Please!…

I just got word that one of my contractors has been killed in a car crash. He lost control on a turn, over corrected and rolled his truck. He was not wearing his seat belt and was ejected from the vehicle. He died at the scene. His wife who was wearing her belt suffered minor non-life threatening injuries, was treated then sent home. The contractors eldest son is home on leave from the Navy. The family was together to attend the youngest sons High School graduation tonight.

Please! if you are in a car put your seat-belt on. There is no logical reason not too. DON’T BECOME A STATISTIC!

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Chaos

The quick & dirty for this weekend goes like this.

The Wife and I are painting the foyer. Late Saturday night Kid One trips over the bucket of paint sending it down the stairs. The stairs, banister, & floor are unpainted wood, or were. Not only did the paint splatter the woodwork but it seeped through some backboards and ran down the basements stairs too. Coming to rest in a pool on the downstairs rug. Unfortunately, as if the previous wasn’t unfortunate enough, the foyer is adjacent to the living room we had a new floor put in a week ago. While I was desperately toweling the paint off of the new living room floor I realized I had not yet replaced all of the table lamps. Meanwhile the paint is seeping into the joints, permanently like. I desperately need enough light to fill the room so I can see all the spots. I yell at Kid One to ‘get me a light fast’. Two minutes later he shows up with a small flashlight.

>BOOOOM!<

Any rationality I had left…Left. I went off like a bomb. I over reacted. The poor kid. He’s a klutz. Just like me. The wife said I sounded like my father but not in the good way. More like ‘this guy needs an intervention or medication or both’ kind of way. I don’t go by the moniker of Polar because I like the cold folks. What an ugly scene. There is nothing good about a gallon of paint cascading through one’s house. But it’s worse, I think now, to down dress your kid for doing it accidentally. essentially I made the situation much worse for everybody in earshot. Yeah, yeah, it was a unusual paint in that one MUST maintain a wet edge while painting or the job goes to hell. Which means one cannot just stop halfway through a wall for an hour to clean a spill. But once the can went down the stairs all that became moot anyway.

I wish that I had said something like ‘Um, your supposed to play Kick The Can with an empty outside in the yard.’

I wish that I had made like a foreman on a Exxon Valdez clean up crew calmly pointing out missed spots and issuing towels. letting Kid One learn how to clean up paint.

I wish that I had made this a lesson instead of a catastrophe.

I wish that I had laughed instead of panicked.

The real mistake here was not made by Kid One but by me.

The real damage here was not done to the house but to the relationship between Kid One & myself, Dad Zero.