The Red Wine Incident

Alright, I'm just going to say I'm sorry once, because my absence has been inexcusable. So here it is: I'm sorry.

Now, to the action...

Currently, Bill & I are renovating our kitchen. It was supposed to take 5 days, but we are on day 11 with hopefully only 3 days until we are done. What's triple the estimated time, really?? We are having a contractor do the work, and this has taught us a few invaluable life lessons.

1. When said contractor tells you a list of things will be done in one day, expect half of it to be done & rejoice when you get home to realize parts of the list were somewhat completed. It helps keep the bitter taste of disappointment at bay. 
2. When the contractor tapes off the room under construction, keep cats out of said room under ANY circumstance. This brings us to...."The Red Wine Incident"

It's 4:45 AM on a Sunday & suddenly there is a large, continuous banging crash - coming from the dining room (which was part of the "don't go in here" area taped off from humans and cats). Bill & I jump out of bed in a state of panic to investigate the noise. Hemingway had found a way through a corner of the plastic & climbed to the top of our mountain of cabinets parked in the dining room, waiting for installation. Once on top of the cabinets, knocked down a 2x4, which hit every cabinet on it's way down & slid down across the floor.

So back up 20 seconds, and go to the part when we didn't know what Hem knocked down. Bill starts clawing away at the plastic, rushing to push his way through & get into the dining room, thinking Hem was the one who fell and potentially got hurt. By the time I got into the living room from the bedroom, Bill's hind end is pushed up against the plastic wall & he's hunting for the cat. In an instant, he bumps into the wine rack, which is on the living room side. The rack tips, I catch it, but two bottles of red come crashing to the floor...and one breaks all over our new white area rug.

Bill: Was that wine?
Me: Yes.
Bill: Did it break?
Me: Yes. ALL OVER MY NEW RUG.
Bill: What bottle was it?!

We move with ninja-like speed to find Sham-Wows & clean up the red wine that is now getting my brand new rug nice and sloshed. We start sopping with the Sham-Wows & realize now would be a good time to turn the lights on.Yes, until then we'd been doing all of this in the dark.

Please keep in mind with what I am about to tell you: One wall in our living room is windows. We live on the first floor. Our condo faces a common yard, in which all of our neighbors can see into our windows at any time. 

So we're in the living room, standing toe-to-heel, hands together, so we're kind of making an "A", holding one another up while the stacks of Sham-Wows under our feet work their magic to pull the red wine out of the white rug & I stop, look at Bill & start to laugh. I say "Can we just stop, for a second & remember this moment?"

Until then, neither of us had realized that...we weren't wearing clothes. We were in our undies, lights on, sun rising next to us through our wall of windows, and anyone in our building who happened to be awake at 5am on that Sunday could just look our way & see the ridiculous events that were taking place in our living room. Just picture it: Pile of cabinets behind a wall of plastic wrap, cat leaping, wood flying, wine rack tipping, red wine splattering....and a man & woman fresh out of REM standing on a pile of Sham-Wows in their underpants.

That, was The Red Wine Incident.

...and yes, the Sham-Wows got that red wine almost entirely out of the white rug. Some cleaner was used later to finish the job ;-)