Hope everyone had a great weekend. Cousin Fred was visiting the compound from Western Arkansas again, and as always, brought along his latest entrepreneurial offering to try out on me…literally.
Cousin Fred since his last visit has become steeped in the possibilities of solar power on, as he puts it, the micro-level. His latest offering is a military boonie hat with a two small solar panels on top of the hat. The solar panels are arranged so as to resemble a pitched roof atop the crown of the hat. According to Cousin Fred the idea there is that it will keep the rain off of you, which as he pointed out has been a nearly daily occurrence here in Northwest Oklahoma lately. Dangling from and encircling the brim of the hat were several thin pieces of wire with tiny fish hooks attached to the ends. Now, friends, if you’re like me (and hopefully you aren’t), you’re asking yourself, “Huh? Now what do you suppose that’s all about?” Be careful what you ask for… So, like the idiot I am, I asked the question (after, as I recall one too many glasses of red wine). Sure, I could have left well enough alone and spent the rest of my life telling people about Cousin Fred’s boonie hat with the solar array and tiny fish hooks. People would have asked, “Well, what was it for?” To which I would have responded, “Who knows?” And that would have been that…an opened-ended endless joke without a punchline. But noooooo…I had to find out the rest of the story. Sigh. Okay, so Cousin Fred’s boonie hat is designed (as it turns out) to repel mosquitoes. As he’s telling me this I was swatting at one of the corpulent atavistic blood suckers that had landed on my arm. Guess it’s the downside of all the rain we’ve been getting. Every puddle becomes the Hotel de Amor for these savage insects. That’s when I had kind of a flashback. I’ve seen hats set up like that (but, without the solar array) in a couple of places around the world. You find them in Australia where the ends of the strings hanging around the edge of brim are fixed with corks to keep the biting flies away. The other place, I think, was India where they used beads instead of corks…or maybe that was Djibouti…all of those years and locations kind of run together. But, I digress… I asked him if he expected the mosquitoes to impale themselves on the tiny fish hooks. Cousin Fred chuckled. No, he told me, the idea is to put bits of raw meat on the fish hooks which are charged with an electrical current powered by the solar array. Huh? He went on to say that the raw meat attracts the mosquitoes and are zapped as they land on the “baited” – and electrified - fish hooks. I pointed out to him that it’s possible to buy boonie hats with mosquito nets already attached. When the mosquitoes become a problem, you simply drop the net over your head and neck and that pretty much takes care of it. Cousin Fred, ever the family huckster, chuckled again and asked me if I was going to deal with mosquitoes the old school way with netting and/or by spraying vile chemicals all over my body? Wouldn’t I rather step up to his high tech method? With that, he moved the hat out into the yard so as to allow it to “catch a few rays.” He indicated that he would demonstrate the hat’s utility once the solar panels built up a charge. I could barely contain my enthusiasm. Sigh. After several more glasses of wine and a meal of my special version of Korean BBQ chicken (Cousin Fred’s favorite) and an hour long, albeit informative, lecture from him on the advancements of micro solar arrays over the past six months, I realized that sunset was upon us. I think Cousin Fred realized it at the same time. He leaped from his seat at the table and ran outside urging me to follow him. He asked the wife to grab the little baggie of raw meat that he had placed in the fridge. There on the porch of the compound he began slipping bits of raw beef liver onto the hooks. Once every hook was baited, he beckoned me over. Me? I asked the wife if she wanted to try, but she assured me there was no f#@^ing way she was putting that on her head. Sigh. Very carefully, he placed the hat on top of my head. He made certain it settled into place. I could feel the solar panels against the top of my skull thinking, “Judas priest, this is like taping a bunch of cell phones all over my scalp!” I was just about to beg out of the demonstration, when Cousin Fred announced we were set. Maybe he was…I know the wife was already laughing. She mentioned that she didn’t recall a time when I looked so much like a tool as I did at that moment. Do you suppose Chuck Yeager got that kind of support from his wife? Once the hat was firmly settled, Cousin Fred announced, “We’re ready. Switching on.” With that, I heard a click as he flipped a switch somewhere at the back of the hat (sooo convenient a location if you’re doing this alone). Suddenly there was a low-frequency hum that seemed to permeate my skull. I swear I could actually feel my brain vibrating. Cousin Fred told me to start walking around so we could see it work. I began moving slowly, noting that the wife was on the porch swatting at mosquitoes on her arms. Even Cousin Fred was squatting at bugs on his face. Me? I was just walking along, mesmerized by the smelly bits of raw liver swaying to-and-fro in my vision. I found myself focusing on the hooks rather than anything in front of me, which is when things began to go wrong. I tripped over the anchor wire of my Acme Everkill mole/gopher trap (pesky bastards are worse than the jackrabbits here at the compound). I didn’t fall, but the stuttered step caused the dangling wires of the boonie to begin swinging into one another. This caused the current running through each to begin arcing as they connected. The eerie blue light of the arcing was completely disorienting. I began staggering around, spinning and weaving like a drunken sailor on vampire liberty (Navy talk). It was about then that I began to pick up the sound of sizzling meat and the smell of cooking liver. Egad! The damned contraption was cooking the bait! There was a loud bang as the solar array atop my skull apparently shorted out. Bright sparks were now raining down over me. Cousin Fred was screaming, “Drop and roll. Drop and roll.” That was my first clue that my skull was on fire. As I made the move to drop to the ground, my body lurched forward slightly and my foot became ensnared in the gopher/mole trap. I reached up to pull the boonie hat from my head and received a mild shock and burnt fingers for my trouble. The wife seeing the initial explosion of the solar array grabbed the fire extinguisher that we keep on the porch of the compound for just such a mishap and emptied its contents all over me. As I lay on the ground with curls of smoke all around, the wife began trying to pry the mole/gopher trap from my foot. I peered through the haze and asked Cousin Fred if by chance he had tested his boonie hat before trying it out on me. He smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Nope.” Sigh. Comments are closed.
|
Archives
March 2019
Categories |