First of all, I have to warn you that if you are not reading this post in a place where you can laugh, groan and make other loud noises bound to attract attention... you might want to wait until you are. Oh, and it might take you a while to read the whole thing but there is something riveting about seeing a particularly unusual accident and being unable to look away.
I must admit that my favorite all time blogger has always been Air Force Wife. I totally GET her humor, her husband's brand of humor and her family. As much as I was sad that she closed down her own blog I was thrilled to see her as a permanent fixture on SpouseBuzz.
Now it has been a while since her particular post was written, but it is one of those that never goes out of the memory. I laughed so hard, I was in serious danger of things better left unmentioned. The comments were absolutely unforgettable. For those of you who have no experience with military life... you will get a rare view of how the other half lives. For the rest of you who have survived, we salute you!
So I am thinking back over the last twenty odd years (more if I include my own childhood) of military life and of course there are always tours that stand out in one's mind when dragging up these memories. I'm flipping through the 'infamous' incidents in my mind for a short one to share.
Oh, there are too many to count. Let's see, the volcanic eruption? The hurricanes? The typhoons? The earthquakes? The snake? The delivery room? The rat? The trip home to Maine with 14 month old, 6 week old premie baby with me in leg brace to hip and air cast on opposite leg? (All on one tour of Guam?)
So I settle on what I thought would be the shortest story. The RAT. But after writing it out I realized that it was a little too long for a comment to a post. So here it is in all it's glory....
WARNING: Not for the faint of heart!
So we are both active duty (the husband and I) at the time working opposite shifts and living in base housing on Andersen AFB in Guam. I kept finding these grub like worms all over the kitchen. I completely scoured it down with bleach. Twice. And finally left a note for the husband to make sure he didn't leave any food out.
I came home the next morning after a mid-shift and the husband has already left for a day shift. In the sink he has left his cereal bowl. Again there were these fat white worms everywhere. I call him at work to chew him out and as I am waiting on hold I notice the worms have a kind of pattern direction. They seem to be coming from behind the stove.
My husband gets on the phone and I explain what was going on and he says to pull the stove out. So I put the phone down, yank and twist until I get that darn stove out and look behind it............... lots of bunnies.... of the dust variety. There is nothing else back there. So I get back on the phone and the husband is as perplexed as I am. I hang up the phone, scour the floor where the stove goes with bleach and just for good measure I look UNDER the stove. Nothing. I'm exhausted. I put the stove back and head to bed.
This continues to go on for about a week and the worms are growing in numbers at an alarming rate. Every day I scour everything with bleach and every night they are back.
Finally my husband and I both have a night off together and I go to cook a meal. Something I haven't been able to do in weeks. I get everything out, turn on the stove and..... nothing. It doesn't work. Huh. I figured that maybe I didn't plug it back in right so I called my husband to pull out the stove again. It is plugged in fine. So the DH gets out his tools and a flashlight to take the back panel off the stove. He's looking into the air vent with the flashlight when he suddenly jumps back against the wall. By now I am really worried. He looks at me and says he has found the problem but that he isn't hungry any more. I asked him what was wrong and he takes the flashlight and points it toward the vent and as I lean over the top of the stove to look down I see barely noticable tufts of fur and then a few of those fat white worms that we now know are maggots start crawling out the vent.
OK. Normally I am calm in an emergency but there is something about snakes and rats that do it to me every time. I made the husband take the stove outside without saying a legible word. (According to him) Just violent gestures, a few grunts and perhaps a whimper or two.
The next day, the housing office sends someone over. (I stayed FAR away!) He knocks on the door a while later and says that it's all fixed. Turns out that since the house was so clean, a rat had climbed into the stove (never figured out how) and he chewed on the electrical wires for sustenance. Killing himself in a most shocking manner and disabling the stove.
This airman just stood there with a grin on his face as he's explaining this, brushes his hands together and asks if I want him to bring it back on in and test it since he replaced the electrical wires.
It took me a minute to compose myself but I asked him if he had also disposed of the rat and ALL of the maggots and if he had then sanitized every square inch of the stove. INSIDE AND OUT? NO????? Then I want a NEW stove! Oh and by the way, take that one out of my yard immediately along with the remains thank you very much!
And the rest of the story? The airman left to report back to his boss to determine what to do. He never returned. My husband was called at work and told to return the stove to it's proper place and that since it was repaired we were not going to get a new one.
We cleaned and sanitized it the best we could, but I NEVER used that stove again!
QOTD: "You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster." Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) English Author
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try again in the morning.