Cactus Butt

Earlier today, I was doing a little bit of sweeping and cleaning out in the front yard with Chris. We often like to do some tidying inside and out on Sunday afternoons and this was what we were doing. Anyway, I was sweeping up all these little dried blossoms and yanking out weeds in this small section of our front yard by the car and garage door. I got most everything gathered together in little piles but had to get down on my hands and knees to hand collect all these camelia blooms that had fallen underneath the bush. I got most of them and made a little pile of those too. When I went to stand up, I completely lost my balance and fell backwards onto a cactus that had been sitting there for months, sort of dying in its pot.

At first, I was laughing and screaming out to Chris (who was about 10ft further down the driveway) that I had fallen on the cactus. He came running over and I turned around and he says, "Oh my god it's like a cartoon!" because I had dense little clusters of cactus needles all over the butt and leg part of my jeans. I chuckled for about one more second until I realized that I felt a prickly burning on my lower butt cheek. When I realized that the needles were not only on my pants but in my skin, I freaked out and ran into the house yelling. I threw the front door open, tore off my jeans and twisted my neck trying to see what my bare ass looked like, hoping that it was not that bad. To my horror, the needles were so tiny and light in color that I could not see them at all!

I grabbed my tweezers and yelled out the door for Chris to come and pull them all out for me. As I laid on the hardwood floor in my underwear in pain, Chris patiently tried to see the needles and pulled most all of them out. There were still a couple left to pull that he couldn't see but I could feel so I attempted to remove them myself with the aid of a hand mirror. I had some luck but didn't get every last one. Tiny red welts were forming and I just felt so annoyed and embarrassed by the whole thing. Anyway, I think that there are still a couple needles still in there but what can I really do when they aren't even visible.

Since the incident, my new nickname, thanks to Chris, has become Cactus Butt or just "CB" for short.
The plant itself was promptly thrown into the trash can.