Parts Per Million!

 "Parts Per Million!" I swear, if I have to hear that one more time. Gah. 

This is Butch's pat answer whenever I complain about certain common things that happen up here on the ole mountaintop like a dead mole or two floating in our spring where we get our drinking water. "Eh, it won't hurt you. Parts per million!" 

Or when he cleans out our plastic water tank with bleach then doesn't rinse it out before filling it with more water, which we drink. "Meh, you won't taste it. Parts per million!" 

Or when there was a bloated fly floating in my tea ... 

Or dog pee in the snow we were melting for household use .... 

Or dog slobber on my huckleberries... 

Or weevils in the flour ... 

Or when he tracks in mud on my floor... 

Or leaves black fingerprints everywhere ... 

Or leaves a mess on my table .... 

Or ... heyyyy, wait a minute. Wait just one cotton-picking minute. He's using that excuse for everything!  What the heck?! How did I miss that? 

Well two can play that game! Yessiree Bob. The next time he finds a dog hair in his food and freaks out or I accidentally break the tractor, or the house is a mess I'm going to gleefully yell, "Parts per million!" and see what he does. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? 

I felt the need to test his little motto a bit further by putting a couple of scared, odiferous stink bugs in his milk to see how "parts per million!" worked in that situation. I wanted to see where his particular line was drawn. He picked the bugs out and drank the milk down, no problem. Huh.

Next, purely out of intellectual curiosity mind you, I decided to go for the extreme, to a place I was SURE "parts per million" wouldn't fly, so I asked him about the famous chocolate poo pie from the movie "The Help", if "parts per million!" worked there. He grimaced and said, "Hmmm... I don't think so." 

(He doesn't think so?) 

"Those Southern women could COOK! May have been worth a try."

"Sooo, you'd have easily survived the Biblical plagues then." 

"Oh yeahhh. Frogs, grasshoppers, flies, locusts, lice, dead fish. That's good eatin' right there. Pure protein!" 

Okay, so now it's clear - we have found THE man, 

Mr. Parts Per Million, who will survive a nuclear winter, hands down, no question. 

Good to know! ;)