster in the kitchen and dining room, she had me in the car and on the way to the ER in no time.
   I walked into that ER looking like I don't even know what. My shirt was covered in blood; the towel that I had pressed against my hand was red, and it had been white. The security guard took on look at me as I staggered into the ER and had said "Oh my Lord, what happened to you?"
   Well, I was never one to spare myself from humiliation, so he got the "I cut myself with a steak knife trying to cut up a chocolate Easter bunny" story, and he LAUGHED. And laughed, and laughed, while the nurse took the towel and threw it away and wrapped my hand in what seemed like 20 lbs of white gauze bandage.
   I didn't wait long in the waiting room, apparently the knife had slipped into the artery in my wrist, and it seems that they put you on the fast track for punctured arteries. Mom (grandma) and my daughter had left me there with a cell phone to call when I needed to come home, and they had gone back to the apartment and mom was cleaning up the blood soaked areas.
   I got called back to the waiting room quickly, and the bandage was carefully removed, but the bleeding had actually stopped. "Sometimes arteries will repair themselves if they have enough time," the doctor told me and then got to work numbing up my hand.
   Because the knife I had stuck into my hand was serrated, there was a lot of tissue damage, and she had the tweezers out and was trying to piece the skin back together. Of course, I watched all this, and years later, I can get an awesome reaction from my sister when I talk about the doctor putting me back together with tweezers. (I also get a good freak-out when I try to replicate the way the blood sounded as it sprayed out of the palm of my hand.)

Knives + Me = Bad News

   It only took three stitches to close up that little cut, and honestly, if I had known that the bleeding would have stopped on it's own, I probably wouldn't have gone. I hate going to the doctor's, much less the ER.
   I really pissed my mom off two days later. The stitches were itching so badly that I got some scissors and took them out myself. Still have a small scar on my palm from that one, and my daughter does not trust me with a knife. Every time I get a tiny knick, or make any 'ow; noise, she'll say in a menacing tone "You better not have cut yourself, Momma." Kids. Cut yourself one time, and they never let you forget.

The Witch's Knife

   While shopping for my new apartment, and restocking kitchen supplies, I have found one thing to be true. Paring knifes are not created equally. Some of them, in fact, are really crappy and little better than a butter knife. Try peeling cucumbers with those, or slicing up your apples. You end up basically tearing off the peel, and that takes an awful lot of vegetable along with the peel, which is waste; or you rip off pieces of your apple, and can't cut straight, leaving a lot of fruit on the core. I don't know about you, but I pay a lot for fresh produce; I don't want that produce feeding the trashcan, I want the fruits and veggies to feed me and my daughter.

This knife has proven to be very bloodthirsty. 

   So I was very frustrated with the paring knifes that I had picked up from the grocery store. They weren't knives, they were crap pretending to be knives. When I went shopping for my do-it-yourself furniture, I made a point of hunting out a good paring knife. After finding one that suited me, I took the knife home.
   As I was standing at my counter, blissfully slicing up my apple with my new knife, which cut though the apple like there was nothing there but air, I stabbed myself in the finger. Which, for some reason, caused massive bleeding, even though the puncture was just a tiny one.
   I thought nothing more of this beyond the fact that I had just bled all over my apple, which was going to end up feeding the trash anyway, because there was no way  I was eating a bloody apple. I don't care if that could be rinsed off, or that the blood was my own. YUCK. No bloody apples are being consumed in this household. But beyond the waste of the apple, I had no suspicions about that knife, but I did do my usual facebook post, letting everyone know that my finger had been mutilated by my new knife.
   And I had a friend respond that the knife was a witch's knife (wink, wink, you know who you are!!) Naw, I thought. Until, about five minutes after I read that comment, as I was cutting up another apple (I make a really yummy apple dip out of cream cheese, which is why I am eating so many apples,) I sliced open my finger, again. A much bigger cut. That bled a lot more. Yet another bloody apple in the trash.
   Which has led me to believe that there is something up with that knife. I have had the thing for a total of one day and one night. Two cuts: two wasted apples. This trend is very suspicious. Do I believe in the supernatural? Hmmmm. If you have been reading my posts, you know the answer to that. If this is your first time reading about my supernatural fears, let me take a moment to direct your attention to certain tales about children's toys, used furniture, and unruly registers. But regardless of all that, supernatural or not,  there is something amiss with this bloodthirsty knife. But I can't get rid of the knife, because then I would be left with nothing but that crap in my drawer that is just pretending to be a paring knife. Yup, if this was a horror movie, I would be that dumbass white girl who dies first. Good thing this isn't a horror movie. Or is it???