Don't eat the casserole

   Don't eat the casserole

You are probably asking yourself, “Where has he been?  Why has it been so long between Intrepid Traveler reports?”.   Well, thank you for your concern. If you were not concerned, I think you should be ashamed of yourself.  If you really were concerned, I think you need to get a hobby.

Here is the short answer to why no new reports from the edge of normal:   I have not been out of the USA since my China trip, and I have been too busy doing very uninteresting things, so there was nothing to write about.  But the worst thing that kept any new Intrepid Traveler reports from hitting the “E-Waves” was the fact that I had my laptop stolen from my vehicle.  The laptop that had all my past stories in it . The laptop that has accompanied me to most of the 30+ nations that I have been to.  I had thousands of photos on that hard drive and hundreds of irreplaceable files on it.  I also had a brand new, excellently written, fabulously witty story on it that I was ready to publish.  That story was about the odd foods that I have eaten or been offered during my years of travel overseas.  The title of the piece was “Bad food for thought”.    But it is lost forever since I did not have it saved in any other location.   Oh well.  I hope the thieves enjoyed reading it.

Speaking of food…..

I was watching professional football this evening when hunger forced me to stop and find food.  Since I am a man and am at the top of the evolutionary food chain, I knew that I had the skills and intelligence to hunt and gather food from the refrigerator.  Using my well-honed survival instincts I found some leftover ham from last week  and some green bean casserole.  The casserole was in a Tupperware container, and, being a man, as mentioned before, I will eat pretty much anything that is found in Tupperware, regardless of how old it is. 

I scooped up a large portion of the green bean casserole to accompany my ham, heated it up and scarfed it down.  I resumed watching football.

An hour or so later, I started to feel very bloated, like I had eaten way more than I should have.  I felt extremely lethargic, my joints began to hurt and I was achy.  But since I pretty much feel like this all the time, I really didn’t think much of it.  I decided to go to bed early since I had a busy work week ahead of me.  I layed in bed and tried to read a book, but could not concentrate on it.   I finally decided that there really was something wrong with my stomach.  The longer I lay there the more I could feel my guts knot up.  I could feel it begin to bubble.  This was not good.

I got out of bed, and called to my wife that I was sick and warned her not to eat the casserole.  (I am always in a protective mode for the fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler) I told her I was going to throw up.  She said she thought I said I was going to go out.  I walked in to the bathroom and calmly puked in the toilet.  Several times.  If any of you have ever drunk too much alcohol and gotten commode hugging drunk, as they say, you will appreciate the difference between vomiting when you are sober and when you are drunk.  Since I was sober, I found it much easier to coordinate the opening of my mouth at the proper moment for the vomit to spew out of it.  When drunk, (So I have been told) it is not always easy to coordinate the mouth in time, forcing some of the vomit to come out the nose.  Vomit being forced out of your nose is BY FAR the worst thing about puking.  The smell of it, the taste of it, and the chunks of it are now plugging up what is supposed to be your air intake system.  So, even if you are drunk you are assaulted by the remains of the vomit in your sinuses, and that is just plain gross.  But I digress.

Since I was not drunk, this puking session did not have any of that unpleasantness. I just vomited a few times and then felt much better.  I washed up and told my wife I was going back to bed.  She said she was going to sleep in the guest bedroom because she did not want to have me puke on her.  We have a modest sized bedroom and she sleeps on the side of the bed between my side and the bathroom.  I suppose she thought I would be too lazy to get out of bed and just do some projectile vomiting over her and have it land, artfully, into the toilet.    I told her I was done puking but she did not want to take any chances.

I was lying in bed, making sure my guts had stopped bubbling, and started to formulate this story in my head.  So, I grabbed my new laptop and began to write this story down.  It sounded a lot more interesting in my head than it is on paper.  I guess you will now, after reading this, be asking yourself: “when will he go away again?”