The Baking Soda Mystery

My schedule is crammed with endless chores to feed and water animals and plants and us. Doing just that is something that takes me most of the day, leaving little time to just sit and think. Or stand and think. Or lie down and ponder my life, goals, flaws, hopes……the whatever that today’s actions will bring into being.
So, every night I must do certain things to just maintain this level of existence with these animals all around and I use copious amounts of baking soda for maximum maintenance. No, not for baking. That’s too normal an activity for me. I use it for cleaning and for sipping before I go to bed to avoid the dreaded reflux. It keeps me alkaline so I can sleep through the night horizontally without any dyspepsia, (that sounds very medical, huh?) My three cats that always lie sprawled out where my legs or body should be, can also negatively impact my sleeping of any length of time. But that’s another matter. And boy it sure does matter where they are on the bed, usually dead asleep, like bowling balls glued to their designated spots.
Cleverly, I purchased a huge brown paper sack of bicarbonate of soda from a wholesale distributor since we go through quite a lot. I keep it in a closet out of the way of mice in my office that also has my larder of canned goods etc. Lots of the latter in the larder. Cleverly again I used some black clips that some of my recently purchased socks were hanging on when I bought them. They’re like giant paper clips and work great to really keep everything out (like mice) but the baking soda in. But I can’t store a huge amount of baking soda in our tiny kitchen so I refill a plastic tub I bought of baking soda from the market with a big spoon whenever we start to run out, about twice a month. I refilled this container the other night after a very long day (probably chasing my tail) and thought nothing about it as I was filling it up. My mind was elsewhere. Having topped up my little glass of water from the leftover from the night before and then I added a bit more bicarb. When it came time to drink it I took a medium sized gulp and spit it out in the sink as fast as possible. What had happened to my baking soda? It tasted like poison. So, the very next day I checked all of my filtered water and even the tap water and they were all okay. So, this morning I decided to pull out these sacks from their cardboard box where one was to the left of the closed full bag of baking soda and one was to the right. Then I read the labels of what’s in them. Uh oh.
I had been tasting Epsom salts, that’s in the other reasonably priced large brown bag, exactly like the sack for the baking soda. I use this in my bath water but drinking it. Ugh. I should have known from the crystals that this wasn’t baking soda, but it was late and dark and I just opened the bag and took what I needed of the random white stuff at the bottom of the bag that I had to dig out..
It tasted terrible.
But now that I’ve figured out the mystery, I feel pretty stupid. As John says I multitask. Translated that means that I’m scatterbrained. Not thinking of what I’m doing when I’m doing it. My mind is elsewhere. Many different elsewheres actually.
But this lapse of intelligence was really quite funny when I thought about it. Just glad I didn’t order that large bag of arsenic at that bargain price.