the wrong way to use caffeine to wake you up in the morning

oh you guys, i have such a backlog of things i need to blog about that i hardly feel like i can blog about ANY of them since it seems unlikely i'll be able to blog about ALL of them any time soon. it's this kind of stupid logic that keeps me from ever having a clean house, by the way. i don't have enough time to clean EVERYTHING, so it's useless to START! right? makes perfect sense. also: i apologize in advance for the state of my house, should you ever come over.

anyway! since i'm (still) slammed at work and in the middle of a 6 straight weekends in a row where i'm away in trips, i'll stick to blogging about the one of the things i do best: injuring myself in strange and difficult new ways.

i, um, ended up in urgent care because i spilled starbucks on my back.

let's just ponder that for a moment, shall we? urgent care. starbucks. my BACK. i have honest-t0-god BLISTERS over my left shoulder blade. we'll start with what is, by far, the most common question i've received over the past few days: how in the HELL did i manage to pour scaldingly hot chai ALL OVER MY OWN BACK? allow me to paint a picture for you:

last wednesday. my morning commute. we're in the middle of a massive rainstorm which has flooded out several roads in the area, causing me to have to turn around and backtrack halfway to work. i call my boss, gertrude, to let her know i'm now going to be late. and to gripe, because that's what i do. i grumble that i really need some caffeine already, despite not having even made it to work yet. she counters that if i stop at starbucks and get HER a chai, i'm totally allowed to be even later.

20 minutes later, i posted this:

soooo. imagine me leaving starbucks with 2 grande skim chais, a large purse, and an open umbrella to protect against the downpour. i've got the chais stacked on top of each other so i can hold the umbrella in my other hand. once i get to my car, i very carefully put both chais down on the roof, unlock my car, and then get in with one chai. with the first one safely deposited in the cup holder, i'm feeling very pleased with myself for not spilling anything, and i reach up over my head to grab the second chai from the roof - with the umbrella still held over the open door in my other hand.

it was at this point that i apparently hit the chai with the corner of the umbrella before i got to it with my hand, because the next thing i knew, i had SCALDING HOT LIQUID cascading down the back of my neck. it was a sort of surprising sensation, given the circumstances - since i didn't realize i'd knocked over the chai - so my natural inclination was to duck. which did absolutely nothing except allow the chai to pour all over my back as well as my neck.

at this point, the whole "scalding" thing kicked in, which resulted in me hopping out of my car and dancing around next to the open door yelling "OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW!" over and over again, while sort of flapping my arms around ineffectively.

there were several people sitting in front of starbucks at the little sidewalk tables, mind you, watching this entire event unfold. because the only thing that could make something THIS RIDICULOUS even better is an audience.

one dude came up to me as i was finishing up my flappy-dance, and asked if i was ok.

"umm. yeah. i guess? i mean.. i suppose so. man, that really hurt."
"yeeeeeah. it looked like it did."

so now i was standing next to my car, in the rain, and soaked from head to knees in chai. and the skin on my back was reeeally starting to burn. i called gertrude and told her i was going to be even later. and that she wasn't getting a chai.

i had to stop at target before continuing in to work, due to the fact that my sweater was literally dripping with a sticky tea-milk combo, and my pants were stuck to my left leg. i bought an entire new outfit, finally got to work, and pulled gertrude into the bathroom to rub some sunburn-type cream on my back. i tugged off my shirt, exposing the scald-mark that ran from just beneath my right ear, across my back, to under my left arm. gertrude sent me to the doctor. where i had to fill out my triage slip with "BURNED BACK WITH STARBUCKS."

so! i'm pretty much fine, all things considered - the scald mark went away except for a weirdly-shaped patch on the left side of my upper back, which has a few blisters and a freaking TAN LINE from my bra strap down the middle of it. A TAN LINE. FROM TEA.

i feel fairly confident that i'm one of very few people who spent a good deal of their weekend in vegas explaining to concerned people at the pool that i hadn't "missed a spot" when putting sunscreen on my back.