Dining Room Impalement

Picture Does not do Justice to Beauty of Last Night's Sunset

My wife is thinking up new nicknames for me after last night’s packing exercises – Vlad the Packer leaps to mind. I was talking a good game, feeling I was more than qualified to break down the dining room furniture after seeing it done so many times by the professionals during our military moves. I even had a cogent plan. I had a couple very large cartons from the TV stand and the replacement mirrors which I was going to use for the immense glass shelves from the hutch.

The Wrapped Shelves

She was skeptical but in a surprise move actually permitted my plan into action with only token resistance. Everything was going well, we had the shelves out and encased in the cardboard with liberal amounts of tape. My wife deigned that her furniture was out of the danger zone and she could leave me to own devices although she did look nervously at the knife I was wielding to cut the cardboard down to size (she knows me so well).

Dining Room Table Prepped

I was happily cutting away and just about to finish when I noticed I was cutting towards my other hand. I thought (and this actually happened) that my wife would be upset if the knife slipped and I impaled my hand. A split second later, well, you know what happened. I kind of ignored the pain because of the embarrassing predictability of the injury. I pulled the knife out of my finger and wrapped it tightly in a paper towel and then wrapped that in the handy packing tape (battlefield medicine don’t you know). That allowed me to escape immediate condemnation and insured I wouldn’t bleed all over her furniture.

Just a Flesh Wound!

When she eventually noticed the hasty bandage she only shook her head sagely and remarked that she was certain the favorite son’s well documented proclivity to injure himself had certainly been inherited from his father. I was left without a valid counter-argument. The paper towel and tape combo staunched any major blood flow but of course the wound is right on the first knuckle of the index figure which is painful any time I lift anything. There’s a rumor that I’ll be doing a little bit of lifting come Saturday – perfect.