toxic

First of all, I talked to my sister this morning. It was GREAT! (that was not the toxic part of my day)

Unfortunately, I woke up feeling a little worse this morning. But after the skype call with my sister and a little straightening around the house, I went in to the restaurant and finished up the room. The mosaics are FINALLY up on the walls, and it feels AWESOME.

(I promise to stop using ALL CAPS for emphasis from now on)

I noticed, as I picked up the work where I left off on Friday, that my throat felt more and more sore as the hours passed. Just like it had on Friday. I began to wonder if the dust or fumes from the work or the room were what gave me the sore throat to begin with; or at least made an existing problem worse. ??? Anyway, now it's on fire, and I think I'm losing my voice.

Part-way through the afternoon I decided to treat myself to a hot cookie with ice cream. It's the dessert they're known for, so I was really looking forward to it. (I also needed to photograph it for their promo shots.) All the photos taken (I really think I ought to go into food photography—they make a lot of money, I hear!) I dug into the cookie and by then melty ice cream. I enjoyed the first bite or two, and then realized there was a weird taste. Undaunted, I kept eating. It took me about half the cookie to identify the strange taste. It dawned on me that the turpentine I had been using smelled exactly like the unusual flavoring in the cookie. Uh-Oh.

I went in to ask the cook and she it wasn't in the cookie, it was in the ice cream. One of the guys helping us had put a paint brush in the freezer, and the smell of turpentine had permeated all the ice cream.

Yikes. It's my fault, really. For those of you who think putting a paint brush in a freezer sounds totally whacky, there is a logic to it. It's an old trick for paint rollers, which are hard to clean. Back in my theater days, if we were planning to use the roller again soon, we would freeze it so that it didn't dry out before we got back to it. As soon as it thawed it was as good as new, sort of.

I am afraid, though, that a roller (or brush) with enamel paint got put in the freezer. Those paints have very strong smells. Or he tried to clean it with turpentine and then put it in the freezer. In any case, the ice cream is totally whacked.

The most disturbing thing, besides the thought of throwing away gallons of ice cream, is that they said, "Yeah, a customer complained about the ice cream tasting funny yesterday." And they were still serving it. Oh boy.

OK. Maybe that's not the most disturbing thing. It might be topped by the fact that I went ahead and finished off the rest of the cookie and ice cream anyway. 

So, I was totally going to post a photo of the finished room design today, but when I stepped out of the restaurant to walk home, there was an amazing sky. You'll just have to enjoy that for today, and wait to see the room another day.