Matchstick Impaired Irish Girl

I'm supposed to be working on a WIP... any WIP... but I'm at one of 'those' points... you know the ones I mean, where those of us still seeking representation are like 'but what if that OTHER WIP is the one that someone will love... but I'm closer to being finished with THIS WIP... but really, THAT WIP is tighter and will need less revisions'... and since we don't have an agent to smack our bum and tell us which one they think is the hot tamale, we wemble. Any who, instead of working on a WIP, I'm sipping scotch (Balvenie Double Wood 12 Yr, for anyone interested) and writing up this post, which I promise will be pretty funny. At least, I'm still laughing, and if I can laugh about it, you ought to :)

Firstly, Happy St Patrick's Day! Which I celebrate simply out of tradition, since the real history is just a tad terrifying and not something I would really support. But I'll take any excuse to eat cabbage and nip scotch (I hardly drink) so here I am, celebrating the tradition, if not the actual root of the tradition.

That was the 'Irish Girl' part of the post... now for the matchstick impaired part. To start, you have to understand that I'm virtually fearless... except for fire. Now to clarify further, um, I love campfires, roasting marshmallows, fire places, and burning sage. I've even had fires in the teepee. However, 'loose' fire... not so much. I'm pretty much catatonically paralyzed by fear when it comes to like, house fires, forest fires etc. The only genuine faint I've ever managed involved setting the stove on fire. And it took me years to live down the rice cake in the toaster oven incident... but I digress, and you get the picture.

Soooo I decided to light a candle the other night. It was one of those yummy Yankee Candle candles. A vanilla one. This is something I do a lot. I mean, it's a CANDLE. Well, anyway, I went and got the box of matches (Amish handmade ones, no less) and returned to the living room where the candle was sitting atop our nifty fake-fire electric fireplace. First match, strike, strike, strike, nothing. I used up all of the gritty sulfur stuff, no flame. Second match, same deal (so much for 'handmade' being better) so I pulled out match number three. Now by this time, I was annoyed, the cats were lined up staring at me, trying to figure out why I wasn't on the couch any more and the forensics show I was watching was explaining how the butter knife that someone stabbed through some woman's eye didn't actually kill her, so I wasn't paying that much attention to match number three. After all, one and two already gave me the shaft.

Since I wasn't looking, I failed to realize that lucky number three lit up brighter than the Griswold's Christmas tree. Until the flaming tip flew by my face on it's way south, anyway. The entire match head didn't break off. Oh, no, just the sulfur part. It sailed up, then down, smashing into my thigh, because I had my hip all popped out with a little attitude. Yeah, so I was wearing stretch pants (you know you own a pair) that I bought like three years ago at American Eagle for about two dollars. You know, those stretch pants that are made of fake long john material. All the girls were wearing them for a while (mine have never left the house because my momma taught me better than to wear my jammies in public) and since mine are a couple of years old, they've attained that really soft skim of fiber that pants get when they reach that 'perfectly broken in' stage. Well, they HAD that soft skim of fiber. The right leg is bald now.

Yep, as soon as that burning sulfur got in the same zip code as my well-worn stretch pants, my right leg went up like the fourth of July. I made that breakdown Sally Fields had in Steel Magnolias look like a tea party. Seriously. Course, it's sort of hard to run from your own leg. I didn't get all that far. Just far enough to hit the front of my grandmother's ancient yellow recliner. Being, well, ancient, it can't take a great deal, so when I crashed into the thing, it rocked back, and I REALLY crashed. My butt stayed in the seat for about a tenth of a second. Just long enough for the chair to go over backwards and flip my flaming carcass into the stair banister, where I landed in an extinguished pile. You have to love furniture that's smarter than you are. Left to my own wits I would have staggered about squealing like a bad remake of the Towering Inferno. As it is, I came out with nothing but a very smooth pant leg and high blood pressure. And I did get the candle lit, dammit. And it smelled great. Even got rid of the singed stretch pants scent that was lingering in the air. So there you have it. I'm totally matchstick impaired. I mean, some girls have them and freeze to death in doorways. I have them and light my britches on fire. At least I won't freeze to death any time soon.

And with that, I shall leave you. I'm sure there's a WIP I can torture lying around somewhere... Happy writing all!