Funny Story

Where to begin...?

Ok, a couple of weeks ago I woke up at about 2:30 in the morning to what sounded like a crash (or maybe a really loud thump.) Being the paranoid person that I am, I immediately assumed the worst. I thought for sure that someone had broken into our house to murder us. After sitting up in bed listening for sounds of intruders for a couple of minutes, my panic subsided a little and I started coming up with more rational explanations for the sound that woke me up. I got up and checked on both kids. Embry has a tendency to fall out of bed, so the noise I heard might have been her, but they were both safely asleep in their beds. I checked the front and back doors - they were both locked. I peeked out the blinds into the front yard - no burning wreckage from a car crashing into our house. Hmmm. I was starting to believe that I had imagined the entire thing, or maybe I had dreamt it. But, I could've swore that I not only heard something, but that I had felt something as well. Surely, I didn't imagine that. I was too tired to debate it any longer and I went back to bed.

Two days later I went downstairs to my basement to wash a load of towels. I got to the bottom of the stairs and I almost tripped over something. I was carrying a huge laundry basket, so I couldn't see what it was right away. I put down the towels, and picked up an empty plastic bottle. Well, actually, I was half of an empty plastic bottle. I turned on the light to examine the bottle and to try and figure out why it was lying at the bottom of the stairs. In an instant I understood what the noise was that woke me up 2 nights earlier.

You see, J likes to brew small batches of beer. He received a kit a few years back, and he has successfully made several batches of pretty decent beer. He bottled his last batch about a week before the middle of the night incident. Apparently there was some sort of flaw in one of the bottles, because when I turned on the basement light that morning I saw that beer had covered just about every surface in our basement... floor, ceiling, wall, furnace, washer/dryer, boxes, shelves. Everything was sprayed with beer when one of the bottles exploded. And I don't mean exploded like when you drop a soda can, and it foams all over your arm. I mean exploded like a bomb. Boom! I could see where it had hit the ceiling directly underneath our bedroom.

You'd think that I would be upset about the gigantic mess all around me. About the fact that I had a ton of stuff to do that day, had both kids at home with me, and that I had to go to work that night, and therefore had no time to clean up such a mess. That all of that sticky beer would have to stay on the walls and the ceiling for a day or two before I would get the chance to spend hours cleaning it up.

But, I just laughed. I actually laughed out loud because I was so ecstatic that I had not imagined that noise in the middle of the night.