Glorious weekend at Chez Scotsman. Weatherwise.

The World’s Greatest Mother-in-Law doesn’t think much of it. Her homebuyer backed out of their contract. Which leads me to ask (repeatedly), “You can do that?”

Apparently.

Our day trip to hang with the father of My Beautiful Wife at his house-under-construction went well enough. He lives in a completed garage packed to the ceiling with all his worldly possessions while the contractor builds the main house. Visiting in that environment echoes an episode of Hoarders. Not to imply that he’s a messy guy. He already maxed out two storage lockers. There’s just nowhere else to go with his stuff while he waits for the completion of this house. I can’t imagine living that way. This is out in the country where the General Contractor building his house is also a farmer. So construction progress happens when there are no crops that need tending. And no deer that need killing. And no beer that needs drinking.

Gah. I can’t imagine.

Nice house, though. Looks as though it will be spectacular when it’s complete. Which should be sometime in 2023.

My dog stabbed me. That’s not a joke or an anthropomorphic stretch. The freakin’ dog freaking stabbed me. With a knife.

We own two exceedingly sharp Pampered Chef knives, the kind that come with sheaths. I nicknamed the smaller of the two knives the “Kill Bill Knife of Death,” or KBKOD.

 “If in your travels you should meet God, God will be cut.”

Somebody… (MBW)… I forget who it was… (MBW)… Left the KBKOD on the kitchen counter, unsheathed.  I packed some edibles for our day trip and the 55-pound dog smelled goodness and lifted her front paws onto the counter to investigate. She whacked the handle of the KBKOD and set it to spinning like a top. I panicked a little and tried to shout the dog down. The KBKOD circled; a propeller, less than an inch away from her paws and nose. If she repositioned her feet, we were destined to spend the day at an animal hospital instead of construction site in the woods.

So I shouted at the dog and reached to grab the knife.

My shout made the dog flinch. Her feet skipped and her paw slapped the knife… On the plastic handle in a one-in-a-million angle that rolled the blade edge of the knife upward and levered it off the counter and into my hand. If you put that scene in a movie, people would roll their eyes and say, “Oh right!”

The bitch stabbed me.

My wound was superficial, mercifully. The knife was so sharp that the cut was razor thin and the wound clotted with a paper towel in a few minutes.

Daisy the Dog seemed remorseful at the time, but she has started wearing a khufi Muslim knit cap and brewing raisin jack in the toilet. Now I’m less-and-less certain it was an accident.

The imagery of the spinning knife reminded me of the Bukowski poem:

“question and answer”

            he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer

            night, running the blade of the knife

            under his fingernails, smiling, thinking

            of all the letters he had received

            telling him that

            the way he lived and wrote about

            that–

            it had kept them going when

            all seemed

            truly

            hopeless.

 

            putting the blade on the table, he

            flicked it with a finger

            and it whirled

            in a flashing circle

            under the light.

 

            who the hell is going to save                                 

            me? he

            thought.

 

            as the knife stopped spinning

            the answer came:

            you’re going to have to

            save yourself.

 

            still smiling,

            a: he lit a

            cigarette

            b: he poured

            another

            drink

            c: gave the blade

            another

            spin.