The legal affairs department here at MarnCo--the ruthless multinational behind The Big Adventure--wants to stress again to the three loyal readers of The Big Adventure that said Big Adventure should always be treated as a cautionary tale.

In other words:

OMIGAWD, DON'T EVER DO ANY OF THIS AT HOME.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Last night I faced the challenge of gooping and then taping my eye shut for the night. The spousal unit said not to apply surgical tape directly to the eyelid because not only is it tender, but I could also end up ripping off half my eyelashes when I removed the tape.

Good points.

So I made a small rectangle of bandage gauze to hold the eye shut and then I put a piece of tape over that. I was feeling pretty darned competent.

I got a bunch of the expected pirate jokes from the spousal unit when I crawled into bed complete with my improvised eye patch. He surveyed my tape placement and expressed concern that the tape ran over the right side of my right eyebrow.

"Aren't you going to pull our your eyebrows when you take off the tape?"

I grandly pooh poohed his concern, explaining that it takes tweezers to pull out eyebrows, mere tape couldn't do it. Besides, I would peel the tape off slowly. No way I would affect my eyebrow.

Those last seven words? They should be filed in that large folder marked "Famous Last Words".

I stumbled out of bed this morning and couldn't wait to get that gauze-tape thing off my eye. I began to ease the tape off, but as we all know slowly peeling off surgical tape hurts like nobody's business. The faster it comes off, the briefer the pain.

So I yanked it off. And when I looked down at the tape I saw, to my horror, a clump of my eyebrow hairs firmly embedded in it.

Because, you know, it's not enough to go out in public with a slightly contorted mouth and one eye that definitely appears to be shooting the world The Evil Eye. Oh, no, why stop there When You Can Also Disfigure One Of Your Eyebrows?

I really did not want to look in the mirror.

The good news is that I did not give myself one of those Vulcan style eyebrows made famous by Mr. Spock. But I did end up pulling out about 1/3 of the right brow's hair. Fortunately most of the damage happened under the arch. I briefly debated the merits of tweezing the other brow to match but decided that was madness and it was better to just wait for the goofy eyebrow to grow back in.

Which it will do. I'm sure it will. Eventually.

Some days, I am my own worst enemy.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 252.73 miles.
Oh man. This is going to be hard
Goal for 2004: 1,000 miles - 1609 kilometers