What in Blazes is Going On?!

A few days ago, I was putting on a coat and noticed a thread caught in the zipper. I moseyed over to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of scissors, and started to cut it off.

“Hang on,” Tara said, mid-snip. “Let me take care of that for you.”

I thought I had the situation pretty well under control, but thinking my wife was just being sweet, I shrugged my shoulders and tried to pass off the scissors. She brushed my hand aside, reached into the junk drawer, and withdrew a lighter. One of those long multi-purpose push-button Bics, the kind you use to light candles without burning your fingers. I wondered WTF was going on here.

“WTF is going on here?” I asked.

She was so focused on the task she paid me no heed. Got a flame going on the lighter and touched it to the thread.

“Whoa!” I shouted. “Hey! Ow!”

I’m not sure why I said ow, because she hadn’t burned me or anything. Yet.

“This is a much better way of getting rid of threads,” she explained, and then proceeded to find several more on my coat and set them ablaze.

“It’s also a pretty good way of setting me on fire!” I replied, pulling back. “How bad are you going to feel if I end up a pile of ashes on the kitchen floor?!”

I can’t swear to this next part, but it looked like her eyes shifted furtively to the cabinet in the corner where we store the broom and dustpan.

My wife kept ignoring me and trying to set me alight. Even after I told her she got all the loose threads, she started lifting up my arms, examining my sleeves, doing an all-over inspection. I have no idea what she was thinking. I guess it really is a thing, but why play Russian roulette with a lighter? The scissors worked fine!

Never trust a sock-shoe-sock-shoe person is the moral here.

By the way, Tara’s boss reads my blog. After the whole sock-sock-shoe-shoe thing, she asked if we really have conversations like that or if these posts are more for entertainment.

“This is what it’s like in our house all the time,” Tara assured her.

Who could make this stuff up anyway? Truth is always stranger than fiction!

We’re required to complete quarterly safety courses at work. These used to be in person but are now mostly videos. Some are more useful than others: bloodborne pathogens and HAZCOM aren’t huge concerns in the marketing department, but ergonomics and cold weather safety were interesting and potentially helpful.

There was even a fire safety course last fall, so I’ll know what to do if/when Tara sets me on fire next time.

The only drawback is, these videos make me paranoid about all the bad things that can happen to me at work. Thank god we don’t have a vending machine that might tip over and crush me, but I could still trip on a cord or tweak my back lifting a carton of paper. As illogical as this sounds, because I’ve never shared a needle, am tattoo-free, haven’t given birth to a baby, and never once donated an organ, today I convinced myself I have Hepatitis C just because my joints were a little achy.

Here’s hoping the next batch of courses cover less scary topics, like active shooters and tornado safety.

It’s been crazy cold here all week. Thursday morning, we woke up to a temperature of -5°. Which means most of that snow we got last weekend is still around.

I joked to Tara that I must be developing poor circulation in my advancing years, because the cold has felt extra unbearable this week. But then again, maybe that’s because it’s mid-March now and it should be 25-30 degrees warmer this time of year. I think I’m just psychologically cold.

Call it brain freeze.

Change is comin’ though. It’ll be in the 50s and 60s starting tomorrow. Spring’s right around the corner, kids!

Have a great weekend and avoid open flames.

49 thoughts on “What in Blazes is Going On?!”

  1. I can’t believe you didn’t title it “What the Blazers Is Going on Here?” But I guess it wasn’t a sports coat.

    You never actually said if her method worked better than scissors. (Maybe just don’t try it after drinking…)

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    1. Ahh…no, it was a puffy jacket. I never even thought about that. Talk about a missed opportunity.

      Yes, her method worked. But it didn’t work any BETTER than scissors! I think my wife’s just a pyromaniac.

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  4. Don’t puffy coats melt rather than burn? One wrong move and you could have had a permanent coat melted right onto your torso. Imagine the scrapping to get that off…

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  6. Burning threads is most definitely a thing. Matter of fact it’s how the Marine Corps taught my husband to do it in boot camp. Though the Corps calls loose threads Irish pennants. Even though he’s not standing for uniform inspection anymore, he can’t let a stray thread stand to this day. 🤣

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      1. “The term comes from the British navy, first recorded use in 1829 to refer to any untidy or loose end of rope, or out-of-place line. Its use in the US Marines for untidy threads on a uniform developed later. “

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  7. What in the hell?!? I thought you were going to tell me that was a dream?! I mean, isn’t there a very good chance of burning one’s finger doing nonsense like that? I suppose Bic will now need to put a safety warning about burning stray threads now!

    Speaking of safety, Middle Child also has to watch quarterly videos on that topic at her library job. Yesterday, it was Cyber Safety. Be watching for it….lol!

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    1. Definitely not a dream! But on a positive note, it gave me another interesting topic to write about. My marriage is a great source of material for this blog.

      We actually have separate cyber safety courses we have to take, too. I can go on for days about phishing scams and two-factor authenticity!

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  8. So I was on board, chuckling and nodding, through most of this, until you got to the part about safety training. And then my head exploded. Because in my mind I thought you worked for a company that does strictly computer-based marketing stuff so why in the world would you or anyone else who works there need HAZCOM training????

    And now as I’m writing this it’s dawned on me that you probably have production lines there so there’s ink and solvent to clean the presses. So. HAZCOM it is. I bet there’s a good lockout/tagout program, too.

    Carry on, nothing to see here, ignore the gray matter stains on the rug, we’ll get those cleaned up.

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    1. We’re actually a telecom company with a small marketing department, so there’s a lot of equipment involved. Not so much manufacturing but field installation, that sort of thing. Still doesn’t really explain the HAZMAT training, or why the marketing team would need that, but I guess they’re covering all their bases from a legal standpoint.

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  11. Wait a minute, I thought these conversations were just for our entertainment! Whether or not you guys actually have the is irrelevant! 🙂

    By the way, climbers fix threads like that all the time because it’s the way to keep ropes from unraveling too. Or they just slap a piece of duct tape on it. So I’d count yourself lucky that it was just flame because I can’t imagine how you’d react if Tara got out a roll of duct tape! 😉

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  15. We have had the same weather as you and today (Sunday – I’m way behind on blog reading) the ice skating rink that is 1/3 of our driveway is finally starting to melt. We even opened the sliding glass doors for a while to give the critters some fresh air. This week is going to be quite nice for us to and I simply can’t wait!

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    1. I figured what we experience, you probably experience a day later. Definitely looking forward to some warmer weather (even if it means the beautiful snowy landscape has been replaced by dead brown grass again).

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  16. I’d heard about burning fraying edges of rope, but never considered doing so on items of clothing, especially as we keep hearing how flammable clothes are these days. That said, I don’t even seek out the scissors, I’m more of a thread puller…. I know, shoot me now!

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    1. I’ve done that before with disastrous results. The thread never seems to stop where you want it to. Next thing you know, half your clothing is in a pile on the floor!

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  17. I knew about the ‘flames to a thread’ thing. Where have you been?

    Lord. I hope you don’t have hep C either; you know you can get it from eating anything from Trader Joe’s. 😳

    I would be so over winter if we actually had winter. I think we had four days of actual winter between 2021 and 2022.

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  18. Fire is tricky stuff. I mean, it scares me and fascinates me. I’ve read that the best clothes to wear on a plane are ones made from cotton or wool because they tend to burn more slowly– should the plane catch on fire. So another fun fire-related thing to fret about. Happy Monday!

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  19. If you’ll allow adding fuel to the fire (pun alert!) of sock-shoe-sock-shoe, we just saw on the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel a one upping of that: one of the characters, Susie, confessed to fully clothing the top half of her body and only then starting on the bottom half of the body, starting with the underwear 🤷‍♀️

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      1. As you can imagine, this came up because she could not get up from behind her desk since she only had time to complete half her dressing routine. The other character on the show found it just as bizarre as you and I did 🙂

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