Now, here is an experience I never expected to have on Earth.

Sunday morning, I opened the passenger door of my car to put in some stuff I was taking to church, and I saw this:

A trail of slug slime across the upholstery ended in a black crunchy thing which I determined to be a slug that had fried in the heat of the closed car.

Eww.

I picked off the dead slug and threw it away, but I wondered how to clean the seat. My five-year-old had recently demonstrated the persistence of slug slime by accidentally stepping on a slug while barefoot on the garden path; I washed her feet with the garden hose, then in the bathtub with regular soap, then with full-strength dish detergent and a scrub brush before I was able to remove every bit of slime! And then I had to scrub in between the bristles of the scrub brush for quite a while to de-slime that! So I expected a lengthy ordeal.

My websearch on the subject wasn’t helpful. My Facebook friends were only speculating on what might work; nobody had experience. After a couple of days, my partner Daniel found an online tip for removing slug slime from fabric: Let it dry completely, then remove it with a brush.

Well, it was completely dry already, thanks to the hot car! I didn’t want to clean a brush again, but I happened to have a gift-card I had just redeemed.

I went out to the car and scraped at the slug trail with the corner of the gift-card. It simply flaked off! I just brushed it out of the car! It took one minute!

And then I sat on the seat for an hour today, in hot humid weather, but I detected no vestiges of slime re-activated by moisture. It seems to be completely gone.

It’s nice to have another use for used-up gift-cards!