I was lying lazily on my bed, watching a bit of weekend afternoon TV, when my three-and-a-half-year-old son brought me a 2 litre bottle of pop, putting it beside the bed.
Okay, I thought to myself, I wonder what he's up to? It was one of the 10 for $10 pops we picked up earlier in the day, and had not yet put in the cupboard.
A few minutes later, he brings me another, this time violently depositing the bottle on the floor beside the bed. Time to put a stop to this.
I walk down the short hallway towards the kitchen, where he has a third bottle in hand, held over his shoulder, as he giggles fiendishly.
"Spencer! Put that down!"
He lobs the bottle at me like a grenade. And like a grenade, it exploded, landing just in front of my feet.
Now, this wasn't a splash type of explosions. No, that would have been too easy. This was a small pinhole leak explosion, causing the pop it instantly atomize as it burst through the pinhole.
"Spencer! Go to your room."
He scampers off without protest, knowing he is in serious trouble.
I pick up the bottle, dumbfounded. It's one of my favourite flavours - Raspberry Ginger Ale. I have an affinity to this particular flavour due to a one-day odd job I had as a university summer student, offering taste tests for Raspberry Ginger Ale in Yorkton's Parkland Mall.
What I never realized back then that this stuff should be categorized as a chemical weapon.
Instead of doing something immensely logical, like put my hand over the eruption point of the bottle, and take it into the adjacent bathroom, I instead carried it across the kitchen, and deposited it into the kitchen sink.
While only three cups or so of pop sprayed out, it covered every surface for 7 feet in every direction, left, right, up and down. The floor is covered. The carpet needs to be shampooed, immediately. The walls have little shiny dots. The oak kitchen cupboards are sticky. The 25-year-old G.I. Joe airplane Spencer left on the kitchen table is coated. The kitchen table and chairs are all icky when you sit on them.
I pull out the rug shampooer and take a go at it. When my wife gets home, she washes the floor and cupboards. Mr. Clean and our normal mop are ineffective. The floor is still sticky. I need to take a scrub brush and mop it a second time. Even two days later, I'm still coming across surfaces that were coated in atomized Raspberry Ginger Ale.
This came a day or two after Spencer took a broom handle to the roof of the playhouse. Katrina and I were cleaning the playhouse for a summertime campout, when Spencer got a hold of the broom handle. He somehow figured out that if he put the broom handle under the cedar shakes and lifted up, they would pop right off and fall down, presumably right on top of him as he stood on the ladder. Apparently protruding nails didn't bother him. A little later, I find a pile of cedar shakes in the centre of the back yard. Where on earth did these come from? I ask myself. Seeing the shed door open, I suspect they came from there, so I put them in the back of the shed. The little terror is always digging in the shed.
It's only when I walk of the back door of the house do I see the big gaping hole of missing shakes off the playhouse.
"Spencer!"
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]
