Kinetic Energy

This weekend I started prepping the outside of my house for painting. The first thing I have to do is replace some mediocre trim with nice fresh boards lovingly sculpted with my own hands. Saturday, I pulled off some trim that capped the brick along the front of the house. Taking the wood off was easy, but where it meets the house there’s a huge 12 year old bead of caulk the width of a thumb that is quite content to stay where it is. I used a utility knife for a while, a scraper for a while, both with some success but neither was ideal for the task. Then I found an old rusty putty knife with potential written all over it. Putty knives have a blunt edge, so in its original form it was pretty much useless, but with a little edge, I knew it would do the trick. I fired up the sander and put a decent edge on it. At first, I wasn’t having much luck, so I went back to the garage and honed the edge a little more. I worked the knife up under the caulk and started pushing and it was working great, it glided relatively smoothly between the wall and the caulk…..one inch…….two inches….. alright this is good, I said to myself, only 12 feet to go. The blade snagged for a second, I worked it past the snag and got into position to keep it going. This is kinda like peeling an apple, it’s most efficient if you keep it in one long strip so you don’t have to start a new cut. I stooped down to put my weight into it and continued pushing…..6 inches….8 inches…. It was hard, but the caulk was coming up clean……10 inches…..keep pushing…….11 inches…….SMACK!

……. Holy Crap what just happened…Ouch! …my mouth has sand in it……what’s this?…..wait a minute whats going on here?……………Oh crap…..blood………..I think I hit myself…..is there a rock in my mouth?…………uhhhhhh……that’s a lot of blood…..whats happening?

I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My mouth and chin were covered with blood, Upon closer inspection I realized that I had a gaping wound below my bottom lip. I opened my mouth and spit out part of my front tooth.

This is what happened: The putty knife slipped as I exerted maximum force, and the kinetic energy stored in my flexed arms and legs, which was intended to release caulk from house, exploded forward and continued along its vector until it would either

A) run out of energy and fall to the ground, or
B) be stopped by another object.

Unfortunately the other object was my face. The putty knife entered my face below my bottom lip, went through into my mouth then smacked into my front tooth.

Today I have 5 stitches below the purple pickle once known as my bottom lip, and a busted tooth Billy Bob smile from Hell. I took the pain pills and watched ”Anger Management” when I got home from the hospital, but I needed a towel because every time I laughed, blood would run down my chin.

This Blog entry is brought to you by Hydrocodone, keeping America numb