The Giant Bubby Pepper Poke Disaster

Well friends, we've had our first casualty in The Great Pepper War of 2012. It was just two days ago during the last and final surge against the never ended bucket of peppers. There I was in the kitchen, surrounded by boiling cauldrons of bubbling pepper goodness.

Man down! The Bubby takes one for the team.

The end was in sight - I only had a few sweet peppers left in that bottomless bucket. But I wanted to have one final triumphant extra spicy salsa. So I donned my heavy, hot pepper handling gloves and headed to the far back corner of the garden to get one of the bad boys. You know the ones - those extra long, extra skinny, pointy, extra hotsy totsy peppers with the special warnings on them. Oh yeah, this was gonna be a spicy salsa for the record books. I marched out to get the Holy Hot one. Without incident.

On my way back to the house I was greeted by the dogs wagging all around. They had been on morning patrols and were covered in dew, those weird sticky green seeds, and had come to report no unusual goings on. "Good work, men!" I called to them as I made my way thru the wagging, panting, bouncing horde of dogs. Zander...aka "The Bubby" was especially bouncy as he followed me to the door.

Just as I as opening the door, my prized Holy Hot pepper in my protective gloved hand... it happened. In an instant my joyful pepper victory turned to horror. I was being slightly jostled by a bouncing Bubby and then.....a yelp.

I turned and saw The Bubby. Crying and pawing at his eye.

I looked at The Bubby. I looked at the Holy Hot pepper in my hand. It took me a few seconds before I realized that I had just stabbed The Bubby in the eye with a scorching hot pepper.

"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"  I cried.

"Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooee!" Cried Zander.

He ran. I ran. There was running. And crying. and more running and crying. Finally I got ahold of my 100lbs+ squirming crying puppy. His poor little eye was starting to tear up. And when I mean little, I mean to tell you that he has very small squinty eyes to begin with. Talk about a one in a million shot! Sheesh!

Then there was a lot more running and crying. Mostly by me. Luckily I was better in this crisis than, you know, other ones. I sprang to action with the phone in one hand - cuz you know we have the Good Vet on speed dial - and a cold compress in the other.

After more running, chasing, and wrestling I got Zander tackled and was able to hold the cold washcloth on his eye. He did not protest.

Of course the whole time I was trying to figure out what I was going to tell the Good Vet. As you can imagine they've heard just about everything from us. In fact I am fairly certain they have a standing appointment for us in their books. Probably called something like the "What Could They Possibly Come Up With Now Hour."  We tend to win awards from them with titles like, "The Weirdest Thing We've Seen Today"  and "The Worst Wound in 15 Years of Vet Practice." And my personal favorite, "Seriously? How Did This Happen?"

After determining that the eye poke was probably not fatal I brought Zander in the house, gave him some snuggles, a can of food, and watched him. He promptly passed out on the floor - asleep. When he woke up a short time later I tripled checked his eye - it was no longer tearing nor red. I made sure he could see and follow my hand to ensure his vision was not impacted, gave him more snuggles, and sent him back outside to play with his sister, Kai.

And thusly ended The Great Pepper War of 2012. Just one man down, I think we did OK.

Happy Wednesday everyone!  Any body got a canning casualty to top that one?