Vitamin E Oil Works as Advertised

Winter, with the electric blankets on the beds and the kerosene heaters in the living room, is a drying sort of season. Skin cracks and pulls and breaks out in eczema and weird localized rashes.  
            Winter, however, doesn't bother me. I have my secret Australia weapon - my little orange bottle of Vitamin E oil. This stuff is so very moisturizing that doctors recommend it to make scar tissue fade, and on winter spots it works like summer sunlight on snow.

            Mr Tabubil has a small red winter spot on his left calf.  He's not fussed, but I am good at winter spots, and take care of them whether the owners want me to or not.  I started small, doing it up overnight in layers of moisturizer cream and Vaseline  but it didn't vanish, so on Saturday night I decided to pull out the big moisturizing guns and dug out the little orange bottle.  

            Mr Tabubil sat on the bed, looking martyred, but I am strong-minded and I ignored him.  I held the bottle over his leg and squeezed - and the dropper top of the bottle popped off and pinged sideways off the nightstand, and while we were giggling, an entire bottle's worth of Vitamin E oil dropped in one quivering mucilaginous blob onto his leg and slid all over the sheets. 

            A little of this stuff goes a long way: a drop the size of a pearl pinhead does all 10 of my cuticles AND my lips. One 100 ml bottle lasts me all year.  

            It's nasty stuff when it comes by the bottle. Mr Tabubil gagged. I reached down and started scooping, but that ropey, viscous, goop just plain wouldn't scoop.  How it all came out of the bottle in the first place I still can't figure out.  I scraped and pawed and rubbed until half of the stuff was on me rather than the sheets, and then I went into the bathroom and pulled out a bar of soap - 

            And here, we seemed to enter some sort of obscene sci-fi slasher flick. It wouldn't wash off; the more I scrubbed, the worse it got. My arms grew thick and tacky with  translucent goo -down my fingers, across the palms and the backs of my hands and up to my elbows.  Muffled swearing from the shower indicated that things weren't much better for Mr Tabubil's leg - soap and water seemed to help it MULTIPLY. 

            It was very "Killer Jellyfish from Outer-Space!" - suitable for a mid-afternoon matinee at the drive-in where your boyfriend's best friend is hiding in the backseat with a cup full of jell-o - a film like that might get to the heart of it. 

            We worked it out, eventually.  Dawn dish soap was what it took.  A whole bottle.  And only piecemeal. I couldn't touch shiny surfaces till half-way through Sunday. The sheets spent two days soaking in a heavy Dawn solution, and there's a zone the size of a car tire on one of them that looks like the spill sheet under an oil pan.

            On the positive side, as of Wednesday evening my arms are soft like velvet from shoulder to fingertip, and Mr Tabubil's legs are as silky as a head of waving hair in a Pantene Ad.

            But I'm not allowed to touch his winter red spots any more.  He's quite emphatic about that.