Dead Mom Scavenger Hunt
Welcome to Dead Mom Scavenger Hunt where cousins Christmas and Cara tick off the wild, sometimes ridiculous wishes from the bucket list of the late, great Bonnie—Christmas's mom and Cara's bonus mom. Every episode, we unpack grief and life’s absurdities through belly laughs, bizarre encounters, and the kind of soul-searching that only happens when you're half a bottle deep into questionable wine, munching on crackers and what-the-hell-is-this cheese. It's not just about where we go, but the oddballs we meet, the unbelievable stories we gather, and the existential crises we tackle together. Strap in and hold on —Bonnie's list isn’t going to complete itself, and things are about to get hilariously out of hand!
Dead Mom Scavenger Hunt
The Mothwoman Cometh- New Fear Unlocked
Ever been haunted by the creepy-crawlies of your childhood? We’ve turned our fears into fodder for fun stories, starting with an earwig encounter that spiraled into a lifelong moth aversion. Get ready to laugh along with our Bodega Bay camping tale, where moth earrings serve as a symbol of irony and acceptance. You'll hear how a cousin's story inspired quirky nighttime rituals like covering our ears with hair, and how a moth-in-ear incident brought it all full circle. We promise you’ll find humor and possibly a few relatable moments in the ways we've learned to cope with these irrational fears.
On a lighter note, discover the outrageous world of extreme hair styling with our hilarious "rat balls beard" creation, and explore creative ear protection hacks to keep the bugs at bay. We'll share our mosquito war stories from Costa Rica, complete with tales of daring pharmacy visits for a quick fix. And if you're heading somewhere tropical, you'll want to hear about the miraculous B12 shot that left us buzzing with energy. Packed with amusing anecdotes and practical tips, this episode is your passport to laughter and learning, with a side of insect-induced hilarity.
Welcome to Dead Mom Scavenger Hunt
Holler at us with questions or comments:
Email: dmshpod@gmail.com
Insta: @dmshpod
Christmas: @drugstorecowgirljewelry
Cara: @cara.steinmann
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Okay, are we live? Do you like how I say are we live? Right when you have a Squiz Chase cracker in your mouth? Good timing, always, always and forever. So we wanted to circle back to a couple things that we mentioned in episode one that people were wondering well, what is that? I asked Kara to tell a story and then we just took off on a tangent and tangent and abandoned that ship yeah, people were real curious yeah, the inquiry.
Speaker 2:People, inquiring minds want to know cara so we need to follow up and share this moth story the moth story that we, and in honor of which we are both wearing our moth earrings yes, kara and I are both fans of large beaded earrings tip of the hat to Lucky Lark cheers to Lucky Lark, who is another um maker here in Sonoma County, and these are both her moth designs.
Speaker 1:She made these custom for me, uh, because here's what mine look like moths um hold a very special and traumatic place in my heart are they still as traumatic? Are they getting less still?
Speaker 2:no, absolutely okay and yet I feel really, really bad when I have to kill them when they get in my house. I try not to, but I also don't want them breeding in my house.
Speaker 1:Well, you can just take a cup and a piece of paper and release them outside. Yeah, that's what I do with spiders and moths, and or you just go straight to murder I don't know, I can't talk about it, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, we're here to talk, so we have to talk about it. Yep, so we're going to talk. Well, let's back up, okay.
Speaker 1:Let's back it up.
Speaker 2:This is the moth story. When I was like eight, a different cousin, which one Another cousin? That traumatized me.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:I think it was my cousin Erin. Oh okay, she was staying at our house and she told me this story about how an earwig had gotten into her ear. Nope, and her mom had had to put like hot oil in her pour hot oil in her ear to get the earwig to get out, to come out. So ever since I was eight years old, I've been terrified that something's going to crawl in my ear while I'm sleeping. Okay, so to this day, I have to take a big chunk of my hair before I fall asleep. Oh, don't worry, we're going to make you demonstrate later. I have to put it over my ear. I am aware that it probably moves when I roll over.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter, I'm exposed, but I cannot fall asleep without a big chunk of my hair covering my ear hole.
Speaker 1:You know what? Whatever your anti-moth device needs to be, as long as it makes you feel good.
Speaker 2:I support you. No, this is an earwig problem. Oh, sorry, At this point in my life we only in the fucking story. Sorry At this point.
Speaker 1:We only have earwig problems. This is an earwig problem.
Speaker 2:We got 99 problems, but a moth ain't one yet, and it is trans. There's transference here because I did assume that spiders would probably try to crawl in my ears too, or my mouth or my nose. But I can't do much about that. It's really, I'm afraid of my ears, right? So my whole life, this is a fear you actually can do something about it with your mouth.
Speaker 1:As you and I now will know, we'll get to that in a different episode next up, next mouth tape.
Speaker 2:We're going to talk about mouth tape, okay, okay, because this is educational. But right now this I've always said that right now this is just story time.
Speaker 1:I've always said that.
Speaker 2:Right now, this is just story time. You guys are going to learn so much that you did never want to know, that's true, but you're going to learn. You're going to learn today. So at this point in my life, okay, then fast forward. I'm like 21, and I'm with Bonnie camping at the coast we were at Bodega Bay camping with a bunch of her friends and we're sharing a tent and we go to sleep and we tuck in all cozy. I put my hair over my ear.
Speaker 1:I go to sleep. I'm sorry to say I was living in Santa Monica At this point in time, so I was not on this particular Bodega Bay camping trip. We missed you deeply, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:So we hang out by the bonfire, we drink wine, we go go to sleep in the tent.
Speaker 1:Wait, didn't she pee on the?
Speaker 2:beach too. No, this was. That was a different story. Okay, that was. We were just at. We were at Bodega Bay, though, when we were just drinking wine on the beach, and she had to pee and she didn't want to go find a bathroom, so she just hiked up her dress and just peed in the sand, like she pulled her underwear aside and just peed in the sand, and I was, was you know, back to drinking wine.
Speaker 1:It's like the world's largest litter box the beach.
Speaker 2:I mean Gross, she was creative, I was. I appreciated that. Okay so, but fast forward.
Speaker 1:You're in the tent, I'm 21.
Speaker 2:I think I'm 21. I'm visiting her and we're in the tent sleeping and I hear, hear, she wakes me up. She's just Kara. Kara, there's something in my ear. Can you take a look? We have our flashlights, or whatever. I look and I turn the light on just in time to see moth a moth finish burrowing its way into her ear, just the, just the tips of the wings back ends of the wings.
Speaker 2:I saw moth wings, all, like you know, put together, because it had to fit oh, it had to fit its little body into a canal-ish shape.
Speaker 1:I'm really proud of you for even being able to tell the story. This is how big my eyes were in the night looking.
Speaker 2:I'm like, oh, my god, there's a moth and it's crawling, it's burrowing into your ear hole and she's like, okay, well, oh. And then it starts like flapping its wings against her eardrum and she's like, oh, it's so loud, could you please like we have to do something right. She's like here, drown it. She hands me her water bottle and I pour water in her ear hole like there's nothing. It's in there there's nothing I can do except drown this mom no, that was there's.
Speaker 1:She went straight to death too. Well, if it's in your ear that you can't do the cup paper trick, she said it was very loud, like it was flapping against her.
Speaker 2:It's flapping against my eardrum. Make it stop.
Speaker 1:No tweezers.
Speaker 2:I mean, would we have had the fort Like I don't know. I don't know if I traveled with tweezers back then.
Speaker 1:Well, you don't have the eyebrows, I do.
Speaker 2:I hadn't started sprouting chin hairs yet. Okay, okay. So I did not travel with tweezers, probably. Anyway, we didn't think about it. We were like we need a fast solution here. We're going to drown it. Okay, so I poured water out of a plastic water bottle into her ear hole and she was like, oh, that's better, it's slowing down, it's dying, it's like.
Speaker 1:She's just listening to it slowly, slowly, okay, flap its last.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, I think it's dead. Okay, let's go back to sleep. She rolls off. I'm like what? Like no, we need to get that out of your ear somehow. Like we gotta go to the hospital. She's like don't go tomorrow, it's fine, just goodnight. Nothing's gonna happen today and I was like holy shit, I'm supposed to sleep now. I'm already like new fear unlocked. So I, of course, I grabbed my hoodie and I grabbed my hoodie up and I'm like yoink, oh and you just cinched it so tight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just cinched it so tight. Nothing's coming in your face, just looked like a cat's ass. That was the only way that I could get back to sleep.
Speaker 2:That night was with a hoodie on. That night was with a hoodie on. It was summer, but it was at the beach, so I don't think it was that. I don't think it was that hot, yeah, but yeah. So I cinched up my face like a butthole, like it's cat's butthole, and went back to sleep and in the morning we hopped in the car and went to Kaiser and we went into the doctor.
Speaker 1:I went into the doctor's room with her. I'm going to. I do have a question. I'm going to even venture to say it probably wasn't even that early in the morning. She probably wasn't that concerned about it.
Speaker 2:No, there was probably tea first. I'm sure we had breakfast and coffee and hung out for a while and I was like this is the only thing on my agenda since midnight when she woke me up.
Speaker 1:Operation Remove moth. Remove moth Immediately.
Speaker 2:She's like okay, so we make our merry way over to kaiser. We sit and we wait and you know she's totally fine. And we get in there and the the doctor looks in her ear and she he's like well, I mean, I hate to tell you, there's nothing in there. There's nothing in there and I'm like well, there's something in there oh, I saw it.
Speaker 2:Oh, I promise you, there is something in there. And she was like yeah, we, we know that there is something in there. And she was like yeah, we know that there is something in there. And she's like well, I don't know what to tell you, there's nothing in there. So we landed on the solution they were going to wash her ear out, so they come in with the water in the little tub and they squirt stuff in and blah, blah, blah, blah and after like three or four flushes out, plops the moth behind it must have been hiding behind a big chunk of earwax or something gross.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, that's the gross part, the wax.
Speaker 2:The wax part is the gross, yeah, so out plops a big piece of earwax with a moth stuck to it. Do you think it was stuck, I wonder I don't know if it got stuck, but um but it, it was this is new technology and moth trapping it was a silence of the lamb's moth. Okay, and they let her keep it. She asked if she could keep it.
Speaker 1:Of course she asked you know this, no, but it totally tracks when she had her hysterectomy. She wanted to keep that too. Yes, that does track. So she was like it was your home for nine months. I couldn't just throw it away. People wonder why I was like feral as a child.
Speaker 2:There's two glaring examples, and the doctor's face too.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sure, oh shit, oh shit. I wonder what she did with it.
Speaker 2:She kept it in her glove box for a long time In what. We walked out with it that day in a biohazard bag.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:In a clear biohazard bag and she kept it like. She flattened it out in the biohazard bag and kept it in her glove compartment for I don't know how long. It was probably there for years, yeah. So we I mean so, yeah, so I'm not a huge fan of moths, but we loved. She loved to tell that story and I loved it because she was so chill about it.
Speaker 1:It was not a chill situation I mean she was pretty chill about almost a lot of things, almost everything.
Speaker 2:People wouldn't be.
Speaker 1:Yeah except for, maybe, politics chill about everything. That's true. What I'm gonna need you to do right now and because this is for most people, unless you're a patronus patreon member um, I'm gonna need you to take your hair out of that bun and demonstrate what you do when you sleep. I need to wash my hair when you don't have a hoodie, because I have seen this so many times and it makes me laugh, so hard, every single time. So I'm going to describe, for the people who aren't patreons, cara's hair.
Speaker 2:It look, it's full of body right now and crazy and full of dry shampoo um okay, she's gonna.
Speaker 1:She's gonna part it.
Speaker 2:I'm grabbing a big chunk from the right hand side.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I'm like it's basically from her from the back, the behind, her ears forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, section of hair, I would say a quarter of her head from the right I'm pulling it into like a ponytail and she's making yeah, so that it's thick and now I'm gonna pull it down and just like make sure that it's sitting right over the ear hole yes and the idea is that if something does try to get in my ear, it will tickle and I will know that it's coming Okay.
Speaker 1:What she also does. What Is? Take the other side.
Speaker 2:Oh, I have done that, haven't I? Yes, I don't do that all the time.
Speaker 1:But you can. This is a bit more of an extreme version. This is an advanced situation, so she's taking her hair into two low-ish pigtails and she's going to fashion it like a beard underneath her, so imagine it looks like a weird bonnet, it's a ponytail coming out of the bottom of your chin?
Speaker 2:yes, and it's sourced from two separate ponytails on either side of your head.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it looks like the creepiest, like when when a 20 year old kid who can't grow a beard tries to grow like a weird, it's rat balls beard.
Speaker 2:You've never heard me say rat balls, grow like a weird straight. It's rat balls beard. You've never heard me say rat balls. I rat balls is what you describe like like picture a young man coming into his beard yeah, but it's scraggly and oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's called rat balls oh, I've never heard that.
Speaker 1:Did you come up with it or is that a thing? Katie, tip of the hat to tooch cheers to tooch.
Speaker 2:Katie tooch and I came up with that in college because some, some guys would just be kind of scraggly looking and we're like, oh, he's rat balls, oh okay, that's rat balls. I love it yeah, I mean, feel free everyone to use the term rat balls, um, and I'm gonna remove this now because this is rat balls it it's the she.
Speaker 1:She has done this like we'll be getting ready for bed and sharing a bed, and all of a sudden, I look over and she's got this random hair situation with her ears covered tightly. You would definitely feel it, though, so I think they do sell ear muffs like you can buy these little.
Speaker 2:Yes, they do sell ear muffs.
Speaker 1:That is a thing shut up.
Speaker 2:They sell like. They're almost like mesh, that you could. They're like ear condoms, but they're mesh and you can they.
Speaker 1:They tuck over your ear so they're like so and so that you so like, like, when you go to tropical places. It's basically just an insect screen for your ears so what I do, though?
Speaker 2:because I'm not buying mosquito net. For your ears it's a mosquito net for your ears, yes, but I do feel like there is some vulnerability in the front because it's not, uh, because your ears not shaped regularly, does it?
Speaker 1:look like a very, very tiny shower cap. Yes, okay, I'll show you, okay, a tiny shower cap made of mesh. I don't have the same phobia, so I can tell you with 100 certainty that I'm never going to worry about this. Look, shower cap for ears. It's um, wow. Someone is making $7 off something that costs 10 cents to make Ear caps, for it does look exactly like a tiny, tiny shower Cap for your ear. Shower cap for your ears, yeah, okay so, but what I do.
Speaker 2:when, like when I went to Costa Rica, I was very concerned about this right Because the spiders are and I have beef way before the moth situation happened. Um, I've always been like super scared of spiders. I just it's like a visceral thing. I can't help it. I'm so sorry, I know.
Speaker 1:I know Poor me. I mean, you're not alone.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people who share that, but Costa Rica is full of giant spiders, right? So I yeah the mosquitoes? There are no joke I had to get all the things there.
Speaker 1:I had to get a giant needle in my ass cheek for the mosquitoes yeah okay, we'll come back to that.
Speaker 2:Sure, um, but I do bring a big, thick headband and when I'm in tropical places I sleep with a big thick headband over my ears and it seems to make me feel comfortable.
Speaker 1:I would like something like under my chin, like no, it's not, it's not under my chin, it's not under my chin.
Speaker 2:Oh it's, it's just pulled forward, enough on my forehead Okay.
Speaker 1:So that it's like but it still comes from the back. Yeah, okay, yeah. Does it go under your hair or over top of your hair?
Speaker 2:In that scenario I sleep with my hair in like a bun. Okay, and the headband is like around, okay, like as if I was working out and trying to keep sweat from coming onto my face like, okay, headband, like headbands, go, so anyways. Yeah, that's the moth story. That is how headbands work. That's how headbands work, in case anybody needed to know.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, so that's probably a good place to stop, unless you want to talk about getting stung by what happened to you in costa rica oh, the mosquitoes were just out of control and normally they like me, but they like Raina better, and Raina and I were together, so usually if there's a plethora of mosquitoes, I just have to stand near her and they go to her instead of me, which is kind of evil. I mean, they're going to bite her regardless of whether I'm there or not. They they really, really love her. But when we were in Costa Rica they loved both of us and we got blasted so bad. I had hundreds on my legs, so much so that I would wake in the night and literally feel like I wanted to claw my skin off.
Speaker 1:So we went to the pharmacy to get just something for the bites that were already there, and the lady asked how many days we were still going to be in Costa Rica, and at the time I think we were going to be there like six or something more days. And she said well, there is a shot you can get. And I was like I don't care, I'll take it, I don't, I don't care, I don't care how much it is, I don't, because in the night I would wake up so itchy. Then I thought maybe it was bedbugs, and then I freaked out about bedbugs. So I was like, yep, I'm doing it.
Speaker 1:And Raina said, okay, I'll do it too, and I went first and it was fine. What I should not have done was look at the needle first. No, never, I don't have a weird needle phobia, but it was a big fucking needle. It was long, was long, and it was pretty girthy, it seemed like to me, but luckily it was super, super sharp, so it didn't hurt going in when she pulled out. When she pulled out, you could feel it a little bit, stung a little. It stung a little during pull out, but I'll tell you what it worked.
Speaker 1:Okay, I would do it again in a heartbeat b12 oh, oh okay yeah, and both reina and I said anytime we go anywhere tropical, we are definitely gonna go get a b12 shot, a big fat one, right in my ass cheek, because it helped amazingly well. You heard it here first yeah, b12. See, we told you guys you were gonna learn stuff. I just learned something I didn't. And it's cheap. It's a b12 shot even at like a med spa is, you know, 25, 30 bucks here in Sonoma County. All right, yeah Well, all right. Well, that's it for this one. Thanks for joining us, bye, bye.
