Thursday I mentioned that I burned my arm doing a photoshoot.
It was pretty alarming, though thankfully not ‘disarming’. Ha.
Here’s a photo of my injury, proving that I’m Hubris in real life.
How does it prove that I’m Hubris-like? Well, there were also two children and a grown woman who were engaged in the selfsame activity, and they sure didn’t get hurt. In fact, until this happened, we were pretty amazed at how safe the operation seemed to be.
You put a bit of steel wool in a wire whisk. You put the whisk on the end of a foot or two of rope. Hold a flame to the steel wool, and it starts to smolder. Whirl the whole mess around at arms length in front of you.
If you do this in the dark, with a camera trained on you, you get a neat effect. If you stand just to one side of the camera’s view, you get a neater effect: glowing rain. The tiny bits of smoldering steel fly out of the whisk and if you’re using long exposure times on the camera, you get a neat shower of sparks. With a little practice, you can even direct the height of the fall and the general direction.
And without much practice at all, a whole chunk of molten steel can somehow get out of the stupid whisk and land smack on your arm. Your first instinct will be to brush it off with your other hand. Bad instinct, bad! The resulting blisters on your other hand will hurt a LOT worse than the ruination on your arm… mostly because those nerve endings in your arm have seen their OWN end. Them li’l suckers are cauterized, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore.
What you DO have to do is get some of those soothing gel pads from your local pharmacy and stick one to your arm, and some high-grade aloe product for your hand. The hand will be fine in a day or two, though you might suspect there’s a tiny piece of charred steel where there had been a couple of blisters. Cool. The arm, on the other hand… oh, the arm. Still no pain, so you start showing it off, leaving the bandage off after a couple of days, and letting a big ol’ scab form. Except that if you’re not careful enough, that scab gets awfully wet in the shower and sloughs off, and then you’re back to square one with the gel pads and the bandages. Putting the bandages back on is good. Because as your friend, who tore his face off in a mountain bike wreck, will tell you, you don’t want open sunshine on your wound, ’cause the scars turn an unmistakeable red and everyone says, “OOoogh. Nasty scar, there.” On the arm, that might be okay, but he wanted his face to heal up proper and so he didn’t go outside for, like, two months or something.
I was told all this after spending a couple of hours at the skatepark thinking a little sun would do my wound good, since it was fresh out of the gel pad and I didn’t like it looking all wet and gooey.
And before you ask- no, the fire didn’t burn all the hair away from the wound. I hadda shave my wooly arm to keep the bandages from sticking to the hairs and making removal some kind of wax-job joke.
Y’all be careful out there. But if you’re not, send photos.
Some of you guys have very kindly asked me to put up some photos of the New Orleans trip. I oblige.
From the New Orleans Zoo. I’m always on the lookout for interesting helmets. How did the Aztecs skate in these things? Or maybe this is Buddha. Did Buddha skate?
Even if you don’t have small children, if there seem to be more than enough strollers at the rental booth, get one. Much better than carrying the camera, the camera bag with another camera and more lenses in it, tripod, souvenirs, umbrella, maps, sunscreen etc. on your person.
The first of two wedding parades we saw on Bourbon street.
One of the test shots that would eventually lead to the photo shoot that involved my arm injury.
There you go for now. I’ll post more things later. New Orleans is a fine, fine town, and this trip was the first for me to take my kids along. There was much more spending-time-in-places-with-expensive-tickets than my wife and I usually do. The WWII museum is, however, great and well worth the expense. Go if you have the chance. Probably never would have made the time if the kids hadn’t wanted to go, and that would have been a shame. And they don’t allow photos there, so you won’t see any photos here.
I’ve said in the past that I would try not to degenerate into crotch-area humor. But this is a product review, not a cartoon.
The subject of The Camp Shuffle comes up on long outdoors trips. Going down the Grand Canyon for a couple of weeks, say. Or taking your kids to Scout Camp. They warn the kids and warn them good, but you know somebody in the group will neglect to take proper showers or change his underwear or not take the proper precautions in the sweaty days of Summer camp.
I feel bad for them. Because I’ve gotten the Camp Shuffle. I’ve staggered along like the crippled sidekick in an old Western, wishing I could quit the hike, go back to camp and let my tenders heal. It happened this past June. I was miserable. I could have been MORE miserable, but another scout leader told a funny story about a buddy of his that got the Camp Shuffle. The guy had gotten some powder, figuring that would fix it all up. But, the story went, he bought MENTHOLATED powder. Everyone laughed, and I felt better. My drawers were uncomfortable in the extreme, but at least I hadn’t dropped menthol down in ’em. Ha. Hilarious.
This gave me a good idea, though. While the scouts were being taught or tested or whatever the heck during their Camp class, I’d step over to the trading post and see if they had anything for Camp Shuffle. I figured that if it was standard practice to lecture the kids about it during our first few moments at camp, surely the trading post would keep powder or something on hand. And they DID. They had two different kinds of Gold Bond powder. Regular, of which they had a dozen containers, and Extra Strength, of which they had two containers.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d heard the story about the idiot who dropped Menthol down his pants, so I looked over both bottles carefully. ‘Extra Strength’, the one bottle said. ‘Healing’, it said. ‘Triple Action Relief’ it said. ‘Cooling, Absorbing, Itch Relieving’ so far so good, and I’d exhausted the front of the bottle. No mention of ‘Mentholated’. The directions on the back say, ‘Apply freely up to 3 or 4 times a day’. It also says, under ‘Uses’: temporarily relieves the pain and itch associated with: minor cuts, sunburn, insect bites, scrapes, prickly heat (!) minor burns, rashes (also “!”) and minor skin irritations. The ‘Warnings’ say it’s for external use only (good. I had no plans to eat it.) and to keep it out of my eyes. (also, no problems. I’ve never powdered my eyes and couldn’t see a reason to start.) There was some ‘ingredients’ list at the bottom. It didn’t mention ‘menthol’, though it did say ‘methyl salicylate’, which worried me since I had no earthly idea what the heck it might be or if I wanted it on my tenders. But I figured that there were only a few ‘Extra Strength’ bottles left because that was the kind everyone bought. And I bought the Extra Strength.
Then I went to the car. It was very close and mostly, no one goes to the parking lot during the day, so the lot was empty. I opened both doors on one side, stepped between them, and discreetly medicated my nether regions.
Which is to say I set my own crotch on fire.
Fire. fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire!
While I am trying to hold still and wondering if I should, maybe, run around or call for help or die or something, my son comes up from the trading post. He said… something that didn’t have to do with testicle fires, so I don’t recall what it might have been.
Nerve endings, says my wife who was a burn nurse for many years, die. They burn up and the victims of fires no longer feel the pain- not until they begin to heal, that is. I decided, while standing there sweating, panting, gasping and trying to answer my son (I thought, I’ll tell him I’m okay. Everything’s okay and I love him very much. Those would be good last words.) that I would just wait until there was enough nerve damage that I could get on with the day.
Finally, things changed. The fire didn’t go out, you understand, it just started oscillations between nuclear fire and nuclear winter.
fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice fire ice
I had never thought that I’d be happy to have my gonads light up and freeze over and over again, but I assumed that any change in blinding furious pain was a good thing. Maybe someday I could live like normal people again, and this was the beginning of it.
•••••
Okay, that was about as funny as this story gets. Eventually, the pain turned into a confused discomfort that I was able to see through and deal with. It was probably only a couple of minutes that I had flop sweat, agonizing fire and ice and a sincere concern that I had crippled myself to the point of needing hospitalization. It seemed like longer, but you know how that is.
I finished the day and got back to our campsite. Another Den Leader with us had Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Powder. I used it that night and the next day, and didn’t have another minute’s discomfort.
So here’s the conclusion: If you have Camp Shuffle DO NOT put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. Even if you DO NOT have Camp Shuffle, do not put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in your shorts. If you have a bitter, bitter enemy for whom you have nothing but a seething hell-born hate, and you find that you have an opportunity to put Gold Bond Extra Strength powder in his shorts, DO NOT do it. It’s and evil thing to do, and you’re not that evil. No one is that evil.
You have some poison ivy rash on your arm or leg? It’s itching like crazy? Use Gold Bond Extra Strength powder. Use it. It’s fine. It feels good. It even smells kinda nice. Need something on your pits before you go out on a long hike? Go for the powder. Back of your neck a little sunburnt? Use it according to instructions. It’s good stuff.
But DO NOT put it on your genitals. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Last thing- I must have been in a desperate hurry to get relief. The label on the back of the bottle? Yeah, at the bottom there’s those ingredients listed? They’re ‘Inactive’ ingredients. Up at the top, Right under ‘Drug Facts’? THERE’s the ‘Active Ingredients’ and the first thing listed is ‘Menthol’ 0.8%. You might want reading glasses to see it, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there, my friends. On the label and in the bottle. It’s THERE.
On an only semi-related note… in this video they are using the non-mentholated Gold Bond:
By the way, THIS is the stuff I’m using next trip. Mostly cause ‘MonkeyButt’ is just too funny not to have on some kind of packaging around here. Click on the bottle if you’d like to buy some too:
Get new VR Troopers fire-starting lumps- with extra UGLY!
Seriously. This isn’t a product review as much as product instructions.
You like campfires? Me, too. Do you like nice, roasty toasty campfires when you’re expected to be the boy scout that starts ’em? Everyone looking over your shoulder and asking if you know what you’re doing, and offering advice “Blow on it!” “No, fan it softly!” “Pile the sticks like a TeePee!” “No, like a log cabin!” Not so much, right?
Okay. You have a dryer? If you do, then you have dryer lint. You know what dryer lint is good for? Burning down your house. Google it. Lots of stories about houses burning down involving dryer lint.
Know what happens when you try to use dryer lint as your tinder? (Just to backtrack- when you’re building a fire, you start with Tinder- the tiny stuff that burns easily) The lint will burn too fast and won’t have time to get the kindling going (the kindling is the larger, yet still smallish, slightly harder to burn twigs and junk. You know that.) So, bottom line, you can burn down a whole house with some dryer lint, but starting a fire on purpose is tricky. Damn it, isn’t that just the way?
So what to do with the tons of dryer lint that your dryer supplies you with? What’ll make it GOOD dryer lint? I’ll tell you what. Paraffin. Yep. Wax. You know why candle wicks (string, for heaven’s sake) don’t burn away and leave a little wax tube? ‘Cause the wax won’t let it.
So you go to the hobby store. You get some blocks of paraffin. You get a couple of pans you will never want for anything ever again. And, depending on the instructions that come with the blocks of paraffin, you melt that stuff.
I used a sort of idiot’s version of a double boiler, melted my paraffin, and started tearing up my dryer lint (saved for months and months, so I had PLENTY) and chucking it right into that hot paraffin. I mixed it around til it started getting sluggish, then carefully started burning my fingers by pulling out bits and shaping it into slugs or briquettes, or lumps or lozenges or whatever you’d like to call them.
And when you’re starting a fire, you no longer have to look for tinder, just for kindling and fuel (fuel is the log you’ll eventually stare at for hours). You still need a lighter, but you won’t have to singe your fingers holding the lighter to damp leaves and pine needles and other rotten tinder that’s not worth singed fingers. You light a lump and set your kindling on top while it merrily sizzles along.
Because my lumps were going into some sandwich baggies inexplicably printed with ‘Saban’s VR Troopers’, my fire lumps became ‘new VR Troopers fire-starting lumps- with extra UGLY!’
They are ugly, too. But most of them (some don’t have quite the amount of dryer lint/dog hair you’d like to have for fire building) catch fire quickly and burn a good long while. Plenty long enough for you to figure out what you’re doing wrong and fix it before the lazy eyes of your fire-greedy co-campers.
Try it. Make you some ugly fire-lumps and keep them in the bottom of your pack for that damp day when you’ll be very, very glad to have them.
Oh, and if the title here or the dryer lint/dog hair comment earlier wasn’t a tip off, these things are not the most aromatic things in the world when aflame. Not that I’m advocating scented paraffin, either, mountain man.
My brother was a park ranger. Used to tell stories of what the raccoons at a North Carolina park got up to. My prediction is that when they discover fire, they’re gonna burn us out and take our kitchens.
