When you are a high anxiety person (like me) and are exceptionally clumsy (also me), maiming and death traps lurk around every corner. And it turns out that when you buy a house, you can hire someone to come in and tell you all about the many dangers of your future home. Some of these items even I'm not worried about - the inspector was pretty concerned about the 1/8 inch difference between the tile in the kitchen and the wood floors in the dining and living room, but not even I could trip over that. We acted on other recommendations, though. Getting the radon situation mitigated was probably a good choice. Some issues we didn't even need the inspector to point out. The stairway upstairs has a low doorway, so we have to watch our heads. The basement stairs are narrow and rickety, so we have to watch our steps. I knew I had to be careful there...but so far, I've had a few near - death experiences that had nothing to do with anything I'd been warned about or figured out on my own.
Venomous Serpents: One of my earliest childhood memories is of being terrified of snakes. I can't say for sure if I have a diagnosable phobia, but truly nothing frightens me more than those slimy, slithery, harbingers of death. So imagine my dismay when I was peacefully walking with my dog in the backyard and heard a deadly rustle - it was a foot long, black snake wriggling away from us. I screamed. Now the neighbors think I'm crazy, and every stick, leaf, and walnut lying on our lawn startles me and makes me shiver. I should point out that not only did the dog fail to defend me, she didn't even notice.
Poisonous Spiders AND Fire: We were spending a lovely late summer evening sitting on our new deck furniture, when a monstrous spider started to descend right in between us. I'm not exaggerating about the size of this beast, it was intense enough to make Matt jump too. Brave husband that he is, he started to attack it with our nearest weapon, a can of bug spray. The spider was undeterred. Matt's mother then handed him a lighter, hoping to burn the creature to death. A second's hesitation reminded us that bug spray + flame = probable house fire. So Matt defended us with a shoe.
Drowning: We have an old house with a stone basement. We were advised to buy a dehumidifier to keep the slight dank odor out, and dry things out in the event of a heavy rain. So on our weekly trip to Lowe's, we decided to pick one up. And after some debate, we ended up going with the big daddy 70 pint model. And it's a good thing we did. We started running it on Saturday afternoon, and as of Tuesday, we had emptied it 3 times. That's 210 pints, or 26.25 gallons. As of this evening, it's still going strong. That's some serious moisture seeping into our lungs.
Dog Suicide: No one has ever accused our dog of being brilliant. But I also didn't think she was dumb enough to try to off herself. However, within 15 minutes one evening, she tried to end her own life no fewer than five times. She squeezed out the front door, and gleefully ran across two streets straight to the defensive German shepherd that lives in his backyard and would have thought she was a snack. Fortunately, the shepherd's owner so what was going on in time to pull her animal inside, which then inspired ours to run back and forth across the street like a fate-tempting fool. My father-in-law tackled her to the ground in the front yard. It was not pretty.
I guess the moral of the story is thank goodness for insurance. And does anyone know where I can take out a policy on my dog?
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