Let There Be Light

I couldn't take a picture of it where you could actually see the damage, but Johnny singed his whole left eyelashes and brow.

He's been re-glazing the windows on the sunny side of the house. He started out replacing the glass on the one he tripped and put his head through -- and he actually suggested we replace that one with Plexiglass. I said "we are not putting plastic in our windows!" He said "It's not plastic, it's plexi!" I gave him a look. He said "well, it's dangerous! What if it happens again?"

Listen, I love you, honey. And I'm sure it was scary to put your head through the window. It was scary enough for me to come home from my weekend away and find your baseball hat in the yard in a pile of broken glass. But plexi is plastic, and we're not replacing the windows with plastic on the off chance that such a fluke happens again. We'll just be glad it was the Green Bay Packers hat that Gerry gave you, and not the Patriots one that you got from my sister.

Anyway, in the process of replacing the broken one, he noticed that one of the windows in my office was practically falling out. Needless to say I never picked up on any such thing myself, but it would explain the arctic breezes that blow through. And replacing that one led to him doing that whole side of the house and now the porch. My kitchen's still not finished, but I suppose having actual panes in our windows come snowfall is ever-so-slightly more important.

So anyway, re-glazing windows involves taking the old glazing out and scraping and scraping and scraping and scraping. It involves a heat gun and lots of elbow grease. He mentioned something about having to burn off the something left around it (I don't know how taht sentence ened because I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang "La la!"). He has a bruise up the side of his right arm from when his hand slipped with all the scraping and he clattered the elbow of him off the wall. And then the other day I noticed he was missing all of his left-eye hair.

"My gosh, honey, did you singe yourself?"

"Yup," he answered with a little grin.

"That's not funny! How did you manage that?" I couldn't imagine accidentally putting the heat gun in your face long enough to singe your eye, and I didn't want to imagine the fireballs of lead paint that might be happening in the cracks of my house while I'm away.

"On th' stove."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my Guild-Trained Irish husband can burn the glazing off the windows with a beer in one hand and a heat gun in the other.

But he nearly blew his face off trying to light a smoke.