En-Countered

The other night I came walking down the hallway at Chez Bang Bang, flipped on the light into the kitchen and nearly jumped on up outta my skin at the sight of an unidentifiable black scary thing on my counter.

Now, it was not one of my seven three cats. First, only two of my three cats are black, and since they look alike, I group them together and count them as one item.

I do that same counting method to assess* if I qualify for the 10-items-or-less line at the grocery, too. Forty-eight cans of cat food?? ONE ITEM, PEOPLE.

*I just realized that if you leave one “s” off the end of “assess” you get asses, which is basically fitting in how I’m an asses in the 10-items line. 

It’s Al Gore’s New Math.  I’m not even sure if Al Gore is responsible for that common core situation, but since he single-handedly invented the internet, I feel safe in blaming him.  So if you’re upset with being behind me in the store, Reader, well, take it up with Al. I don’t make the rules. Well, maybe I actually do. But that is neither here nor there, nor relevant to this story. Back to the black scary thing on my counter.

I approached with utmost caution. If my time in Florida taught me anything, it’s that I’ve learned that all sorts of the things from nightmares can be just living in your house with you.

I grabbed a utensil from the counter to poke it as I approached.

And poked it’s fleshy body.

Where I discovered that the Creature of Fright was actually a black olive slice that must have fallen off of the pizza we had cooked earlier that evening.

Now, in my defense of the scary black olive, it was a little on the smooshed side and didn’t have a true olive appearance at this point in the game.

But yes. That is when I realized that maybe I’ve gotten a little jumpy from my time living in Florida, also known as one of nature’s horror stories. I say one of, because Australia. And probably Africa. And certainly the Amazon jungle. Mostly everything south and hot. And east and west and hot.