fhqwhgads

This actually happened a few months ago, but I never shared the story with the TFP. Enjoy...

I'm washing the siding of my house the other day, and I'm adjusting the ladder that reaches up to the second story. I get that "you should probably look skyward" feeling that you get just before something bad is about to happen. As I look up into the sky, I think "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's my one-gallon pump handle garden sprayer tumbling from the rooftop twenty feet above..." Apparently, balancing the sprayer on the edge of the gutter wasn't as stable as I had thought. Go figure... round object + slanted roof + gravity = potential concussion.

Because of the cat-like reflexes that I have honed over my 30 years, I was able to move my head slightly to the right while simultaneously screeching "Holy crap!" A lesser man would have only been able to accomplish one of those tasks. In my younger days, I'd be able to estimate the amount of force that the garden sprayer had as it impacted my left shoulder, but I have taken that part of my brain which used to store physics equations and filled it with more important things... like Simpsons quotes. I can tell you that it hit me with enough force to knock me to one knee. However, like any adult male, I quickly jumped back to my feet and brushed off my shoulder, in case anyone happen to be watching me clean the siding on the back of my house at two o'clock in the afternoon.

Of course, when I tell the story about the bruised shoulder to anyone else, it's going to involve saving a baby from a runaway Dodge Neon, or maybe getting an old lady's purse back from a band of rogue pirates. People always love stories about pirates...