THE DIABETIC MACHO, MACHO MAN

The other day my cousin and I were talking about how, years ago, when she first was diagnosed with diabetes, they taught her how to give herself injections by having her practice injecting an orange.

“I haven’t been able to look at an orange since!” she said.

Our conversation reminded me of my late husband, who also was diabetic, and the first time he had to give himself an injection.

In the beginning, when he was taking only pills for his diabetes, he had a monthly appointment with a diabetes counselor who discussed diet and nutrition with him and checked the blood-glucose chart he kept every day.

The counselor also just happened to be a young, petite, very attractive brunette.

“Hurry up!” my husband always urged me on the day of his appointment. “I don’t want to be late!”

I’d still be eating my cereal, mainly because his appointment usually wasn’t for another three hours. Funny, but when he had an appointment with one of his male doctors, I practically had to dynamite him out of his recliner five minutes before it was time to leave. But for the sexy diabetes counselor, he was out warming up the car while I still was in my pajamas.

“Did you do the laundry yet?” my husband asked, rushing around to get dressed on one particular appointment day. “The only clean underwear I have is full of holes – both the undershirts and the briefs.”

“Holey underwear is fine, as long as it’s clean,” I said. “No one’s going to see it anyway. You’re just going to have a chat with a diabetes counselor, not do a striptease for anyone.”

Thanks to me, we arrived three minutes late for my husband’s appointment. The way he carried on, you’d think I’d committed a criminal offense.

The diabetes counselor, stunning in her turquoise outfit accessorized with silver and turquoise jewelry, studied my husband’s blood-glucose chart and looked thoughtful for a moment. Finally, she said, “Even on your current medication, your levels are still higher than I’d like to see them. I think I’m going to recommend to your doctor that you start on insulin twice a day to help boost the medication. So while I have you here, I may as well teach you how to give yourself an injection.”

The look of panic that swept over my husband’s face at the mere mention of the word “injection,” made me think of his friend, Andy, a man who rode a motorcycle, had fought in Vietnam…and passed out cold whenever he saw a needle.

“Are you going to use an orange to demonstrate how to give the injection?” my husband asked the counselor.

She shook her head and laughed. “No, I used to do that, but then I found out that some people were going home, injecting the insulin into an orange, and then eating the orange! They thought that was how they were supposed to take their dosage!”

Her eyes made a quick sweep over my husband and she added, “I think your stomach will be the most convenient place for you to inject yourself.”

He narrowed his eyes at me and I immediately could read his mind. He didn’t want to unbutton his shirt to reveal a holey undershirt…or, heaven forbid, a stomach that didn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

“Is there another spot where I can do the injection?” he asked the counselor. “Like my arm?”

“Your thigh would be better,” she answered.

Again, he cast me an if-looks-could-kill glare. If the thought of lifting his shirt embarrassed him, then dropping his pants to reveal undershorts that looked as if they’d been blasted with buckshot was totally out of the question.

In the end, he opted for his stomach. To my amazement, he injected himself flawlessly, without the slightest bit of hesitation. In fact, he acted as if he were a seasoned pro. Even the counselor was so impressed, she praised him until he actually blushed…and gloated.

And he continued to gloat until we got back out to the car, where he sat behind the steering wheel, leaned his head back against the headrest, exhaled several times and then cried out, “Oh, my God! I actually gave myself a shot! I feel pale! I think I’m going to pass out!”

“But you did everything so calmly in the counselor’s office,” I said.

“That was all just a big macho act so she wouldn’t think I’m a wimp!”

I was pretty sure I’d have to hire a sexy young woman to come to our house every day and stand there and stare at him while he gave himself his injection, but after only a couple panicky days of holding the needle and crying, “Nooo!  I can’t do this!” he finally got brave.

Proud of himself, he was eager to return to see the counselor the next month and tell her all about how great he was doing. But when we arrived, we were shocked to see a long-haired, muscular young man in her place. The guy explained that the regular counselor had been transferred to another clinic and he would be taking her place.

My husband’s expression resembled that of someone who’d just been informed he was about to be audited by the IRS…especially since he’d even made a point of buying and wearing brand-new underwear.

After that day, he began waiting until the last minute to head to his appointments, and often said things like, “Do I have to go? I think I’ll cancel.”

I, however, usually was ready by about 6 AM.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

DRIVE-IN THEATERS ARE MAKING A COMEBACK

It seems that during this pandemic, drive-in theaters are making a big comeback. I really do miss the drive-ins that were in NH back in the 1960s. There were four we went to regularly, just about every weekend during the summer months. There isn’t any way they will be returning, however, as there now are office buildings and shopping plazas where they once stood.

The last time I went to see a drive-in movie was back in 1997. By then, there were only two choices – Weirs Beach or Milford.  Both were pretty far from where we lived, but Milford was a few miles closer.  

 All that summer, my husband kept mentioning his burning desire to recapture his youth by going to a drive-in movie. I basically ignored his hints until after Labor Day, when I read in the paper that the drive-ins would be closing for the season the next night. Feeling guilty, I mentioned it to him.

“We’re going!” he said in a tone that invited no argument. “I don’t even care what’s playing. I’m not about to wait another whole year to go to a drive-in!”

So late the next afternoon, I loaded the car with blankets and jackets (because the weather report said the temperature was going to be in the 40s that night) and a portable radio. The portable radio was going to take the place of the old-fashioned car speakers the drive-ins once had. No more speakers being torn from their poles like back in the good old days. The audio for the movie now could be heard by tuning in to a specific FM radio station. I imagined that the people in the surrounding houses that had a view of the movie screen were pretty pleased. No longer did they have to read lips from their front porches. All they needed was a portable radio to finally hear all of the dialogue.

“I’m hungry,” my husband said the minute we pulled into a spot in the fifth row from the screen. “I’m craving a cheeseburger.”

“You’re not actually considering buying one of those dried-out mystery-meat concoctions sitting under a heat lamp in the snack bar, are you?” I asked.

“Yes! I’m here to recapture my youth, remember? I want to do everything I did as a kid!”

“Then maybe you should have worn your Lone Ranger pajamas and then fall asleep in the back seat!” I joked.

Knowing that my husband had a bad knee, so walking to the snack bar probably would take him an hour and he’d miss half the movie, I volunteered to go for him.

Once inside the snack bar, I was surprised to see a sign that said all of the food that night was being prepared fresh. So I got brave and ordered a cheeseburger for myself, along with some fries. I told the employee to make sure the burgers were well-done.

As I stood waiting for my food, the building began to fill with smoke. It wasn’t long before my eyes were watering and my throat was burning.

“The exhaust fans aren’t working,” an employee explained to me as she tried to stifle a smoke-induced cough. “Neither is the pizza oven. We’ve had a pizza in there for 15 minutes now and it’s still raw.”

By the time my burgers and fries were ready, I felt as if I needed to be treated for smoke inhalation. When I picked up one of the burgers, which was wrapped in foil, however, it felt more like an ice-cream sandwich than a burger.  Puzzled, I opened the wrapper.  The bun was frozen solid.

“The hamburger buns are frozen!” I said to the employee, just as the manager walked in.

“Did anyone remember to turn on the bun warmer?” he shouted at the employees. They all just shrugged.

“You’ll have to excuse us tonight,” he apologized to me. “It’s our last night and we’re having a few problems. Our handyman, who’s also the projectionist, will hopefully straighten things out when he gets here.”

“He’s not here yet?” I asked, wondering when the movie would be starting. At the rate things were going, I figured it probably wouldn’t be until about 10 PM.

“Let me take care of these burgers for you,” the manager said, grabbing them from me. I watched in horror as he tossed them and the fries into the trash and started cooking new burgers. I’d thought he was just going to shove them into the microwave to heat up the buns, not start over from scratch. I’d already been gone so long, I was afraid my husband might be thinking I’d left him for another man.

“You smell like a smoked ham,” my husband said, wrinkling his nose, when I finally returned to the car. I had been gone over a half-hour by then. “And where have you been? I was getting worried!”

“There was a big problem with the ventilation system in the snack bar,” I said, handing one of the burgers to him and taking the other one for myself. 

“Open your window,” he said. “No offense, but you stink.”

So much for drive-in romance, I thought.

We both bit into our burgers at the same time and both made the same face.

“There’s nothing on mine,” my husband said. “Where’s the ketchup? I’ll need some for the fries, too.”

In my haste to get back to the car, I’d forgotten to put anything on the burgers.

I dashed back to the snack bar to grab a few packets of ketchup. The only problem was, there were no packets  – there was only a bowl of ketchup, with a spoon.

So I ran back to the car, grabbed the burgers and fries and headed back to the snack bar, where I broke all speed records flinging ketchup onto everything that even resembled meat, including my arms. I also dumped a hefty amount into the container of fries. Then I bolted back to the car, just as the movie was starting.

My husband took a bite of his burger and frowned. “Now it’s cold.”

The look I shot at him contained so many daggers, he knew better than to say another word. I’d already run the equivalent of the Boston Marathon that night, so I was in no mood for any complaining.

He ate every crumb.

The movie was “G.I. Jane,” starring Demi Moore. The screen was so dark, I honestly couldn’t tell which actor she was. Then, to make matters even worse, she shaved her head in the movie so she would look more like “one of the guys.”  From that point on, I mistook just about every guy in the cast for her at one time or another.

“I don’t remember drive-in screens being this dark,” I said to my husband.

“Oh, they’ve always been dark,” he said. “It’s just that no one ever really noticed it because they didn’t go to drive-ins to actually watch the movies anyway.”

He had a point. The windows on just about every car around ours already were fogged up. Ours, however, were as dry as the Sahara.

To make my movie viewing even more challenging, the brake lights on the car directly in front of ours suddenly popped on, bathing our car in a red glow. The light in the car’s back window was especially annoying, shining right into our faces. Ten minutes later, the brake lights still were on.

“Great,” I muttered. “Leave it to us to park directly behind some guy who’s too dumb to realize his foot’s on the brake pedal! I’m going to go tell him!”

“No way!” my husband snapped. “He could be some psycho with a gun and he’ll shoot you full of holes for disturbing him! You stay put. I’ll go talk to him.”

“Oh, sure! As if seeing some hulk of a guy peering into his car window will make him feel any less threatened?”

Before my husband could utter another word, I was out of the car and banging on the window of the car in front of ours. Let’s just say that from what I could tell through the fogged-up glass, I was interrupting the guy and his partner at one of the worst possible moments anyone could interrupt someone at a drive-in. My husband’s warning about being shot full of holes instantly popped into my head, and  I wondered if my life-insurance policy was in order.

“Your brake lights have been on for 15 minutes!” I shouted through the glass. Then, without waiting for a response, I dashed back to our car.

To my relief, the brake lights went off.

“There! I took care of it!” I said to my husband.

But my smugness was premature. The brake lights not only came back on, they also adapted an on-and-off pattern, which was even more annoying.

“I think he’s sending me signals in Morse code for disturbing him,” I said. “He’s probably spelling out a bunch of swear words.”

My husband chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t think it’s Morse code, but there’s a definite ‘rhythm’ to the lights going on and off, if you know what I mean.”

I didn’t even want to think about what he meant, but I figured if he was right, the lights probably would be off in another five minutes or so.

They weren’t, and the blinking continued throughout the entire movie.

We didn’t get home until 1:30 in the morning. By then I felt as if I’d just participated in a triathlon.

“So, did you succeed in recapturing your youth tonight?” I asked my husband.

“Yeah,” he said, yawning. “And now I’m perfectly willing to set it free again.”

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

LETTERBOXING MIGHT BE A FUN PANDEMIC ACTIVITY

During this pandemic, I’ve been thinking about fun activities for families that would keep them socially distanced from others, yet provide a different kind of entertainment they might enjoy. One activity that comes to mind is something called letterboxing.

Over the years, I have received many interesting invitations from my readers. One woman invited me to her house for tea and a tuna sandwich.  Another woman invited me to her birthday party.

I accepted many of the invitations and had a great time, so when a long-time reader, Kim, sent me an e-mail and asked if I'd like to go letterboxing with her, I was intrigued.

The problem was, I had no idea what letterboxing was.  Visions of the two of us wearing boxing gloves and swinging at giant cardboard cutouts of the alphabet immediately came to mind (hey, shadow boxing is punching your own shadow on the wall, so my vision wasn’t all that far-fetched!).

Luckily, Kim's e-mail also included a website link for letterboxing so I could read all about it. 

Letterboxing actually turned out to be a form of outdoor exercise, combining walking and searching for buried "treasure."

Letterboxers, the people who engage in letterboxing, hide small, waterproof boxes all over the country. In each of these boxes is a pad of paper, an ink pad and a rubber stamp.  The goal is to find as many of the boxes as you can by following specific clues, which are listed online at www.letterboxing.org.

Letterbox searchers carry an inkpad, rubber stamp, pen and pad of paper with them. When they find a box, they remove the rubber stamp that's inside and use it to stamp their own pad to prove they found it. Then they stamp the pad inside the box with their rubber stamp and date it (they also can add a personal note, if they'd like), so the owner of the box will know they were there. 

So basically what it all boils down to is the searcher takes a rubber-stamp imprint, and then leaves one in return, and puts the box back in the same spot for the next person to find.

Kim, a seasoned letterboxer, told me she wanted to find a series of boxes hidden off Podunk Road in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown.  The clues had grouped the boxes together under the title of "Hungry?"  They sounded like the perfect boxes for me to try to find, seeing that my nose and thunder thighs automatically lead me toward anything that's even remotely associated with food.

So Kim and I met at the state park and set out to find the boxes.

The first thing I learned about letterboxing is that it probably isn't a good hobby for someone who can't tell left from right, has a bad back and is afraid of creepy crawly things like spiders and snakes.

Unfortunately, I fall into all three of those categories.

Kim and I soon discovered that some of the clues not only were a bit vague, they also were really confusing.

For example, the first clue read: "There is an orange snowmobile sign on a tree and a round blue XC on a tree to the right. Salt Lick Trail is across from the snowmobile tree. Facing the sign, take the trail to the right. Look for a pyramid rock on your right. On the back side of the boulder, between a rock and a tree, you will find something to satisfy your sweet tooth!"

The "facing the sign" part of the clue was what confused us.  Which sign was it?  The snowmobile sign, the blue XC sign or the Salt Lick Trail sign? 

To try to solve the problem, Kim and I set off in two different directions to search for the pyramid rock.  I found rocks of all shapes and sizes but none, even in the broadest sense of the imagination, could have been considered pyramid shaped. 

Still, after a while, I became so desperate I started to convince myself that every big rock, even the round ones, resembled pyramids.  I wedged myself behind a couple of them and started to dig for the elusive box.

All I succeeded in doing was getting dirty hands.

As it turned out, Kim and I found the pyramid rock by accident…to the left of the Salt Lick Trail sign.  Immediately, Kim, who was wearing shorts, plunked down on the ground, opened the plastic box and started stamping.

As I stood there watching her, I wondered about two things:  Was it still tick season?  And should I, after seeing Kim's large, artistically crafted rubber stamp, bring out my teeny, pitiful bear one that was so small, it was difficult to tell if the image was of a bear or some guy in desperate need of a full body wax?

I decided to keep the bear in my pocket. 

The pad of paper in the box contained pages of interesting and colorful stamp imprints made by people from all over the country and beyond.  It was fun to look through them, not only to see the variety of images, but also the notes people wrote, such as "I am visiting from Germany and am having a wonderful time...but you may keep your black flies."

Our search for the remaining boxes led us to an old picnic table, four "sister" trees, and a tree shaped like an archer's bow.  The "hungry" theme was evident in each box, as the images on the rubber stamps inside them included cookies, watermelon, a barbecue and even ants (at least I hope the ants in the box were rubber-stamp imprints).

I felt a huge sense of satisfaction after we finally found all of the boxes, even though we did miss the bonus box "past a small X and under a big X beneath some bark."  We peeled enough bark off a dead, fallen tree to build a canoe, but never did find anything (except for several of the aforementioned creepy crawlies).

"That was fun!" I said to Kim as we headed back toward our cars. She said she'd been letterboxing with her family all over the state and they always really enjoyed it.

When I got home, I looked up more letterboxing locations and found them just about everywhere. One, not far from my house, was called "The Safari," and people who'd tried it said they'd had a lot of fun finding a series of seven boxes - each one containing a rubber stamp with an image of a different jungle animal on it. They said their kids especially enjoyed that one.

There even was a "hunt" listed for another location in Bear Brook State Park, on Catamount Trail. I was familiar with that trail - about 150 miles straight uphill (or so it seems).  Years ago, when I was much younger and less fragile, I'd tried to climb it.  After only 10 minutes, I was clasping my chest and praying for a swift and painless death. 

Still, I just might consider downloading the letterbox map for Catamount Trail and exploring it someday. 

I’ll even bring an appropriately themed rubber-stamp with me…one that has an image of a defibrillator on it.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

AM I GETTING TOO OLD FOR A PUPPY?

Many of my friends have said lately, “Once my current dog (or cat) passes away, that’s it. No more pets for me. I’m getting too old for them. Besides that, I’m having trouble taking care of myself, never mind a pet.”

This has made me seriously think about what I will do once my two dogs pass away.  Will I be too old to take care of a new dog? But if I choose never to get another dog, will I be able to stand the loneliness? The silence? The non-furry floors?

To be honest, I’ve been thinking I would like to get a puppy because the last puppy I had was over 20 years ago. After that, I adopted full-grown dogs, so I really miss the “cuteness” stage.  However, I clearly do remember what it was like to raise a puppy, so I’m wondering if I’d be able to handle it now that I’m so much older.

Back in 2000, my husband and I became the proud parents of a rottweiler pup I named “Sabre” (okay, I admit it was a vanity thing - “SA” for Sally and “BRE” for Breslin).  The day we picked her up from her foster home, she was eight weeks old and already weighed 18 pounds.  She had paws the size of small hams, which made me a little uneasy.

 “If she ever grows into those paws,” I told my husband, “we’ll be raising a horse, not a dog.”

CHECK OUT THOSE PAWS!

Sabre sat on my lap during the ride home in the car.   When we were only a few miles from home, she began to whine.

“What’s wrong with her?” my husband asked, immediately panicking. “She’s not getting carsick is she?  I don’t want her to get sick on my nice clean upholstery!”

I shrugged.  “I have no idea why she’s whining.  But we’re almost home, so she should be all right.”  No sooner did the words leave my mouth did I feel a warm, wet puddle spreading across my lap.

The pup stopped whining.

Having raised puppies before, even though it had been nearly 10 years since the previous one, I still remembered what to expect the first night or two - total sleeplessness.   We had a warm, cozy bathroom, so I put Sabre in there with a little fleece bed in one corner and a baby gate across the doorway.

My husband and I had just settled into bed and turned off the light when Sabre began to cry.  This, however, was unlike any crying I had ever heard before.  This puppy sounded just like the screaming woman in the shower scene from “Psycho” (and at about the same volume as a fire-engine siren).

My husband sat upright in bed.  “Oh, my God!”  he said. “The neighbors are going to think I’m murdering you!”

I climbed out of bed and wrapped a small plastic wind-up alarm clock in a towel. “I’ll put this in bed with her.  The ticking will relax her.”

For 30 minutes afterwards, there was blissful silence, then the screaming began again.  With my eyes still half-closed, I got up and walked barefoot into the bathroom…right into a puddle on the floor.  What was left of the alarm clock was sitting in the middle of the puddle.  

I decided to try the radio method, which I had read would calm a puppy.  I turned on the radio, tuned it to a soft-music station, set it on the sink, and then went back to bed.

As it turned out, Sabre hated soft music.  In fact, I discovered (after 20 minutes of trial and error) that the only thing she did like was loud, rock ’n roll music.  She finally fell asleep…as my husband and I remained wide awake all night, forced to endure endless choruses of such soothing lullabies as “Highway to Hell” blasting from the bathroom.

The next morning, I began my tried-and-true method of housebreaking.  This involved taking the pup outside every 20 minutes without fail.  And when she actually DID do something out there, instead of on the carpet, my training method also included making a big deal out of it - jumping up and down, cheering, turning cartwheels and praising her until she felt as if she’d just won the canine equivalent of America’s Got Talent (and the neighbors were ready to have me committed). 

This method had worked like magic with my other dogs, and they had been completely housebroken in only two days.  Whenever I made a big deal over Sabre doing her duty outdoors, however, she looked at me as if she thought I needed a lobotomy.   Not only that, I swear the puppy was a pee factory.   She would stand at her bowl and drink water, and as she was filling one end, she simultaneously would be emptying the other.  It took me three months, and about $500 worth of Nature’s Miracle pet-stain remover, before she was completely housebroken.   The first day she made it through 24 hours without an accident, I was so excited, I nearly hired a marching band and broke out the champagne.

Sabre, however, excelled in other ways.  She never chewed anything other than her dog toys. She preferred to sleep in her dog bed rather than on any furniture, including our bed. And she was an excellent watchdog.

Anyway, not long ago when I mentioned to one of my friends that I thought I’d continue to adopt dogs for as long as humanly possible, she said, “Well, then, make sure you keep them well-fed.”

I gave her a puzzled look because I had no clue what her comment meant. I mean, I’ve always made sure my dogs were given plenty to eat.

She then said to me, “Well, face it, you’re old. You could drop dead in your house at any time and not be found for days. By then, your dogs will be so hungry, they will eat your corpse. There probably won’t even be enough left of you for anyone to bury.”

My first thought was, “What kind of friend says things like that? Thank you for all of my future nightmares!”

My second thought was that maybe I should consider getting a hamster for my next pet.

I’m pretty sure they’re not carnivorous.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.

THERE IS MORE THAN COVID-19 TO WORRY ABOUT IN MY HOUSE!

One thing I didn’t need the other night, during this whole coronavirus madness, was to see a rerun of a TV show that aired a few years ago. It featured a guy who was promoting his book about deadly bacteria and germs hiding in people’s houses. 

As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about.

Funny, but until I saw this “germ pro” on TV, your average run-of-the-mill household germs were not something I spent extended periods of time thinking about. This guy, however, made it sound as if we were at war, and the germs were winning.  I can only imagine what he must be doing now during this pandemic, if germs concerned him so much way back then. He's probably been hermetically sealed in a plastic bubble since March.

The worst place for germs, he said on the TV show, is the bathroom. “Before you flush the toilet, you MUST put the seat’s lid down,” he emphasized. “If you don’t, millions of bacteria will go flying up into the air as far as 20 feet, all over your towels, your sink and toothbrushes!  You wouldn’t believe how many deaths have been caused by bathroom germs alone!”

Heck, I figured I should have been dead years ago. My husband rarely even put the toilet seat down, never mind closed the lid. 

“And carpeting is another breeding ground for germs!” Mr. Doom-and-Gloom continued. “There are dust mites, hairs, dirt, tracked-in animal waste, spoiled food particles and much more, all hiding in the fibers.  And when you vacuum, all you succeed in doing is blowing all of those germs out into the air you breathe indoors.  So if you have carpeting, get rid of it!  Get hardwood or tiled floors. They are so much more sanitary.”

I sat there staring at my living-room rug, where I was certain safaris of millions of hideous, fang-toothed germs were gathering at that very moment, forming an army in preparation for an attack.  Suddenly I didn’t even want to set my feet down on it.

I was just about to change the station and switch to a less frightening show, like a rerun of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, when the germ expert announced that he was going to visit one of the TV show’s producers and test her house for bacteria.  Curiosity forced me to keep watching.

The woman’s house was so sparkling clean when he arrived, I was pretty sure she had hired a squadron of maids in anticipation of his visit. Her kitchen counters were spotless, her floors were so shiny they looked as if an Olympic skater could do a double axel on them, and her stove was so clean, I figured she’d probably ordered take-out food for every meal for the past 20 years.

The germ expert immediately set to work rubbing cotton swabs over every surface, nook and cranny in the kitchen.  He paused to glare at a sponge on the back of the woman’s kitchen sink.

“It’s damp,” he said, his tone accusing as he touched it with only the very tip of one finger and then backed away in horror. “Germs LOVE damp things!  Dry sponges don’t attract bacteria. Wet sponges do!”

As I sat there wondering if I should leap up and go blow-dry my sponges, he rammed a cotton swab into the sponge. “Just wait until you see how much bacteria is living in this sponge!” With each word, his voice began to sound more and more like an evil cackle.

He then made his way into the bathroom.  The toilet seat gleamed so brightly, it looked as if you’d need a seat belt to keep yourself from sliding off it. 

“Sure, it LOOKS clean,” the man said to the poor woman, “but just watch how many germs I collect on this swab!” He almost gleefully ran the swab over the toilet seat.   His eyes then caught sight of the soap dish on the bathroom sink and his swabbing abruptly stopped.

“BAR soap?!” he exclaimed with a look of such undisguised revulsion, you’d think he’d just discovered a clump of dog poop sitting on the sink. “Bar soap is one of the worst carriers of germs!  You MUST switch to soap in pump bottles!”        

Needless to say, the woman’s test results from the swabs proved that her spotlessly clean house was carrying more germs than Typhoid Mary.  I suspected that maybe the guy had tampered with the tests just to psych people into buying his book, but still, the test results terrified me. I mean, if Mrs. Clean really had failed her test, then I, whose two huge dogs have made it their mission to make certain my house hasn’t been spotlessly clean since the first day I moved into it, am doomed to be wearing a toe tag at any minute.

The germ guy’s sadism became even more apparent when he went on to discuss supermarket shopping-carts.

“Think of all the germ-covered hands that touch the handles on those carts,” he said. “These shoppers are picking up packages of meat and poultry loaded with salmonella, getting blood and bacteria on their hands and then grasping the handles on the shopping carts. And the seats in the carts are even worse! Toddlers with leaky diapers sit on them, and then unsuspecting women set their purses on the seats and end up turning those purses into germ-infested potential lethal weapons.”

That did it.  I changed the station. Up until that moment, I had felt safe in my house, my sanctuary from the coronavirus.

Now I’m thinking I might be safer if I pitch a tent out in my yard and live in that instead…and then erect an outhouse next to it, so I won't have to worry about flushing.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.