Today we are having our carpets professionally cleaned. We have a wet vac, but it has failed to get the dirty areas clean and so has spot cleaning. A tip for you, if you ever buy carpeting — I realize hard wood is the preference these days — go black. Once you go black, you never go back and I swear I am talking about carpeting.
Since my husband and I moved all the furniture out of the rooms we are having cleaned, it gave me an opportunity to crawl around on my hands and knees with a dust rag and a can of Pledge to wipe down our wood baseboards. So much fun, especially in the rainy, ugly, 88% humidity.
I then moved on to the wood doors and it was there I met the enemy, The Splinter.
At first I wasn’t even sure the splinter was still in my hand, had it gone in and come out? There was a dark mark but it could have been the result of the splinter having left the premises. My husband and I both tried to determine if the intruder was still embedded but we couldn’t. He tried squeezing my hand from the bottom like that last drop of toothpaste (yes, he got his medical degree at Home Depot) but nothing popped out. I went upstairs and got under my bed light with a safety pin and began digging away. It hurt and yet I still couldn’t tell after I scraped up some of the skin.
I had my BlackBerry with me so I quick Googled (God Bless Google) “remove splinter” and there was a suggestion of using baking soda. It did say, however, to do this only after you’d tried digging and taping and tweezering.
We interrupt this blog post for a Public Service Announcement: Click HERE for that baking soda remedy.
I continued scraping around with my safety pin like the archaeologists over in Egypt, hoping to uncover a small piece of the treasure, without disturbing it and God forbid breaking it into pieces. Finally, I saw the tip of it appear out of my skin and was able to grab it between my fingernails. At last, the Shard of Pain was exhumed.
Since everything in my life is One Degree of Separation from the job search, I looked at this teeny tiny shard and related it to my job search. Like the splinter, it’s under my skin and it hurts. It’s all I can think about and I’ve tried everything to dig out the job that fits me — phone calls, emails, old-fashioned U.S. Postal letters (with a stamp and everything) — only to have it elude me and continue to hurt and weigh heavy on my heart and mind. I’ve tried Googling for how to “remove unemployment” but there have been no answers.
Although the splinter didn’t make me cry as the job search has, the splinter made me curse, it made me sweat and it made me mad.
Baking soda is not going to get me a new job. If it was, I’d be backing up a U-Haul to Costco right now. It’s gonna take more digging and more sweating and a lot more cursing. I’m gonna need a bigger safety pin . . .
