Dirty Jobs

Sunday evening we were having friends over for dinner and because it was a nice night we were grilling and eating outside on our new patio furniture for the first time. But because I've dug out most of the plants and rocks that had been holding the soil in place on the slope from the upper patio to the lower one, after a heavy rainfall we had some run-off. To put it bluntly, the back yard is currently a working model of erosion in action.

Not wanting our guests to dine with their feet in the dirt (and trying to make the back yard look generally less ghetto) I grabbed a wide shovel from the garage and started scraping up the dirt. Zach took one look at me, in my dress and apron, with clogs on my feet and shovel full of dirt in my hands, and said, "that perfectly sums you up." And then he got the camera.

Yes I wear dresses I made by myself. Yes I do some fairly girly things. But I'm not afraid to get dirty. I'm really not. I'll slog through muddy riverbeds, pick up rocks that are crawling with centipedes and slugs and hold them close to my body as I move them to some other spot, and clean up dog vomit. I'll clean up animal feces of various kinds. I've probably come into contact with a larger variety of poop than most white-collar workers (armadillo, snake, turtle, ferret, rabbit, owl, porcupine, dove, chinchilla, etc.). I once had a tarantula defecate on my hand during a zoo presentation. No problem.

But there is one thing that makes me gag. Hair. I'm not big on fresh hairballs, but most of the time I can stomach cleaning them up. What really gets me is hair in the tub drain. This week I noticed that my tub was draining very slowly and by the end of a shower I was standing in an inch of water, and I generally take very short showers. Zach had cleaned that drain last, so it was rightfully my turn, especially since it's my bathroom and my hair in there. So with some instruction from him on how to remove the drain cover, I got to work. And so did my gag reflex. I don't know what it is about wet, partially decomposing hair, but it gets me every time. I've never actually given in and thrown up, but that's the only time I gag.

It got me to wondering, is there anything you have to do occasionally that just makes you want to throw up? Anything that you physically can't do because of a phobia (like kill a spider in the house*)?

* NOTE: We do not kill house spiders (or any other non-mosquito and non-ant bugs) but instead catch them in a cup and take them back outside. Yep. We're those people.