This has been a long, long week. Insanely long. Eric is in Wisconsin, where he's been on business since Tuesday. Sam, a handful on his best days, has been missing his daddy more and more with each passing hour; at night, he refuses to acknowledge bedtime without Eric's presence in the bed next to us. He fights off sleep until he collapses out of sheer exhaustion, sometimes in mid-crawl. Then he tosses and turns all night, searching for Daddy in his sleep.

I need to clean the house, but Sam doesn't want to let me out of his grasp. I suppose that's a remnant of having one parent missing for so long. Yesterday I needed to have my haircut, and my friend Betsy, who lives around the corner from the salon, kept Sam for me. He didn't cry, she said, but he got very somber and quiet when he realized I was gone. He snuggled into Betsy's lap and gazed out the window or solemnly watched Betsy's daughter's antics until I arrived with my shorn locks. Seeing me, he was happy once more and only needed a few moments of nursing before he was crawling off to play.

But now he's on my lap, nursing, and showing no signs of allowing me to mop or vacuum or straighten. And it's not as though I even want to clean. So I'll procrastinate, as Sam wishes. Hey, maybe he'll take a long nap later today, and I'll clean then.

Have I ever told the story of my first trip to the emergency room? I was a junior in high school, never having broken a bone in my relatively "safe" childhood. This is a long story, so you might want to get something to drink first.

Where was I? Ah, yes. I was sixteen years old, and I was taking my second year of chemistry in high school. I thought that if I could manage to do well enough in the class and on the Advanced Placement exam, I could opt out of science altogether in college and be forever and completely done with a subject that I hated intensely. What I neglected to realize was that my difficulties in science wouldn't simply disappear with determination. I studied my butt off and was still lost, lost, lost. It was only through Amy's help that I didn't fail altogether.

Chemistry was a two-hour course, beginning with "Zero period," an hour before school opened. We shared the classroom and the teacher with second-year physics during that time; we both used the first hour to do lab work and self-directed study. I usually sat staring at my mammoth textbook, watching the words swim incomprehensibly about the page.

"'Make a six molar solution...' Amy, what's a 'mole'?" That was the question of the course for me. I was never able to satisfactorily figure out how to make solutions of a specific molarity. I'd end up taking stealth peeks at my neighbor's measurements and then trying to approximate them by sight. It was a situation that promised disaster.

One fine spring morning, we were beginning work on our final experiment of the year. The preparation for the lab involved making a sodium hydroxide solution. (I'll never forget the name of that chemical.) My lab partners, Amy and Tanya, and I were alone in the lab, across the hallway from the classroom. Technically speaking, this was against classroom policy; when doing lab work, a teacher was supposed to be present. With one teacher and two classes, though, it was a much-broken rule.

I stood in front of a bottle of sodium hydroxide pellets and a boiling beaker of water. I turned off the Bunsen burner to allow the water to cool. Now, how many pellets did I need for a one molar solution? I had no idea. I randomly entered the numbers from my notes into my calculator. Ten sounded good, I thought.

"When the water has cooled, add the sodium hydroxide to the water and let dissolve." I eyed the beaker, then the clock. Amy and Tanya were already well ahead of me, having assembled their burners much more adeptly. I was running late, and the bell would ring soon. I touched the glass beaker with my finger, then with the palm of my hand. It was warm, but not hot. Cool enough, I decided. After all, the instructions didn't say very cool.

(I suppose that this is a good time to mention that none of us were wearing safety goggles of lab aprons. After all, all we were doing was boiling water and dissolving little white pellets. It was supposed to be a simple, easy, harmless procedure. What could possibly go wrong?)

Lifting the beaker, I plopped my pellets into the water and set the glass down next to my partners' solutions. While their beakers contained quietly melting lumps, however, my own was suddenly more...active. The pellets began to fizz excitedly. It wasn't unusual for my experiments to have vastly different results that those of my classmates; on one occasion, when everybody else managed to produce green crystals, I made raspberry slush. Still, I hated the thought that I'd managed to mess up so early in this experiment.

"What should I do?" I asked Amy, the resident expert in such matters. Amy critically stared at my beaker, then uttered the phrase that would soon make the morning much more interesting.

"Shake it."

I obeyed, popping a rubber cork into the mouth of the beaker and giving a few experimental shakes. Suddenly and without warning, the cork exploded out of the bottle and hit me in the forehead. It was followed by a stream of hot liquid which sprayed into my face.

At first I was too startled to scream. Amy and Tanya only saw the cork hit me, and so they burst into laughter. That stopped when I howled a moment later. The liquid had filled my left eye, burning and stinging. I dropped the glass and stumbled into the counter. Tanya ran for the teacher; Amy grabbed me and dragged me to the eyewash.

I was in agony. After a few minutes of washing, we recalled that I was wearing my contact lenses. Tanya helped me remove them, and I continued to lean over the eyewash until an ambulance arrived. The teacher was in tears; not only had she broken the rules by allowing us to work unsupervised, but the jars of chemicals had been undated, putting her in danger if anyone should decide to investigate.

In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, the rescue workers continued to wash my eye. On guy asked me what I'd been doing. When I told him, he laughed and said that he'd done that exact experiment in high school. According to him, though, I should only have used two pellets. I told him I'd take that under advisement for the next time. Wise guy.

In the meantime, the school secretary was calling my mother. The teacher, for some reason, told the secretary that my mom was "excitable." Thus, the conversation went like this:

"Mrs. A.? This is the secretary from Carrie's school. I have some news; are you sitting down?"
"No, what is it?"
"I think you should sit down first..."

In the ER, I was feeling fine. My eye was much less painful, and they had me attached to yet another eyewash apparatus, shaped like an oversized contact lens that slipped over my eye and kept a constant drip. I glanced at the solution being used: sulfuric acid. It made sense, since they needed to neutralize the hyper-strong base solution that I'd created, but it still made me chuckle. I tried to make jokes to the doctors who walked past, but nobody seemed inclined to smile.

Mom arrived, looking distraught. I calmed her down ("Ever have one of those days, Mom?") and we waited for a doctor to examine me. Finally, one arrived. He gave me some eye drops that turned the whole world red, stared into my pupils, and announced that my contacts had probably saved my vision. Then he gave me a patch to wear over the eye for two weeks and sent me back to school.

And that's how I got the nickname "Redbeard."

By the way, this is very nice. Go vote, even if you don't vote for me. Lots of good reading!