Dryer Sheets of Death

Looks so innocuous, doesn’t it?

Our laundry/bathroom is on our main floor.  We have two doors leading into it, one from the back hall and one from the back staircase.*  There are occasions where I might bound into the room from either direction.  Did you know that you can slip, in your bare feet, when previously used dryer sheets have been rubbed into the floor.?  Residual fabric softener, it turns out, is a great floor waxer.  Who knew?  Not I.  Until I galloped down the stairs, skittered into the laundry/bathroom, hit a slippery patch, IN MY BARE FEET, and went careening into the door jamb, sliding down the jamb, full weight upon my arm to rest in a pile of legs and arms.  I believe all the neighbours on our street could hear me colourfully peppering the air with Danish expletives.

I looked around to see what had caused me to slip and there was nothing there. I mean NOTHING.  Not a piece of clothing, not a rug without a slippy-pad, not a dryer sheet.  So I crawled across the floor and started feeling around the way a blind person might, my hand out in front of me brushing from left to right and back again to feel the floor.  And somewhere around the chrome waste basket (where dryer sheets are supposed to be put), I felt a bunch of really slippery spots.  So what did I do?  I got up and tried to walk over the spot and SLIPPED AGAIN!!!  Which means that I fell on my ass TWICE.  The second time as an EXPERIMENT.  I lay on the floor, laughing at my own stupidity for a few moments as the cats mocked me from the doorway.

I bruise if someone breathes on me so if I actually injure myself, it’s a sight to behold.  There will be bruises on me that I don’t even remember getting.  I bump into a shopping cart at the grocery store and end up looking like I’ve gone three rounds with a welter weight.  David frequently looks at me and says, “What the hell did you do to yourself?”    This has happened when I’ve been massaged:

I trip, slip, scald, goose-egg, gouge, sprain and gash myself… I am THAT clumsy.  I always win the “How many scars do you have?” game.  It used to really put potential boyfriends off because they’d want to be all manly and itemize every wee little mark they had on their bodies and I have literally DOZENS.  I’ve split my head open, fallen through a glass table, punctured my leg through a snowsuit…   It’s only because people know me so well that David hasn’t been picked up for abuse. Thank God (touch wood) Rissa seems to have more grace and coordination than I ever had.  Although she does excel at collapsing to the floor in dramatic gestures.

* I thought it would be too poncy to say we had a servants’ staircase, but we totally do!  By no means do we have servants, we just live in a century home that once
had them.  When we were renovating, we saw what looked to be the top of a run of stairs in the upper hall, so we opened the walls and discovered two sets of stairs in the back of the house.  We found one from the main floor to the 2nd floor and a second staircase from the main floor to the basement.  I felt like Indiana Freaking Jones!  I had always wanted to have back stairs.  One downside to all these various stairs in the house, when a bat finds its way in?   It can be REALLY hard to catch the sucker because it has several escape routes.