I'm in LA this week for a class. 10 students, it's not too big a class, but they're making me work for it. I've never had a class that asked so many questions. It's a good thing, they're involved, they're learning, but it's also a bit worrisome. This is the class I'm least qualified to teach out of the classes I teach. I've done the least amount of real work with the material of the class.
Two days in, they've asked me more questions than a normal class for all 4 days. The good news is that they're not smart enough to ask me smart questions that would expose my lack of knowledge of the subject. The bad news is that they're also not smart enough to read documentation. Thus, the exercises, which are basically right out of the documentation and the class slides, end up being a lot harder than they should be.
Now that the class is over, I've also realized that while they weren't smart enough to ask smart questions, they asked so many questions that they were almost able to expose my lack of knowledge of the subject. But I made it through the class relatively unscathed, so I guess I can't complain about it at this point.
Switching gears....
I generally don't like anti-bacterial soap. It's a bad thing. The argument as to why it's a bad thing goes something like this: anti-bacterial products claim to kill 99.9% of germs. What about the other .1%? They reproduce and eventually, all we have left are vast amounts of the bacteria that's resistant to anti-bacterial products. And what do we do at that point?
That's the basic argument, I don't have research that says anything, but I've read articles and heard NPR segments about this.
Tonight, I want my anti-bacterial soap. See, S and I made a mistake 6 months ago.
When we moved in, we bought a new trash can, and in the interests of keeping it our trash can, I wrote our address on it in permanent marker. After a few months went by, we'd been using our trash can primarily for picking up after the dogs. The dog crap got deposited in grocery store plastic bags, and then placed in the trash can. At some point, the trash can lid was left off, or blew off, and it rained. So here we were with a trash can full of dog crap in bags that were floating or sunk in water. Shortly thereafter, the water froze. Now we had ice with dog crap in it. Our other trash can filled up, and brilliant guy that I am, I put some pizza boxes into the trash can with the dog crap & ice melange.
Fast forward 6 months. This trash can, for the past few weeks, maybe 2 months, has been unfrozen, and you really couldn't get close to it without noticing the smell. I equate the smell with snake crap, but for most of you, that won't be an illuminating analogy. It smelled pretty bad, let's just leave it at that. We've not been sure what to do with it. If we throw it in a dumpster, it's got our address written on it, they could come find us. We can't just dump it out, because the smell would be unbelievable. Certainly don't want to dump it out right out back, because it would just run into our yard. Definitely didn't want that.
Tonight, though, we had the good fortune of having a terrific thunderstorm. Thunder, pouring rain, all the good stuff. So at 1:15am, I decide I'm gonna take care of the trash can problem. So I go out back, while it's pouring, and go to lift the trash can over the fence (the gate's locked, it's a 3' high chain link fence). This usually isn't a problem, except that I haven't accounted for the water that half fills the trash can. So I get the brilliant idea to jump over the fence, and pull it towards me. While in the process of doing this, I realize that the lid has arched a little bit and is now open, and I'm pulling this container filled with shit water towards me, and it's tipped towards me. Bad news. I can picture it, me covered in this water that's been sitting there for months. I guess that's one way to ensure that I never let this happen again.
But I'm successful in getting the trash can over the fence. I roll it down the alley, making a ton of noise in the process, I'm sure, hoping that the noise is covered by the sound of the rain. I get to a storm drain and dump out the water, or at least, as much water as seems to want to come out. Here again, I miscalculated. I didn't take into account how much water would have soaked into the pizza boxes that were in there. So it still weighs quite a bit. I'm gonna have to dump this shit-water-logged stuff into a trash bag.
So I come back into the house to enlist my sister's help in this process. It's at this point that I realize my hands smell. A lot. I don't worry about it too much, thinking that it will be fine after washing my hands. So we go out back and take some trash from the house with us when we go (tomorrow is garbage day, part of the prompting of this whole experience). My sister brings some bleach with us to dump into the trash can after we're done to start correcting the smell problem in that trash can.
It's still pouring, we have a double-bagged trash bag to dump this stuff into, and after a bit of concerted effort, we manage to get everything out of the trash can. Except now we have some on the asphalt in the alley. Soggy, shitty smelling bits and pieces of cardboard. Ugh. So, as I laugh, I tell her, "Hey, pick that up and put it in there." No takers on that one, as you can imagine. Maybe I shouldn't have had her smell my hand before we went outside.
So I use the garbage bag (the outer one) to scoop it up, tie up the trash bag, dump some bleach in the trash can, and head inside to shower and wash my hands. A shower later, several hand washings later, and the smell is still on my hands. I thought that I would put the problem to rest by putting some cocoa butter lotion onto my hands, making my hands smell nice. That is just not to be however, because after the initial period of nice smelling hands, after it soaks in, my hands just smell like cocoa butter snake shit.
Ok, enough typing, time to go wash my hands again.
