Chemical Poisoning

Phil is home on holiday's today, so its a good chance to do very little other than a few festive finality's.

First things first and we extract the christmas tree from the loft, fluff it up so it looks like a tree rather than a pencil and then set about decorating it. I have to say, its a masterpiece of overloaded glitz and glamour and not in the slightest bit coordinated, but it's our tree so we can do whatever the hell we like with it :)

I then set about wrapping all the presents that have to be transported to Wales this weekend, and that takes ages, and a huge amount of gift wrap too, yards of the stuff! So I guess it's a valid lesson in "what not to buy for christmas", in particular housewares of the kitchen bin size. I get so far with the wrapping, but then run out of paper so we take a trip into town and pick up a few more necessities. Whilst were there we also manage to get some plastic cement (which is basically fancy glue used to stick plastic models together) - in fact we get a variety of the stuff just to be sure, which included a small jar of it that rather resembles a pot of nail polish. The reason we need this is that one of the presents I've got my dad is in fact a model which will need gluing together, and knowing my Dad he won't have the right stuff to glue everything in the right place - which will be a bit of a bummer come Christmas Day when he opens his present and can't do anything with it.

Whilst we're in town Phil eyes up some new phones that he'd like to get for the house, since the old ones are a bit long in the tooth and a touch flaky to say the least. Alas however they don't have the ones that he wants in our local Argos store, but they do in the Oxford one. So the next trip, after a quick pit stop at home to get some lunch is the Argos Extra which is about 11 miles away.

Please bare in mind at this point that for all the time since we picked up the glue, it's been in very close proximity to me.

Just before we leave the house to go get the phones I notice that I've got one mutha of a headache coming on, so pop some aspirin to try and disperse it. By the time we get back from our phone trip (about an hour later) I notice that despite having prescribed myself some pain relief the headache is still there, it just won't shift.

I then set about doing some more wrapping of stuff (Phil's pressies in particular whilst he's banished up stairs) and for the hour or so I'm doing that I'm sitting next to this glue we'd bought earlier in the day. When I finally get to wrapping Dad's glue I notice that the nail polish pot of sticky stuff is quite stinky, in fact it wreaks! And the source of the odour is due to the fact that the lid isn't quite on right. Phil has a sniff too, and our consensus of opinion results in putting the pot of glue outside because the smell is so bad.

It was like the curtain of death had been lifted! Pre-pot presence my headache was getting beyond the point of ridiculous. The left hand side of my head was thumping and my left eye felt as if someone had pinned a bag of sugar to my eyebrow and left it hang there. Forming sentences was confusing, and as for walking well I looked like I was half cut from a big night out, any my ears were ringing like the Hunchback of Notredame giving a rendition whilst on speed. But now, everything was starting to ease off, and I felt almost human again.

So there you have it, I can now categorically say that I seriously doubt I'll ever become a qualified glue sniffer or ever indulge in the art of flirting with fumes. It appears I'm already chemically imbalanced, and the glue sent me over the edge.

You learn something new everyday eh?

Oh, and did anyone else notice how big the moon was tonight? Or was it me hallucinating because of toxic glue fumes?

Posted by Abi on the December 15, 2005 9:59 PM