Poisoning Myself?

I don't know, but I'd bet that's exactly what I did.

Yesterday morning when I got up, I had a horrible taste in my mouth. I'm not talking the usual morning variety either, I'm talking nasty. My coffee tasted bad to where I could hardly get it down. When I got to work nothing I ate would "cut" it--Even my favorite peppermint gum. That's when it hit me as to what it could have been. When the notion hit me, I started drinking mass quantities of water to flush my system. That worked. By about 10 or 11am I was doing much better.

So what happened? Sunday I was out cleaning my truck and was using a new cleaner. It's called Purple Power and it's made by Aiken Chemical Company. It is one of those ultra-strong, kickass cleaners that will clean anything. It's so strong that you have to dilute it 10:1 for some things according to the label. Well I diluted it all right, putting a "splash" of it in the bottom of a coffee can before filling it to the top with water. Using an old sock, I dipped and wrung like you'd usually do when cleaning something, and spent about 10-15 minutes cleaning door jambs and the hood opening to rid them of greenish growth. When I was finished it was very hard to get that stuff rinsed off my hands. I kept rinsing and washing and rinsing and still they felt slippery and soapy. When I finally did feel like I got it all off and my hands were dry they felt like they had been baked dry and felt like my skin was too small for my hands.

So I think I was poisoned by a "safe" product just because I should have used latex gloves (which I have lots of). This sort of thing never used to be a problem you know? We never had anything more concentrated than Ivory Liquid "back in the day" so we never had that sort of thing pop up. I can't help but wonder how many times I've done that in the past and never associated the result with anything. I've messed with some nasty chemicals over the years.

I was on their website this morning and was very surprised that they didn't have an MSDS sheet available for download. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's a Material Safety Data Sheet, and I thought it was required for any chemical product, but apparently not.

Let that be a lesson to you. Gloves. USE EM.

In other news, I stopped by the license agency yesterday and succeeded in getting my new truck put in my name and getting new tabs. I was kinda nervous about it, but it went without a hitch. I send Melinda an email explaining that my title would show up there and to just hang on to it because we would probably be heading down toward her place sometime in the near future anyway. What a relief to have the truck in my name.

When you count all the little things I had a lot to be nervous about: The title was in two names (different last names), had a lien on it at one time (that was still on the title), and had a $200 sale price (for tax savings). Add to that the fact that I was titling it in Chehalis (3 counties away?), and that my driver's license had one address listed on it that I no longer lived at, and my checks had my current address--Neither of which reflected the new address I was using to title it. All those things compounded made lots of things that could have went wrong but fortunately didn't. I had everything going my way I guess, because I own my truck now and it's legal to drive. Woohoo!

Oh, and my coffee tastes much better today. As a matter of fact, it just like usual, meaning it almost tastes like coffee should taste! Almost.