Usually, there's a moment before I make a bad decision when I'm aware that I'm going to do something stupid, and yet I press forward anyway.

I had one of those moments last week in the kitchen when I was chopping a hot pepper from my garden.

Perhaps I was feeling brash because I was messing with a recipe I had never tried before. The recipe for chicken tikka masala, an Indian-inspired dish, called for a serrano pepper. I decided to use one of my "garden salsa" hot peppers instead. I looked up the Scoville Units to compare pepper heat and they seemed to be roughly the same. Roughly.

Usually I go to great lengths to protect my skin from the sting of hot peppers. I've worn plastic baggies on my hands. I've wrapped my hands in plastic wrap. At the very least, I usually use the tip of a spoon if I'm going to scoop out the hottest part of the pepper, the seeds and ribs.

Yet, for some reason this time, I looked at the pepper, looked at the instructions to remove the seeds and ribs and thought, "I might as well just do this with my bare hands."

Two days later, the skin under my fingernails was still burning.

I didn't notice the sting right away. I chopped the pepper, discarded the spicy parts and touched my finger to my tongue to test the spiciness. It definitely had heat, but not in a painful way. I scrubbed my hands with soap and water and assumed I was safe.

My gamble on the pepper substitution was a success. The final product wasn't too spicy to eat. In fact, the tikka masala was hardly spicy at all.

My gamble on the bare hands? Not such a good idea.

About halfway through the cooking process, I must have rubbed the corner of my right eye because I felt a mild sting. No big deal. A few hours later, I noticed my fingers felt hot, as if I had sunburn. Troubling, but still no big deal.

Then it was time for bed, and I opened my contact lens case. Again, I was pretty sure I was about to do something stupid, but there was a voice in my head saying, "Hey, that pepper wasn't so spicy. You might just get away with it."

I poked my right index finger into my right eye to remove the lens. The sting was instantaneous and intense. My eye snapped closed and tears gathered in the corners.

Here's where it gets really bad. Did I flush my eye with solution? Wash my hands again? Sit down for a minute and think hard about what I had just done? No.

I stuck my left index finger into my left eye, quickly as though I knew my brain was about to catch up and make me stop.

The second sting was even worse. I stumbled out of the bathroom, eyes swollen and leaking tears, to show my husband what an idiot I am. It's probably good that I couldn't see across the room to catch his reaction. I fantasized about dipping my eyes in the yogurt and heavy cream left in the refrigerator from the tikka masala. He said perhaps a wet wash cloth would be a better approach.

In front of the bathroom mirror, I pried my eyes open enough to see that they were bloodshot and puffy. The wash cloth helped, but my eyes were still swollen when I went to sleep. The next morning, they were swollen shut and dry. The skin under my fingernails burned and throbbed, and no amount of scrubbing would make it stop.

As I look back on the experience, I wonder why I didn't have the same respect for this pepper as I usually do for hot peppers.

I think it's because it came out of my own garden.

It's pretty amazing that something that grew out of my humble backyard produced so much spiciness. In fact, it's not just amazing. It's counterintuitive. It's almost unbelievable. It's just soil, sunlight and water. How could it possibly produce something so complex as a spicy pepper?

It's one thing to understand intellectually that capsaicin, the spicy compound in peppers, is just one arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. There's no magical special ingredient, no magical process. It's just basic biology.

Yet, to see this demonstrated in the real world - that one plant takes these building blocks and makes a sweet, brilliantly red tomato while another makes a fiery pepper - is just stunning. I watched it happen, yet I can't quite get my mind around it.

I hope, at least, that I learned enough from this experience to get my mind around the idea of protecting my hands next time I chop a hot pepper.

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Julie Kirkwood's "Yard Dirt" appears weekly in the Home North section. Reach her by calling 978-946-2251 or via e-mail at jkirkwood@eagletribune.com.