How was your weekend?

Hmmm . . . What's this?  

Funny, you should ask.

My weekend is off to a weird start. Because of the heavy rain, I decided that I needed to try and fix a leaky downspout that was flooding the pump house. Nothing serious; I just wanted to get it fixed as a safety precaution.

So I had already put my dirty clothes into the laundry to run while doing other things like fixing the rain spout. So I'm out in the rain, in my bathrobe, wrestling with the leaky gadget. Eventually, I improved slightly, and it's better, but I'm not sure yet.

So then the washing machine completes its cycles, and I go to unload it to transfer everything to the dryer on the other side of the room. As I'm bending over to empty the wash, I'm also thinking about another problem I'm having some frustrations with, so I need to pay more attention to what I'm doing. Then I pull out some clothes, and BAM, I hit the top of my head on the sharp edge of the window frame. OUCH, I say, and then put my hand up to feel for a bump on my head, and then I notice the spot is bleeding a little, I can't quite see the top of my head, so I notice the red substance on my hands and think ... I better go take a look in the mirror. I get a hand mirror, and it's still hard to see the back of my head with two mirrors, but then I see a big one-inch gash right in the middle of my bald spot on the back of my head.

I'm looking around for band-aids but can only find the small ones. So then I grab some toilet paper, fold it over a few times, and start to soak up the blood, changing it over and over for a few minutes until I remember there might be some bigger band-aids in the other bathroom on the other side of the house. I open up a large band-aid but can't quite get it placed on the back of my head accurately and must try again. Finally, I get another band-aid placed, and the bleeding stops. So I've been wearing a hat all day.

By this time, it's raining very hard again, and I notice my efforts to fix the leak have failed, so I wait until the rain stops, and I go out and find a tarp just large enough to cover the little pump house and keep the water from leaking into it, Praise the Lord for small victories.

This is funny because I watched the Robert Redford movie ALL IS LOST last night. In the film -- if you've seen it, you might remember -- he is alone on the ocean in his little sailboat, all alone sleeping until he realizes his boat has a hole and quickly fills up with water. So the film has just one actor, Robert Redford, and shows him trying to cope with one problem after another to keep from sinking into the middle of the ocean.

So today, I felt like that character, running around the house trying to take care of all these little issues and problems, one after another. So that is how my weekend has begun. Fortunately, I have a sub-drummer playing for me at church this weekend, so I don't have to show my big bandaged head. 

Yesterday I was cleaning out some file drawers and found some old report cards from kindergarten thru 6th grade, and it was exciting to see that some of my most essential character traits are still the same now as when I was in pre-school and the early grades. Ha ... some things never change. But that is another story.

While I'm thinking about it, here's another cartoon I came up with recently.

I like this little guy in the hat … the other guy here is obviously me on a better day.